Aliana watched Malam turn and leave. The Goddess of Hatred strolled out without a goodbye or a farewell. She simply turned in a brilliant display of her monochrome style. White hair and black coat spun around her, then settled on her back. She took quick steps, heels clicking against the wooden panels of the floor and swung the door open for herself. She even raised her hand and flicked them a single wave. And then she disappeared. Without so much as an acknowledgement.

Aliana was left in Richard’s Shadow Council Chamber staring at the backs of the men who were supposed to represent the nation she was the incarnation of. Some of them leaned back, utterly defeated, others sighed with relief. A few reached for their glasses. What a humiliation. Malam had not played them, Malam had come in, demanded an answer, and all they could say was that they were indecisive little swine who needed more time.

It was obvious that they had underestimated Arascus and Malam. They had started thinking about building a henhouse as the chickens suddenly started to hatch. The Alanktydan blockade had been stopped indeed and now what? Did they really think that Malam and Arascus would be fine with a thank you? Did they not see the coup in Lubska where Jozef’s entire government was executed? Or Doschia? Where no one dared even suggest that there was something more to Wissel’s unfortunate demise rather than just a White Pantheon assassin? Or maybe they wanted to end up like Rancais instead? Broken and battered and needing even more help from Arascus and his expertise?

“We will meet in my court.” Richard VI broke up the silence. “In three hours’ time. That should be enough for everyone to get their papers and documents and have time to think.”

Aliana finally raised her voice, she wasn’t going to be left out of this meeting. It was too important, and she could not trust her own people after seeing the utter humiliation that they had performed before a Daughter Goddess of Arascus. “I expect to see everyone there.”

Arascus walked through the town of Iboud. He towered over even the cars that drove down these streets poured with fresh asphalt. The official name was the Imperial Bureau of Weapon Designs. It had started as a firing range for new guns in the middle of the country, chosen for the fact it was at the mid-point between Nanbasa and Central Requisitions. In the north, Kirinyaa’s natural jungle began, in the south, rocky formations began to jut out of the ground as trains raced along the central east-west railway. Four or five machines running along the tracks were common, and the number never dropped below two as resources were brought to the coastal cities for refining and export, whereas machines and tools were sent to the west to expand the mines. Kirinyaa’s largest problem now was that it simply lacked people.

Arascus took his mind off the trains and kept on walking to Iboud’s headquarters. The bureau here had then built a warehouse for the various guns. Then a housing block for the engineers and designers. A machine shop had opened and a garage for analysing vehicles from the front. Another housing block. A gym. A shop, for foodstuffs this time. A swimming pool. Another housing block. The Imperial Bureau of Weapon Designs moved its headquarters from Central Requisitions to here. The place was renamed after the organisation that ran it. The locals shortened it down. Iboud stuck as a name.

Not a town yet although one walk through these streets had convinced Arascus that it could be given proper status as an official city, Arascus approached the Bureau’s headquarters. It was a huge building that lay low to the ground as if it purposefully tried to take up as much surface area as possible. It had concrete walls and gardens, flowerbeds and bulletproof grass, fountains and watchtowers. Researchers in dirty clothes, guards with new models of rifles, and businessmen in dark suits with cases by their side. No matter who it was, they all stepped out of Arascus’ way as the God entered through the grand front doors.

The bureau knew he would coming today, he had requested the meeting after seeing the various pet-projects that were being dreamed up here. They were in times of relative peace for now, so pet-projects and grand ideas were tolerated. Times of war would cut the fat anyway, but sometimes fat grew into something no one could predict.

A team of six men were already here to meet Arascus. Three dark Kirinyaans, and then three Epans. They were various heads of departments here. Not bureaucrats or managers, those men were smart and that was the exact issue with them. Mangers and bureaucrats went into the Imperial Financial Department to use their skills there as much as to keep them away from everything else; men who knew how to work the books were simply too competent for their own good. The six engineers saluted, Arascus saluted them back and let them start their speech.

They were of course honoured to host him here, and they wanted to show everything off, but of course, they had gone through with his request and only chosen the best of the best. To relay that meagre amount of information took five minutes of walking down hallways and tripping over each other’s words. “And that’s everything we’re going to show off today.” One of the Kirinyaan men finished.

“I’m not here to inspects new designs of rifles.” Arascus shut them down immediately. “Or new vehicle models.” That was Kassie’s job for one, and for two, the best inspector of a new model was the battlefield. As long as there weren’t glaring flaws in the papers, then he wasn’t arrogant enough to think his opinion mattered. “I know that you’re developing new technology.”

“Indeed, indeed!” One of the engineers answered. “We’re more than eager to show them off!”

Of course they were.

