Chapter 1237 - New Weapon

In that instant, Li Huamei knew she had become a commander without a single soldier to command. Li Ying had not been with her long—hardly enough to call her a trusted confidant—but she was at least someone Li Huamei had personally cultivated. Now, in her place stood this new "female orderly," all smiles and watchful eyes. The message was unmistakable: the Australians were keeping tabs on her.

Her thoughts drifted to the crew members consigned to the "quarantine camp." Given the Australians' talent for winning hearts and minds, would they still be loyal to her when they emerged?

She recalled that terrible sensation from moments ago—being watched while she bathed, naked and exposed with nowhere to hide.

There was nothing to be done about it now. She consoled herself with the thought that trust always came at a price.

She was assigned a double room in the single officers' dormitory at Zuooying Naval Base. Being the only female officer, she had the room entirely to herself—a small mercy.

Yet her freedom extended no further than these eight square meters. Through the window she could see sentries patrolling the base and a forest of masts crowding the harbor. Technically, she could move about freely within most of the compound, but leaving Zuooying required a leave pass, and the approval process involved so many bureaucratic hurdles that she abandoned the idea entirely.

No different from prison, she thought grimly.

Still, amid this helplessness came unexpected good news. The modification plan for the Hangzhou—the very same proposal Lingao had dismissed—was approved here in Kaohsiung. The improvements to her ship's handling and firepower were relatively straightforward; apart from the somewhat complex installation of a ship's wheel, the Kaohsiung shipyard could manage the work without difficulty.

Then there was a second piece of news: on her third day in camp, ostensibly to relieve her boredom, she received orders to attend "Surface Vessel Officer Training."

The training took place within Zuooying Base. All students were naturalized naval officers of the First Fleet. At first, Li Huamei sneered at the notion. She had spent years adrift on the sea, encountering every sort of person and situation imaginable. Never once had she heard of naval battles won by men sitting at desks, pushing model ships around sand tables. And lectures on navigation theory? Were there any Australians who could truly claim to sail better than she could?

But it was an excellent opportunity to probe their secrets. For that reason alone, she threw herself into participation. She was the first to arrive at the classroom each day.

Before long, something captured her attention: a picture album. Beautifully bound, it rested on a dedicated reading stand, and one had to wear gloves to handle it.

The paper was thick and heavy in her arms. Within its pages were renderings of every type of vessel—ships she had seen, ships she had heard of, and ships she had never imagined could exist. Each was meticulously labeled with nationality, tonnage, sail configuration, speed, armament, and crew complement. The dense annotations were methodically organized.

What stunned her most were the sprawling three-view diagrams and cross-sectional drawings, which laid bare the structural and internal workings of each vessel type with uncanny precision. Li Huamei could scarcely believe the Australians could depict a ship so intuitively on paper. She knew Europeans kept detailed shipbuilding plans, but those were secrets jealously guarded by shipwrights and owners—ordinary folk never glimpsed them.

Since the album could not leave the conference room, she would arrive early on class days just to pore over its pages. She studied the ships with something close to rapture, secretly hoping that one day she might claim a vessel from those pages as her own.

As the courses progressed, the album proved to be only the beginning. From the podium, an Australian lecturer wielded dense terminology, diagrams chalked on a blackboard, and a handful of simple models to guide her into a realm she had never known existed. She could not have guessed that what she learned in that classroom would soon draw an entirely different trajectory for her life.

During lectures, the rumble of distant cannon fire drifted in intermittently. No one paid it much mind—Kaohsiung had become a hub for warships, with vessels constantly entering and leaving port. Nevertheless, the Lichun and several steam-powered gunboats had not sortied again. They ventured out only occasionally for live-fire exercises in nearby waters, returning by the following day at latest.

But on this particular day, the instructor made an announcement: all trainees would observe an amphibious landing exercise conducted by the Marines.

The exercise took place on a beach outside Zuooying Base. Several warships of the First Fleet participated, along with a flotilla of Daihatsu, Chuhatsu, and Shohatsu landing craft.

It was a textbook beach assault: Special Reconnaissance teams marked targets and landing zones ashore while destroying the command center; ships approached to bombard the beach; troops transferred to landing craft, stormed the sand, secured the port, and unloaded artillery. Every phase connected seamlessly, dazzling in its precision.

