Tyranomaster
patreon
[Vol.4] Ch.45 The Battle for Kembora Part 1
🕑 Added 2024-02-14 17:59:01 +0000 UTCThe air raid sirens were the signal everyone had been anticipating for the past few weeks. We had an entire year to practice and prepare our defenses, and the earie sound of the sirens coming from the mountain now are indicating that soon the battle will be upon us. At three evenly spaced locations on the mountain, a few hundred feet below the cloud layer, we had built watch posts, each equipped with a simple telescope. Every fifteen minutes for the past few weeks, someone has scanned the horizon for signs of ships. Now, on the fourth day of the twelfth month, our enemy approaches.
It's far too early for those of us closer to the shoreline to spot any ships. It will probably be at least half of a day before we're able to spot the ships from down here. This was expected though. The sirens are there to ensure everyone is ready when the time comes to actually repel the invasion. I'm currently on the beach where the merchants and dwarves would normally land for trade, as it is the closest location to the mainland, and also the easiest location for a landing on our island.
We managed to find sulfur a short distance underground at a location on this island, but we were still limited by how much saltpeter we could make, leaving us with a slightly limited supply of gunpowder. To compensate, we've got one time use steam cannons stationed at various locations, specially designed to be usable even without magic. Along this beach alone, there are twenty steam cannons.
The air raid siren signals a start point for various countdowns until it is time to light fires under those steam cannon boilers. The main use for the steam cannons is area control. Some are loaded with a significant amount of grapeshot, a few others are loaded with particularly large shells made of darkstone to use for sinking either landing vessels or targeting a particularly hardy individual. These are all stationed behind pitfalls and barricades along the beach to make attempts to invade further on the beach difficult at best.
To protect our valuable gunpowder, bunkers have been dug out of the rock faces that face out over the sea. Inside those bunkers are one of our best bets for actual defense of the island, long distance artillery pieces. Five of them, to be precise. One stationed in a bunker in a cliff the left side of this beach, another in a cliff on the right, a third stationed in the cliff separating the two valleys near the city, the fourth in the craggy terrain opposite the side of the island with the road, and the fifth in the craggy terrain with the road.
The process of actually making these five pieces took almost half of a year of work from myself along with two military blacksmiths that were part of Kao's troops. The cat's out of the bag on this one, and I'm sure in the next few years rifled artillery is going to take off. Perhaps fortunately, without industrial scale tools, the ability to mass produce them is non-existent. I spent five months developing them and working on fine tuning until we actually had a working model. Each individual cannon after that took those two blacksmiths a month to make with extra assistance, nevermind the testing that had to be done to ensure they'd each work as expected.
However, in our particular situation they should prove vital. After the first artillery piece was made, I began training crews on operating, aiming, and maintaining these cannons. Each bunker is manned by an eight individual team, although you could operate it minimally with four. The artillery are breach loaded with pre-measured shells, armed and operated with a fuse. Since we don't have, and couldn't find, any lead we're using our next densest material, copper, for the shells. Each shell weighs in at twenty pounds, and each bunker has forty shells. They're accurate enough to hit a ship at about a mile away consistently and with enough accuracy to hit it close to the water line with a high enough angle that the exiting shell will be underwater.
The entire goal of those artillery pieces is not only to sink ships, but also to keep the ships from coming in closer and potentially providing a platform that either mages or their own cannons could use for taking over the beach once they decide to properly invade. In a perfect world we'd have more shells, but even having this many should provide us with a decent advantage before the battle even starts. Even if the men successfully bail from the ship, their supplies will sink with it, leaving the army heavily undersupplied.
The actual entrance to these bunkers are hundreds of feet away from the bunkers themselves, tunneled through rock and hidden away. Climbing up into any of the bunkers would also prove incredibly difficult, as they've all be strategically modified to make climbing up to them nearly impossible. The opening for the artillery would also prove small enough that squeezing through would likely leave an invader so vulnerable that the individuals inside would easily kill any would be intruder.
On this beach, we've also fortified ourselves further. The old fort that the dwarves built prior has been rebuilt and improved. It's now a stone fort with ten ballista facing the beach, then four on each of the other walls. I'm here setting up the final parts of the fort's hidden use. To make the absolute most of this defensive position, fifty individuals have been selected or volunteered to defend this fort until the bitter end. Before I leave, I'll be sealing one of the two entrances with stone, and the other entrance will be reinforced behind me as I leave. Ideally, we completely hold them off, and those fifty live, but I'm not leaving that up to chance.
Outside the fort, we have another fifty individuals here on this beach, meaning we have a little less than 10% of our forces here. The reason for this is that we didn't want to leave other parts of the island vulnerable. The artificial tide pool area and the neighboring valley's area meeting the ocean each have sixty individuals. Outside of those locations, we identified three other locations where a landing could potentially happen with a sizable force, and we've stationed fifty individuals at each of those as well.
Behind all these locations is a secondary line of defense a few hundred yards back manned by thirty individuals each, designed to allow our own forces to retreat if overwhelmed, allowing us to escape with minimal losses to live on and fight in phase two of the defense. Phase two involves repeated fallback points and hit and run tactics designed to whittle down their armies. Smaller smooth bore cannons, taken from one of the dwarven ships, are hidden in small ambush locations throughout the island in small pillboxes hidden in their surroundings. The goal here is to fire grapeshot once or twice into groups of soldiers, then retreat. The area surrounding each pillbox is also littered with pitfall traps and small holes designed to injure and maim anyone who attempts to recklessly charge towards the cannon. A large portion of these ambush locations are concentrated overlooking the road, as that is the most likely place their army will try to move across the island.
Navigating the island with an army that size and not using the road would take more than a week, which plays to our advantage. If they decide to not follow the road, then hopefully we've sunk enough of their ships that their supplies are running dangerously low for the remainder of the army. Especially if my surprise for stage one works out. This puts our opponent on a clock, weakening them the longer they fight. Each successive defensive fallback that we use delaying their victory and sapping their strength until the scales tilt in our favor.
Stage three of our defense is defending our double walled city, and it's new citadel in the center. If the defenses fall until it's just the citadel remaining, the emergency escape tunnel will be used to evacuate as many personnel as possible to move on to stage four. There, we've got two options, neither of which is particularly good for us long term, but must be done to survive. For now, I won't say what those options are, as the idea of executing them worries me.
Finally, if we still must fight from here, stage five involves a slightly different variation on stage two, utilizing a network of underground tunnels to hit and run attack on any small parties separated from their main army. From this, we have only one option left. We'll separate our force, twenty of the remaining individuals including Zaka and myself will retreat deep underground into a hidden bunker. There we have stored enough food and water to last two months. While we wait those two months, the rest of the individuals on the island will continue attempting guerilla warfare. Our goal will be to wait out some of the remaining forces leaving, and attempt a final attack to reclaim the island. If we can reclaim it, then we can probably rebuild and re-establish ourselves over the next year to attempt a second defense with a few hundred individuals the following year, albeit weaker than we were the first time.
For now though, we're waiting on the beginning of stage one. Once the ships become visible, the fighting is going to start, and it probably won't stop for quite some time.
