Rise of the Horde

Chapter 905: Chapter 904

Zul’jinn went home at the second hour of the night, stood at his wall plan for three minutes, and came back to the forge district workshop.

He brought the installation plans. He laid them on the primary worktable and began pulling numbers.

The northern perimeter arc required twenty-three wall-mount positions in total: twelve primary installations on the wall face, seven secondary bracing points on the interior support structures, four anchor systems at the arc’s terminal points. At current output, his crews completed two primary installations every three days and one secondary brace every two days. He did the calculation on the planning sheet without pausing. At current pace, the full northern arc needed thirty-nine days. He had fourteen.

He pulled the secondary bracing from the sequence.

Secondary bracing was structural reinforcement, not operational requirement. A wall-mount installation without secondary bracing operated at eighty percent of rated stability. Eighty percent was not optimal. Eighty percent was functional, and functional was better than not-yet-installed when the Ferrath breach territory’s edge was nine miles from the perimeter and closing.

He revised the timeline. Primary installations only. Twenty-one days. Still seven over.

He pulled the anchor systems.

The arc’s four terminal anchors distributed the wall-mount’s operational load across four structural points rather than concentrating it at the installation base. Without the anchors, each base took the full load. The bases were engineered to take the full load. He had specified a fifteen percent structural margin in the original design specifically for exactly this kind of time-constraint situation, because Zul’jinn designed for the contingencies he hoped would not occur and not for the conditions he expected to encounter.

Primary installations only. No secondary bracing. No anchor systems. New timeline: fifteen days. Still one over.

He looked at the remaining variable.

The bottleneck was the stone-facing process, the step that bonded each installation unit to the wall face. It required a six-hour curing interval at ambient temperature. Ambient temperature on the northern perimeter was four degrees above freezing. At four degrees, six hours was the minimum curing time for the bond to reach operational strength. He could not change the temperature. What he could change was how the work was staged around the curing intervals.

Three installation teams running in overlapping six-hour cycles. Each team’s curing interval would be completing as the next team’s installation was beginning. No crew time lost to waiting on completed work. He needed a third crew, which meant pulling people from somewhere.

He went to Arka’garr’s office at the third hour of the night.

Arka’garr was awake, reviewing the patrol schedule revision that Dhug’mhar’s engagement report had prompted. He looked at Zul’jinn’s calculation sheet without asking why Zul’jinn was in his office at the third hour of the night.

"Who do you need?" Arka’garr said.

"Sixteen workers from the outer quarter residential expansion. People who can follow precise physical instructions and who will not cut corners on the bond measurements."

"That project belongs to Mekka."

"I know. I need Mekka’s sixteen for fourteen days."

Arka’garr wrote a notation on his planning board and said he would have Mekka in the room at first light. Then he said: "The curing compound substrate. Is there a supply question?"

Zul’jinn had the materials sheet in his hand. "Thirty percent more substrate than current inventory covers. The Ironbeard void compound shares a base chemical with the wall-mount bonding agent. I need to know whether both operations are drawing from the same raw material pool."

"I will send a message to the Arch compound team tonight."

"Address it to Vorra Deepcut," Zul’jinn said. "She will know which substrates her people are drawing from and at what rate."

He went back to the forge district workshop and sat at the worktable with the revised plan in front of him.

Fourteen days. Three crews in overlapping six-hour cycles. Primary installations only at eighty percent stability. Bases operating at full engineered load within the fifteen-percent margin he had built into the design. Every assumption in the plan was either correct or it was a catastrophic error dressed as a workable solution, with no middle option available. He had built the fifteen-percent margin specifically to avoid the catastrophic version. Either the margin held or the installation failed under operational load.

He wrote the crew assignments.

The assignments required deciding which of his people went into which rotation and who handled the bond verification checks between cycles. He wrote names. He crossed three of them out and wrote different ones. He was not indifferent to who verified the bonds, because bond verification was the step that determined whether an installation was operating at eighty percent or at sixty percent presented as eighty. That distinction would eventually matter in the way that all structural distinctions mattered: invisibly, until they mattered enormously.

He put Gorrak on bond verification for all three crews.

Gorrak was meticulous in the way that some engineers were meticulous: not as a professional habit but as a personal quality that could not be accelerated by deadline pressure or adjusted by the urgency of a situation. He would verify each bond at the correct interval and report a failed measurement to Zul’jinn’s face rather than record it as acceptable and move the schedule forward. He was slower than two other people Zul’jinn could have put on verification and he was the correct choice regardless.

The crew assignments were complete at the fifth hour of the night. He sent the documents to three locations: Arka’garr’s office for authorization, Gorrak’s quarters for first light review, and the forge district’s main board where the day-shift crews would see the new rotation when they arrived.

Then he began recalculating the secondary bracing installation sequence. The secondary bracing was what the four weeks after the primary arc needed to accomplish, and planning the second phase before the first phase was complete was the operational habit that kept the second phase from becoming an emergency. He had learned this from every project that had not had a second-phase plan ready before the first phase ended.

The day-shift crews arrived as he was working on it. They saw what he was doing and did not ask. They went to their stations and began.

He kept working.