For Li Huamei, who had come with the intent of gathering intelligence, the gulf in knowledge rendered her sensitivity to such things frustratingly low. She could only watch for spectacle. Though she witnessed many gadgets and tactics she would never have encountered otherwise—novel things that shocked and fascinated her—she gleaned no deeper clues from them.

Yet observing the exercise allowed her to reach one clear conclusion: the Australians would soon launch a landing operation. The target was almost certainly Zheng Zhilong.

The intelligence was valuable, but she had no means of passing it to her sister. Besides, the Zheng family's survival mattered little to her. Watching the earth-swallowing momentum of the Australian army and navy, the outcome was hardly in suspense. Even the young miss would not wager on a force destined for ruin.

She remembered what the young miss had said a few months ago: "Liu Xiang is finished. Sooner or later he'll be destroyed by Zheng Zhilong and the Australians. We don't need to do business with him anymore."

Now she could say much the same: "The Zheng family is finished. Sooner or later they'll be destroyed by the Australians. We don't need to do business with them anymore."

For the Senate members in Kaohsiung, the landing exercise signaled that full-scale war against the Zheng family was imminent. The two Special Reconnaissance teams transferred before summer had been gathering preliminary intelligence; the Marines arriving now from Hong Kong represented formal combat troops taking their positions.

Shi Zhiqi arrived in Kaohsiung quietly, bringing with him a newly formed Marine unit from Hong Kong. Publicly designated the "Shi Detachment," it was officially the 1st Expeditionary Force of the Marines. The organization was new—and so were its weapons.

The entire Marine Corps had been re-equipped. Gone were the Fubo Army's standard Minié rifles. In their place was a brand-new, more powerful firearm: the Hall breech-loading rifle.

The Hall was an early breech-loader featuring a hinged breech block that could be lifted open. To load, one placed a paper cartridge whole into the breech, closed the block, and positioned a percussion cap on the nipple. In effect, the breech itself functioned as a fixed metal cartridge case.

The breech-loader's rate of fire far exceeded that of any muzzle-loader. The drawback was gas leakage at the breech, which reduced range and power compared to the theoretically inferior muzzle-loading rifle—before the invention of the metallic cartridge, all breech-loaders shared this flaw. Against seventeenth-century enemies who lacked effective long-range projectile weapons, however, it was hardly a crippling disadvantage. Moreover, the Machinery Department indicated that machining precision improvements, brass wedge-shaped mating surfaces, and curved locking mechanisms could mitigate the problem. After all, endlessly producing uniform Minié rifles had grown tedious; every craftsman harbored some urge to create more advanced equipment.

The prospect of enjoying a breech-loader's speed without metallic cartridges was deeply tempting. Although the Minié ball had solved loading difficulties, the actual procedure for a muzzle-loader remained unchanged: tear open the bottom of the paper cartridge, pour powder from the muzzle, ram the bullet down with a ramrod, cock the hammer, place a cap on the nipple, aim, and fire. The two-to-three rounds per minute typical of muzzle-loaders referred to this method. In emergencies, one could ram the entire paper cartridge into the bore and fire directly, but since the powder remained wrapped in paper, this increased the likelihood of hangfires or misfires—occurrences common in both training and combat. By contrast, the Hall using paper cartridges could achieve seven to ten rounds per minute. With higher-quality granulated black powder, it could even fire over thirty consecutive rounds without cleaning the chamber—a clear advantage over the Minié rifle.

Perhaps most importantly, the Minié rifles already in widespread service could be converted to Hall rifles simply by modifying the rear of the receiver, without major adjustments to the production line. Aside from a few parts requiring slightly higher machining precision, the basic manufacturing process remained nearly identical.

Though the Hall represented only a modest technological leap—a single small step in military industrial development—the cost of that step was low, while its combat power could be multiplied. This aligned perfectly with the Executive Committee's philosophy of low-cost improvement.

After relentless lobbying by Lin Shenhe, this incremental upgrade was finally implemented before Operation Engine. A batch of rifles was converted on a limited scale and issued exclusively to the Marines. Shi Zhiqi's proposal to establish an experimental Marine unit with independent amphibious strike capability, built around the Hong Kong Detachment, dovetailed neatly with Lin Shenhe's plan to create a test unit for the new standard model.

(End of Chapter)