A Perverted Path to Victory

Chona

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Wind whipped by, long strands of air reaching beneath her jacket to rustle its way through every inch of her fur. They were at a thousand feet and descending, spiraling down over a crowd of workers who were, at the moment, getting very little work done. Almost all of them had dropped their shovels in order to shade their eyes with both hands, staring up at the sky. It wouldn’t have been the first time they had seen an aircraft. This was not the first time she and Tinvel had flown over Tulian’s slowly-growing fortifications.

But it was, without a doubt, the first time any of them had seen two of the aircraft at one time.

Off the Sunrise’s crimson right wingtip was a second plane, this one painted a light field-grass-green from prop to rudder. Its lines were a near perfect copy of the Sunrise, save for the fact that it lacked the pontoons for water landing, thick landing gears jutting out in its place. There were other changes, of course, to compensate for the massive weight loss of the pontoons, but those were mostly internal. Shifting around components to twitch the center of gravity back up towards the center of lift to maintain stability, thing like that. That was something that Professor David dealt with; he was the only one who knew the math to back up everyone else’s eyeballed guesses. As far as Chona was concerned, the Type S and N were nearly identical.

While the final name of the overall aircraft type hadn’t been settled, too many competing ideas for any general winner to break ahead of the pack, the names of its variants had been simpler. Chona and Tinvel were flying in the Southern Type, patrolling alongside the Northern Type. If Chona got her way with the naming scheme, they’d end up being the Mamba Type S and Mamba Type N. Most of the other prospective flight crews thought that “Mamba” was too unoriginal. They wanted something a bit more interesting than using an animal’s name, seeing as they’d just be stealing the tradition of Professor David’s homeland.

Whatever the name ended up being in the future, Chona hoped she’d be looking at a different pilot in the cockpit. Affe, the irritating little prick who’d slapped red paint on their plane a few weeks back, was tossing up a series of hand signals to her, using the simplistic sign language they’d developed for communicating in midair. Even from a hundred feet away, his face buried beneath thick flight goggles and an ugly leather cap, Chona felt the smug, smarmy energy radiating off of him.

But he was flying an important piece of hardware, and more than that, he was carrying an insanely important cargo, so she flashed the proper signals back to him.

Chona held up a single finger, patted her head, pointed down, then brought her two palms together in a slow-motion clap, finishing the ‘sentence’ with an exaggerated nod. Next she pointed with her whole hand at Affe, then spiraled her two fists around each other.

Translated literally, it meant: one plane, us, landing, coming to a full stop. Then she started a new sentence by pointing at Affe and signaled “repeat previous instructions for yourself.”

In plain language, Tinvel was going to land, and Affe was only to start his own landing attempt after Tinvel and Chona’s plane had come to a complete stop.

Affe’s response had Chona scoffing out her irritation, glad the hundred feet they kept between planes was more than enough to hide her blatant irritation. Affe pointed forward and quickly tapped his wrist, meaning future time, then wobbled one hand back and forth, indicating unsureness. He was asking her what he should do while Tinvel and Chona completed their landing process.

Chona slid her hand from left to right slowly, meaning to maintain altitude, then spun her fist in a circle.

Just keep circling at this altitude until it’s time to land, dipshit, was what Chona wanted to say, but they hadn’t made profanity a priority for their primitive interplane language quite yet.

Affe gave a thumbs up, then peeled away to the right, giving Tinvel room to approach his landing angle.

His turn exposed the back half of his plane where, waving like an excited child, Professor David sat. His grin was ear-to-ear, so wide that it threatened to shove his goggles off his face. For some reason she couldn’t fathom, he’d delayed the entire delivery date until a tailor had finished making him a particularly long scarf, one that was currently trailing out behind him to flap flamboyantly in the wind. It looked ridiculous, but no one could say the Professor wasn’t loving it.

Chona refocused on the rapidly approaching ground as Tinvel leveled off, pushing the nose forward into a descent.

The Northern Bastion, yet another placeholder name for the endless list of innovations that had been pouring out of Tulian’s industries, was sprawled out below her.

