The Exiled Duke's Lottery system

Chapter 261: Chapter 254:The hybrid

Ironbreaker sat.(Cont.)

"How heavy’s the fighter?" he asked.

"Light," Maerath said. "One man, guns, a thin wing. Everything else we cut."

"And how much of its own weight does the tube have to hold up?"

Maerath opened his mouth. Then closed it.

"None," he said.

"None. The wing holds her up. The tube only drags her forward fast enough for the wing to do its work — and the faster she goes, the better the wing works. Everything helps everything else." Ironbreaker turned to Lucien. "So say the other half. The one you’ve been sitting on."

"The tube pushes," Lucien said. "That’s all it will ever do. Point it back and it pushes the aircraft forward. Point it down and it pushes the aircraft up. So far so good — that’s why you said it’s Arven’s machine."

"But."

"But a fighter only asks the tube to beat the *air*. Drag. That’s the whole bill, because the wing is carrying the weight. Arven’s machine has no wing doing anything — it stands still in the sky. So the tube has to beat the machine’s entire weight. Hull, armor, eight men in plate, guns, ammunition, fuel, wounded. Continuously. Every second it’s up there." He let that sit. "And there’s no rest. A fighter can ease the throttle and the wing carries her. Take the push away from a hovering machine for one heartbeat and it isn’t gliding. It’s falling."

"So more thrust. Give me the number in the new unit."

"I can’t give you an exact one. I can tell you it’s many times what the fighter needs — not double, nowhere near double — and it has to be held steady for the whole flight." Lucien shook his head. "And that’s before the thirst. You heard me say this engine drinks hard pushing one man along at speed. Now make it hold a loaded troop carrier off the ground for an entire operation, and still have enough left to fly four hundred miles home. It would drain itself in minutes."

The room was quiet.

"Then it’s the same wall," Gandalf said. "The gun that can’t move. The super-heavy that can’t be started."

"The same wall. The tube isn’t power — it’s a better way to spend power. It removes the propeller’s ceiling, which is why the fighter works. It does nothing about how much a mana core can give, which is why Arven’s machine doesn’t." Lucien looked around the table. "Every core we build makes power and hands it over as fast as it makes it. What that machine needs is a core that *stores* it — an enormous amount of it, packed into something small enough to fly. High density, small space. We’ve never built one. We don’t know how."

"And the relic," Maerath said slowly. "The core from the Caelrith auction."

"May be exactly that. A core from an age that knew how to press that much power into that little space — which would explain why it’s sat on your bench for three weeks looking dead. You’ve been trying to make it *do* something. It may not do anything. It may simply *hold*." Lucien spread his hands. "Or I’m wrong, and it’s a paperweight that cost me a very strange evening. Until you two crack it, nobody knows. And until somebody knows, Arven’s machine cannot be built. That’s the honest position."

---

Ironbreaker sat back, and for once didn’t reach for the pencil.

"So I’ve spent an hour designing an aircraft for a problem I still can’t solve."

"You’ve spent an hour designing an aircraft I want regardless. Build the fighter. Prove the tube, prove the heat, prove the wing, prove the guns. None of that waits on the relic, and the day it flies, every air force on this continent becomes an antique." Lucien pulled a fresh sheet toward himself. "And there’s a second machine that doesn’t wait either."

"The rotor."

"The rotor. We’ve never built one. Not a model, not a toy. Torque, blade pitch, what a pilot does when the engine dies at height — nobody in this territory knows the first thing about any of it, and none of that learning needs the relic. It needs a bench, a frame, and somebody patient."

"So while I’m at Ironhold solving heat, someone here builds a small rotor machine."

"One man. No armor, no guns, nothing that matters when it breaks — because it will break, often, and that’s the point of it. It teaches us to hover on something we can afford to lose fifty times."

Maerath was frowning. "You’re building two machines toward one aircraft, my lord."

"I’m closing two ignorances toward one aircraft, and I don’t know yet which one it finally stands on." Lucien set the pencil down. "Maybe the Stormhaul is a tube pointed at the ground. Maybe it’s a rotor. Maybe the true answer is a marriage of both — thrust for the speed, a rotor for the hover, neither doing the whole job alone. Nobody can know that today. So we don’t guess and build one. We learn both properly, on machines that are allowed to fail, and when that core finally opens, it will tell us which answer it can feed."

Ironbreaker looked at the two sheets for a long moment — the tube on one, the first rough circle of a rotor on the other.

"Two apprenticeships."

"Two apprenticeships."

"And what do I tell Arven? That his squad flies in a tube, or a rotor, or some creature that hasn’t been born yet, made of both?"

"You tell him the truth. It can’t be built today. It’s blocked on exactly one thing. And everything we build in the meantime exists so that the day it stops being blocked, we start from knowledge instead of from zero." Lucien looked at the three of them. "He’d rather have that than a comfortable answer. I’ve met him once and I already know that much."

Ironbreaker gathered up both sheets.

"Then the tube first, because heat won’t wait for anyone. And I want a rotor bench started here before I’m back — with someone competent on it who won’t try to fly the first one himself out of enthusiasm." He was moving for the door. "Gandalf. Maerath. Ironhold."

"It’s four days," Maerath said, without much hope.

"Four days you’ll spend writing down everything you know about a blade cutting air, so that when we come home there’s a machine half-designed and waiting instead of an empty bench and an apology."

He had them both by the sleeve before either could argue, and the door swung shut on Gandalf’s protest.

Lucien sat alone for a moment. Then he put the rotor sketch in the drawer beside the tube, and locked it, and went back to the work the morning had interrupted.