Under One Banner, page 11
part #4 of Commonweal Series
‘Tube-team’ has an old specific meaning within the Line and the Line’s artillery formations. The Line is not going to surrender that term nor any part of its meaning to a group of sorcerers. The team that makes the artillery tubes is the Awkward Metals team in consequence, or just the Awkwards. It’s not something Eugenia would consider polite even before they find out the present fifteen people are the survivors; there were six more. Two of those are in hospital regrowing limbs, one of those kept their eyes but not their jaw and is the Independent Grue’s specific patient in a closed vat, and three of them are dead. It wasn’t all one accident, and Eugenia is inclined to think them rash before they find out the size tolerances of the distinct tube layers.
The tube assembly demonstration starts with the Awkward Metals team lead saying “We can’t do a tube all at once.” In another mouth, it could sound like an admission. It sounds proud, Eugenia thinks, and makes a conscious effort to reserve judgement. The working space is materially sheltered and the room is deep, if not especially large, and the walls are especially thick and obdurate by the expectations of the Edifice. The air is chill and fogged, because the process has been discovered to work better if you don’t let the tube layers warm all the way back up to room temperature from their cryogenic annealing.
Glass mandrels, because glass has enormous compressive strength and is easy to make smooth, aren’t especially a surprise. An assembly technique that nests the tube layers by using ancient smaller-along-strange-dimensions workings in reverse to make the tube layers larger does surprise. Releasing the outer eight layers in a controlled way, a tense, protracted, and necessarily symmetrical way, results in a tube that’s slightly crushed in all its layers and only free of stress during the peak of a heave.
The whole made tube has to rise to ambient temperature; the stresses across subtle alloys of cobalt and samarium have to be symmetric, despite the sharp lines of enchantment structures; there can’t be any trapped liquid air or condensed water between tube layers; none of the layers can have gone even slightly out of round from being stored at its actual size, instead of in tension with strange dimensions, trying and unable to return to its material size on its layer-specific mandrel; and the individual layers have to be made at very slightly the wrong sizes, to account for the compressive force of the layers outside them and the resistive force of the layers inside them. There is no way to calculate this offset size with sufficient precision; the only way is trial and error.
Get any of those things wrong and the tube might not survive to have the partial enchantments tested with the Power. The tonne-and-a-half of effort and expense and hard refractory metal can explode from the stress.
The demonstration Eugenia gets goes all the way to an assembled tube and the initial testing with the Power; not enough to cycle the tube, not nearly so much as the least amount that would move shot, but done with the whole team and the observers standing at the back of a large pit. The front of the pit is an illusory mirror over a deep mass of sand. At the top of the pit, at the level where the new tube floats in the grip of the team’s collective focus, is a mirror made of nickel-steel fifteen centimetres thick. That mirror’s ten metres wide; Eugenia never thought they’d be standing in a periscope for any reason, but the upper armoured mirror has dents and scuffs that would not polish out.
After that, Eugenia thinks the Awkward Metals team are insane, but admires their success.
“Thirty tubes a year,” Grue says when asked. “Given the drafting teams and the existing stock of templates and gauges and the mining and refining being done by other people.”
One artillery battalion, six batteries and spares, requires seventy-two tubes; with necessary pauses and no expectation of perfect logistics, thirty months’ production. The Line wants two artillery battalions for the First Valley. Ten years from now, they’ll have them, even if the First Valley Armoury never does learn how to make this model of artillery tubes.
If the Line gets them, those will be the only full-time formations in the whole of the Folded Hills. Eleven thousand unproductive adults is pressing hard on what the Folded Hills can feed.
“Those were all the Independent Blossom’s students?” Eugenia doesn’t look directly at the Independent Grue to ask this. It’s an extremely awkward question along angles of politeness and tradition and perhaps law.
“All those teams use external Power working,” Grue says, and Eugenia has come to recognize this tone.