The professor called it a ‘Star Fort’, but Chona didn’t get what the hells he meant by that. A star fort, to her at least, would be a little dot on the landscape, maybe made of white marble, shining bright with enchantments. What he was actually designing was something better called a Sea Urchin Fort, in her opinion. A big ball of lethal spikes embedded into the earth, bristling with every sort of cannon Tulian had ever made, and the occasional ominous holes where there was room for something far larger to be shoved into place. Even at a thousand feet above the ground, she couldn’t quite get a perfect view of the half-finished construction.

To Chona, it looked like the world’s largest dog had dug a giant pit in the earth, piling the dirt up about itself in order to shelter from a cold wind. A large concrete hexagon had been summoned up too, deep trenches of unfilled moats dug all around its perimeter. All the displaced dirt had been piled up against the walls in sharp, smooth slopes, just steep enough that they wouldn’t collapse all on their own. If that was all it was, it would simply be an oddly shaped castle, with the idiotic addendum of the defenders having already built the ramps required for an attacker to climb over its walls.

Professor Brown’s plans hadn’t stopped there, of course. He was not a genius, but when he had spent so much of his life reading the work of geniuses, there was little difference when he’d been dropped into a society as ignorant as Tulian’s. Each of the walls of the hexagon were deeply indented, turning six sides into twelve, and another shape had been built at the tip of each of the six outermost corners, concrete spearheads that jutted several dozen feet past where the walls would have otherwise ended.

Those simple changes, just a touch of concavity and a simple triangle at each corner, turned something laughably vulnerable into a near-insurmountable challenge. The entire concrete wall was littered with divots for cannons to be emplaced, the triangular outcroppings most of all, where massive guns were pointed in just such a way that any of them could easily send a cannonball bouncing along every rank of an encroaching army.

Professor David had explained it to the University’s students, back when a class on geometry had been derailed by one of his extraordinarily common tangents. If an army were to press an attack against the flat faces of the bent hexagon, even with shields or magical protection of some sort facing forward, they would have to pass multiple stages of defenses. Every step forward would bring them further into overlapping fields of fire. First the long-range cannons would roar from the entire wall, battering the army from ranges unseen in any mortal war until the year prior, then they would be joined by lighter cannons, thick clouds of iron chewing dirt to mud. If an army didn’t break from artillery alone, if they actually got close enough to the walls to try and climb that treacherously sleep slope, individual riflemen would be raining musketballs down upon them from almost every conceivable direction. The only angle they wouldn’t be shot at would be from directly behind, and that wasn’t unintentional. The Professor had explained that you always wanted to give your enemy somewhere to flee, just to make it all the more likely they actually would.

Hearing her jovial Professor, who still carried brightly-colored adhesive ‘bandaids’ from his home in case any of his students cut themselves in class (and still got pale and shaky when he applied them over any kind of bloody wound), explaining how he’d devised a killing field of a brutality unlike anything the world had ever seen? Chona had felt disconnected from herself, like each eye was showing her a different version of the world.

As Tinvel came in for a landing, he was aiming for the fortification’s lone source of controversy: a long stretch of well-pressed dirt, Tulian Combat Engineers having turned the lumpy terrain into a road flat enough to avoid jostling even the ricketiest of mule-drawn carts. While most of the road that led to the fortification was like most in Tulian, winding, widening, and narrowing as it followed the natural contours of the terrain, it encountered a stark change as it neared the fort. Seemingly out of nowhere, the dirt pathway became a dirt highway, packed flat as could be while spreading out three times as wide as could ever be needed for people or carts. In fact, there was only one thing in all of Tulian that needed such a creation: airplanes.

It was Tulian’s first true runway, and that unnatural aberration stretched out some five hundred feet, ending right at the fortification’s most glaring weakness.

A long wooden bridge rose up on spindly limbs of Tulian hardwoods, taking an L-shaped path down from the heights of the walls to reach ground level right at the end of the runway. It was the only way into the fort without climbing the walls, and it was clearly built to be burned the moment any actual army came close. Once the battle started, no one could get in without climbing the walls, and even leaving would require a treacherous tumble down the forty-five degree hills. The defenders’ only way to receive resupply would be air-dropped packages, something Shale had abhorred almost as much as Professor Brown had insisted upon it.

Clearly, judging by the fact that the bridge had been built with not a single gate or entrance in sight, Professor Brown had won the argument. Rumor had it, though, that Lieutenant Shale was still royally pissed, going so far as to throw a flame-spitting-tirade during a private session of Parliament all about having the design modified, and that she had loudly proclaimed that she didn’t care how expensive it would be to knock down a wall that was already built, not if it meant she got her gate.

