Chapter 106: Echoes of Steel and Thunder

The wind off the Coriba coast was crisp and heavy with salt, and it buffeted the reinforced windows of the royal carriages as the convoy pulled away from the new commercial district. Prime Minister Takuya Kazuha had planned the day's itinerary down to the minute. Their destination was an installation that appeared on no public map, and whose existence the government had never admitted: the Cynthia Naval Marine Base.

As the convoy drew closer to the cliffs, the base rose out of the broken ground ahead of them, a sprawl of poured concrete and high-tensile steel fencing that looked as if it had been cut from the coastline rather than built upon it. The carriages ground to a halt before a massive, reinforced iron gate. Count Aldric Sterling was already waiting at the checkpoint in the immaculate dark-navy uniform of the Interim Fleet Admiral, standing perfectly straight despite the wind.

Takuya leaned forward and spoke to the driver. 'Only the two primary royal carriages will go in. The Vanguard and the Homeland Security detachments stay outside the perimeter. Secure the access road.'

Emperor Regis frowned as he watched his own elite guards being waved to a stop at the gate. 'Takuya, my Royal Guards and Chief Vane's men are the most thoroughly vetted soldiers in the empire. Is there a particular reason they cannot enter a military installation that belongs to us?'

'It is a matter of absolute technological quarantine, Your Majesty,' Takuya said evenly. Count Sterling had climbed aboard by then and taken the seat beside Viscount Inori Kazuha, who had been travelling with them since they left the hotel. 'The base runs on a strict "Zero-Leak" policy. Only the royal family, senior government officials and a handful of high-ranking officers stationed here may see the interior. If a single blueprint were to reach Frisia or the Theltan Empire, the advantage we have spent so much to build would be badly compromised. I would rather offend a few loyal men at the gate than take that risk.'

The Emperor nodded slowly. He did not entirely like it, but he recognised the ruthless, almost paranoid caution that had kept his empire secure, and he found he respected it. 'Very well. Let us see these secrets of yours.'

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Once the two carriages had rolled through the gates, the Emperor did not have to wait long to see the new military doctrine of Cynthia at work. To the right lay a vast paved training field, and on it hundreds of fresh naval cadets were running in perfect formation. They wore matching dark-canvas fatigues and carried heavy canvas packs, with their lever-action rifles held across their chests. Their boots struck the asphalt together with a rhythmic, booming beat that Regis could feel through the floor of the carriage.

'Discipline over individual glory,' Count Sterling said, with a proud, hard-edged smile. 'They move as a single organism, Your Majesty. A man who keeps step with two hundred others learns to trust them, and that trust is worth more in a battle than any amount of personal courage.'

The carriage passed the training ground and pulled up in front of a colossal, warehouse-sized hangar. It had no windows, and it was lit from inside by the harsh white glare of electric floodlights that leaked out around the door frames.

Inori was out of the carriage before it had fully stopped. His eyes had the same feverish brightness they had held all week, and he strode past two heavily armed Naval Marine sentries and seized the iron locking wheel on the hangar doors. Count Sterling joined him, and together they hauled the doors open with a groan of heavy gears. A wave of warm air rolled out to meet the visitors, smelling of grease, curing rubber and diesel.

'This is the first stop, Your Majesty,' Takuya said, gesturing for the Emperor and Seraphina to follow him inside.

Regis stopped dead just past the threshold. His eyes widened, and the composure he wore like a second uniform slipped for a moment to show something younger and far more excited. Fifteen machines squatted on the reinforced concrete floor, in two neat rows.

'Welcome to the heavy cavalry division, Your Majesty,' Inori said, grinning as he waved a hand at the low, sleek, faintly predatory shapes. 'We call it the Main Battle Tank.'

The machines sat close to the ground on wide, continuous treads of interlocking steel links, each link wrapped in a thick rubber pad. The tracks were designed to spread the vehicle's immense weight across as much ground as possible, so that it would not simply sink into soft earth. Above the tracks, the turrets were sharply sloped and angular, forged from carbon-tempered steel. Every surface had been set at an angle so that an incoming shot would strike a glancing blow and be deflected, rather than meeting the plate square-on and punching through it.