There’s a short list of independents who could have taught them. The majority of the work is what a wreaking shop could do. It would be a notably skilled wreaking shop, but you wouldn’t expect an independent to be required to make a waggon frame or wheel bearings or even precisely regular iron bars to be fed into the shot-making. Having an independent to consult with, having a scope of discussion outside the team to consider mathematics or conceptualization or just what alloy of copper doesn’t usually catch fire, those are all important but that customarily exists.
Some of what exists now is having the neighbours there to ask questions. The Shot Team and the shot-makers and the Awkward Metals team have achieved a degree of skill appropriate to someone studying for an independent’s qualification, and the neighbours are no-one any tradition would consider able to teach sorcery, and Eugenia stops outside the refectory and looks at the wall, because their mind has gone on from not just the Independent Blossom into less comfortable places.
“Why?” Eugenia means the effort to establish an external-working tradition so quickly, when speed must mean risk.
“Dread River hell-things,” Grue says. “What happened to the Eighth was a surprise. What happened to the Eighteenth wasn’t.” The enduring shades of the Eighteenth Brigade volunteered to be emplaced in the westernmost range of the Folded Hills, to guard the place the pass used to be. Eugenia remembers the pass as it was, and how it is now. Order took their students to observe the functioning emplacement ‘as an indication of the temptations of necromancy.’
“There are two Commonweals because the whole one didn’t have the population for enough brigades,” Grue says, their voice oddly gentle. “We can afford enough artillery if we can build it before we need it. Potentially expending informed adult volunteers isn’t an ethical question.”
Chapter 16
Year of the Peace Established Five Hundred Forty-Four, Month of Floréal, Nineteenth Day
“Captain Blossom?” Eugenia sounds uncertain. Which is accurate, if undesired.
Captain Blossom’s head tips interrogatively.
“Is there some way we can talk about the shot shop?”
Eugenia’s regular report slot is an hour long on days four and nine. Everything related to handbooks took the first fifteen minutes today.
Captain Blossom nods, gets up, closes the door, and the walls of the little office do the same endless-variety-of-diamond-shapes pattern dance that the second floor of the shot shop did.
“One reason to have this office. People don’t need to come in and out of it.”
Eugenia realizes that the battery banner is standing where the open door would cover it. Captain Blossom must have been actively latched. The battery as a whole must be maintaining a passive latch. Eugenia thinks the whole thing impressively smooth for a new battery with a new banner.
“It’s not materially inaccessible.” Captain Blossom waves at the slowly shifting patterns on the walls. “Today is a classroom and personal maintenance day.” There’s half the quirk of a smile on Captain Blossom’s face. “If there’s an attack, someone will come open the door.”
Eugenia remembers several independents working on their second centuries and much involved in weeding. Order would have them in to explain specific techniques. They had a similar comfort with the statistical likelihood of emergencies.
“Does this place have a similar guardian to the shot shop proper?” Eugenia feels odd with an unfamiliar oddness guessing on the basis of a near-stranger’s lack of concern.
“You met Spot.” Captain Blossom smiles. “Spot’s territorial, you can’t put more than one anywhere they’re aware of each other. So the Armoury has something different.” Another wave at the wall, while Eugenia’s trying not to think about specifics. “This sort of thing is a big help, it makes what happened to Slow’s banner unlikely. We don’t have the people to garrison with brigades and keep a watch battalion live all the time.”
Eugenia’s face tightens, more than Eugenia nods; there aren’t enough people for that many brigades.
Eugenia hasn’t been back out of the edifice via the canal. They remember the high and long canal viaduct, though, and the cyclopean gates. Nobody’s going to get the gates open without magic, and sorcery will wake whatever guardians the Armoury has. And that will hopefully take long enough to allow artillery to emplace on the prepared roof positions, Eugenia’s had a tour of those, and commence to bombard the attackers.
So just having this discussion isn’t irresponsible.
“It seems as though the purpose of the shot shop is to kill as many people as possible.” Eugenia finds this awkward to think, never mind say, but can’t think of it in anything other than this miserably awkward way.