Chona didn’t know if she believed those rumors. She’d heard a lot about Tulian’s premier artillery expert, both good and bad, and after playing such a pivotal role in the final battle of the last war, she’d captured the public imagination in a way that meant there were more rumors than could possibly be true. Everyone knew she took a certain liking to the weapons she was charged with, too much of one, that much was agreed on by all. But as for why she wanted that gate built so damn bad, if she did at all?

Some people claimed she loved her cannons too much to abandon them, so if the fort was going to fall, she wanted a way to drag them to safety, no matter how impossible the idea was. She was simply that insane, those rumors claimed. Others said she was too aggressive for her own good, and wanted a way to send the fort’s defenders charging out in a surprise attack whenever the opportunity arose, bringing the mouths of her cannons right up to King Sporatos’ chin. Others, mostly veterans of Old Tulian’s armies, simply agreed with her. With the range of attack afforded by the cannons, they argued it should be possible to protect an incoming resupply with artillery alone. And those old veterans, those who had suffered through sieges, could imagine nothing better than getting fresh food right in the middle of one.

She didn’t know what was true, but considering the fact that absolutely no one had tried to argue against Shale being utterly, perhaps maddeningly obsessed with cannons, Chona was eager to meet the artillery expert for herself. For all that she loved flying, the prospect of meeting the woman had Chona actually excited to get back on the ground.

Tinvel, having spent his early flight hours landing on completely unprepared fields of grass, then the literal ocean waves themselves, didn’t disappoint her. He glided onto the runway with the engine on its lowest setting, setting the Sunrise down with barely a bump. Their new tires, thin rubber inflated with high-pressure air, did the rest of the job of keeping things smooth. Even with the Sunrise rolling along the ground twice as fast as any wild horse had ever dared to dream, Chona’s teeth barely rattled.

“Getting better, aren’t I?” Tinvel called, cutting the engine to taxi speed as he let the Sunrise coast down the rest of the runway.

“Yeah, it was better,” Chona admitted, “But you did just have a couple hundred people working for a week to give you the easiest landing strip in the whole world.”

“Sure, sure. But come on,” Tinvel persisted, kicking the rudder left to guide them to a flat patch of dirt laid out for plane parking. “That was still great, right? The flare was smooth, I kept a steady descent angle the whole time, no sudden movements, touched down right on the centerline…”

All of those were true, but Chona wasn’t interested in telling Tinvel that. Instead she turned around in her seat, shading her eyes until she caught sight of Affe’s plane.

“Yeah, well, let’s see how that prick does.”

Chona and Tinvel both paused their usual post-landing routine in order to watch Affe’s spiral level out, aligning his nose with the runway. Even as various Tulian workers and Combat Engineers came up to chat, they stared, a small bundle of tension gathering in their gut.

Should’ve just let Tinvel fly the professor out on his own, Chona privately lamented. They didn’t need two planes for this delivery; it was only supposed to be a test of resupplying the fort from the air, with the Professor and the package he carried being the only delivery. Tinvel could have flown with the Professor in her seat just fine.

The phantom scent of smoke seemed to waft into Chona’s nostrils, carried by memories of a sharp, whipping wind. The memory of the world flipping from sky to sea to sky again, impossibly fast. The only stable sight being Tinvel latched into his seat, wrestling with useless controls as he tried to save a plane that was already dead. Trying to save it at any cost, even his own life, fighting for control until Chona had torn him from his seat.

She took a deep, shuddering breath, thinking of what Sara had told her when she’d visited the Champion. A week after the crash, she’d shown up outside the woman’s apartment in the dead of night, her arms wrapped so tightly around herself her fingernails were drawing blood. She’d had to knock on the door by kicking it. She hadn’t been able to unlatch her hands from her shoulders. Her limbs had kept trying to clutch something close, something that wasn’t there anymore.

Slow breaths, she reminded herself. Count them.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Touch something.

The grain of the wooden cockpit she was sitting in. Her patchwork leather jacket against her fur.

Look at something.

The half-finished fort, workers scurrying over the soil like ants. And to her right, Tinvel. He was still watching Affe’s landing, saying something she wasn’t hearing.

