Chương 166: CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-SIX: THE FORGE, MEANWHILE

The mechanism decision was still waiting. Marcus went back to the forge complex on the fifth day, because the world did not stop when a rider went east and because Briggs had been waiting three days with two viable designs and no direction. The forge complex in the ninth year was four buildings and a yard.

The blast furnace occupied the largest, running continuously now on a rotation that kept it at temperature through the night — a practice that had begun as an experiment two years ago and had proven so much more efficient than cold starts that the rotation had become permanent. The second building was the finishing shop, where Brennan had worked until his knees stopped him and where Aldric now ran the precision work. The third was the assembly hall.

The fourth was Briggs's, and had no formal name, and was where things that did not yet exist were figured out. The fourth building smelled of hot iron and lamp oil and the particular sharp scent of the quenching bath. Marcus had come to associate that smell with progress in a way that had nothing to do with anything rational. Briggs was at the long bench with both sets of drawings weighted down at the corners. Lena was across from him with a test piece in her hands, turning it slowly under the lamp.

Lena was nineteen. She had been eight years old when she announced she was going to be a blacksmith and she had been in the forge complex since she was fourteen. In the past year she had begun to do the thing that Briggs had been waiting for someone to do, which was to disagree with him and be right.

"Tell me the fork," Marcus said. Briggs slid the first drawing forward.

"Approach one. Interrupted-thread breech. The barrel and the breech block have matching threads with sections cut away, so a quarter turn locks it. Fewer parts, simpler to make, and if it's out of tolerance it just doesn't close — it fails safe." He paused.

"It's slower to operate. Maybe two seconds slower per cycle than approach two."

"Approach two?" He slid the second drawing forward.

"Falling block. A wedge that drops to expose the chamber and rises to seal it. One lever motion. Faster, smoother, better under stress because the motion is simpler." He paused.

"It has more parts. The tolerances are tighter. And if it's out of tolerance, it can fail closed — it can seem locked when it isn't." This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. Marcus looked at the two drawings for a while.

"Fail safe versus fail dangerous," he said.

"That's the fork," Briggs said.

"And approach two is faster."

"Approach two is faster," Briggs said.

"In a defensive engagement with a wall breach, two seconds per cycle across twenty operators over three minutes is—" he did the arithmetic without visible effort "—roughly forty additional shots. That's not nothing." Marcus looked at Lena. She had not said anything.

"You disagree with him," Marcus said. She glanced at Briggs.

"Say it," Briggs said, without heat.

"You've been sitting on it for two days and I'd rather hear it." Lena set down the test piece.

"The falling block isn't the faster option," she said.

"It's the faster option if the operator is calm." She paused.

"The lever motion is simpler, which means it's faster when everything works. But when it binds — and it will bind, everything binds — the operator has to diagnose why. On the interrupted thread, if it doesn't close, you can see why: it's not aligned, you turn it. On the falling block, if it doesn't seat, you can't see the reason. It's inside the mechanism."

"That's a maintenance argument," Briggs said.

"It's not," Lena said.

"It's an argument about the person holding it." She looked at Marcus.

"My brother is in the garrison. He's told me what the third engagement was like — the one four years ago, the big one. He said his hands stopped working properly. Not shaking. Just — slow. Like they belonged to someone else." She paused.

"That's who's holding this. Not us in a workshop with good light. Him, on a wall, with his hands not working right." The room was quiet.

"Design for the worst hands," Marcus said.

"Design for the worst hands on the worst day," Lena said.

"The two seconds don't matter if the thing binds and he can't tell why." Briggs was looking at the drawings.

"She's right," he said.

"I've been optimizing the mechanism. She's been optimizing the use." He paused, and there was something in his face that Marcus had seen only a few times in nine years — the specific expression of a craftsman being corrected by his own apprentice and finding it excellent.

"That's the better question."

"Approach one," Marcus said.

"The interrupted thread. Fail safe."

"Approach one," Briggs agreed. Marcus made a note in the notebook. Then he looked at Lena.

"How long have you known?" he said.

"Since the second day," she said.

"I wanted to be sure before I said it."

"Next time," Briggs said, "say it on the first day. I'd rather be wrong for one day than three." Lena's expression did something complicated and settled into something that was mostly pleased. Marcus left them to it and walked back across the yard in the late morning light, and thought about a nineteen-year-old who had grown up in this forge and who had just made the most important design decision the weapons program had faced, and about the fact that she had made it by thinking about her brother's hands.

Design for the worst hands on the worst day. He wrote it down when he got back to the study. Not as a technical note. As a principle.