Author's Nightmare: Chapter 140 (Patreon)

Solitaire POV: Day 112

Current Wealth: 233 gold 47 silver 16 copper

Ever since the invention of the gun, the technology has been plagued by a single, crippling flaw. No, it’s not the noise. It’s not the recoil, or the inherent nature of potent violence to inspire the worst in men and drive into an ever deeper downwards spiral of barbarity, Othering and hatred. It’s the rate of fire. The fact that there’s such ludicrously long pauses between each shot is a vital factor holding us back from meeting our full killing potential. I’d not managed to fix this, but for my part I like to think I made steps in reducing it somewhat.

The gatling gun was a very significant leap forwards, historically, in the delicate art of killing people very quickly. I’d replicated it. It had been hard, mind. Fucking infuriating in fact. But I’d done it. The trick had been a new kind of explosive, mercury fulminate. Shock-activated and powerful enough to ignite black powder in even tiny amounts. Pack a bit at the back of a cartridge, which we were making out of linen, then a single oscillating hammer mechanism could strike it, detonate it and trigger a proper firing. Slot this into a rotating barrel mechanism, figure out a way for new cartridges to be rotated in and empty ones out, and soon enough you have a gun capable of firing…Fucking, I don’t know, like five shots a second or something. Pretty fast anyway. 

Of course there were drawbacks. There always are. 

Mercury was fairly expensive, even for “alchemical materials”, which meant that creating literal tonnes of ammunition had been out of the question. One quarter of a tonne, more or less, was the best I could manage within a few weeks. Fortunately I didn’t need as much mercury fulminate as I did black powder- finding that about a four to one ratio of them was enough for the cartridges to fire. The hard part came with actually assembling the cartridges themselves. I found out the hard way how slow a process that would be after two hours netted me about forty rounds. Enough for eight seconds of shooting.

Yeah, fuck that. 

I brought in Elizabeth, since she wasn’t doing anything, and Alora too. Then upon being accused of asking specifically the women to do handicrafts, I realised that they actually had a point and called Magnus onboard so they could suffer more egalitarianly. 

We got to work, and within a few more hours we’d made around one three hundred more. Enough for seventy seconds of shooting, including the forty I made alone. 

God, this was going to be so annoying.

Soon enough the limiting factor became raw materials again, so much of my time was spent on whipping up new batches. We wasted some in making the rounds of course, and we really did need quite a lot, but with all of us doing our parts we started making steady progress towards a useful pile of munitions. As a British man, I have a great deal of knowledge as to just how effective musket balls are against technologically pre-industrial natives. In fact you might even say it’s genetic memory. We could devastate infantry formations with just a few seconds using this weapon. 

But that didn’t mean we could win by firing it that long. I wanted minutes of shots, not moments, so we all continued our work. Those fleeting moments between, I spent on other projects.

“What?” I hear you think. “Other projects, why Solitaire, does your unbelievable handsomeness and genius know no bounds?” It’s funny you should ask that, because no it doesn’t! 

A big problem we’d been having in all of our fights was that, after we’d finished erasing the hordes of weaker enemies, something stronger and faster would show up to beat us all up. Now Beam had gotten nice and powerful, in fact I was certain now he was in the top ten thousand deadliest people in the entire planet. The problem was, there were still ten thousand on his level. Or, failing their appearances, numerous magical creatures which were simply far more powerful than humans by nature. That vampire we’d fought had been a small fry, almost a fledgeling, and vampires weren’t the deadliest undead out there either. If something like a Demon made an appearance…

Well, if a Demon showed up I was fairly sure we were fucked even if I spent the next few weeks making a howitzer, and it was polite enough to stand still while I fired it. So best to focus on the things we could account for. 

Something big and powerful, more so than Shango’s gun. But also small enough to be aimed at an individual target. For that matter, we could use more guns too. That was more Ardin’s area, though, unless the design changed. And I was getting off topic.

Something man-portable and easy to aim, that could take down big, tough enemies immune to gunfire. It didn’t take me long to land on the obvious solution, and so I started working on my rocket launcher.

Now, the history of rockets in warfare is actually a great deal longer than most people know. Even in Europe. They were used to some extent during the Napoleonic Wars and beyond, though never very accurately. I’d never looked into the precise design of those primitive ones, but I did know that projectiles prone to doing summersaults were not what I was looking for. 

So I got to thinking. It’s amazing how much you can figure out just with a bit of abstract consideration, especially when you’re me. I figured I’d need some way of keeping the rocket on-target, and that its long shape and low mass, compared to a  cannon ball at least, would combine with its inevitably lower velocity to make drag force and sidelong wind pressures a huge problem. 

Spin it then. That was the universal fix for stabilizing things over distance, the only issue was how to go about it. I called on Beam, during his downtime between training sessions, and we got to work. 

The first obstacle was finding somewhere to actually test them. Phelia refused to let us do so inside, for some reason, and Shango took her side, which ended up forcing us out into the gardens. The second obstacle was that it turns out rocket science is actually really hard. Who knew?

Rifling the barrels turned out to not work so well, and half our early days were spent just figuring out the best way to maximize velocity. Eventually we managed to get them moving at, what I estimated, was about two hundred miles per hour. Not bad, but still incredibly inaccurate. At fifty paces we’d be lucky to hit within five metres of our target. Not ideal for what was meant to be an anti-individual weapon. 

It took me an embarrassing amount of time to stumble onto the obvious, and when I did Beam wasn’t able to make it for me. Gun barrels were one thing, but tightly-measured holes at sharply-cut angles was something that demanded Ardin’s touch. He wasn’t too happy to be given the job, but he got to it. 

The next day, we were able to try his work out. It failed. We tried again the next, and again. Studying the effects of each minor change, predicting which others might follow, seeing what happened instead. On the second day we’d finally managed to perfect the design, but it wasn’t until the fourth that we showed it to Shango. 

He wasn’t exactly in a good mood when we did, despite being assured that I’d made something really, really cool. In fact, if anything, being told just how cool it was seemed to make him less happy, and more nervous and worried. Well, he’d always been a strange one, I suppose some people just need a visual demonstration to grasp things. 

“That.” I told him, gesturing across the field as he stood beside me, “Is our target, scientifically chosen for the purposes of this test.”

The scientific process in question, of course, had been finding the heaviest boulder Beam and I could carry together. It weighed a ton. Or, to be more precise, it weighed one point four tons. A roughly hemispherical block of granite measuring four feet at the base, a nice stand-in for about the toughest castle walls we’d be likely to run into for a while. 

“Big target.” Shango noted.

“Tough target.” I replied. “And I’ll aim for the centre, if it hits more than half a foot from the median line then we’ll consider it a miss.” Anticipating his complaint, I’d illustrated just that line from top to bottom with a nice length of pasted-on mud. “Ready?”

“Fire away.” Shango invited, now seeming rather more…Excited. 

I fired.

One of the first things we’d done, in the early fixes, was make the muzzle velocity lower. This is because a six pound projectile hitting two hundred miles per hour really isn’t producing the kinds of momentum we’re designed to handle. My superhuman physical abilities seemed to give me some innate ability to resist being moved, but there was a limit to even that. So when the rocket exited its barrel, I was treated to a good few moments of it accelerating as it tore away. 

Barely half a second later, impact followed.

The boulder seemed to shudder, and might even have been budged slightly. Chips of stone flew outwards in all directions as the rocket bounced off, then shot spinning and spitting for a good few hundred more paces before smashing down into the dirt just shy of the railing. Lucky that, it’d almost hit one of the-

“Holy shit!” Shango gasped, and I saw he was gawping at the point of impact. 

Well, I couldn’t blame him there. Where the rocket had hit, a chunk of stone about as big as Andre the Giant’s fist was now missing. The spot still smouldered, jagged and rough. But it was a good foot off-target.

“Give me five more shots.” I told Shango, and he agreed. These ones were far better aimed. 

In the end, the solution I’d coined for the drag problem had been little, angled vents on the outside of the rockets. Black powder was carefully packed to burn slowly and imperfectly, providing a constant thrust alongside the main charge at the back. So each one spun, and screamed, and whirled like a firework before impact. The first hit, burying itself a good five inches in the stone. The second hit outside the median line, the next one hit slightly worse than the first.

Then the fourth came and buried itself a good seven inches, thanks to the tool steel point we’d had put on as an experiment. Shango was very impressed with that right up until the final rocket hit dead-centre and split the entire boulder in half with a sound so loud it was as if God himself were drunkenly backhanding it. 

When the debris finally cleared, we had a lot to talk about. 

“Mercury fulminate filling.” I told him. “About a kilogram of the stuff, not as powerful as TNT but…Well, not that far either as you saw.”

“How fast can you make it?” He asked.

“Not fast enough that these aren’t more difficult to produce than the other rockets, but they’d serve as good frag rounds too. We made the metal casing out of cast iron. Hard, brittle. It shatters under the explosion. You didn’t see it here with all the flying rock, but anyone within single digit metres of that blast would get shredded by shrapnel.”

Shango gave me one of those “my best friend is a psycho” looks that I know and love, then licked his lips.

“Make it fifty fifty then.” He said at last, frowning. “Fuck, Solitaire, you’ve levelled up.”