He’s alive, she reminded herself. He’s alive. You caught him. He’s alive. And…

And…

And he’s still wearing those stupid fucking goggles.

“...disappointed it wasn’t worse,” Tinvel’s voice floated in, the pilot frowning as he gazed over her shoulder.

“We need to get you a better flight cap,” she abruptly said.

“What?” He looked at her, baffled, then self-consciously adjusted the leather cap. It was made of such cheap, stiff leather that he’d had to use a vice to bend it into the vague shape of his skull, haphazardly stitching two discs of glass over his eyes. “Screw you. It does the job just fine. And besides, I made it myself.”

“It makes you look like a bug.”

“At least it keeps real bugs out of my eyes,” he countered snappily, cutting the engine with a flick of his finger.

Chona twisted the other way in her seat, looking down the runway. Sure enough, Affe had landed safely, all three landing gear intact. He hadn’t even popped the tires. He was currently trundling his way over to them on taxi speed.

“How’d you think he did, flyboy?” She asked.

“Eh, decent enough,” Tinvel said, his voice growing muffled as he bent forward to inspect the interior of the engine cowling. “He’s practiced plenty, even if he’s not had as much flight time as us. Only had one bounce, and he wasn’t too far off the centerline.”

“I guess. Still would have been funny to see him dig the prop into the dirt, though.”

“Not with Professor Brown in the back.”

“No, I guess not,” Chona admitted. “I wouldn’t have minded if he got cold feet, had to do a few go-arounds.”

Tinvel scoffed. “You ever met Affe? He wouldn’t go around if he was trying to land in a typhoon. He’d rather crash.”

“Probably,” Chona agreed, hopping out of her seat. The various workers who had gathered around the plane immediately started to badger her, asking what she was here to deliver, why they had to fly over when Tulian itself was just a half-dozen miles to the south. It was a decent question; the walls of Tulian were literally in sight from where she was standing. It was a few hour’s walk, hardly worth a flight. But all she told them was that the delivery was on the other plane, then she went quiet, studying the fort.

Up close and personal, it was really being driven home just how impossible it would be to break through the fort. Even with the concrete still drying, the slopes half-built, she could paint the picture for herself. She imagined trying to charge up that incline with nothing more than a spear and a shield, a thousand muskets cracking all around her. Every shot that killed someone ahead of her would send a body tumbling back down, tripping everyone it crashed into. The hill would start the battle covered with nice, slick grass, and by the end of the first day there would be nothing more than churned dirt, putrid mud created by untold gallons of blood seeping into bullet-chewed ramparts.

She’d like to think it was going to give the Sporatons every hell of a surprise when they marched on Tulian again, but she wasn’t that optimistic. Sara had said to practically everyone involved in the defense industries that if the King came for Tulian again, he’d be coming with everything he had. No more underestimation. Even if the Sporatons never got a single spy in the entire country, which was wildly unlikely, there were so many workers shifting on and off this project that rumors of the fort had surely already reached Sporaton harbors. They’d know it was there. The question was, could they do anything about it?

That’s one part of what they were trying to figure out today. The engine of Affe’s Type N cut out, sparing them all from its incessant buzzing. It was replaced an instant later by the eager chatter of a million workers pestering Professor David, who, despite everything he had to do, was trying his best to answer every question.

“We better go grab him,” Chona said.

“Yeah,” Tinvel agreed with a grunt, hopping out of the pilot’s seat.

They elbowed their way through the crowd, which was growing by the second. Professor Brown, the first parent of a Champion to ever grace the world, was an object of absolute fascination for much of the Tulian populace. While those that lived in the city had mostly worked out their obsession already, the rural farms that most of the workers here had been pulled from were still enamored. He stood in the center of a thick press of bodies, a cotton-wrapped package clutched to his chest as he tried in vain to respond to any single person.

“C’mon, Prof,” Chona said, reaching out from the press to grab the man’s arm. Tinvel joined her a moment later, beginning to shout for people to get back, and then the proper Combat Engineers arrived, using their shovels and assortment of others tools like a Guardmember’s staff, forming a cordon around the man.

“Thanks,” David breathed, wiping sweat from his brow. “They’ve got more questions than I can answer. At least not right away.”

“You don’t have to answer any of them,” Chona said drily.