'Is it ready for a battlefield?' the Emperor asked, almost under his breath. He was walking towards the nearest one as though drawn by a rope, and he laid a palm against the cold plating.

'Not quite. It is in the middle of some very punishing terrain trials,' Inori said. 'My military research department is working on the suspension bogies at the moment. Those are the sets of wheels that carry the tracks. This thing weighs fifty tonnes, and if the bogies are wrong, it will chew itself apart in deep mud or throw a track the first time it tries to turn. We need it to plough through a bog and keep going.'

'I want to see the inside,' Regis said.

Inori laughed and scrambled up the angled armour with the ease of long practice. He threw open the top hatch. 'By all means, Your Majesty. Mind your head, though. Everything in there is made of steel, and it does not forgive.'

The Emperor climbed the steel rungs with surprising agility for a man of his rank, and dropped into the turret with Inori close behind him. Seraphina and Takuya remained on the floor and watched the two of them vanish into the hull.

Inside, the tank was cramped and purely utilitarian, a space in which every inch had been given over to some working part. Inori tapped the breech of the main gun with a heavy wrench, and the note that came back was dull and solid.

'It's entirely mechanical, and that is on purpose,' he said. 'If a component cracks during a skirmish, the army technicians can strip it down and rebuild it in the field with a wrench and a spare part. No fragile parts to fail. The main armament is an L/55 one-hundred-and-twenty-millimetre smoothbore cannon. The turret ring is modular as well, so depending on the target we can take out the main gun and fit twin-linked heavy machine guns in its place.'

'And the weapon on the roof?' The Emperor pointed up through the open hatch.

'That's a new generation of belt-fed heavy machine gun. It fires hardened armour-piercing bullets,' Inori said cheerfully. 'Any knight in plate armour who comes within three hundred yards of this vehicle will be cut to scrap metal before he has time to raise his lance.'

Regis took in the sheer lethality of the machine around him. It was then that his eye fell on something out of place. Bolted to the interior wall of the turret, right beside the commander's seat, was a rectangular hollow with loose wires trailing from it.

'Lord Inori, why has this space been left empty? Is it meant for ammunition?'

Inori followed his gaze, and a spark of real brilliance lit his face. 'No, Your Majesty. That cavity is exactly what our second stop is about. If you would follow me.'

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Count Sterling led the delegation away from the fumes of the tank hangar and across the paved compound to a heavily fortified concrete building. A flight of stairs took them down through two sets of blast doors and into a sprawling underground laboratory. Dozens of engineers in white coats hurried between drafting tables and humming electrical dynamos, and the air was sharp with the smell of hot solder.

The nearest researchers froze when they saw who had come in. Then, in a flurry, they scrambled into a line and bowed deeply.

Emperor Regis gave a warm, booming laugh that seemed to fill the room. 'At ease, all of you. Please, relax. You are building the future of my empire, and I will not have my presence interrupt your work. Carry on!'

The researchers let out a collective breath. One or two of them smiled sheepishly, and then they went back to their soldering irons, though a few kept glancing over their shoulders.

Inori led the royal party into a soundproofed side room and closed the door behind them. On a long wooden table stood two heavy iron boxes, each precisely the size of the cavity in the tank. They were covered with dials and glass vacuum tubes, and a handheld microphone lay beside them on a coil of cable.

'Your Majesty, Princess,' Inori began, and his voice dropped, for once, to something quiet. 'We have already conquered the telegraph and the telephone. We can send a voice across the country along loops of direct current. The trouble is that every one of those loops needs a physical wire, and we have had to lay thousands of miles of heavy copper to make them work.' He put a hand on one of the iron boxes. 'A tank crossing a battlefield at forty miles an hour cannot trail a cable behind it. So we had to work out how to throw a human voice through empty air.'

Seraphina frowned, and her sharp mind visibly turned the idea over. 'Through the air? With nothing connecting the two ends?'

