"Mmm. Tomorrow."

Tomorrow the latest episode of Freedom Radio is somewhat the talk of the secret project. Some people have made the obvious guess that the radios are another division of this secret project, but Iomedae doesn't know if any of them have made the connection between their supervisor and the radio host (she tries to use a different voice for radio). This means she gets all their opinions about her, said in front of her, which is a lot of fun. 

They only know about this at all because she screwed up but it's still very satisfying. 

In the afternoon there's a strategy meeting. Iomedae enters quietly and goes to her seat and is not particularly stubborn or rebellious.

"Alright Alex," opens Jan, "Was yesterday a costly victory or an outstanding one?"

"I don't know yet."

"When do you expect to know?"

"I don't know that either."

"...Okay. Let's all put it down in our hearts as a moderately costly victory until we know more. There won't be an incident report until we know what, if anything, it cost us or could have cost us - Iomedae, how many guns of each kind can you have ready by the end of Calistril? And how much ammunition?"

Is that going to be all of the discussion. Well, it makes sense that the most important question is whether their spies in Cheliax got caught for this and they don't know yet. Iomedae has current estimates on guns and ammunition by type, as of this morning. She'll read them off. "- and eight thousand of the centerfire bolt-action rifles. We could do more but can't scale the ammunition as easily. Same deal with the crank guns. I could make you a hundred of them but only about four thousand shells, and they go through two hundred a minute, that's the whole point of them."

"How much would it cut into regular ammunition stockpiling if Cansellarion starts soldiers drilling with the new weapons over the winter? We have twelve months in which Cheliax is without their usual reserve wish, and with that I'm inclined to - advise - that it's not worth another year to stockpile and train more."

"- for that we wouldn't need the batch 3 ammunition, which is designed for the Worldwound. Batch 2 we can produce a thousand a day. You could …probably design a halfway adequate training regime where every soldier learning the weapon fired forty shots? Less than that I’d worry they wouldn’t have experienced any problems while reloading and wouldn’t know what to do with it, or that under pressure they'll just forget how to do it at all.” She is suddenly aware of how she really doesn’t treat the President as a President at all, and generally does not behave at all like she acknowledges any authority whatsoever, and how possibly this is part of the error she identified yesterday. “Sir."

"I'm not actually in your chain of command."

"- understood." She's not sure if that resolves any of her confusions about how Lastwall's treating her but it sure does introduce another potential angle by which it'll predictably be complicated.

"Cansellarion is, and anyone he's assigned you under. But as for the rest of us in this room - we're your allies, not your superiors. So, who wants to make the case for Cansellarion not starting the war next spring?"

"Well, that's simple. How many guns would we have by the end of next Calistril?"

"- I don't actually know. I expect more than implied by 'production is four dozen a day' but less than implied by ‘production is doubling every month’ - at some point we're going to run into supply bottlenecks we haven't even thought of, or your druids will rebel about what you're doing to the groundwater. Or - see, I didn't know you could use Wishes to kidnap people, and I don't know how many more things like that there are and how often you will learn in advance of them."

"Well, there's the case, at any rate. Wait another year and we can at least triple the size of the army, and we have whatever new weapons the little geniuses come up with. Downside is passing up the initiative, if Cheliax decides to move before then."

"And they get their wish back."

"That too."

"Do you two have anything planned, down the line, that wouldn't be ready by next spring but would with one more year?"

"Artillery guns?" Alfirin adds, somewhat uncertainly. "Same basic principle, but bigger. Pulled around by a horse or a team of horses, usually used as siege weapons - might be useful against adventurers, if you can aim them fast enough. Or dragons. They're very good on ships or armored vehicles. But it'd mean setting up a whole extra production line and that would cut into the rest of production pretty sharply if you want them by spring."

"Artillery guns are very important in Earth warfare of this time period but - mostly in wars between major powers, they're not as important when a single industrial power is fighting some backwater. And I don't know enough about fireballs to say if they're a lot better than fireballs. ...I want airplanes but I think I could only have them in fifteen months if I did nothing else and it's not a good trade. …airplanes can do most of what dragons can do, and are only a little less scary, and also they can do overland logistics. But they're ill suited to these secrecy conditions and quite challenging even if you're cheating in various ways I expect we will to start out."

"I don't think you can build an airplane that runs off a coal boiler. On top of the plane development itself, which I agree would be hard to fit into fifteen months, we'd need to develop petrochemical refinement…and find some crude oil."

"Spring, then, with guns and no artillery or airplanes?"

"I think so."

Cheliax learns that their enemies knew of the Wish attempt because they have Manohar run some Discern Locations from a scroll at the right time. They fail, as they would if everyone were Mind Blanked, and Codwin and Cansellarion usually aren't. 

Lilia frames a subordinate, obviously, modifying his memory to include going out to dinner with a friend the night before the operation and then waking up in his own bed with no memories of the rest of the dinner at all. She gets tortured anyway, because Abrogail Thrune is very upset and can't take it out on Gorthoklek, but she can beat a Detect Thoughts and a Dominate and she is ultimately not under wildly more suspicion that she was before, as far as she can tell. 

She is nonetheless irritated that Myrabelle presumably intervened to save the girl. Lilia finds the girl very annoying. She's aware this is mostly just because her own life is a lot worse when Abrogail Thrune is having a bad day, and doesn't reflect much on the girl's actual value as an ally, but she would have enjoyed interrogating her and she has not enjoyed the last few days of her life at all.