“To have the capability,” Captain Blossom says, the soul of equanimity. “Artillery used to be for keeping primary opposition from running before the heavy battalions could wade through the minions and come to grips with them.” There’s a flash of grin. “Which are long-standing euphemisms for kill all the opposing troops and immolate the sorcerers.”
Eugenia’s trying to think of how to reply, if there can be a reply, when Captain Blossom waves a little. Creeks talk much more with their hands than Regulars, especially Regular Sixes, and Eugenia is never comfortably sure what any of it means.
“The point to the nine-layer tubes is that you can kill the sorcerers, not just pin them. If they’re from an undeveloped tradition they can’t handle the kinetic energy and if their tradition is developed there’s a variety of red shot. It’s unlikely a single sorcerer can stand up to all of them.”
“And the pointy sticks?” Eugenia’s voice is calm. Eugenia likes Tiggy. Eugenia likes the whole shot shop, Tiggy’s bunch, however someone who is actually their friend ought to refer to them so the Creek social complexities make it clear you are their friend.
Tiggy is so proud they have to admit they’re proud of the working, the complex collection of focuses and bindings that requires the whole team’s attention. It turns three kinds of clay into little fired porcelain cylinders that drop into javelin points made to take them. The shot shop team can make those inserts by the several thousand, ever since Year of the Peace Established Five Hundred Forty and a year and more of work put into the bindings and the focuses and learning the careful balanced dance of Power to wake the broad complexity into a functional productive whole. The Shot Team’s first anti-demon shot got in such quantity were in Five Hundred Forty-Two, after one of the Independent Blossom’s awful grins and a shiny complexity of possibility hung on the air and eleven months of knuckle-chewing frustration.
The cold results go into rune-cut brass tubes, thickly drawn ones, plugged with heartwood plugs that are a wet red to physical eyes and a pulsing hunger to inner eyes, even prosthetic inner eyes. Then, leaving the physical shot shop, the brass tubes go into wool-felt wrappings and steel kegs wrapped in carbon wire and come back across Armoury Pond to the edifice, where teams of people having no talent to speak of put them into the javelin points using care and bamboo tongs.
Eventually, maybe in the field, shafts screw into the point on coarse square threads and push the dab of wax or pitch backing the binding flat and tight. Easier than tapers on the shafts and the material part of the binding really can’t move with the shafts screwed down. Not even when the focus gets into the special spear-throwers and pushes the javelins hard enough they can range out two kilometres.
It’s ferociously clever; the binding doesn’t work on its own, the presence of an active banner or standard is required, the accumulator can’t work without. Everyone’s extremely careful anyway, because the Power likes its little jokes and the pointy stick bindings have names like punch and liquid and spinner. Flash is simple stuff, it explodes. Hungry annoys Mel and Tiggy and Lily and Xenia all together because it ought to be simple and when they try to make it thousands drops to tens and they end the day wrung out and sweating and not understanding what they’re doing wrong.
Hungry eats minds, irrespective of substrate. It’ll gnaw through a lot of warding to get you, and the amount of Power isn’t less than what goes into the body-tossing explosions of flash or the whirling transparent razor-tentacles of spinner. Aella had shown Tiggy shredded armour plates from current Line-pattern titanium armour. The plates were a progression of cut edges that indicated they hadn’t got spinner right yet and then the completely clean shearing without distortion that indicated they had.
Eugenia had pulled their gift of perception out of Aella’s carefully provided necessary magnification of the metal edges and tried not to shake. There are no bone examples; it’s part of the specification, but it had been waived on the grounds of not wanting to waste a pig carcass.
“We’ve got battalions doing brigade jobs,” Captain Blossom says. “No help for it on numbers. The pointy sticks are a way to maintain a full battalion bubble and still get the job done.”
The effort of throwing, the accumulators that start the live cascade, won’t significantly tax the focus. It’s nothing like as effective an amplifier in the pointy sticks, three layers, little ones, against nine layers in artillery, but the effects are standard and have been optimized. The kind of thing a sorcerer over five hundred can do with what they’ve done most; there’s nothing in there but the one single murderous intent.
