Rewrite That Witch
CH060 · Rewrite
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Chapter 60: Arrangements

The second recruitment went better than the first.

Word of mouth was a more efficient distribution system than Roland had expected, though in retrospect he should have expected it — it was the oldest and most reliable technology in existence, predating writing by millennia, and what made it run was simple. During winter rationing, the militia’s rations were better and more regular than the general population’s. The men who qualified found ways to move bread and meat to their families on visiting days. Their families told their neighbors. Their neighbors showed up at the recruitment post.

He’d told Carter and Iron Axe to notice this and not interfere, and they had, and the result was two hundred new militia in four weeks.

Barov objected to the cost; Carter objected to the training time required before the new recruits would be worth anything against a disciplined opponent. Roland acknowledged both objections and kept the policy, which was his standard response to objections he considered correct but not determinative. The recruits would be ready by spring. The cost was offset by the thing it was purchasing, which Barov did not yet know he was purchasing.

He hadn’t told anyone about Longsong Stronghold.

He had thought about telling them. He had written and discarded several versions of how the briefing would go, and in each of them he’d come to the same moment: Barov’s face when he heard we are going to attack the Duke’s seat with three hundred militia. Carter’s face directly afterward. He’d set aside the briefings and gone back to the manufacturing plan, because manufacturing was the part he knew how to think about.

Steam Engine II stood in the backyard and was, objectively, better-looking than its predecessor.

It was not beautiful — beauty was not the operational requirement — but it was clean. The welds were even. The fittings met without the visible negotiation that the first engine’s components had required. This was Anna’s work, the Heart of Fire applied at a scale and precision that even the best blacksmith’s hands couldn’t match: she could direct heat into a seam at exactly the angle and temperature required, and hold it there, and move on to the next one without variation. The tolerances between the moving parts were measurably tighter, which meant the engine ran at a more consistent output.

The centrifugal governor was attached to the main drive shaft, and Roland had looked at it for approximately ten minutes after installation before allowing himself to feel good about it. Two iron balls on connecting rods, counterweighted, linked to a valve. When the engine ran fast, the balls swung outward and rose, and the rising closed the valve incrementally, reducing steam input, slowing the engine. When the engine ran slow, the balls fell inward, the valve opened, more steam entered, speed increased. The system corrected itself. It did not need him to correct it.

In the history he’d come from, this had been a significant moment — the first practical feedback loop in mechanical engineering, the conceptual foundation of automatic control. Standing in the backyard of a provincial castle watching it work, Roland felt a specific kind of satisfaction that he associated with things being true rather than things being pleasant.

The next step was the boring machine.

He had Anna hold the Heart of Fire at the driving end while the gears engaged — involute-cut gears, still not up to any industrial standard he’d known before, but functional, and the lard they’d been soaked in gave them a metallic sheen that made the arrangement look more purposeful than its tolerances warranted. The boring head cut into the iron bar with a sound that was not beautiful either, but was correct.

He counted.

In an hour, the bar had been drilled through cleanly. In eight hours, he had a gun barrel that would have taken a skilled blacksmith two full days to produce by hand.

Ten barrels per day. The math went somewhere useful.

He let the machine run under Iron Axe’s supervision and went back to his desk to work out the artillery problem, which was more complicated.

A six-pound field gun required a barrel with enough wall thickness to survive the pressures of black powder firing, bored to sufficient precision to form a seal around the projectile, mounted on a carriage that could absorb recoil without shaking itself apart. He didn’t need many. Three would be enough to produce the effect he needed: a deterrent that operated before the enemy could close to close-combat range, that his militia’s training level was insufficient to handle.

He worked through the specifications twice, noted the points where his memory was uncertain, and flagged them for testing.

Two months. He had two months before the Months of the Demons ended and the roads became passable again. It was enough time if everything went according to plan, and in his experience things never went according to plan, which meant the actual amount of work he had to do was everything he’d planned plus approximately thirty percent for contingency.

He got up, went back to the backyard, and asked Anna if she was tired.

“Not yet,” she said.

“Good.” He pulled up the specifications for the boring head’s next pass. “I want to see if we can increase the diameter for a cannon barrel.”

She looked at the specs. She looked at him.

“Show me what you need,” she said.

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