Arascus had come around now, when they were still riding high on the amount of money that had been allocated to the Bureau. An audit was coming in two weeks from now, because one of the plane projects was starting to run away on costs and some marksman rifle was starting beginning to have a unit model as expensive as a new car. Neither should be happening, but these men would be far more cautious to talk of their projects after the audit then before it. “Well then what are we waiting for? Lead off.”

And they did, through corridors and down stairs, outside the headquarters buildings, and then into a large hall that was fashioned entirely out of concrete and steel panels. Cables snaked along the ground and tables were arranged haphazardly, each one without so much as a single square inch of space to spare. There was a team working here. A Rancais flag hung on the wall and an engineer, a man with curly hair and a sharp jawline, ran across the workshop. In the middle was something that Arascus could only describe as a nightmare of moving parts. Cables and lenses and metal prongs concentrated a thin beam of light that was melting a piece of steel on the other side of the hall. Scientists around it were jotting down notes on clipboards and it looked as if this team had not even been aware that Arascus would be coming for inspections.

“My name is Nicephore Allain.” The man with long hair introduced himself. The name sounded nothing how it was spelled. The man turned and explained the inner workings of the machine. Arascus caught that it had lenses and ran on batteries. The intricacies of light refracting through glass, he cared little for.

“Is this your prototype?” Arascus eventually asked once the man stopped talking about tiny increases in power.

“This is only our newest model of laser, I sent a document about practical combat applications.” The Rancais engineer said as Arascus stared at the machine. Admittedly, it was unbelievably impressive. There was no denying that as he looked at the exposed wirings and moving lenses and cables, he had no damn clue what did what.

“I have read the reports.” It was this laser that made Arascus realise he had to come back to take a guiding hand and lead the designers back onto the trail of feasibility. There was going to be no shouting, but it was the same as when Fer played about. There was time for play, and there was time for when he needed to step in and simply say why something would not happen. “There are two problems.” To get tunnel vision was a natural part of being an inventor, but a person with tunnel vision sometimes missed obvious flaws. “One, how will this work during fog and rain?”

That wasn’t even something Arascus had thought of, it was a tactic thought up of by Kassandora to counter Seeker’s beams of light. Heavy fog shrunk their range down to a few dozen feet. And those were powered by Allasaria’s power rather than batteries. “And two, you wrote about this serving as artillery.”

Nicephore blinked in surprise at the first flaw, obviously taken aback by the fact he missed something so obvious, but he pulled himself together enough to answer Arascus’ question. “I did, it requires no ammunition.”

“Light goes in a straight line, does it not?” Arascus asked.

“It does.” Nicephore replied.

“How far away is the horizon?” Arascus asked and immediately saw Nicephore understand the issue.

“It…” Nicephore said. “I see it.”

“Unless you make light bend or mount this on a tower, you’re not outranging the artillery we have.” Arascus said, he thought up of how the man said it required no ammunition though. “It runs on batteries I assume.”

“It does sir.” Nicephore said.

“How many shots do you have in a single battery?”

“In the prototype models we have, it’s sixty.”

“And how large are they?”

“About the size of a car-engine.”

“Reduce their size.” Arascus said. “Make it more space-efficient than tank shells, and then mount them on tanks. Send them to the Underground Expeditionary Legion to serve in the front lines, this won’t be artillery but we do have something here.” Arascus, honestly, did not see what these lasers could accomplish, but it had been the same with the early handcannons. Crossbows had simply been better, and then the musket had come about in the closing days of the Great War. If it had been there from the start, they would have won. Someone would think of something with these lasers, even if it wasn’t Nicephore. “Anything else?” Arascus asked turned back to the men who were taking notes.

“There is a new style of cannon we wished to run by you too.”

“Show me it.” Arascus said as they left Nicephore in his workshop. If the man gave up, he wasn’t cut out for this line of work whereas if he stayed, then his ideas would have to be re-designed. Maybe someone else would take up the mantle, but laser artillery was simply not going to happen. The team of six head engineers led Arascus outside and to another building.

If Nicephore’s workshop was organized chaos, the this was unorganized cleanliness. On one side of the room was a table, on the other side were two filing cabinets with a trio of engineers in suits drinking beer. There was a chair in the middle of the hall, seemingly facing the invention in the middle. A man smoking on it as he looked at the grand machine in the centre. It was a cannon of sorts, but with two prongs instead of a single barrel. The prongs were interconnected by rings and cables as wide as car tires snaked from the walls and to the… was it a turret? Arascus didn’t really know.

At least the fact there was a pile of shells meant that this fired projectiles and not immaterial light. The smoking man stood up, he wore glasses, had a thick moustache, a receding hairline, a wide face and looked as if the very concept of joy was foreign to him. Doschian then. “My name is Werner von Ziemen.” Doschian indeed.

“Arascus.” Arascus replied out of honesty as he pointed to the thing in the middle. “And apart from being ten percent of the budget, what is that?” Werner turned and waved for his engineers. One of the men pressed something, the wall started to slide down and reveal the outside. There was no building, not even a road ahead of them and in the distance, there was a rocky mountain that had obviously been battered.