It would be beautiful, Eugenia thinks, if all this skill and elegance didn’t have names like liquid and hungry. If get the job done didn’t mean kill them all.
“There should probably be tea,” Captain Blossom says, “but I wasn’t expecting this quite today.”
Eugenia makes a flapping motion. It was supposed to be a small gesture of demurral.
They take the glass they’re being handed. It’s regular-sized to Eugenia. The drink in it is coal black with an authenticity that includes faint iridescence.
“Entirely safe for Regulars,” Captain Blossom says. “No alcohol. Psycho-activity makes it somewhat centring.”
Eugenia looks at it. It smells surprisingly nice; some combination of roasting coffee and roasting meat. Eugenia almost says “Psychoactive?” and remembers that they can’t actually do anything with the Power; Order’s rules about avoiding anything altering one’s judgement fail to apply to Eugenia.
It doesn’t feel oily and it tastes like neither meat nor coffee but it does taste warm, an entirely friendly sort of warm like returning to bed.
It might even help.
“We lose a lot of recruits at this point,” Captain Blossom says. “People come to an emotional understanding of what all the camaraderie and healthful exercise and encouragement of striving are meant to fit you to do.”
Eugenia takes another sip.
“It’s not the Peace.” Eugenia sounds sad.
“It’s not.” Captain Blossom looks entirely friendly. Kind, Eugenia thinks. Captain Blossom is at least four decimetres taller than Eugenia. Lately Eugenia weighs a couple kilogrammes more than they expect to with recent muscle. So instead of the forty-four kilogrammes they’ve been for the last twenty years they weigh forty-six. Eugenia wouldn’t bet Captain Blossom doesn’t weigh three times that. Creeks seem to vary from what a Regular sculptor would consider an athletic physique through Regular heroic then to what Eugenia thinks of as solid to what must be the Creek version of heroic.
Captain Blossom looks like someone who could tear the arms off other Creeks, heroic large lads included. Eugenia can’t support this impression factually, but cannot doubt it.
The large lads weigh four times what Eugenia does. The brigade quartermaster, who goes by Tankard and whose shoulders the regular run of Creek lads scarcely overtop, would be much more than that. Tank has been known to pick up one side of an empty caisson, to save setting up a jack.
The Peace means you’re not supposed to have to think about that. That it’s not a question of making up for being small and fragile by being skilled and polite and useful. Things outside the Peace frighten Eugenia.
“I’m not asserting fault in the Line.” Which is suddenly formal language, but Eugenia can talk that way. They couldn’t otherwise; their voice would lock with nuance.
“Wondering how Tiggy, who you like, can be doing this?” Captain Blossom’s tone has stayed friendly and a bit distant and just something that might be kind or amused. Eugenia can’t tell. The banner is there, and Captain Blossom is there, and it’s a single smooth surface between them. There aren’t any penumbra hints about meaning or intent.
Eugenia says “Yes.”
“In the unlikely event Tiggy ever tears someone’s face off, they’ll look cheerful and a bit abashed the whole time.”
Eugenia would formally attest Captain Blossom thinks this is funny, actual amusing funny.
Captain Blossom waves the bottle in an interrogative way, and Eugenia holds out their glass. Whatever it is, it seems to dissolve panic but not thinking.
“What’s Tiggy’s talent flavour?” Captain Blossom assumes Eugenia knows, this is a conversational question.
Eugenia blinks, blinks again, takes a larger sip than they intended. “Enchanter and necromancer.” There’s a pause. “They’re all militant, aren’t they?” Militancy doesn’t show, not the way talent flavours do.
“Yes.” There’s a sort of wry smile. “As a general thing among Creeks, a lass will be encouraged to stay near the maternal home. Mother wants to be able to visit eventual grandchildren, there’s the offspring of your sisters and cousins to be Aunt to, there’s family responsibility and family holdings.”
