The Exiled Duke's Lottery system

Chapter 259: Chapter 252:Stormhaul

Lucien found the Commandos exactly where Malen had left them. Rather than summoning them to the center of the tarmac, he walked straight to the edge of the apron, closing the distance between a lord and his soldiers.

"You watched all of it," Lucien said, his gaze sweeping down the rigid line of steel-clad men. "The Commander tells me he brought you here to ask for things. So ask. Badly, if that’s how the words come out, but speak plain."

For a long moment, the block of knights remained perfectly motionless—a wall of dark iron against the gravel. Then Arven stepped forward, the joints of his greaves groaning softly under the weight of his armor.

"Could it carry us, my lord?"

"That one?" Lucien glanced back toward the idling Stormwing. "No. It’s a fighter. One seat, and the pilot fills it."

"Not that specific one, then." Arven looked past Lucien, his eyes tracking the grease stains where the aircraft had taxied. "I’ve stood here for an hour working out what I just watched. What I watched is a way into places that have no roads." He straightened his shoulders, the armored plates of his chest clicking together. "Our entire doctrine is built on the assumption that nobody is coming to save us. Five of us drop behind enemy lines, do the job, and walk out. But the walking out is where we die. Every plan we’ve drilled, every mock exercise we’ve run—it’s never the objective that kills us on paper. It’s the leaving."

Lucien nodded slowly. "Go on."

"So don’t make us walk," Arven said, his voice dropping into a hard, intense register. "Fly us in, and fly us out."

"Then tell me what that machine has to be. All of you." Lucien turned, addressing the entire block rather than a single man. "You’ve each got a different role in this squad, and each of you will want something different from the design. Say it all. I’d still rather hear a bad idea today than a good one two years too late."

The floodgates opened. It came out of them in jagged pieces, stripped of military deference or polite phrasing, and Lucien simply stood his ground and let the complaints run.

"It has to come straight down and go straight back up," Arven insisted, striking a fist against his thigh. This was clearly the hill he had decided to die on. "There’s no runway where we’re going. There’s never a runway. If it needs a strip of flat ground to land, then it can only take us where flat ground exists—and that’s precisely where the enemy will be waiting for us. We need to drop straight down onto a jagged hillside. Straight down into a fortified courtyard. And straight back up out of the same."

"Armor," Varro cut in before Arven could even finish drawing breath. "Heavy plate. Not a fighter’s thin skin."

"Say why," Lucien commanded.

"Because going in, a machine like that is just a fat target that can’t shoot back and can’t dodge, and everyone underneath it will be looking up," Varro said, shrugging his massive shoulders. "The moment they see us clear the ridge line, every crossbow, every ballista, every hedge-mage in that valley is going to aim at one single thing. The hull has to eat that fire. Not just once, either—the whole way down, while it’s hovering, while five men are scrambling out, and all over again on the way home when they know exactly where we are."

"How much armor are we talking about?"

"Enough that it doesn’t matter what they hit it with," Varro said flatly. "I don’t know how to express that in engineering numbers, my lord. I just know that if that machine can be knocked out of the sky by one lucky shot from a wall-bow, then five knights, their gear, and everything you spent three years building dies to a single peasant’s luck."

"That’s a remarkably fair way of putting it," Ironbreaker muttered from the side, chewing on his lip. "Write that one down, someone."

"And it should shoot back," Varro pressed on, his eyes flashing behind his visor. "Nose guns. Something like the Aeries rapid-fires, if they’ll fit the frame. Right now, the plan dictates that five of us jump out into whatever hell is waiting. If the machine can hammer the ground down for thirty seconds while we get our footing, that’s thirty seconds nobody is shooting at our backs."

"And on the withdrawal," Arven added grimly, "it’s the exact difference between a clean getaway and a total massacre."

"Room," Rellan spoke up next.

Lucien turned to him. "Say more." engineering costs are. That’s why we’re giving you all six. You asked what we need, my lord. Not what we’d settle for."

Ironbreaker had spent the last two minutes aggressively rubbing his coarse jawline, the bristly sound filling the quiet gap in conversation. Finally, he stopped, his hand dropping to his belt.

"Right," the dwarf said, stepping into the center of the gathering. "Before this conversation goes one step further into the clouds, somebody has to be the bastard who does the arithmetic out loud, and it may as well be me. Look at that aircraft over there."

They all turned to look at the sleek, sharp lines of the Stormwing.

"That machine lives because it goes fast," Ironbreaker said, gesturing with a thick hand. "That’s the whole trick of the sky, and every flying thing ever built relies on it. The engine drags the airframe forward, the wind moves over the curve of that wing, and the wing lifts the weight. She weighs what she weighs because we sheared off every single ounce that wasn’t a wing, an engine, or a gun—and even stripped down to the bone, she still needs every yard of this gravel field just to get her wheels off the dirt."

