The Exiled Duke's Lottery system

Skyforge

They were still walking back from the target range, boots crunching on the sun-baked gravel, the faint stink of burned turbine oil clinging to their heavy coats, when Brakka spoke up.

"My lord. What comes after this?"

"After what?"

"After today." Brakka gestured back over his shoulder toward the valley with a thick, grease-stained thumb. "You have an aircraft that flies faster than a wyvern and a rotary cannon that punched clean through my best forged plate. Every man on that field is going to spend tonight in a tavern telling anyone who’ll listen. Tomorrow morning they’ll report for shift and ask me what we are building next, and I would like an answer that is not ’nothing.’"

Lucien walked a few more paces, watching the smoke from the target line drift lazily into the northern hills.

"Not out here," he said. "The office. Malen, call Maerath and Gandalf as well."

Skyforge’s primary office belonged to Maerath, and it had never been engineered to hold five grown men.

Brakka took the only other heavy wooden chair, his broad frame overflowing it. Gandalf leaned against the sunlit window frame. Malen remained posted by the door, a dark leather notebook already resting in the crook of his arm, while Maerath cleared a broad swath of blue ink bottles and draft paper off his desk.

"I want a bomber," Lucien said, stepping up to the desk.

"We have a bomber,my lord" Maerath said smoothly.

"We have the Stormwing, which carries four hundred kilos three hundred kilometers and has to turn around before its tanks run dry. That is a machine for hitting an enemy on the other side of a hill." Lucien unrolled a fresh sheet of draft paper across the cleared wood. "I want a machine for hitting something on the other side of the world."

Gandalf shifted away from the window, leaning over the desk to study the ink lines. His eyes narrowed.

"There are two distinct aircraft drawn here."

"There are two but the same airframe family, two specialized variants." Lucien put a finger on the first schematic. "This one carries heavy bombs. Six turbojet engines. Eight Vulcan Aerie turrets arranged for interlocking fire so it can defend its own airspace. Twenty-five tons of bombs, and five thousand kilometers of range."

Brakka’s head snapped up. "Twenty-five tons."

"Twenty-five."

"The Stormwing carries four hundred kilos," Brakka repeated, as if trying to force the comparison to make sense.

"I know what the Stormwing carries."

Maerath had gone very still, his quill hovering above the desk. "And the second variant?"

"The second variant carries no bombs at all." Lucien dragged his finger across to the second drawing. "Eight engines. Twelve turrets. Five thousand rounds of heavy ammunition fed to every single gun position. Its only job is to fly with the strike group and kill whatever comes at the formation."

The room fell into a heavy, suffocating silence. The distant, rhythmic thud of the iron foundries hummed through the floorboards.

"Wait wait wait my lord,you want an aircraft," Gandalf said slowly, measuring every word, "whose entire existence is dedicated to shooting things out of the sky, and which possesses zero capacity to strike the ground."

"Precisely."

"Why build a giant airframe for that? The single-seat fighter handles air-to-air."

"The single-seat fighter has forty minutes to an hour of fuel endurance and cannot operate five thousand kilometers from base. She cannot escort a long-range raid—she cannot even reach where the formation is going." Lucien sat back against the edge of the table. "So the escort has to be an integrated part of the formation. It flies as far as the bombers fly, at the exact same cruising speed, and it can keep shooting for a very long time without turning back."

Maerath pulled the heavy draft sheet toward himself, tracing the structural ribs with an ink-stained thumb. As his eyes moved down the handwritten specifications, the color slowly drained from his face.

"Six engines," he muttered. "And eight on the gunship."

"Yes."

"My lord, we have built exactly two jet engines in the entire history of this world, and it took Master Brakka eleven days of continuous tuning just to make the second one agree with the first." He looked up, his brow furrowed. "You are asking for fourteen engines for just two aircraft."

"On the first two aircraft."

"That is vastly worse."

"It is meant to be worse. If we build one of each and stop, we have wasted an entire year." Lucien nodded at the sheet. "Say the rest. You have more major objections, and I would rather hear all of them right now."

Maerath counted them off on his fingers without hesitation.

"One: The engine specified on this paper is not the engine currently sitting on our test bench. You have written twenty-five kilonewtons of thrust. Ours produces eight point eight. That is not a larger version of the same casting—that is a completely new propulsion program from the ground up."

"And it gets worse than three times harder," Brakka grunted from his chair, stoking his beard. "Heat does not scale politely. Managing thermal decay at eight point eight was difficult enough. At twenty-five, it will be far tougher, and I do not yet know how I will manage it."

"Two," Maerath continued, undeterred. "Every engine mounted on that bomber is an engine a fighter airframe did not get. Six engines equals three fighters. Eight is four. Build twenty bombers and you have not built sixty fighters."

"I have factored that into the strategic allocation."

"Three: Cores. Sixty mana cores are already promised to Master Dray for the battleship in writing, by your own order. Ironhold’s foundries refine two a month and will reach four by winter if the ore holds out. Every single one of those jet engines wants a core, and I have none spare between now and next autumn."

"I know that too."

"Four." Maerath spread his hands wide over the paper. "Nothing at Skyforge has ever been built at that scale. I have no hangar that would fit one. No alignment jigs, no gantries, and no man on this site who has built an aircraft with a wingspan he cannot walk across in ten paces. And the primary airstrip is fourteen hundred meters—which is barely enough for the fighter and nowhere near enough for a fully loaded heavy bomber which you are telling me about."

"And much runway do you think it would need?"

"I do not know. Three thousand meters four thousand maybe More." Maerath rubbed his face with both hands, leaving a faint smudge of dark ink on his temple. "That is a year of earth-moving and paving before anyone bends a single sheet of metal."

"Then start digging while you design it," Lucien said calmly.