'Exactly that.' Inori snatched up a piece of chalk and a small slate and drew a quick, oscillating wave across it. 'Think of a still pond. If you drop a stone into it, the ripples travel outwards in every direction. What this machine does is the same thing, but with the electromagnetic field. When I force a high-voltage spark to jump across a gap inside it, which is why we call it a spark-gap transmitter, the disturbance sends ripples of energy out through the air at the speed of light. Nobody can see them, but they are there all the same.'

Beneath the wave he wrote a simple equation: v = λf.

'The velocity of the wave equals its wavelength multiplied by its frequency,' he went on, quickly. 'By pulsing the spark in a controlled pattern, we encode the sound of my voice into those ripples. At the other end, the receiver has a coherer, which is a small glass tube full of loose metal filings. When the wave strikes the antenna, the filings cling together and suddenly let electricity flow through them. That current is what decodes the wave, and out of the speaker comes the voice. We call the whole system a radio.'

Seraphina stared at the iron box and said nothing for a long moment. Yet she was not looking at it as an engineer would. She was looking at it as a politician.

'Lord Inori,' she said at last, in a voice that was very quiet and very calm, 'you are telling me that when one of these radios sends out a signal, any receiver tuned to that same wave can hear it. Wherever it happens to be.'

'Exactly so,' Inori said, nodding proudly.

Seraphina turned slowly to look at Takuya, and a smile spread across her lips that was brilliant and faintly chilling. 'Takuya, if we manufactured receivers like this and put one in the middle of every major city, every town square and every tavern in the empire...'

Takuya's posture stiffened. He had seen where she was going before she finished.

'We could speak directly to the people,' she went on. The full scale of the weapon in her hands had begun to unfold in her mind, and her voice quickened. 'We could tell them the news we wanted them to hear, in the words we chose, at the moment we chose. We could decide the story of a war before the Theltan Empire even knew it had started. We could win the loyalty of the whole population without sending a single soldier.'

Takuya and Inori exchanged a look, and neither of them spoke. They had built the radio purely as a local military tool, a way of keeping tanks in touch with their commanders. In less than thirty seconds, the princess had taken it apart and rebuilt it as the first mass-media broadcast network the world had ever seen.

Takuya let out a long, impressed breath. 'It would mean changes to the transmission frequency and the bandwidth, Seraphina. A great many changes. But yes, it is entirely possible.'

Emperor Regis had watched the exchange in silence, struck by the ease with which his daughter and his Prime Minister could match each other's thoughts. He looked from Takuya to Inori, and it occurred to him that the Kazuha brothers, together with the girl beside him, were exactly what the closed-door intelligence briefings called the Three Geniuses. He cleared his throat.

'Fascinating as the politics are,' he said, 'I would like to see it work. Does it work now?'

'Of course, Your Majesty!' Inori practically beamed. He pushed the wire-mesh microphone into the Emperor's hands. 'Hold that. Press the brass button on the side whenever you want to speak.'

Then he tucked the second box under his arm and walked out of the soundproofed room. The Emperor watched him go down the long, busy concrete corridor until he had turned a corner and disappeared.

Regis looked at the microphone in his hand for a moment. Then he pressed the brass button. 'Testing. Lord Inori, can you hear me?'

There was a pause of no more than a second. A hiss of static rose from the speaker of the box on the table, and then Inori's voice broke through it, clear and loud, and unmistakably cheerful. 'Loud and clear, Your Majesty! The signal integrity is flawless!'

The Emperor stared at the machine. It did not look like much, only an iron box with a few glass tubes. Yet somehow he felt as though he were holding the whole physical world in his hands.

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The party climbed to the upper floor of the research building, and there the mood changed. The talk of ripples and fields gave way to something plainer, closer to the daily work of an army.

'We've settled the baseline Kei-trucks for civilian use,' Inori said, leading them to a row of detailed schematics pinned along the wall. 'But the military needs something much more durable than that.'

He stopped in front of a large, meticulous blueprint of a heavy, multi-axle transport vehicle. It had thick, deeply treaded rubber tyres, a reinforced steel chassis and a high-clearance suspension that would let it clear ruts and rocks without tearing itself open.