He turned back to the knights, his expression grim. "Now take the forward speed away. Tell her to sit completely still in the middle of the air. What happens?"

"The wing does nothing," Malen answered quietly.

"The wing does nothing. It becomes a useless plank of pine or canvas." Ironbreaker held his hand out flat, then let it drop like a stone. "So if you’re going straight up without a runway, something else has to claw at the air to hold you there. That means a rotor—a massive propeller turned flat on its side, pointed at the dirt, throwing air down hard enough to lift the entire mass on sheer brute force. And here’s the part I need every one of you to actually digest."

He locked eyes with Varro. "Your thick armor. Your nose guns. Your eight fully loaded men. Your medic’s kneeling room. Every single pound of that fantasy hangs entirely off that rotor, and that rotor hangs entirely off the engine. The second that engine sags, there is no wing to glide on. There is no coasting back to base. It just comes down like an anvil."

"Then we build a bigger engine," Varro countered simply.

"Many times bigger," Ironbreaker snapped. "And it has to run steady, not in short bursts. Steady for as long as you intend to hover over your courtyard. And before you say it: we tried building bigger back at Ironhold. Bigger doesn’t just work because you want it to. Past a certain scale, the engine spends its own strength just holding its own cylinders together, giving you back absolutely nothing in return. That’s not me being a cautious old dwarf. That’s a gun the size of a townhouse that can’t even lift its own barrel, sitting in Brakka’s grand hall right now, proving it to anyone who walks past."

A heavy, oppressive silence fell over the apron. The reality of the physics seemed to settle into the gravel.

"The sphere," Lucien added

Ironbreaker’s face soured instantly. "The sphere."

"Then it’s not an impossibility," Arven pressed. "It’s just waiting."

"That’s what I’d love to tell you," Ironbreaker said, casting a quick, sideways glance at Lucien before looking back at the men. "For three weeks, that damn artifact has been sitting on a reinforced bench between two high mages, surrounded by every measuring instrument in this territory and more of my personal patience than I usually part with in a decade. Do you know what it’s done? Nothing. It hasn’t warmed up. It hasn’t so much as hummed. They’ll crack the cipher eventually—I’d bet the entire workshop on those two mages—but neither of them can give me a timeline, and I am absolutely not going to stand here and promise twenty-five good men a machine built around a power source that might wake up next month or next century."

"So we wait," Daren murmured, his voice flat.

"So the Stormhaul project waits," Ironbreaker corrected him, his tone surprisingly gentle for a dwarf. "That’s the honest engineering answer, boys, and I’m thoroughly sorry for it."

Lucien had been standing apart, silent for the better part of the debate. Now, he stepped forward, the heels of his boots clicking sharply on the stones.

"Write the specifications up anyway," he commanded.

Arven blinked. "My lord?"

"All six of them, Arven. In exact numbers. What an armored man weighs on a scale, what he carries in his kit, how many wounded you expect, how many minutes you need the machine hanging perfectly still, how much fire it has to absorb during insertion. No wishes, no vague terms. Numbers. Ensure Ironbreaker has the document within the week."

"My lord, with respect, if the physics don’t work and the engine can’t be built—"

"Then when the technology does work, I don’t want to lose an entire season trying to remember what you meant by ’heavy armor,’" Lucien interrupted, already turning back toward the road where the carriages waited. He stopped, looking over his shoulder. "Ironbreaker."

"My lord," the dwarf responded.

"Build something small. Something that flies straight up."

Ironbreaker’s head snapped around, his thick brow furrowing. "I just explained to the lads—"

"Not the Stormhaul," Lucien clarified, gesturing toward the silent block of Commandos. "Not a transport. No armor plating. No heavy nose guns. No troops, no long range, no grand ambition. One man, built as light as your smiths can possibly manage, one vertical rotor, and just enough engine power to hold him ten feet off the dirt for two minutes using the components we already have sitting in the inventory."

Ironbreaker stared at him. "A machine like that can’t actually do anything useful, Lucien."

"A machine like that can teach us how to hover," Lucien said, his voice ringing clearly across the quiet airfield. "Nobody in this entire territory has ever built a mechanism that stays in the sky without running at something first. You said so yourself, standing right there, not ten minutes ago. So tell me, Master Engineer: when that sphere finally does wake up—whether that’s next month or next year—do you want to spend the two years after that discovery trying to learn how a vertical rotor affects an airframe’s balance?"

Ironbreaker opened his mouth to argue, found no words, and slowly closed it again.

"Or would you rather already know the answers," Lucien said, a sharp smile touching his face, "and just bolt the new power source on? and after you have completed it come to my office with gandalf and maerath"

He turned and walked away, leaving them to the quiet of the morning. Behind him on the closed airfield, a lone dwarf stood staring up at the empty sky, swearing softly.