Free Web NovelChapter 228: Chapter221:The Flying Fortress
After 10 minutes of walk lucien with malen,gandalf and maerath in tow reached the hangar office at Skyforge. It held one desk, two chairs, a shelf of maintenance logs, and a window overlooking the hangar floor where the blimp now rested under guard — its silhouette filling the glass like a sleeping whale.
Lucien took the chair behind the desk. Maerath and Gandalf stayed standing, which told him they already suspected why they were here.
"Sit down," Lucien said. "You look like men waiting for a sentencing."
"Are we not?" Gandalf asked, but he sat.
"Depends on the next five minutes." Lucien folded his hands on the desk. "This morning, before I arrived, the starboard regulator did something. I don’t know what it did but what i do know is Cedric walked in on the tail end of a conversation about four minutes that I was apparently never meant to hear about."
Maerath attempted an innocent expression, held it for roughly two seconds, and abandoned it after seeing the look malen and lucien were giving "It was nothing just a power spike during cold-start. The regulator caught it and recovered. By every measurable standard the system worked exactly as designed."
"Then why bury it?"
"Umm well you know measurable standards don’t stop a trial from being cancelled by nervous people," Maerath said. "But the engine was safe, Lucien. I’d stake my life on it."
"You staked three other lives on it."
The room went quiet. He didn’t raise his voice — he’d learned long ago, in another life, in meetings under flickering lights, that the quiet version of that sentence always landed harder.
"This morning I’d have agreed with you," Lucien went on. "The spike was probably nothing. The regulator probably worked. But that was before we found a mooring cable cut by someone standing inside our own fence. So the rules change tonight. Every fluctuation, every anomaly, every reading that makes either of you frown gets reported. Not because I doubt your engineering — because I can’t assume our failures are honest anymore. A hidden power spike used to be a footnote. Now it might be the first evidence of sabotage, and if you sit on it to protect a schedule, you’re covering the enemy’s tracks for him. Free of charge."
Gandalf exhaled slowly. "That is a deeply unpleasant way of framing it."
"It’s the accurate way. If an engine dies at two hundred feet, I need to know within the hour whether we killed those men with bad engineering or someone else killed them with a knife we never found."
"Fine," Maerath said. "Full reporting. Every hiccup, every sneeze. Cedric will drown in paper and it will serve him right for eavesdropping."
"He’d tell you eavesdropping is simply listening with ambition." Lucien leaned back. "Now — the engine. Honestly, this time. What can it actually do?"
The two mages exchanged the brief silent negotiation of men deciding who confesses first. Gandalf lost.
"It flies. Genuinely. It’ll pull the Fw 189’s airframe into the sky and hold it there. But it lives on a knife’s edge doing it. Sustained high output cooks the mana channels — we’ve tripled bearing life, but thermal creep at full power is still measured in minutes, not hours. And above a certain altitude the ambient mana thins and the regulator starts, for lack of a better word, gasping."
"And every takeoff still needs a ground crew fussing over it like midwives," Maerath added. "It’s a brilliant engine but it is not yet a trustworthy one."
"Good," Lucien said.
Maerath blinked. "Good?"
"That’s the first fully honest engine report this facility has produced. Only took a sabotage attempt to get it." He stood and moved to the window, looking down at the blimp. "Now think past it. When you two imagine,what do you think about Elarion’s air force — what do you actually see?"
Gandalf considered. "The Fw 189. Observation craft. Eyes above the battlefield, spotting for the guns."
"Scouts," Maerath agreed. "Maybe later Armed ones, eventually, if Cedric gets his way.No wait Cedric always gets his way."
"Just as I thought." Lucien turned back to them. "You’re imagining better eyes. Then I m about to ruin your evening by describing the rest of the body."
He picked up a maintenance log, flipped to a blank page, and started sketching — rough shapes, no draftsman’s skill, just enough to carry the idea.
