Chapter 286 -279: Team Six
IRON JUNCTION-STATIONMASTER OFFICE
Whole team six reached the stationmaster office but Malen didn’t ask them a single thing about selection.
That was the first strange part.
They stood in the station master’s office at two o’clock, seven of them, boots polished and gear squared away. Instead of interrogating them, Malen asked how the Junction was. Then how the food was. Then whether the barracks roof still leaked over the north end—which it did, and which Malen apparently knew about already.
"Sund. Greyfell. The shoulder?"
"Fine in the cold, Commander. Complains in the wet."
"So does everything."
He asked Marrick about his brother, who was a mechanic at Titanworks.Tallen about whether he still played cards, and Tallen said not since spring, a detail Malen let pass without comment.
He didn’t ask about the ford or flare.
Kolt stood there waiting for the blow to land, but it never came. After twenty minutes of a senior commander asking pleasantly about leaky roofs, Kolt had gone from standing at rigid attention to feeling considerably more uneasy.
"Commander," Kolt said. "May I ask what this is about?"
Malen leaned back in his seat.
"One question. If I offered you a posting—active duty, away from here—would you take it?"
Nobody moved for a moment thinking about possible implications of the offer.
"Would you take it?" Malen asked again. "That’s all I’m asking."
"You haven’t said what the assignment is."
"No and i am not going to tell either."
Verrin said, "Yes."
Marrick said yes. Tallen said yes. Sund nodded. Wend looked at Kolt for a beat and then said yes.
Odric said, "What is it?"
"That’s not the question I asked."
Odric’s jaw worked. "Then yes."
"Good." Malen stood up and picked up the folder. "The train leaves at four. Bring nothing you can’t carry."
Kolt said, "Where are we going?"
"Ironhold."
That was all the information on the first day.
They ran south out of the Junction with the engine humming under the floor plating and the rail yard sliding away behind them. Malen sat in the forward compartment with a folder unopened on his knee and spoke of nothing relevant. Marrick tried to ask twice. Malen brushed him off with Perfunctory responses both time.
Wend simply closed his eyes to get some rest for the journey. Odric stared quietly at the carriage ceiling.
Kolt watched the countryside pass outside the window and couldn’t make the logic add up. If you were breaking up a gate detail, you did it in an office. If you were dismissing men, you did it in an office. Nobody put seven knights on a train for a day to do something that took four minutes.
On the second morning, Malen finally opened the folder.
"Right," he said. "Now I’ll tell you where you’re going."
He looked at the squad. "Ironhold has been building a gun."
He laid the first sheet on the compartment table. It was a side-view diagram, and it took Kolt a moment to figure out the scale, because a human figure was drawn beside it and the man only came up to about the height of the lower tracks.
"Six hundred millimeters of bore"
"A hundred and twenty-four tons in firing order. Two magic cores built into the rear hull—she can walk herself over flat ground around 7 miles per hour. Beyond that, she travels in sections by rail." Malen turned the sheet around so they could examine it properly. "Twenty-four men to serve her. Mages also included with it as part of the crew, because without them she doesn’t move and the shells can’t be lifted."
"How heavy is a shell?" Verrin asked.
"Two tons."
Verrin’s mouth opened and shut.
"Range?"
"Just over six miles with the heavy round. Ten miles with the light round, though that’s a poor trade—the light shell is just for reaching out, while the heavy one is for what the weapon was actually built to do." Malen laid down a second sheet. "Which is this."
It was a survey map of a test firing. Kolt stared at it for several seconds before he truly understood what he was looking at, because the shape in the center made no sense at the printed scale.
"But that’s a crater sir."
"That’s one round fired into a stone quarry," Malen said, tapping the spot. "It caused a forty feet deep crater into solid stone. Wide enough to swallow a house and the rock around it shattered another thirty feet out in every direction."
"One round," Odric said softly.
"One. Against a wall—any wall of any thickness built anywhere on this continent—she doesn’t just breach it. She removes the piece of earth the wall was standing on." Malen let that truth settle over them. "There is no fortress on this continent that matters anymore. Most of them just don’t know it yet."
Wend was still staring at the survey drawing. "How often can she fire?"
"With magic applied to the shells, about eight minutes between rounds,maybe less on a bad day" Malen shrugged. "Which means she doesn’t lay siege to a fortress. She stands where she is and takes it apart, one bite at a time, for as long as she’s fed."
Marrick let out a long breath. "That’s not a gun, Commander. That’s a siege engine that walks."
"Yes."
They sat with that thought for a while as the countryside rolled past.
"Right, then," Kolt said. "Now say the rest."
"What rest?"
"You spent a day telling us nothing, and now you’ve spent twenty minutes telling us how impressive this weapon is." Kolt met his eyes directly. "Nobody puts seven knights on a train just to admire hardware. What’s wrong with it?"
Malen almost smiled. "It doesn’t have a crew."
"You said it takes twenty-four men."
"I can find twenty-four men. I can find them tomorrow from the field batteries—veteran gunners with ten years of service who would trade their teeth for the post." Malen closed the folder. "But four of those twenty-four positions cannot be filled by an ordinary gunner. The rounds weigh six hundred kilos even with gravity magic active. That still requires four strong men and a mechanical winch for every single shell. Every winch takes time, and every minute the gun isn’t firing, she’s standing in the open being shot at."
"So you want knights working the breech."
"I want knights working the breech." Malen looked along the compartment at all seven of them. "And here is the other half of it—the half I’ve spent four months trying to solve. That gun cannot run. She weighs a hundred and twenty-four tons, she’s anchored deep into the stone with heavy ground spades, and it takes half a day to move her. The enemy will spot her position by the third round. After that, every weapon they own will rain down on that square of ground—and the crew has to keep loading. For hours. Sometimes days. While men die right beside them."
He placed his palm flat against the folder.
"There is no version of that mission where anyone retreats. So I need four men on the breech who will not."
Everyone fell in deep thought at this.
Kolt understood the true reason two seconds before anyone else did, feeling the entire foundation of their situation shift beneath him.
"That’s why you never asked about the flare," Kolt said.
"I didn’t need to ask about the flare. I’ve read the report eleven times." Malen sat back. "You had one item on your belt that would end all seven of your careers, and a man who couldn’t walk, and you used it inside ten minutes. That’s why you aren’t Commandos. A Commando might have to leave a friend on foreign ground and keep going, and you proved that you can’t."
He shrugged.
"Which is a terrible quality in a soldier who deploys alone, and a very good one in a man standing next to a gun he cannot leave."
Verrin said, slowly, "You want us because we failed."
"I want you because of how you failed. I could fill that hall with brave men. Bravery is common." Malen looked at Odric. "I need men who were offered the door at full price and didn’t take it. There are seven of those in my knowledge and I’m sitting in a carriage with all of them."
Ironhold emerged out of the haze in the late afternoon—the furnace smoke first, then the rail yards, then the massive assembly halls.
Malen stood up and tucked the folder under his arm.
"Four of you crew her. Kolt commands the position, if he wants it. Verrin, Vance, and Aldarry loading with him."
"There are seven of us," Kolt said.
"Tallen, Marrick, Sund—you’re the core cadre for the second gun. There will be a second. There will be a fourth and a sixth after that, and when those units roll out, every man alive who operates one will have learned it from somebody in this carriage."
Sund said, "So we aren’t spares."
"You’re the reason this is a corps and not just a single crew."
The train slowed down. The heavy hall drifted past the window—the largest structure any of them had ever seen, its massive doors firmly shut.
"You don’t have to answer now," Malen said. "You’ll see her first. Then you give your answer."