The Exiled Duke's Lottery system

"Ironhold," Lucien said, looking down the long table. "Brakka."

"The Karl is finished, my lord. Assembled, complete, standing in the hall." Brakka let the statement sit in the room for a moment before continuing. "Now I’ll tell you why that isn’t as good as it sounds."

"Go on."

"A hundred and twenty-four tons. Six hundred millimeters of bore." He set both heavy hands flat on the oak. "Everything we argued about for a year is solved—the traverse ring, the recoil, the loading gear, the mounting. The new cores gave us the power. She’ll move, she’ll traverse, she’ll load, and she’ll fire." He paused. "That’s the finished part. Here’s the rest: she can barely go anywhere, and once she gets there, I can’t feed her."

Lucas closed his eyes briefly.(The disappointment after spending your budget)

"Movement first," Lucien said.

"On her own tracks, she does a walking pace over ground we’ve prepared beforehand, for a few miles at most—and she tears up the roadbed doing it. We’d be relaying the road behind her the whole way." Brakka’s jaw set. "But it’s not the road that worries me. It’s the bridges. A hundred and twenty-four tons isn’t a crossing. It’s a collapse, and then the gun is at the bottom of a river along with eleven men."

"So she fights where the railway reaches."

"Where the railway reaches, plus whatever short crawl she survives past it." Brakka turned a page in his notebook. "And before you ask—yes, I’ve thought about the weight reduction spell. The stone guilds use them. Every quarry in Aetheris moves blocks that way and has done so for two hundred years."

"And?"

"And I’m a smith, not a mage." Brakka looked down the table at Gandalf. "The heaviest thing anyone has ever laid one of those workings on is a block of granite, sitting still, in a yard, with a supervisor watching it. I need it on a hundred and twenty-four tons that’s moving, under load, halfway across a stone bridge. I don’t know whether the working holds at that size. I don’t know whether it fails all at once. And I’m not putting a crew under it to find out on a guess."

Every head at the table immediately turned to Gandalf.

"Nobody has tried it on a machine that big," Gandalf said evenly. "But the geometry of the working doesn’t change. A bigger block is only a bigger block." He paused to consider the math. "Two-thirds reduction, I’d estimate. She’d still weigh a hundred and twenty-four tons, but she’d only press about forty into the ground beneath her."

"The bridges hold," Brakka noted.

"The bridges hold. And so does her own suspension, which matters more. On a machine that heavy, the running gear breaks long before the roadbed does."

"What does it cost?" Lucien asked.

"A great deal of mana," Maerath interjected, leaning forward. "But we can afford it, because she only needs the working while she’s moving. That’s the difference between this and the Stormhaul. A flying machine needs the magic every second it’s in the air. The gun needs it for a few hours on the march, then we switch it off. Hours, we can pay for."

"So she can’t move without mages."

"No. Wherever she goes, mages go with her."

"Then they’re crew," Lucien said. "Put them on the roster beside the loaders. They train with the gun and they travel with the gun." He turned back to Brakka. "Now tell me about the feeding problem."

"It’s worse than moving her." Brakka pushed a schematic across the table. "The shell weighs two tonnes. One shell. She’ll want a dozen in a day’s work, and every single one has to come off a rail car, cross open ground, get lifted to the breech, and be rammed home. No mortal man alive lifts two tonnes. And no crane I own swings it fast." He tapped the summary figure. "As she stands: one round every forty minutes, on a good day, with a practiced crew and nothing going wrong."

"Forty minutes," Malen said, his voice hard. "In a siege, that’s eight shots before dark. The rest of the day she stands in the open, waiting to be spotted."

"That’s exactly it. The finest siege weapon on the continent, and a competent enemy learns her rhythm by the third round and drops counter-battery fire on the position between the fourth and the fifth."

Lucien sat staring at the paper.

"Gandalf’s working takes two-thirds off a hundred and twenty-four tons," Lucien said quietly. "What does it take off two tonnes?"

Brakka opened his mouth to answer, then stopped. He looked at Gandalf, then back at his own calculations, and picked up his pen. He began writing rapidly.

"Six hundred kilos," Brakka muttered. "Six hundred kilos is an ordinary crane. A fast crane. I don’t need a gantry the size of a barn—I need a simple jib and a man who knows his business." He looked up, his eyes sharp. "My lord, I’ve spent four months thinking about how to move the gun itself. I never once thought about applying the working to the shells, because the shells weren’t the thing holding up the road."

"How fast?"