'The Military Logistics Truck,' he announced. 'It's built to carry fifty fully equipped riflemen, or to tow the heavy artillery right up to the front line. It burns the same refined diesel as the tanks, which keeps our fuel supply chain simple. One kind of fuel, one set of depots, and one line of tankers to keep it all moving.'

'Are they in production?' Takuya asked.

'Not yet. Research and prototyping are still going on,' Inori admitted. 'The paperwork is ready, though. We've already drafted the civil road-safety policies, the convoy doctrines and the formal army driving-school requirements. Once the assembly lines have been retooled for the heavier chassis, we can show the vehicles to the army and start mass rollout.'

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When they left the research building, Count Sterling took the lead again. The delegation climbed back into their carriages and drove to the last stop of the tour, out on the very edge of the jagged Coriba coastline. There they stepped into an elevated observation bunker built from reinforced concrete ten feet thick. It jutted out over the churning ocean, and from the sea it could not be seen at all.

Inside the bunker waited the real monsters of Cynthia's defence. Bolted to massive steel rotary mounts were the Naval Heavy Rifled Coastal Artillery cannons, their long barrels resting silently in narrow concrete embrasures that looked out towards the horizon.

'Count Sterling,' the Emperor said, and his voice had dropped to a hush without his noticing. 'What is the range of these guns?'

'Allow me to show you, Your Majesty,' Count Sterling replied, in a voice as hard as iron. He picked up a radio microphone from the command console. 'Battery One. Target coordinates delta-seven. Engage.'

Regis raised a pair of heavy brass binoculars. Five miles out, five decommissioned wooden galleons lay at anchor in a tight cluster, small and obsolete against the grey water.

Inside the bunker, the artillery crews went to work with a precision that was smooth and almost frightening. They hauled a massive conical steel shell into the breech and locked it home.

'Fire!' a lieutenant screamed.

The sound was not so much heard as felt, a physical rupture in the air itself. A blinding jet of flame burst from the muzzle. The great cannon slid backwards on its rails, and the hydropneumatic recoil system swallowed the catastrophic kick of the discharge. It did this by forcing oil through narrow ports against a cushion of compressed gas, so that the barrel's violent motion was spent gradually. Then the gas pushed the barrel smoothly back into position, ready to fire again.

Through the binoculars, the Emperor watched the horizon. For three seconds, nothing happened. Then the galleon at the centre of the formation simply ceased to exist.

A colossal pillar of water, fire and vaporised wood rose hundreds of feet into the sky. The explosive shell had not merely struck the ship. It had punched clean through the hull, burst deep in the hold, and broken the whole vessel into thousands of pieces of floating driftwood. A low, rolling boom reached the bunker a moment afterwards.

Takuya stepped forward and took his place beside the Emperor. His voice was as smooth as ever, a stark contrast to the ringing in everyone else's ears.

'This is not a weapon of war, Your Majesty. It is a weapon of leverage. When Emperor Magnus of Frisia understands that one volley from our coast can vaporise his entire armada, he will have no choice but to enter a cooperative economic alliance with us. We will conquer them with capital, and the terror of these guns will guard the bargain.'

Emperor Regis lowered the binoculars slowly. 'I pray to the Gods it never comes to a naval war, Takuya. For the sake of the men who sail in those ships.'

He turned away from the sea and looked back along the coast, to where the sprawling skyline of the Coriba Mega-Shipyard rose faintly in the distance. 'The tanks, the trucks and the guns. Will the factories that build them be here in Coriba?'

'It is the most logical arrangement, Your Majesty,' Takuya said, and nodded. 'The railway network is already fully connected to Bergran for the super-steel, and to Dian City for the diesel engines. Coriba will become the central hub, the place where all the raw materials finally meet.'

The Emperor walked out onto the bunker's balcony and took one last, long look down the fortified coastline. Then he turned back to his daughter and his Prime Minister.

'Come,' he said. 'Let us go back to the hotel. Tomorrow, we plan the future.'