"Then there is the crew," Malen interjected quietly from his spot by the door.

Every head turned toward the logistics officer.

"I have been running the personnel tally while you talked my lords." He held up his leather notebook. "And twelve turrets on the second variant. Somebody sits in every turret. Add a chief pilot, a second pilot beside him, a navigator, a flight engineer, a bomb aimer on the first variant, and a man on the signal set. That is nineteen or twenty men per aircraft."

"Correct."

"My lord, we have two dozen man in this entire territory who can fly the jet. We have less than ten who can fly a Stormwing, and one of them is sixty-one years old." Malen snapped the notebook shut with a sharp clack. "You are asking for twenty aircrew per machine, on a craft that does not exist, flying out of an airstrip that has not been dug. I do not have them and I cannot conjure them out of nothing."

"Then crew development starts today as well. Not when the first airframe rolls out of the factory. Today." Lucien looked him dead in the eye. "Pick your first cohort of thirty recruits. Put them on the Stormwings, put them on the observation blimps, put them in a classroom with Renner three evenings a week. I would rather have thirty trained airmen waiting four years for an aircraft, than an aircraft sitting in hangar with nobody to fly it."

Malen stared at him for a beat, nodded once, and wrote it down.

"Now, regarding the spatial rings," Lucien said, turning back to the table.

Maerath blinked, leaning closer to the schematics. "Which rings?"

"Two on the gunship variant. Spatial storage rings built into the fuselage for reserve ammunition." Lucien pointed to a shaded bay directly behind the main wing roots. "Five thousand rounds of thirty-millimeter ammunition per gun is an immense physical weight, and I want it carried aboard because I will not deploy an aircraft that stops fighting when an enchantment fails mid-air. The rings are the feed reserve. They are what allow that machine to reload its turrets four hours from home."

"Two per aircraft," Brakka noted thoughtfully.

"Two per aircraft."

"And how many aircraft in a production run?"

"Eventually? Dozens."

Gandalf slowly turned away from the window, his eyes dark with dry recognition.

"My lord, there are fewer than eighty storage rings in this entire territory, and every single one of them is already strapped to somebody’s finger. Malen has Commando teams in training right now who are waiting for theirs. I have had two master mages ask me about ring allocations just this month." He raised a frosty eyebrow. "So before you ask Aurethar for a single ring for an airframe, you are already operating at a deficit."

"Then I will ask him for two hundred."

"He will complain," Gandalf stated flatly.

"He will complain for about an hour then he will explain to me what a proper hoard costs to accumulate, and he will bring up the dwarf king in the fourth century again." Lucien did not look up from the blueprints. "Then he will hand over the rings and complain about the indignity for another year, and I will listen to that as well. That is the arrangement."

Brakka stroked his beard, genuinely curious. "Which dwarf king?"

"Do not ask him," Gandalf warned instantly, pointing a stern finger at the smith. "That is two hours of your life you will never get back."

"Here is the immediate problem for today," Lucien said, sweeping past the chuckles. "Maerath. The detection apparatus. The unit that reads its own mana frequency output."

Maerath looked up sharply. "Who told you about the autonomous sensor tests?"

"Master Dray’s chief draughtsman put it in a progress summary, Dray forwarded the letter to me, and I have analyzed the frequency logs four times." Lucien leaned across the table. "Where is it?"

"It is almost ready."

"Define ’almost’."

"That is not me being evasive. It is genuinely close." Maerath was already reaching into a lower drawer, pulling out a separate set of wiring diagrams. "The detection crystal array itself has never been the difficulty. The problem has always been human strain. A mage sits in front of the brass scope and interprets the raw pulses, and that has always been the whole cost. Two hours of that concentration and the man is exhausted for the day. Three mages on a warship gives you barely six hours of search time out of twenty-four."

"And the self-reading version?"

"Now, the apparatus writes down its own readings on a revolving ink drum. It has been running continuously on my workshop bench for eleven weeks without burning out." He laid the second blueprint over the bomber schematics. "A mage is still required to initiate and calibrate it, but he no longer has to sit there while it operates. One technician can monitor three or four arrays simultaneously."

Lucien studied the ink drum schematic carefully.

"Then also explain to everyone here why it matters so much for these two aircraft."

"Because a warship can carry three mages and rotate their shifts. An aircraft cannot," Maerath explained, gesturing across the room. "That machine flies kilometers into hostile territory. Nobody is relieved at the halfway point. If it requires a mage staring at an apparatus for twelve hours straight, then it needs a mage aboard for the entire flight, and he is useless for two days afterward. And I do not have that many mages. I have never had them."

"And with the automated version?"

"Then the flight navigator reads it, and a navigator is a man I can train in six weeks instead of a mage I cannot find." Maerath tapped the sheet twice with a hard knuckle. "That aircraft can fly at night, through dense cloud cover, over ground nobody has mapped, and it finds its target. Without it, my lord, twenty-five tons of bombs is twenty-five tons of steel dropped somewhere in the general area."

"And for the gunship?"

"The gunship needs it even more," Gandalf answered quietly. "Twelve gunners looking out of twelve narrow glass windows will only see whatever is already close enough to open fire on them. The apparatus detects incoming threats forty miles out, in total darkness, and tells the whole formation which direction they are coming from." He shrugged. "That is the absolute difference between an escort and a target."

Lucien rolled up the master sheet with a clean, decisive snap.

"Then finish it. Whatever resources it takes and whoever you need." He stood tall. "That detection unit is worth more to me than either airframe, because both aircraft are completely blind without it, and half the navy is running blind in the dark as well."

"It will be fully operational before the runway is dug," Maerath promised.

"Everything will be ready before the runway is dug," Lucien replied, heading for the door. "Which is precisely why the digging starts this week."