Chapter 925: The Air Defense System
The transportation problem had a solution. The air defense problem was a different matter entirely.
Roland had been thinking about it since the first time he’d seen a Devilbeast in flight — the lazy arc of those wings, the scale of them, the way altitude transformed an enemy into something untouchable. He’d learned what aerial advantage meant from the history of his previous world: whoever owned the sky could strike from any direction, at any moment, and before the invention of radar, no one on the ground had a reliable way to even know the threat was coming until it was already arriving. He hadn’t expected the demons to move on Neverwinter this early. He hadn’t started development on ground-to-air weapons yet. The mountain defense line wasn’t finished. The telephone network was still being strung.
He’d found out, five days ago, what that gap cost.
The frontier guards hadn’t managed to hit a single Devilbeast during the attack. He wasn’t surprised — he’d made that calculation himself and known the revolving rifles weren’t the right tool. They were good work for what they were designed to do: fill the dead zones between machine guns and cannons, suppress enemy infantry at close range. But the geometry of an airborne target exposed every limitation. Low bore pressure meant short effective range. No suitable tripod. No aiming method calibrated for tracking a moving object in three dimensions. Five rounds per cartridge. The hit rate had been close to zero, and in the few moments when the demons were within range, the rifles’ arc had forced the soldiers into exposed positions on the wall.
The bolt rifles were a partial answer. More accurate at range, better sustained fire. But they weren’t ready for mass production yet. Anna couldn’t generate enough components to equip the army at scale — only the sniper units had them. The factory workers were still learning to run the new machine tools. When they could maintain quality at speed, output would rise; that was already underway. But “months from now” was not helpful against a threat that had arrived now.
There was also the tracer ammunition problem. Effective ground-to-air fire required tracers — visual feedback that let the gunner walk rounds onto a target. Complex to manufacture, and the production line was already running at capacity.
He would come back to the bolt rifles. For now, he needed something he could actually build.
The answer he arrived at was the same one that armies in his previous world had arrived at independently: volume of fire. When you couldn’t guarantee accuracy against a moving aerial target, you created enough lead in the air that the target had to fly through it. The established solution was a machine gun converted for anti-aircraft use — adjusted angle, adjustable tripod, aiming tool for aerial geometry. Not elegant. Effective enough to matter.
The Mark I heavy machine guns were already designed with this possibility in mind. He’d specified air-cooled barrels from the start, anticipating exactly this. Converting them for anti-aircraft use wouldn’t require new manufacturing — just a modified tripod and a proper aiming tool. The fire control system would be simple, mechanical, and hand-operated. A firing table and enough mathematics to use it.
That was why, after the meeting concluded, he went directly to the Arithmetic Academy rather than back to his office.
The academy occupied a building south of the Castle District, adjacent to the chemistry laboratory. It had grown quickly — more job applications than any comparable institution, though Roland suspected the chemistry lab’s reputation for periodic explosions had done some of the recruiting work by pushing candidates sideways toward a less dangerous neighbor. Most of the researchers were former members of the Astrology Association; they had been brought wholesale to the Western Region and had adapted.
Astrologer of Dispersion Star met him in the main hall, bowed, and immediately began speaking about mathematics with the velocity and warmth of a man who had recently been introduced to a lifelong love. He praised the profundity of Analytical Geometry, its capacity to describe the visible world in symbols, its implications for observational astronomy — “I can describe the arc of your hair, Your Majesty, in numbers” — until Roland stopped him.
“Have you mastered it?”
The astrologer collected himself. Most of it, he said. And in the six months since receiving it, the Association had undertaken their own project: converting all their historical star-position data into mathematical notation. They had concluded, rigorously, that the Star of Extinction — the Bloody Moon — held a fixed position in the sky. It did not move.
Roland had no particular interest in the Bloody Moon’s orbital mechanics at this point in the war. He said so politely and moved on.
“I need a practical tool for the First Army. Not a pure calculation problem — something that needs to be physically constructed and tested alongside the craftsmen.” He laid out the requirements. Two equations describing the motion of an aerial target: one for horizontal displacement, one for vertical. The output would be an aiming device for the converted machine guns — a mechanical tool that could determine a flying target’s range and its forward direction, allowing the gunner to set the correct elevation and lead angle, and then saturate that space with bullets.
It was a manually operated device. No electrical components. No precision machining beyond what the workshops could already do. The shooter needed a firing table and the arithmetic to use it.
Dispersion Star listened with the attention of someone who understood that the mathematics had an application before he understood what the application was. Then: “I understand, Your Majesty. The Arithmetic Academy will produce this as quickly as possible.”
As Roland turned to leave, he noticed the astrologer had something further to say. He waited.
“The word on the cover of the books you gave me — ‘Intermediate.’ On the Analytical Geometry, and on the other mathematics texts.” The man coughed into his fist, somewhat abashed. “I have wondered what it signifies.”
Roland almost laughed. He had used Intermediate Chemistry to secure Kyle Sichi as his Minister of Chemical Industry — dangling an Advanced volume as perpetual incentive. The chemistry minister had never stopped chasing it. But Dispersion Star didn’t need to be managed that way.
“There’s a book called Advanced Mathematics,” Roland said. “It covers mathematical theory well beyond geometry and arithmetic. Think of the primary and intermediate texts as the trunk of a tree, and the advanced text as the crown.” He paused. “It also has another name.”
“What is it called?”
“‘Quitting Math for Dummies.’” Roland spread his hands.
Dispersion Star stared at him with the sincere blankness of a man who had not understood the joke and was too honest to pretend otherwise. Then he collected himself and said with great earnestness, “Your Majesty, I would never surrender to such a difficulty. I intend to pursue this theory for the remainder of my life if necessary. Would you permit me to — ”
Roland, feeling something he recognized as guilt about his own graduate-school napping habits, cleared his throat. “After you finish this project. Come to the castle for the book.”
The astrologer’s expression was that of a man who had been promised the sun.
The anti-aircraft machine guns were a first step. The real answer to the sky problem was air power — an air force capable of meeting Devilbeasts on their own terms. During the Union’s reign, that role had belonged to flying witches and Extraordinaries carrying Stones of Flight. They had been the highest-ranked warriors in the Blessed Army. Three Chiefs of the Union had always come from that corps.
For Neverwinter’s common soldiers, the only path to the sky was a machine. Which meant Roland eventually needed to design an aircraft.
He was not an aircraft designer. He knew, in rough outline, how a WWI-era biplane worked. But the flight control surfaces alone — rudder, elevator, ailerons — required tolerances he could not half-ass the way he’d simplified the locomotive’s braking system. And he’d never flown anything. He had no intuition about what feedback a pilot needed, which control configurations were dangerous, how much was too much and how little was too little.
A glider was more tractable. Wendy could sense wind direction and speed with precision that no instrument could match — she could serve as a test pilot with genuine awareness of what the airframe was doing. Lightning and Maggie could ensure her safety during testing. He could write a flight manual, he thought, without risking anyone’s life in the process.
He filed it as a future project and returned to the immediate one.
Beyond the anti-aircraft guns, there was the question of the God’s Punishment Witches. He’d spent enough months watching the Taquila survivors to understand that they were not ordinary combatants with better endurance. They were warriors who had been waiting hundreds of years for this war, who wanted it the way living people wanted to sleep or eat. The demons had killed their families, destroyed their world, and made refugees of everyone they’d ever known. Equipping them with swords felt like handing a furnace a candle.
His initial plan had been a portable variant of the Mark I — a heavy machine gun light enough for their strength, with the ammunition box carried on their backs. Mobile fortresses.
He’d revised that estimate. Some of the Mark I guns were now being converted to anti-aircraft roles, and a new Mark I variant was about to enter large-scale production. Between the two programs, ammunition consumption would spike. The current production lines couldn’t supply enough rounds to support three hundred walking fortresses and an active air defense network simultaneously.
What he needed instead was a weapon that hit harder with fewer rounds. Simple to operate, simple to maintain. High kill radius.
He sketched it on paper in the backyard of the North Slope: a 40mm caliber, gas-operated, automatic grapeshot gun. Wide killing area from the enlarged caliber. Long effective range. Shot automatically, which lowered the skill requirement for accuracy. It could support the rifle lines at range, assist in artillery suppression against enemies that broke through, and work exceptionally well in ambush — where the shooter could choose the ground, close the distance, and fire first.
The demons, from what the second Battle of Divine Will had shown, were still weapons of cold steel. In direct confrontation, they threw spears; they did not maneuver with guns, did not operate artillery, did not have doctrine for suppressive fire.
Against a God’s Punishment Witch with an automatic grapeshot gun in close terrain, that gap would be decisive.
He put the sketch down and flexed his hand.
Five days later, Sylvie’s Eye of Magic found them again. Twelve Devilbeasts this time, moving toward Neverwinter like a dark stain across the sky.