“But I want to!” He said, recovering some of his good cheer. “I mean, most of them were asking things about the star fort. Only seems fair that they get to learn about the thing they’re being paid to build, right?”

“They could be Sporaton spies,” Affe said, joining the group from behind. He’d apparently went to get some Combat Engineers to put a guard up around the planes while they were away. “And you’ve got better things to be doing.”

“If they were actually spies, I don’t think they’d be asking me why we’re using concrete instead of masonry,” David huffed. They reached the wooden ramp and began to plod up it, joining the flow of workers moving in and out of the fort. “A spy could figure that out for themselves. If someone comes up asking me exactly what the weakness of the whole place is, then sure, maybe that’ll raise some alarm bells.”

“Does it even have a weakness?” Chona asked, looking about her. She didn’t know how many people were working on the fort, but it felt like a thousand.

“Not any that I know of, at least,” David happily replied, shifting the package he carried once more, clearly paranoid about dropping it. “I mean, I’m not building the Death Star here. If there was a flaw in it I already knew of, I’d be trying to fix it.”

“There’re a few I can think of!” A voice called. “Not any I’d want to fix, though.”

“Oh, great,” David mumbled, squinting up at the woman walking down the wooden ramp towards them.

“Is that… Shale?” Chona asked.

“Yeah.”

The woman was… not anything like Chona had expected. A mad cannonneer, the master of blackpowder, Shatterer of the Sporaton Cavalry, was…

Pretty frumpy.

She looked like she’d once had a wide, matronly build, the sort of woman who Chona expected to get introduced as a grandmother when she visited her human friend’s family as a kid. In her mid-fifties with hair that seemed to have just started to gray at the roots, she wore a top almost as narrow as Chona’s, a plain brown wrap that both covered and supported her sizable breasts, but without a vanara’s fur to hide everything else. Stretchmarks snaked up and down her hips, hinting at years spent with a much wider build, or maybe a good few years spent pregnant, though that once-loose skin had been pulled taut by freshly built muscle, leaving the pale marks easy to miss. Her hair had turned frizzy in the humidity of the oncoming rainy season and was all out of sorts, though in contrast to how Chona thought human fur usually lost its color, it seemed her hair from went white at the base, brown through the middle, with an inconsistent tinging of extra-curly black right at the tip. Her lips, too, struck Chona as odd, and she briefly wondered if the woman had caught some kind of disease for which she hadn’t seen a healer. Chona had never seen anything like the scars over Shale’s lips, some of which looked old, others fresh and white, almost like blisters.

At the very least, she was as forward as the rumors suggested.

“You got it for me?” Shale demanded, stomping right up to Professor Brown with an outstretched hand.

“Yes,” he sighed, holding out the package.

“Perfect!” She said, snatching it up. She turned the gray cloth bundle every which way, inspecting it close, then pressed it to her nose and took a deep sniff. “Ahh,” she sighed, leaning back. “Smells like it’ll go good, I can say that much. Let’s see if what you cooked up is worth anything.”

Professor Brown looked around at the busy fort nervously. “Here?” He asked. “Aren’t you going to at least wait for night? We don’t have to do everything right away.”

“We don’t have to, but I don’t want to,” Shale said, tossing the package up, catching it. For some reason, Professor Brown winced at that.

Oh my god, Chona thought, the realization striking like lightning. That’s a bag of blackpowder, isn’t it?

Though she hadn’t really paid attention to Tinvel when he’d been talking about why they were doing this little flight out to the fort, at least beyond testing out flying two planes at once, a quick glance at his ashen face confirmed his guess. Professor Brown, Tinvel, and Affe had all backed a good few feet away from Shale as she made her way up the ramp, still passing the bag of explosives from hand to hand.

“What about this cloth?” She asked David. “Does it burn like you want it to?”

“It’s a mix of cotton and nitrocellulose, so it should be a fairly comprehensive reaction,” he tentatively replied. “But I can’t confirm that until we actually test it. And I still think we need to switch to self-contained ammunition. Carrying around bags of loose guncotton, even if it’s not pure guncotton, is a recipe for-”

“My troops’ll take good care of them,” Shale said, cutting him off. “And I’ll switch to cased ammunition as soon as you give me the volume of brass needed to maintain firerate. Until we have that, I’m not budging.”

