Chapter 1387: Wireless Transmission
“It’s genuinely ugly.” Tilly curled her lip at the page.
Roland laughed, though the sound had more embarrassment in it than amusement. The written language of the Four Kingdoms was generally compared to distorted earthworms; the demonic script made that look elegant by comparison. Some of its characters resembled witchcraft sigils—spiraling, asymmetrical things with branching strokes that seemed to have been designed to resist copying. He had reproduced it from memory, his lines uncertain, his proportions wrong in places, the whole document radiating the unmistakable quality of someone rendering something he had learned to read but never learned to write.
The practical question of whether Hackzord would be able to parse it was one he had already raised with Valkries.
She had addressed it sharply: the fact that a human had copied the characters was not a liability—it was a feature. It proved she was still inside the Realm of Mind, unable to transmit messages directly, dependent on Roland as an intermediary. Her own handwriting would have the opposite effect. If Hackzord received a letter in her hand, his first question would be why she hadn’t simply walked out of wherever she was being kept. The imperfect copy, with its human proportions and uncertain strokes, was the proof of authenticity.
“What does it say?” Tilly asked.
“I’m asking the Sky Lord to avoid an all-out engagement. I need the General Staff to find a way to get this message to the demons.”
Tilly looked at him as though checking whether the question was genuine. “Brother—are you feeling well? Why would a senior lord of the enemy army listen to something you send him?”
“It won’t cost us anything to try.” Roland arranged his expression into something unconcerned. “And if it works?”
She shook her head slightly but put the letter away. Since it was his request.
She was moving toward the door when the telephone on his desk rang. Roland picked up the receiver. Anna’s voice came through from the North Slope Lab.
He listened, and smiled.
“Don’t go back today,” he said to Tilly. “Stay the night. I have something to show you.”
In the workshop, Tilly stood in front of two square wooden boxes and tried to reconcile the word revolutionary with the objects before her.
They were, unmistakably, boxes. Lids. Handles. Approximately thirty centimeters on their longest edge, compact enough to carry with one hand. Nothing about their exterior suggested they belonged in the same conversation as the Phoenix or the Fire of Heaven or any of the machines she had watched emerge from this place and transform what war meant. The only visible difference from an ordinary container was the panel of buttons and knobs running across the front face of each one—small, metal-bright, arranged in neat rows.
“This is…?”
“A mobile wireless transmission device.” Anna’s voice carried the particular precision of someone describing something they had built themselves and understood completely. “The equivalent of a shrunken iron cable tower. It can receive and transmit sound directly, and its effective range is greater.”
“I see—” Tilly stopped. She turned to Roland. “Is this what you mentioned before? The new communication device?”
He nodded.
She had known it was coming. He had described the concept, had spoken about the iron tower relay network under construction, had implied that something smaller was the goal. She had pictured something the size of a Fire of Heaven—already an almost impossible miniaturization of the tower system—and concluded even that would be remarkable. Compact enough to mount on a plane. Manageable. Impressive.
Not this. Not something that could be lifted in one hand.
Roland opened the lid of one box. Inside, a dense arrangement of wires and components—nothing she had a name for, nothing that resembled the mechanical assemblies she was used to seeing taken apart and examined on workbench tables. She looked at it for a long moment and felt the specific disorientation of standing in front of something that operated on principles she didn’t yet have the vocabulary to follow.
“This could be considered the world’s first genuinely electronic device,” Roland said. “The electric motors, the lights, the telephone, the telegraph—they all use electrical current, but in essence they’re using simplified electrical energy: transformation, conversion. This operates differently. It has an independent electrical circuit system, and the electrical current itself is doing the work. Think of it as replacing gears and bearings and mechanical linkages with electrical components. And this size—” he glanced at Anna— “is the large version.”
Anna gave him a look. “Are you suggesting my craftsmanship is insufficient?”
“Not at all.” He cleared his throat. “The Design Bureau’s plans weren’t precise enough.”
“Sister Anna worked through every night for weeks.” Lucia, who had been standing quietly near the workbench, added this with the gentle firmness of someone correcting a record. “The prototype exists as quickly as it does because of her. The vacuum tubes especially—maintaining the vacuum, getting the tolerances right for so many components in such a small space—none of that was possible without her Blackfire.”
The heart of the device was the vacuum tube: capable of amplifying, detecting, and oscillating electrical signals. The thing that marked a civilization’s entry into the electronic age, and Roland knew exactly how difficult it was to build even one. The pile of shining scrap metal outside the North Slope Lab told the story of how many hadn’t survived the process. Electrical engineering was beyond his ability to guide in the hands-on way he had guided previous projects—he could describe the destination but not the path. Most of the path had been Anna’s.
The concept he had handed to the team early on had been a beautiful idea and nothing more. The fact that it now existed as physical objects on a workbench was, he knew, largely her doing.
“Can I try it?” Tilly asked.
Anna smiled. “Of course.”
They separated—Tilly inside the lab, Anna and Roland out—and talked. The sound came through with the quality of a voice in the same room: present, alive, carrying breath and inflection. Not the flat mechanical reproduction of early telegraph; something that felt like conversation.
The mood in the workshop lifted immediately and without effort.
In the electromagnetic quiet of this era—no radio broadcasts, no industrial interference, none of the constant noise that had made early wireless technology so difficult in Roland’s previous world—the prototype’s range exceeded two kilometers on the ground. In the air, where interference dropped further, the number would be higher still. There were interference issues to manage: the spark-gap transmitters used in the relay stations could disrupt reception, but for anything short of emergency communication, the Aerial Knights could schedule their transmissions at fixed intervals, offset from the relay cycles. The conflicts would be rare.
Roland had been thinking about this longer than the device had existed. The wireless transmitter-receiver mattered more than almost anything else they had developed in the past year—including the new twenty-millimeter autocannons. The reason was not power or range or even the specific advantage it gave over the relay station network. The reason was coordination.
A fleet of planes that could not speak to each other was a collection of individual decisions flying in approximate proximity. A fleet of planes that could speak to each other was a single distributed organism capable of executing tactics no individual pilot could improvise alone. The difference between those two things was the difference between an armed crowd and an army. Real-time communication was what made the Aerial Knights, for the first time, an air force in the full sense of the word.
Tilly understood this the moment she put the device down. She immediately began asking about equipping the Phoenix with additional units.
The next morning she left at first light, the two prototypes secured in the plane. The Phoenix climbed into a sky still half-dark, its crimson skin catching what light there was, and shrank into the white distance of the eastern horizon.
Then the dawn came properly—light finding the gaps in the scattered clouds, dispersing through them in long slow rays that crossed the rooftops of Neverwinter.
The Month of the Demons was over.
Four months of red sky and blood-colored light at the top of the world, and now—nothing. The Bloody Moon that had presided over the continent was gone as cleanly as if it had never existed. No gradual fade. No visible departure. Simply absent, the sky returned to itself.
Roland stood at his window and knew the absence meant nothing.
Several hundred years ago, the demons had waited for a Bloody Moon. They had used its reign to quietly establish their obelisks across the northern territories—not launching their assault immediately, but building the foundation for one. Only after the pillars were stable and their foothold unassailable had they moved. A battle for the world showed its true shape only in the middle stages, when both sides had committed and there was no longer any path back to the beginning.
Humanity stood at the same threshold now. The difference was everything that had changed on this side of the line.
He believed, looking at the dispersing light, that the next chapter would not repeat the last one.