"An air force isn’t one machinr. The Fw 189 exists to see. But the moment two nations both have aircraft or in our case if the enemy also learns to fly , then someone builds a machine whose only purpose is killing other . Fast, agile, guns forward, nothing wasted. A fighter. Whoever holds air superiority decides whose scouts get to live — which means deciding who fights blind."
Gandalf leaned forward, the tactical shape of it visibly assembling behind his eyes. "So the scout creates the fighter. And the fighter creates...?"
"The bomber." Lucien sketched a heavier, wider shape. "An aircraft that carries destruction instead of cameras. It flies over the wall no ladder climbs, over the river no bridge crosses, and drops artillery’s worth of firepower on a foundry, a rail junction, a fleet at anchor,a ward. Everything the Iron Bastion does — without asking a railway’s permission first."
Maerath’s expression traveled from interested to faintly ill. "You’re describing a machine that makes geography optional."
"I’m describing four machines. Eventually a fifth or maybe sixth that does several jobs adequately instead of one job perfectly — but that’s an argument for another year." He tapped the sketches. "Here’s why you two are in this room. Every one of these aircraft is the same problem wearing different clothes. Engines. The scout needs two modest ones. The fighter needs one exceptional one. And the bomber—"
He drew a final shape, larger than all the rest, and gave it four engines.
The mages stared at it.
"That’s not a design," Maerath said. "That’s a provocation."
"It’s a destination. Four engines, each stronger than anything on your benches today. A crew of ten. Guns pointing in every direction, so the enemies sent to stop it pay in blood for the privilege. Range enough to cross a sea, bombs enough to erase a fortress, and redundancy enough to lose an engine — or two — and still bring its crew home. Where it flies, the enemy’s stops existing." He set the pen down. "The men who fly ours will call it what it is. A flying fortress."
The hangar sounds filtered up through the silence — a dropped wrench, a guard’s laugh, the tick of the cooling roof.
"Lucien," Maerath said carefully, "this morning our finest engine had a power spike we were scared to report. You’re now asking us to imagine four engines that would each eat it as a light snack."
"I’m not asking you to build it. I’m asking you to start walking." He came around the desk. "The Fw 189 stays priority — nothing slows it. But this week I want a second research line. Small team, quiet, no production pressure. One task: the next generation of engine. More power, honest cooling, mana regulation that doesn’t gasp at altitude. When it produces something, that engine goes into the fighter we design after the Fw 189 flies. The generation after that goes into the fortress. We climb one rung at a time — but we build the ladder already knowing how tall it is."
Gandalf studied the four-engined sketch for a long moment. "Seastar has the Bismarck," he said slowly. "A ship they can’t build, shaping every ship they can. You’re handing us the same thing."
"I’m handing you a decade of direction in one evening. Try not to spend it all at once — that’s Ironbreaker’s trick." Lucien paused at the door. "One more thing. The engine team’s findings route through me and Cedric only. After this morning, anything worth building is worth someone trying to burn. I’d rather our saboteur keep believing our grandest ambition is a balloon."
He left them with the sketches.
For a while neither mage spoke. Maerath finally picked up the page, holding it the way a man holds a bill he suspects he can’t pay.
"Ten crew. Four engines. Guns in every direction. He rattled off its weight allowances like he was reading them off a plaque somewhere."
"I noticed," Gandalf said.
"He does that. The Warhound. The Vulcan. Now this." Maerath set the page down. "Our lord has remarkably detailed dreams."
Gandalf rose and looked down at the hangar floor, where the blimp lay in its cradle — the entire pride of Elarion’s air programme, sixty feet of proven altitude, one cut cable away from having been its tomb.
"Between the two mysteries, I prefer his," he said. "Whoever cut that cable was inside our fence, Maerath. And tonight he just tripled the value of everything behind it."
Maerath joined him at the window. Below, a guard walked the blimp’s perimeter, lantern light sliding along the envelope’s flank.
"Then we’d best build his ladder quickly," Maerath said. "Before someone burns it while it’s still short."
