Solitaire POV: Day 90

  Current Wealth: 211 gold 2 silver 42 copper

  Come to think of it, I was starting to see a few upsides to being stuck in Redacle. Here I could make all the explosives I wanted.

  Which was nice, but boring. I had the mercury cooking elsewhere, a secret tool we’d use later, and that left nothing for me to do except focus on other matters of home defence. I’d already finished the welcome mat, which meant we needed something with a bit of proactive self-preservation power.

  Killing people when they tried to stab you was nice and all, but it just couldn’t beat killing them when they were still a mile away. So I tried to work on a more refined model of cannon.

  That wasn’t hard, at least. The last cannon I’d made had been a repurposed bell, and the one before that had been an anti-air battery I’d set up during one paranoid afternoon when I kept expecting police helicopters to make themselves known above me. Neither one had been particularly fine work, and I had the luxury of time now. A bit of it at least.

  One major factor was that I didn’t need this to punch through any great weight of armour. We weren’t dealing with modern people, or a giant creature, or even any of the actual powerful Redaclans. Kaiju-sized monsters or dark sorcerers were still a ways off from us, so I could just focus on spitting out iron for now.

  Which was still annoying, I did have that old perfectionist urge I always had. The one that drove my mother to make sure her son could diffuse a det charge in under fifteen seconds after rolling out of bed. I wouldn’t settle for a cannon incapable of winning the Napoleonic Wars for a reason as petty as it being completely unnecessary, no sir!

  God, maybe I really did need medicating.

  Well, no helping that now. I got to work.

  The fundamental principle of a cannon, really, is that it can squeeze an explosion. So I had to first decide what kind of blast I wanted. To do that, I’d need to know what I was going to be hurling.

  I didn’t need to kill a fortress, so I decided on a smaller projectile. Four-pounders, as they’d have called them in the age of actual black powder cannons, or in non-caveman terms an iron ball measuring about seventy five millimetres from one side to the other. Then I realised I was being stupid. Why make a ball? Much better to use an elliptical slug, no need to recreate history just for the sake of it when there were more effective alternatives.

  And there’d be no need for iron, either. Why not use lead?

  It wasn’t hard to get my hands on plenty, I just put an order in for our ever-growing horde of blacksmith minions and soon had plenty of the stuff. Lead melts at a hilariously low temperature, so I was looking at a nice big bucket of the stuff soon enough, pouring it out and doing my best not to breathe it in. After so long dealing with steel-liquefying heats it was almost laughable how overly protected I was, between my thick layers and superhuman flesh.

  While I waited for my lead to arrive, I’d gotten to work on the actual barrel. This was a bit trickier.

  Beam was at the arena, Ardin was busy. I’d heard from Shango that his bitch wife was able to dig up some stories of what had happened at Rinchester too. If I was publicly seen ordering people to assemble a big metal cylinder, or if someone paid enough to learn from one of the smiths responsible that I’d done so quietly, a clever person would be able to figure out that I was recreating the weapon responsible for turning so many rotters into a large piece of smaller pieces of rotter.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  I considered the pros and cons, eventually deciding to call on Corvan and see what he could do.

  “This is like your brother’s staff.” He said, instantly. I considered lying, decided it wouldn’t work, and pretended I’d never considered it in the first place with a nod.

  “Exactly like that. Bigger, obviously. Imagine something ten times faster than an arrow and thirty times heavier, solid lead. That’s the sort of weapon I’m describing here.”

  Most men wouldn’t have had the slightest idea what I meant. It just wouldn’t register to them, such forces were beyond anything they had a common reference for. Corvan, though, was a magus. A strong one, and an experienced one. He hadn’t told us most of his history yet, and I’d have bet there were a good few magical phenoms lying somewhere in it. He grasped the essentials nice and quick.

  “Are you insane?” Corvan snapped. “Why would you want that? What do you think is coming for us?”

  “Don’t know, not sure, and I’m making sure to be over prepared for whatever it is. Now get to work.”

  Fortunately, he didn’t argue for long. Fortunately, I still didn’t need a big gun, and we had plenty of iron stores already prepared. Now it would’ve taken a while to make steel, though I was working on a new method for that as part of Shango- or rather his bitch wife’s- business ideas. The good thing about black powder though was that its fundamental weakness meant durable metals weren’t really necessary to gunify it.

  Iron would do. I gave Corvan the dimensions, and kept his measurements lined up while he heated and squeezed the hot metal, hammering and compressing the impurities away.

  We’d formed the initial shape from molten iron, essentially casting it into a funnel of hardened air which left the final product stiff and hard. Brittle, probably, too. Which was why I had him put up a wall of air, and hid behind a desk while we gave it a test fire.

  The gun didn’t explode at least, and our long practice hallway- the longest one in the building- gave a few pointers with its hundred-metre length on just where the shortcomings were.

  After the first few shots, I did end up needing to replace the wall, but they were very educational. Notably in that for whatever reason the projectiles were spinning completely haywire. That was weird, and ahistoric, so I gave a bit of thinking as to why.

  If I could punch myself in the stupid, I’d have stabbed it instead. Elliptical slugs weren’t used with smooth bore barrels, like the one I’d set up. I gave a few more practice shots with spherical balls and sure enough they flew nice and straight. Ish. It would take a damned long time to affix the interior of the barrel with grooves for rifling, so it looked like I’d be stuck doing things like the redcoats had for now.

  “Not much good, is it?” Corvan noted. “Unless you’re fighting a giant.”

  He had a point. The cannon wasn’t that big, three hundred kilos in all, but that was still a fair amount to be doing much of anything with. Even on wheels, or an axel, it would take a lot of strength to turn.

  So we got back to the drawing board, because I quite liked the idea of a workable swivel-gun, and already had a decent notion of how I might make my new toy light enough to work as one. It all came down to the metal.

  Cast iron was alright. It worked, at least, but I could do better. Bearing in mind I had some steel on its way, I decided to try saving the few days that’d likely take by working around my issues instead. In the end I settled on a new design.

  Once more, cast iron. This time though I had Corvan squeeze the cooling metal with rings of wrought iron instead. That was more flexible, less stiff, and gave easier. It provided a bit of flexibility to an otherwise rigid and brittle barrel, which allowed me to make the main structure that little bit thinner. I made all sorts of other ergonomic changes too, mostly to stop the voices in my head that got pissy whenever something wasn’t perfected to half a percentage point, and we tried a few more shots with round balls.

  Their performance was far, far better. A very promising sign, made all the more promising by our newly slimmed-down gun. One hundred and forty kilos, not three hundred. It was still a heavy bastard, but light enough to work with.

  All that was left was the actual swivel mechanism, and I got to that promptly. Then stopped, and started swearing.

  Well, there were limits to raw knowledge and intuition. I’d need Ardin, or at least Beam, to do the fiddly smithing work needed to make all my new design’s complex moving parts. Which meant we’d be waiting a while anyway. Hopefully nobody tried to murder us before they were freed up.