Rewrite That Witch
CH069 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 69: Cannon System

The molds were two holes in the ground, forty centimeters wide at the surface and narrowing to twenty-six at depth, each one baked to a smooth shell by Anna over the course of a morning.

Roland crouched at the edge of the first one and ran a finger along the interior. The surface was glassy, almost ceramic — she’d done it from the bottom upward, driving out the air as she went, and the result was a mold that would not flake or crack under the weight of liquid metal. He had explained what he needed and she had produced something better than what he’d described, which was becoming a pattern he relied on.

He stood and looked at the iron ingots stacked beside the molds and did a fast calculation.

The cannon barrel he had designed — twelve-pound caliber, approximately twelve centimeters bore diameter, four centimeters of wall at minimum, seven at the breech, a meter and a half of tube — would require a quantity of steel that had been, until recently, beyond his means. Steel ingots, not iron. He needed the tensile strength; iron cannons had a historical tendency to fail in instructive ways, and he was not interested in instructing anyone through that particular failure mode.

Anna had helped him produce the ingots in small batches over the previous weeks, working the temperature and composition by feel and by the color of the flame, which she’d developed the ability to read the same way a glassblower reads a gather. The ingots were not perfect by any modern standard. By this era’s standards they were exceptional.

He looked at the pile of them. He looked at the two holes.

“Ready?” he said.

Anna was already in position at the support frame he’d built at the mold’s edge, so she could angle the work without looking directly into it. She had her hair tied back and her coat off despite the cold, because the work generated its own heat. She nodded.

Roland stepped back.

The Heart of Fire came to her, answering its question — he had watched it enough times now to understand that what he was seeing was not her casting something outward but something in her responding to the need — and the ingot in her hands turned orange, then white at its center, then ran. The liquid poured in a controlled stream down into the mold, and Roland watched the level rise, and the light that came off it was the color of a star seen through bad glass, and the heat reached him where he stood twelve feet away.

Ingot by ingot. The level rose.

She worked without pause, which he had come to understand as deliberate — pausing let the earlier pour begin to set unevenly, and she was keeping the temperature uniform. He watched her face when he could look at it without looking into the pour, and what he saw was concentration without strain: the face of someone doing something difficult that they have done enough times to have stopped finding difficult.

When the second mold was full, she straightened. Her cheeks were flushed from the heat, and there was sweat at her temples.

He took out his handkerchief.

She noticed, and a small resistance moved across her expression — not embarrassment, or not only embarrassment, but the particular awkwardness of someone who is not accustomed to being attended to. He wiped her temples and her nose with the careful attention of a man who was thinking about the task and also aware that he was thinking about other things, and she closed her eyes for a moment and let him, which he took as provisional permission and decided not to misinterpret.

“Well done,” he said, because it was, and he owed her the precision of saying so rather than something vaguer. “Black pepper steak tonight. You’ve earned it.”

She opened her eyes. There was color in her face that had not come entirely from the heat of the molds. She thanked him in the quiet, direct way she thanked him for things — not as courtesy but as acknowledgment, which was different — and turned back to look at the cooling molds.

Roland also turned back to look at the cooling molds, and thought about metallurgy.

The boring took longer than the casting.

He spent several days at the North Slope Mine in the interval — sourcing the tool steel for the boring heads, supervising the production of the chucks and guides, walking the geometry through with the blacksmiths who were going to have to execute it. The boring head was not complicated in concept — a steel rod with a gap at the working end to carry away the swarf — but precision mattered, and precision in this era required conversation rather than specification sheets, and the conversation took time.

Anna heated and quenched five boring heads over a week. The quenching gave them the hardness they needed; the steam engine gave them the speed.

He was present when the first barrel went through. The cannon blank — pulled from its mold, scaled and polished to a faceted grey bar — was clamped in the fixture. The boring head engaged. The sound was bad: a metallic scream that put everyone in the vicinity through the same involuntary response, the one that assumes something has gone wrong when something very loud is happening. The lard packed into the cut foamed out dark and acrid.

Lightning, against all instructions, had remained in the workshop. She stood at the far end of the shed with her arms folded and her chin slightly elevated, the posture of someone who has decided that the risk is acceptable and has stopped discussing it.

The boring head went in.

Millimeter by millimeter, Roland watched the measurement marks on the boring head advance. The process was not fast. It was steady, which was better. He had designed for steady: consistent feed rate, consistent temperature, consistent lubrication. The things that failed in boring operations were the things that varied when they shouldn’t have, and the steam engine’s centrifugal governor was managing the thing that had been hardest to manage before him — the rotation rate, kept level, held there without intervention.

An hour in, the head was a third of the way through.

He sat down on a crate and drank his tea and watched, and thought about the field configuration — how many guns, what crew size, what range to set up the line, what the fall of shot would look like at three hundred meters versus five hundred. He had no gunners. He had militiamen who had been training with flintlocks for one winter. The artillery drill would have to be built from nothing, which meant starting with the simplest possible platform: fixed position, direct fire, crew of three, and clear instructions that reduced the operation to steps rather than judgment.

He could do this in six weeks if the boring held.

He looked at the boring head’s progress mark.

“Come on,” he said, not to anyone.

The steam engine turned, and the head went in, and outside the cold continued, and somewhere in the stone beneath the lard and the swarf was the shape of a thing that had not existed in this world before today.

He thought about the wall, and the hybrid species on the wall, and Iron Axe’s face afterward, and the word smarter.

He thought: Not smart enough.

He finished his tea.

Discussion

Suggest a change