Chapter 3 (Part II): Hold My Beer

My mentor once told me that, any time someone asks you how long something will take, you should quote them a time twice as long as you think it will take so that you have room for the unexpected, and can still pleasantly surprise them when you finish the project ahead of time. Except, she said, if there’s a dragon coming to kill you – in that case, tell them it will take exactly as long as it takes for the dragon to show up, because if your deadline is an angry dragon, there is no overtime, no extension, no redo. In my class, you may as well consider your final exams to be a dragon, because when you ask me how long it should take you to study for your final exam, I will tell you the same thing.

-          Magister Harrus Desalvo, Praetor (Retired) of the Sinister Legion, speaking to his combat engineering class at the Gnoman Empire’s Dexter Military Academy. 

Restoring the ballistic pipe had been every bit the pain in the ass that Ochsner had feared it might be. It hadn't proven impossible, but every part of the process had been challenging. It had, for instance, taken the Gnomans twice as long to clean the device as they’d hoped. The Gnomans had cleared the debris off, and carefully followed instructions Ochsner had found for removing the weapon’s protective cover. The good news had been that there were no cracks or serious failures in the barrel or the chamber, the portions of the gun subject to the greatest stress when firing. Unfortunately, despite the protective cover, there was at least some corrosion on every part of the weapon, and some parts of the assembly that aimed the weapon were so badly corroded that ‘cleaning’ them consisted of tearing them out and tossing them away. When the ballpipe nearly rolled over on one of the restoration teams, they had realized they would need to set up a scaffold before yanking out any more parts.

In the meantime, another team had scoured the armory for replacement pieces, but eventually had to admit defeat on finding a few of the parts. Fortunately, Ochsner had figured out how to reactivate a dwarven machine that could actually melt down metals fed into it, and then construct complex objects by successively laying down thin layers of the material. It was miraculous to watch, but it was very slow, couldn’t produce anything that would have needed to be hammer-forged, like a sword, and could only be told to create objects whose designs were catalogued in the fortress’s archives. Still, it churned out sprockets, gears, and levers that were perfectly sized to replace the missing pieces of the ballpipe. As far as Ochsner could tell, they were identical to the pieces that had originally been used – the precision amazed her.

While waiting for the machine to reproduce their missing parts, she and the Gnomans had gone through the ammunition in the fort’s magazine. The arsenal had hundreds of shells of different types but all of them seemed to have gone bad. Most of the shells were visibly corroded to the point of being impossible to fire. Some of the Gnomans had hoped they might make new shells and simply repack the explosives from the old ones, but Ochsner had guessed right away that wouldn’t work. They had cracked some of the shells open to study the chemicals packed inside, and every one they inspected had fouled. Where she dared, Ochsner ‘tasted’ the contents with her fingers, using her uniquely dwarven sense of touch to recognize the ingredients and understand how they’d decayed. For some of the munitions decaying simply meant that that the round would fail to fire but for some going bad meant they had become unstable. The dud rounds could be disposed of casually, but that still left Ochsner with a giant room full of volatile explosives. That was another problem Ochsner would have to deal with at some point, but not right then.

Fortunately, they’d found the recipes for the propellants and explosives used in the different munition types, as well as some very well sealed ingredients in a storeroom on a lower level, and after using the replication machine to construct new shells, they had the means to make their own ammunition. It was, however, an unfamiliar process with limited resources. All they’d been able to construct so far was a single ranging shell packed with phosphorous that would burn brilliantly in the night sky.

The restorations on the weapon had been formally completed that afternoon, and now, having a (hopefully) functional shell, it was time to test it. Ochsner helped the Gnomans load the phosphorous shell onto the same movable rack she’d used to escape the fortress the first time she’d entered it. The Gnomans didn’t like the idea of using their one and only piece of ammunition, but the weapon absolutely needed to be test-fired, and if any problems were to emerge, they needed to find them now, rather than later.

Ochsner gave the munitions team a small salute and headed topside. Ochsner was pretty sure she could aim and fire the weapon from the observation room using the tablet, but she still hadn’t figured out how to see what she was aiming at from inside the mountain. Unfortunately, it was still a long trip from the control room to the weapon. They’d found the front door to the place down in the valley, but the quickest safe route to the ballpipe was still through the back door in the basement of the mountain top citadel that Thrakaduhl’s late father had once made his home in. That meant going down the ramps, across the bridge, up the massive mechanical descender, down the tunnel, and finally up the stairs to the roof of the old citadel. 
Ochsner made it to the roof where the ballpipe gleamed golden in the setting sun. The Gnomans were very intense about the tasks they were given – if you told them to clean the tarnish from the barrel, that’s what they did. They didn’t spit-polish it, they didn’t remove enough tarnish to give it an antiqued look, they didn’t even clean off nine-tenths of the corrosion. It was all gone. The gun didn’t look quite new, but it certainly didn’t look hundreds of years old.  Ochsner inspected the gun thoroughly one more time. One of the Gnomans gave her a lamp with a reflective dish – the kind used in mining – and she examined the gearing mechanisms, and even the inside of the barrel. There were long grooves spiraling down the inside of it; Ochsner was  certain those were supposed to be there, but when she’d looked down the barrel for the first time, days ago, she’d found tiny stalactites growing from the ridges on the top and corresponding stalagmites inside the grooves on the bottom – and they weren’t simple rock formations. They were the product of metal being dissolved by rain water leaking into the barrel from one end and then being redeposited on the inside as the water ran down inside it.

One Gnoman, Harrus, had spent the entire time the ballistic pipe was being restored inside the barrel cleaning it, sanding it, and polishing it to insure the channels were smooth and clear. Having been given a full day off after finishing what turned into the most claustrophobic and miserable job in the history of the universe, Harrus now sat in a reclined lounge chair he’d found, sipping a beer from the town below and waiting eagerly to see the weapon fired.

 Ochsner tapped her tablet as the firing crew stood ready to perform the drill they’d laid out. The ammo feed cowling slid back, and the belt began clanking. After a moment, the shell they’d constructed down below emerged. One of the Gnomans slid the chamber open on the ballpipe as three of them lifted the shell out of the rack and loaded it into the chamber. They clearly struggled with the task. Ochsner had forgotten how much greater dwarves’ natural strength was, at least when it came to tasks like this. She wondered if that was going to be a problem.

The Gnomans slid the chamber into place and locked it. The weapon was ready to fire. She directed them to aim it towards the southeast. If the round’s built in propellant was less potent, than she hoped, and it fell short, she didn’t want it landing in the middle of the town below. Of course, the much more likely danger was that the weapon would simply explode. She gave them an elevation, and once they’d raised the barrel, she gave the order to fire.

It was like nothing Ochsner had ever heard before. There was a sharp crack that briefly deafened her, followed by a rolling, bone-rattling boom so intense that she didn’t think she would have needed ears to hear it. Far in the distance, a point of light appeared in the night sky, like a very bright new star. It flickered and fell towards the earth trailed by sparks.

When Ochsner’s hearing returned, she realized the firing crew was cheering loudly, and already accepting celebratory libations from Harrus. Ochsner whistled into her tablet, the same tune as before.

“This is scout two,” a voice immediately answered, “I hope that show was you guys.”

“It was,” Ochsner said happily, “Can you help me out by tracking down where our flare landed? I’d like to be sure we didn’t light someone’s farm on fire.”