The Exiled Duke's Lottery system

Chapter 265: Chapter258: Three Feet

Ironbreaker came back from Ironhold on Thursday, walked the length of Skyforge to the testing shed, and stopped in front of the sheet of scrap plate bolted to the east wall.

"That’s new."

"That’s the lesson," Gandalf said.

"It’s a patch over a hole."

"It’s both. Things can be both."

Ironbreaker looked at the patch, then at the sphere sitting grey and indifferent in its cradle, then at the two mages, who between them wore the expression of men who had sent very careful reports and knew exactly which parts had been carefully worded.

"I read everything you sent," he said. "The tap. The cistern. The winding rule. The six minutes." He paused. "And the other report. The short one."

"Ah," Gandalf said. "That one."

"I sat in a foundry office in Ironhold and read that sentence four times, and then Brakka asked me why I’d gone quiet, and I told him it was the tea."Ironbreaker recited it flatly

"And now that you’re standing in the room with it?"

Ironbreaker glanced at the sphere. The sphere sat there.

"Now I’d like to see the machine," he said. "The bench crew wrote me that it’s built. They also wrote me that it’s ugly, which I took as a good sign, because everything I’ve ever trusted was ugly first."

It stood in the middle of the old blimp hangar, and it was very ugly.

A frame of welded tube, no skin, no cowling, a single seat bolted wherever they could. Above it, on a shaft, two rotors — one above the other, turning opposite ways, which had been the bench crew’s answer to the torque problem after two weeks of the single-rotor version trying to unscrew itself from the earth. Beneath the seat, strapped in a padded cage, sat one of Maerath’s cisterns with the throttle valve plumbed straight into the drive.

Tomas Renner was walking around it slowly.

"Talk me through the dying," he said.

"The what?" the bench foreman asked.

"The dying. Every machine has a way it kills you. The Stormwing’s is speed near the ground. The scout’s is weather. I want to know this one’s before I strap in, because it will have one, and I’d rather we introduce ourselves now."

"Power loss," Maerath said, from the side. "There’s no wing. If the flow stops, nothing is holding you up. At height, the rotors will windmill and slow the fall — we’ve proven that with weighted drops. At three feet, there’s no time to windmill. You simply sit down hard."

"Then keep me at three feet."

"That’s the entire plan," Ironbreaker said. "Three feet, on four tethers, over sand. This machine’s job is not to fly. This machine’s job is to hover badly, in a controlled place, until it teaches us how to hover well. Anyone who tries to make it do more than that answers to me, and I’ve had a long month, and I’m looking for someone to spend it on."

Tomas climbed in and strapped down.

"One more question. The power. The reports say six minutes."

"Six minutes at cruise, from a full cistern," Maerath said. "For this test, at hover load, closer to four. There’s a gauge by your left hand — when the glow falls to the red band, you have thirty seconds. Put it down before the band, every time, no exceptions."

"And if I’m clever and stretch it?"

"Then somewhere past the band the flow dies mid-air, at whatever height your cleverness bought you." Maerath held his eyes. "The cistern doesn’t sputter like a starved engine. It doesn’t warn you. It gives full flow to the last drop and then gives nothing. Treat the red band as the ground."

"Red band is the ground," Tomas repeated. "Understood."

The first lift lasted four seconds and taught them the machine wanted to spin.

Not the frame — the counter-rotors held that steady, exactly as designed. It was the drift: the moment the skids left the sand, the whole machine slid sideways like a plate on ice, hit the length of two tethers, and was hauled back down in a spray of grit.

"Nobody touched anything," Tomas reported, still strapped in. "I lifted, I held everything centered, and it went left. On its own. Like the air under it was tilted."

"The air under it was tilted." Gandalf was crouched at the sand’s edge, looking at the wash patterns. "Look at the blast marks. The rotors aren’t pushing straight down — the frame’s hanging a degree off true, so the push is a degree off true, so the machine walks sideways along its own thrust." He straightened. "It’s not a flaw in the flying. It’s a flaw in the hanging. Shift the seat, or shift the cistern, until the weight sits dead under the shaft."

They moved the cistern cage three times over two hours, an inch here, a half-inch there, with Tomas lifting to tether-length after each change and calling the drift. On the fourth try the machine came off the sand and simply stayed — sliding nowhere, wandering only as much as Tomas’s own hands wandered.

The hangar went very quiet.

Three feet of air sat between the skids and the ground, and stayed there, and kept staying there.

"Time," Tomas called.

"Forty seconds," Maerath called back. "Fifty. One minute."

At ninety seconds the gauge touched the red band and Tomas set it down on the sand with a crunch, easy as setting down a cup, and powered the valve shut.

Nobody said anything for a moment. Then the bench crew made a noise that the hangar walls had trouble containing.

Ironbreaker walked out onto the sand while they were still shouting, and stood by the skid, and looked up at the rotors winding down.

"Ninety seconds," he said.

"Eighty-eight by my count," Tomas said, unstrapping. "I rounded in your favor."

"Ninety seconds, three feet up, on tethers, over sand, on a machine with no skin, from a cistern that takes an hour to fill." Ironbreaker put a hand flat on the frame. "Do you know what I told twenty-five knights on this field? I told them nobody in this territory had ever built a thing that stays up without running at something first. I was right for twenty more days and now I’m wrong, and being wrong has never once felt like this."

"It drifts," Tomas said. "Even trimmed. It’s not the frame — it’s me. Every correction I make, I make a heartbeat late, because I’ve spent my whole life flying machines that go forward. This one goes every direction at once and my hands don’t have the habits yet."

"Then build the habits. That’s the entire budget of this machine — your habits." Ironbreaker turned to the crew. "Tethers stay on. Three feet stays three feet. He flies it every day the cistern can feed it, and every fault gets written down, and nobody — " he raised his voice over the celebration, "— nobody files a request to take the ropes off. I’ll know the day it’s ready and it is not a day this month."

"And the reports to Elarion?" Maerath asked. "His lordship reads everything from this shed now."

"Tell him plainly." Ironbreaker looked back at the ugly frame sitting on the sand, rotors still, the faint glow of the drained cistern dimming under the seat. "Tell him Elarion hovered for ninety seconds this morning. Tell him the sphere fed it, the tap governed it, the man flew it, and the only thing it broke was my record for being right." He paused. "And tell him four minutes of air a fill won’t teach a pilot fast enough. I want a second cistern built and charging while the first one flies, and then a third. The sphere has nothing else to do all day. Let it work shifts."

Gandalf stayed behind when the others went, and stood a while at the shed door, looking across at the cradle.

The sphere sat there, grey and unremarkable, exactly as it had sat for a month, giving no sign of anything at all.

"Ninety seconds," he told it. "In case nobody mentioned it to you directly."

The sphere did nothing, at considerable length.

"Well," Gandalf said. "Quite right. Neither would I."

He shut the door.