Professor Brown, in a rare display for the man, got a bit touchy at this. “It doesn’t matter how much ammunition you have when your soldiers are spending half their time blowing up their own artillery. You need to accept that compromises have to be made for long-term sustainability-”

“And you need to understand, Dave, that if you had any idea what it was like to stare down the Sporaton gods-damned army, you wouldn’t give two shits about anything other than putting as much lead in the air as you could. This fort could be drowning in a hundred thousand soldiers someday, and you want to tell me we need to shoot slower?”

“I want you to get to shoot in the first place!” Professor Brown all but yelled, cheeks wobbling as his face went red. “If you’re not going to take the safety precautions I reccomend seriously, I’m going to put a stop to the University providing you any sort of propellant, blackpowder or guncotton.”

“I thought you said you weren’t sure if this was proper guncotton?” Shale asked, waggling the bag over her shoulder at the man without looking back. “That’s why you’re coming out to test it in a full-on cannon.”

“I’m not entirely sure,” David admitted, immediately and predictably distracted by the academic question. His frustration was forgotten in a flash. “It seems like there’s some minor chemical differences in this world’s cotton plant compared to the species from my world. It’s not behaving how I expected it to, even when I know I’ve got the right proportion of nitric acid to sulfuric acid. I’m starting to think what you call ‘cotton’ here isn’t pure cellulose, or at least has extra impurities that I’ll have to figure out a refinement process for. Either way, it’s been acting shifty in the lab.”

“Shifty?” Chona asked.

“Shitty, more like,” Tinvel mumbled under his breath.

“Language,” Professor David reflexively scolded, then shook his head. “Sorry. We’re not in class, I know. Cuss all you want. Just habit. But you’re not wrong. It’s been shifty.”

“Again, weird how?” Chona repeated.

“Inconsistent. Sometimes when we put a flame on it, it does exactly what we wanted it to. Big, rapid flash, very little smoke. Lots of energy expended in a very short amount of time, all without much in the way of byproducts. And if that was all it did, I’d have told Sara we should start replacing all our blackpowder as soon as possible with the stuff.”

“But?” Chona prompted.

“But it gets weird at scale,” David said, panting hard. They’d reached the fort proper, and were being led by Shale up and down a series of half-finished concrete walls, catwalks, and even a few stretches of wood-topped bamboo scaffolding. The professor was sweating buckets already. He took a deep breath, then straightened himself, continuing his explanation.

“Real nitrocellulose, real guncotton, it should be a linear reaction. You light an ounce of it, you get X heat and Y smoke. You light two ounces of it, you get X-times-two heat and Y-times-two smoke. I mean, it’s not perfectly linear, because the ignition time and all that varies as the material volume changes, y’know, it takes more time for the initial flame to propogate, but you get what I’m saying.” He shook his head. “Anyway. So far, in the lab, when we’ve been igniting more of this maybe-guncotton, it’s not been a linear increase in heat and smoke. It’s been multiplicative.”

There was a brief pause as they kept walking in silence. Then, Chona thanked the gods, Affe was the one to ask the question she’d had at the tip of her tongue.

“So what?” He asked. “Isn’t that better for making explosives? Sounds like a cheap way to increase their power. If two ounces of maybe-guncotton is four times as powerful as one ounce, doesn’t that just mean it’ll be cheaper to produce? Less material for more power?”

“Well, if it actually works like that, sure,” David said. “But I’m not sure it will. Sometimes two ounces really is just twice as powerful as one. Most commonly, it’s four times as powerful. But the thing is? A couple of times, though we could only eyeball it, we thought it popped off with something more like six or seven times as much energy. And then, the last test, the one that made me decide to come out here? Even though we still just lit two ounces of it, it actually broke the table we put it on. Blew about a three-inch hole through half-inch thick wood.”

Chona looked at the more-than-fist-sized bag of the stuff in Shale’s hands.

“Huh,” she said, scratching her neck with her tail. “Huh. Well. Anyone got hearing protection?”

“I brought some wax, yeah,” Tinvel said, rummaging in a pocket before handing Chona a glob of stiff wax.

“Thanks.” She started rolling it in her palms, warming it enough to mold to her ears.

“And that, kids,” Shale said as they rounded a final corner, “is why we’re going to be firing this puppy with a very, very long string.”

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