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"A rail-road? What is a ’rail’? A new technology to develop, Father? Do you have a draft of it?" Researchina asked, pulling closer an empty wax tablet.
Sadly, I didn’t have time to prepare documentation, so I had to draw it on a clear wall as I was talking.
"Ordinary dirt roads will get too muddy for travel after the first storm. Paved roads will fare better, but they require a lot of effort and bricks or stone to be made. Instead, let’s use the next level—railroads! The entire road will be compressed into two smooth rails for wheels. The rails will make it easier to pull things along them, will be more durable, and might even require fewer resources."
Researchina nodded, while still furiously writing her notes.
"This sounds very effective… what is a ’wheel’, though?"
"Oh, right. I skipped some fundamental technologies here. Alright, let’s start from the beginning! In the beginning, there was the idea of rolling things over the ground…"
Thankfully, wheels and wheeled carts were a simple concept to explain. Not only Researchina immediately understood it, but other Advisers, too.
"Won’t flying be much faster than rolling things over the ground, even on ’rails’?" Things-Things asked with a pout. "My Craftsmen already have to wait for so long to get the next batch of coal and ore!"
I shook my head.
"Yes, flying is faster, but think about it this way. Without rails, 10 bees will bring, say, 10 small bags of ore per day. With rails, these bees could push a cart instead. It will take them, perhaps, a week to make this journey…"
"A *week*?!" Things-Things gasped.
"Yes, a week! Flying is *way* faster than pushing a cart. But this cart will be filled with a hundred, even two hundred small bags of ore! So in a week, these bees will bring over twice as much ore as if they were flying. And they could push carts even in storms."
"This will require a lot of work camps for the traveling carts, Nectus. That will take even more of our resources and efforts," Ambrosia pointed out. "They must be built often enough that all these bees had a place to sleep in."
"And be guarded from the hunters of the night," Bloodhero added.
I grinned and wagged my finger at them.
"But there’s no need! We can make carts big enough that all the bees that push and guard them could just sleep inside. It will be like a portable hive!"
As realization flashed in my girls’ eyes, my grin widened even more.
"It will still take a lot of work and materials," Things-Things said dreamily. "Oh… it will be *so* grand! A project worth of our Father and the Bee Empire! When do we start building?"
I laughed and clapped my hands.
"Don’t hurry so much, Things-Things! First, we need the prototypes and schematics. Second, we use that math teachers taught you in school and calculate how much resources this will take against the resources we have. This is our Project Hotwheels!"
***
There was actually a name for primitive railroads where carts were pulled not by engines, but by muscle power (which usually belonged to horses).
Those roads were called wagonways, and the earliest evidence of them went as far as Ancient Greece, where they were carved into stone.
The railroads of the Bee Empire were going to be pulled by bees for the lack of better options. As for their material, there were options.
Wood was most available, but wooden tracks won’t hold long under heavy carts. Stone was hard to work with, even if we had better tools.
Metal was the best thing.
And according to the reports of scavengers from Camp Rich, we were going to have a *lot* of metal!
The dead giants didn’t carry metal armor, but a simple iron cooking pot discovered in one of their packs already weighed thousands of tons.
Thousands! Perhaps 5, perhaps 10. But definitely a lot!
The dead giants also had knives, axes, and other yet unidentified metal items. I estimated that there were at least two dozen *thousand* tons of metal, mostly iron.
An insane amount.
However, if I wanted my railway to Camp Rich to be made from durable iron, then I would need at least 13500 tons of this iron!
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I looked at the numbers I wrote on the wax tablet and counted again.
Yes…
Even with the smallest rails that were reasonable to make, it would take 25 kilograms of iron for a meter of the railway.
And Camp Rich was 540 kilometers away from Hive Supremo. *Maybe*, because the distance was counted based on the speed of a bee’s flight, and this I just estimated by squinting really hard.
’For all I know, the actual railway will take twice as much iron. It could be used on tools instead,’ I thought, frowning. ’Then again… We can just get more of it!’
Humans were out there somewhere, and they had it all.
The first Beehounds were already powdered with morphotyping pheromone. In a month, they will fly out to seek the scent of humans.
I had nothing personal against them, but they had what the Bee Empire needed. And the Bee Empire had what they wanted, so I’d rather attack preemptively next time.
***
It only took three days for Researcher Bees to make a prototype of the rails and wheeled carts.
The first railway was made from wood, and the first cart was just the most basic wooden cart possible, held together by golden nails. It barely needed inventing, since it was a part of the Early Bronze Age technologies—as soon as my girls understood what my words mean, they built the test version.
Both constructions looked like they could fall apart at any moment, but near them, Researcher Bees were crawling around, searching for ways to improve them.
<Congratulations! You’ve unlocked ’Muscle-Powered Railway’ technology!>
〔Muscle-Powered Railway〕
Brainpower requirement: 25000
Logistics: +200 per 1 thousand affected populace.
〔〕〔〕〔〕
We barely had enough brainpower for the railway, but we had it.
Looking at the prototypes and the techs they unlocked, I estimated the resulting bonuses in my head.
With how many bees lived in Hive Supremo and Camp Rich, I could tell that the railway was going to double our logistics! And for a good reason.
There was just one *smaaaaall* problem that separated me from my shiny new railway…