“I call it a railgun.” Werner said. “Because it uses the magnetic rails that Rancais high-speed trains use.” Doschian indeed, that was roughly the level of creative liberty Arascus had come to expect. The man finished, as if he had said enough.

“And?”

“We don’t use gunpowder, so it fires the entire slug at once. It’s powered by electricity. It cuts down travel time of shells massively. We can have a slug loaded for the demonstration.”

“Then have at it.” Arascus said and Werner took a step back. The engineer lifted his hand and lights on his railgun started to turn on as the machine’s coils started to hum. They hissed, a man on the other side of the room plugged something in and suddenly the white fluorescent lights turned off in the workshop, to be replaced with the backup red lamps.

In the next moment, the railgun fired. The shell travelled for only a second before Arascus saw a cloud of dust appear from the mountain. The coils hissed, the machine started to power down, and then the lights turned back on finally. Arascus had thought they had broken at first with bad timing. But… It was impossible… Did the man not see the issue? “Do you see the problem?” Arascus could not believe he had to ask.

“We need a better cooling method because the coils need half an hour to cool down and a full hour to make sure they don’t melt anyway.” Arascus looked at the two prongs of that cannon and saw the air shimmer around it. That cloud of red dust in the distance was still rising.

The low rate of fire, frankly, did not even matter if this thing had the hundred mile range that the papers said it did. What did matter was what happened to the lights just now. “I meant the fact that the lights had to be turned off.” Arascus said.

“That, we actually can’t fix.” Werner said flatly. He wasn’t argumentative, he was simply stating facts. “I have gotten it as efficient as I possibly can. There is legitimately no way to decrease its power consumption anymore.”

“Then how do you plan to use this in the field?” The man shook his head.

“I do not know.” Werner said. “But the technology is impressive nonetheless.”

Arascus sighed. Well, he had seen it fire. It did work, there was something here, it was simply impossible to mount on tanks yet. But stationary artillery? Maybe on trains? Or ships? That was a good idea. And that was if a more efficient method of power generation wasn’t discovered. “You are correct, the technology is impressive.”

Arascus turned and looked at the six men who were leading him around here. So far, they had two impressive pieces of tech and zero usable pieces of tech. He knew better than to show his disappointment though. Maybe someone could come along and use this technology, or as Werner said, maybe someone would come along and invent reactors small enough to power this monster of a gun. Either way, at least ten percent of the Bureau’s budget had actually gone into building something that existed in reality and not just in imagination. “And the next one?” Arascus asked.

And so he went, from one workshop to the next. This one was smaller, the building looked more like a converted home rather than warehouse or a workshop. It didn’t have any huge signs on the outside, and inside, it was simply a small room with a man sitting by a desk. He saw Arascus and stood up immediately, his hand coming to a salute. A man called Jorg Avol, from the UNN apparently, although Arascus’ Empire poached talent from everywhere. At the end of the day, a little bit of money and a plot of land in the middle of Kirinyaa was worth exchanging for the ability to deny scientists.

“Jorg Avol.” The engineer said. “Here to present the Hound-One.”

Arascus said. “What is it?”

Jorg pulled out his phone and tapped something into it. From behind the table came what looked to be a mechanical replication of a dog. It was only a box with four legs attached to it, and then an arm sticking out the top, but it moved by itself in a bouncy manner. Jorg began to explain in a dry monotone about the battery life, the arm, the carrying capacity, the fact he had managed to already exchange the arm for a rifle to make a mobile turret and he even had the gall to request more money straight from Arascus. To make larger models and hopefully to design bipeds.

Arascus gave it to him on the spot. Frankly, he didn’t care about the applications Jorg could think up of. As long as the man designed the platform, other people would make it fill any niche imaginable. The military uses didn’t even matter to him, that was Kassandora’s demesne. “You mentioned other models?” Arascus asked.

“Larger models for transport. I have a design drawn up, it should be as easy as this.” Jorg snapped his hands. “It’s just this thing scaled up.” The man kicked the Hound One. The robot lost balance for a moment, but quickly caught itself. “I have a biped in the works, but it’s not…” Jorg trailed off. “Well, there’s nothing to show off yet. There’s an autonomous air drone too running the Hound system. That was the first one actually. Theoretically, the ai could be put into wheeled and tracked vehicles too.”

Arascus remembered how the Empire needed to turn to necromancy in the past to keep up its manpower. Near the end of the war, there had simply been no one left. Kirinyaa was facing the same problem right now. They had the land and the resources, but they simply lacked the manpower. What did the nation’s current baby boom even matter? Allasaria would not wait twenty years for a new generation to grow up.

But why bother waiting for people to grow up when you could just build them instead?

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep