base. He got a wall too, after he asked, one that left him with a compound about as large inside as the palace complex was. The wall was about five feet thick and nearly twenty-five high. So an interior space bigger than the whole of Two Bends, including the Smith’s big orchards. Overdone for his personal house, but the guys needed to practice doing something.
He made the heater for the oven one night after bed time, sacrificing sleep, so that they could set it to running the next day. It took two full days to get up to good baking temperature, because the oven was vast, easily the biggest thing like it he’d ever even heard of, but as designed, the field held the temperature exactingly steady after that.
Tor was kind of proud of that little piece of work. It got to the right temperature and held it no matter what. No more, no less. Given the warming time needed, they just left it on day and night. Luckily it was well away from any of the other buildings, so the heat didn’t bother anyone. Summer would still suck in there if he didn’t get some other temperature controls in place, but he had a little time for that.
After the first two weeks they ran out of new building projects to do, but had more and more people coming in for training, so Tor requested they redeem his word and send a crew down to County Ward to build the wall around Ellen’s place. He also sent the crew of ten young men, most not much older than he was, with the building dryers he’d come up with and a pump for her water tank, so that poor old Georges wouldn’t get stuck doing it by hand for all of them the whole time. He added in some lights and a freezer box plate with instructions for use with them too, just because it seemed like a nice thing to do. The man in charge of the cohort assured him he could build it without trouble.
It became a grind after that, the highlight of his day being when he got to work on other almost new designs for things. It took three days for him to come up with the more delicate manual controls for the earth compressors, but the men that used them said had been worth it. Well, they told Rolph. Tor was too busy to chat mainly.
They could make smaller objects then, some nice furniture and doors that sat on real hinges. Even plates and cups started showing up after that, all in a shining red-black stone looking material. Tor would have liked to try using one himself, but he had too much to do for anything that fun or interesting. Far too much.
For every one thing he did, he got “requests” for ten more devices, some of them interesting, but being novel they’d have to wait. Most of them were downright boring and repetitive work for the military. For instance they wanted to try lights for working at night, that each man could carry. He already had the field and could make them pretty easily now, nearly a hundred and eighty per day without missing any sleep. The military asked for a thousand of them. Just for the initial testing.
As badly as they wanted flying rigs, the shields were even more important in their eyes. Oddly, they requested no new weapons from him at all. Not even the force lances or lighter versions of the explosives he’d made before. He didn’t bother asking about it. If they thought they needed it, they probably wouldn’t hesitate. They hadn’t about anything else so far.
Room temperature plates for soldiers all over the kingdom, personal temperature equalizers for the desert and cold north regions and even a hundred faster versions of the Not-flyer, that some general thought might be useful in ground combat.
Well, Tor reflected, they were a lot easier to learn to use than the flying rigs, and were faster than running. You could very nearly just hand one to a person and explain the controls then send them out without practice it was so simple.
The only good part about the whole thing, other than the free room and board, was that he didn’t have a lot of extra time to dwell on Trice and how much that whole thing still hurt. At the beginning of the second month Tor finally got Rolph to tell everyone that came in that he’d be out of touch for a few days, possibly longer. Sitting on the halfway comfortable pile of pillows that had grown around him on the floor over the last month to take the place of a bed, Tor started building the more powerful earth moving field. It wasn’t that hard, just a larger field to do what he already had something for. It just needed to be about a thousand times stronger. That was all. It sounded like a big deal, but either all the practice he’d gotten making the smaller ones, or just the fact that his brain found it easier to work now than not, allowed him to have the new unit ready inside four days. He kind of thought it would be longer. A lot longer.
As had become his habit, since most of the things he made worked the first time, even if some of them needed to be improved on later, like the original shield, he made up ten of the devices instantly when he was done. As chance would have it, it was just about lunch time when he was ready to get out and test it, which meant the sun beating down, blinding him a little and making him squint painfully for about ten minutes while his eyes adjusted. Tor had lights inside, but they weren’t this bright.
Half a dozen of them flew about two miles away from the compound for the testing, just because no one really could see the need for a giant hole or trench right there, plus, even if this worked right, it could still be a mess.
It was.
It worked just the same as the smaller one, except that it kicked up a cloud of dust due to the fact that it had to throw the dirt a lot farther away just for the whole thing to work. Otherwise it would have just dropped the dirt back in the hole being dug, which would have made the thing virtually useless. With a shield on it worked fine. Perfectly in fact.
He just wouldn’t want to try it without a shield or while standing on the ground anywhere near it. He made a ditch, about the size of a middling stream and about a quarter of a mile long. It took about two minutes. That, he decided appraisingly, should serve well enough. It even had three settings to control the speed of flow. He’d been using high, but turned it down for testing, just to make sure he hadn’t messed anything up too bad on the other settings. It worked well enough on medium and on low it would probably be even safe to use like a normal one on the ground, but about ten times faster. Well, if there was ever another fire up in Ross or anywhere like it, this would be what he’d take with him. The river of brown and red dirt and rock flying through the air was impressive even. The roar it gave off kind of frightened him a little, but Tor tried to play it cool, so no one else would panic. If any of the other men felt the same way they didn’t let it show, so it was probably just him.
It would do. It kind of had to, because the second they got back, literally standing on his doorstep was not one, but three, high ranking officials asking for more fields. Or it sounded that way from what Tor could understand. Two of them were trying to talk over each other. Both looked a bit put out by the other too. Because of course they should each be going first.
“Um, well… It’s going to be a bit. I have to make some rivers and, you know, sleep some time soon. But I’ll try to get right on those…” Tor had no clue what the men wanted at all. Floundering he looked around until one of them, a man that looked vaguely familiar, spoke. He’d been at the meeting about the war… Tor drew a blank as to the name though. All he could recall him as was loud map pointer guy.
“Water transport over long distances? That would be helpful. You mentioned water before, and we relocated the base by a river, good call by the way, but the nearly three thousand people we have in training now are using a lot more water than we’d thought originally. This time of year that river is more like a fairly small stream and we have to let the men wash regularly, or else they’ll get sick.”
That made sense. He’d seen similar things in some of the larger families back home. If even one of them was less than clean, everyone could end up ill, especially in the close and cold months of winter when bathing was a freezing hazard and tended to be sketchy even among the dedicated.
“Wait, you added a thousand extra trainees?”
“Well, yes. The council of counts felt that since you obviously can produce the greater numbers of devices we’ll need, it only made sense to add more candidates. Right now we’re only accepting applications from the elite forces however, so it’s felt that at best we should be able to double or triple the amount of trained personnel.”
If he dropped these men into the pit that he’d just dug and buried them, then compacted the earth over the spot for a mile or so, no one would ever find the bodies. He stared for a while and then casually turned to Rolph and said this out loud. He was kidding, but only just. Didn’t they understand how hard, and worse, boring, all this copy work was?
Not at all. Then why would they? They weren’t the ones doing it. Tor sighed and shook his head. Right. Well, he had to do what he could to support the war effort, but seriously, sleep on occasion would be nice. Oh so nice…
The man next to the first put in a request for as many lights as Tor could make. No time limit, no upper cap. Just lights. The goal was to get one to every man in the military, not just the King’s service, but even the County