"Give me a week to test the cradle properly," Brakka said, still scribbling. "Eight minutes. Ten at the outside."

"Is that a real operational difference?"

"It’s the whole difference. At forty minutes she irritates a fortress. At eight, she never stops hitting it."

"Second question," Lucien said. "Who crews her?"

"Gunners. She’s an artillery piece."

"She’s a gun where the lightest thing anyone handles is six hundred kilos, and where the enemy will be shelling the battery the moment they’ve worked out her rhythm." Lucien leaned back in his chair. "What if we crewed her with knights?"

Malen set down his pen. "Let me hear all of it before I object."

"Three reasons. First, strength—a knight can handles six hundred kilos like a sack of grain, so one man does what four gunners and a winch do now. Second, nerve—loading under counter-battery fire takes men who won’t break. Third, survival—that position will take hits, and knights live through what kills ordinary infantry."

"Now my objection, and it’s a significant one," Malen said flatly. "Knights take years to train. I have forty men competing for twenty-five Commando billets right now, and I turned away three mages this season because they weren’t sharp enough. You’re asking me to take men I can’t replace inside a decade and put them on shell-hauling duty."

"Four of them."

"Four?"

"Per gun," Lucien said. "The rest of the crew stays ordinary soldiers—twenty or so. Four knights, stationed strictly at the positions where raw physical strength decides between eight minutes and forty." He met Malen’s gaze. "And I’m not asking for your Commandos. How many men tested well and simply didn’t make the top twenty-five?"

Malen was quiet for a second.

"A lot," he acknowledged. "More than made it. They’re standing gate watches right now and hating every hour of it."

"Then give them somewhere to go. A heavy weapons corps—knights who crew the gear ordinary men can’t lift. It costs you nothing extra, and it gives the men you turned down a purpose."

"They’ll ask why they aren’t Commandos."

"They’ll be the only crew on this continent working a six-hundred-millimeter mortar under live fire," Ironbreaker said from the end of the table. "I’ve known gunners. Not one will waste a minute wishing he were somewhere else."

Malen almost smiled. "Four per gun. Agreed—but I select them myself. If this becomes the dumping ground for disappointed recruits, the unit rots within a year."

"Select them yourself. Train them at Ironhold on the actual gun, alongside Brakka’s crew."

"Last thing," Lucien said, tapping the table. "Getting shells from the railhead to the breech is part of the weapon system, not a cart problem." He held up a finger. "Purpose-built ammunition carriers. Tracked, with a crane mounted on each, working in pairs—one loads the gun while the other runs back to the railhead for more." He paused. "Build them on the Warhound chassis."

Lucas’s pen slipped across the page. "On the—"

"On the chassis we’re already producing. Same assembly line, same spare parts in the field depots, same mechanics who already know how to repair them." Lucien looked at him. "You were about to tell me what designing a new vehicle costs. Tell me what using this one saves instead."

Lucas mentally ran through the figures, his expression shifting.

"A great deal," he admitted. "The running gear and drive train alone—" He stopped, rubbing his temple. "Why is it that the one time you propose a cheap solution, it’s during the meeting where I’ve already written out my argument against you?"

"Practice makes a man perfect."

Ironbreaker tapped his pipe against the table. "There’s a tactical reason, too, and nobody has mentioned it yet. Those carriers stand right where the gun stands, which means they’re under the same fire. A wooden wagon is a death trap—one shell fragment and you have a burning cart and two tonnes of volatile high explosive. On a Warhound hull, it’s armored and tracked. It reverses out of trouble and crosses torn ground a wagon can’t touch. If I’m parking something beside a siege mortar for eleven days, I want a hull that’s built to take a hit."

"Agreed. Armor them properly," Lucien said to Brakka. "Standardize the design. Every carrier identical—same crane, same storage racks, same loading drill, interchangeable parts. That’s the part that matters most. Twelve identical carriers with one shared manual beat twelve clever custom designs every day of the week."

"And after the proof firing?" Malen asked.

"If she fires and the test target is gone, the heavy tank program opens that same week. Super-heavy development follows it." Lucien gathered his papers and stood. "Everything difficult about that gun is difficult about a seventy-ton tank. Casting components that large. Bearings under extreme load. Moving weight that collapses bridges. Machining parts no single man can lift. We learn all of it here, on a weapon that only has to sit still and shoot—and after that, building the tank becomes ordinary work."

"And if the proof firing fails?"

"Then we learn the lesson on our own firing range, at our own expense," Lucien said, stacking his files. "Which is the cheapest lesson we’ll ever get."