Chapter 295 - 288: The Second Engine
The engine came into Skyforge on the flatbed at the west station, and getting it off took most of a morning and all of Brakka’s vocabulary.
"Not like that. Not like that. If you take it on the corner you’ll spring the mount and I’ll have your ears."
"It’s slung dead centre, master."
"It’s slung dead centre now."
They had a gantry over the siding and eleven men on the ropes, and Gandalf stood underneath with his hands out taking a third of the weight off it-through weight reduction spell.
"Are you helping me.wizard?" one of the fitters asked, after ten minutes of straining.
"I’m holding six hundred kilos of it."
"Oh could have said that."
"I said at the start. You were both shouting at each other about the corner." Gandalf didn’t move. "Do go on. It’s fascinating."
It came down onto the trolley clean, first time, with no swing. Brakka walked round it twice looking for a scrape and didn’t find one.
"Right," he said, sounding faintly cheated. "Hangar three."
They walked it across the field on the trolley, which took another forty minutes because the ground was soft and anything going wrong would invite curses from rest of the team.
The airframe had been in hangar three since spring with one engine on the starboard wing and a bare mount on the port. Corvan the apprentice had been dusting it twice a week for four months and had become, by general agreement,a partner.
"He talks to it," a fitter said as they pushed.
"He does not talk to it."
"He says good morning."
"That’s manners."
They got it under the port wing by midday and up on the gantry by two, and it settled onto its mounts on the very first attempt.
Brakka stood under it with a lamp for a long time.
"Well?" Maerath said.
"It’s on."
"Any trouble?"
"None." Brakka came out, wiped his hands on an oiled rag, and looked mildly put out about the whole thing. "Went on like it wanted to be there."
The alignment took two days, and it was the part Maerath had been dreading.
"They have to produce the same thrust and point in same direction," he’d said at the start, to a hangar full of men who thought this was obvious. "And I mean the same way. Not close."
"They look straight," Corvan offered.
"They look straight to your eye at ten feet.But in the air half a degree out means one tube is quietly steering her." Maerath held up a thumb. "Half a degree is that much of the sky at arm’s length. She’d walk off the runway and Tomas would spend the whole roll fighting a thing nobody told him was there."
So they checked it again properly.
They ran a line down the centre of the airframe from the nose to the tail and struck it in chalk on the hangar floor,dropped plumb lines off both wings,measured off the standard bar Brakka had brought down from Ironhold in its own padded case, then measured again with a second man reading the rule, writing both numbers down.
The starboard engine was true.
The port engine was true.
Brakka made them do it a third time.
"It’s true, master," the lead fitter said, leaning on his square.
"Do it again."
"It was true twice."
"Then it’ll be true a third time, and then I’ll go to bed."
It was true a third time.
They ran both the engines together on the fourth day. Chained down, both tubes lit, half power and then full.
Maerath stood at the gauge board and called the numbers out over the roar.
"Eight point eight. Both."
"Together?"
"Together! Within a hair of each other on the way up and level all the way through!"
Brakka had his head tilted, listening, which was how he did most of his work.
"They’re the same," he said when they cut the fuel. "They came up the same."
"Is that unusual?"
"It’s unheard of." Brakka came away from the board. "Two engines, four months apart, built off the same drawings by different hands, and they come up together on the first run. That doesn’t happen. That has never once happened in anything I’ve built."
"It’s the drawings."
"I know it’s the drawings." Brakka rubbed his beard, an expression of deep grievance on his face. "I’ve been telling men for two hundred years that every machine has a temper and you have to learn it. This one hasn’t got one. It’s just doing what it says on the paper."
They ran them four minutes at full power and everything worked perfect. Brakka’s lining held, and when he went round the back afterward to inspect the exhaust rings, the color was exactly where he’d predicted it would be.
He came back looking thoughtful and thoroughly suspicious.
"Call the pilot," he said.
Tomas came down from the north field the next morning and walked round her twice before saying a word.
"She’s grown."
"That’s the other engine," Maerath said.
"I know it’s the other engine. I’m saying she looks different with two." Tomas crouched at the port tube and looked up inside it. "How good are they?"
"You be loving it," Maerath said.
"Good." Tomas straightened up and slapped the wing root. "Then let’s roll her."
They started slow.
Both engines just off idle, chocks away, and she moved forward across the hardstanding at a slowly with Tomas’s head out of the cockpit and eight men walking beside the wings.
He took her fifty yards and stopped. Took her another fifty and stopped.
"Brakes?" Maerath called up.
"Brakes are good. Better than the Stormwing." Tomas tested them again, twice, and she sat down on her nose gear each time and came back level. "She stops when I ask her."
"Steering?"
"Give me the taxiway."
He took her round the loop at the north end, then round it the other way, and the thing everyone noticed was that the aircraft changed direction within milliseconds.
"She’s seems like she knows where to move next," Tomas said, rolling past the hangar entrance. "Dead straight. I’m not holding anything."
Maerath looked over at Brakka.
"That’s the alignment," Brakka said tightly.
"You’ve made your point."
Then they did the fast runs after lunch.
That was the part with a risk in it, because a fast taxi run in an aircraft that badly wants to fly is a very short distance from an accident, and Tomas had made that clear at the briefing.
"If she comes light on the wheels, I’m closing the throttles and I’m not arguing with anybody about it."
"Nobody’s going to argue," Ironbreaker had said. "You’re the one sitting in it."
He did four runs.
The first two at half power, up to sixty mile per hour and shut down, straight as a ruled line.
The third was at three-quarters power. She came up on the toes of her wheels near the end of the strip, and Tomas shut her down immediately, letting her roll out. Everyone watching stopped breathing for about four seconds.
He sat at the end of the runway for a moment, then taxied back to the line.
"Anything wrong?" Maerath asked, stepping up to the cockpit.
"Nothing’s wrong. That’s the trouble." Tomas took his goggles off. "She wanted to go. I was at three-quarters and she was already asking for the air. If I’d left the throttles where they were another two seconds, I’d have been off the ground with no plan and half a briefing."
"So I didn’t. But I want it written in the log that she’ll fly before you think she will, because I nearly found that out by accident."
The fourth run was at full power for eleven seconds before shut-down. The exhaust wash stripped a forty-yard swath of the field behind her back to raw earth. One of Cedric’s ground-keepers came over to complain about the grass, looked at the bare earth, and walked away without saying a word.
They put her back in hangar three at five o’clock.
Brakka went round her with a lamp for a full hour.
"Nothing’s loose," he said. "Nothing’s cracked, nothing’s rubbed, nothing’s out of line. The mounts are exactly where I put them. She’s done four hours on the ground today and she’s come back in the exact same condition she went out."
"You sound annoyed."
"I’m unsettled." Brakka set the lamp down on a workbench. "In my experience, when a machine gives you nothing to fix on the first day, it’s saving it up. There’s a thing wrong with that aeroplane that I haven’t found yet, and I don’t like walking away from it."
"Or there isn’t."
"Or there isn’t." Brakka looked back at her, sitting quiet under the hangars lamps while her twin tubes ticked as they cooled. "And that’s worse, because then I’ve got nothing to do tomorrow except let the lad fly her."
"Send a message to duke,his jet is ready to takeoff"