189: Lucian Vance Goes Broke Building a Less Efficient System

By six the next morning, the Vance strategy room had become a construction headquarters.

Four long tables stood where the tea table had been. Drawings, supply lists, and railway schedules covered them. Evelyn had taped a new project chart across the wall.

[DISTRIBUTED INFRASTRUCTURE — IMPLEMENTATION DAY ONE]

Regional relay sites: 12,480. Independent archive nodes: 1,284. Rotating maintenance teams: 436.

Emergency mechanical isolation sites: More than 2,900.

[CURRENT DETAILED PROJECT ESTIMATE]

118,420,000 GOLD.

Most of the relay sites already existed. They had to be refitted, linked, staffed, and checked. Building all twelve thousand from bare ground in three weeks would have required a miracle with unusually good procurement.

Lucian studied the nine-digit figure over his coffee. He closed his eyes. Opened them.

Still nine digits. “System.”

[Listening.]

“Display error?”

[No.]

“Check again.”

[The arithmetic has been checked three times.]

“Check a fourth time. With a more positive attitude.”

[The accounting module declines to support unfounded opti-mism.]

Hermann, the family finance director, sat at the central table with a magic-crystal calculator and no color in his face.

Lucian pulled up a chair opposite him. “Liquidate my discretionary reserve.” Hermann looked up.

“That’s the royalty fund from Volumes One through Four. Your retirement fund.”

“How much cash does that leave?”

The finance director checked the ledger.

“Thirty thousand gold in the personal spending account.” Lucian sat through the news in silence.

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Across the room, Astra was eating strawberry ice cream on the rug.

“This,” he told her, “is your fault.”

She looked up. “The permanent Keystone option was cheaper.” “Eat your ice cream.”

Eleanor entered and set a red velvet box beside his ledger. Inside was the treasury seal. Transfer documents followed it onto the table.

“The approved royal contribution is forty million gold from the defense reserve.”

“I can balance this myself.”

“It’s continental infrastructure, Lucian. You don’t get to turn public cofunding into another offer you decline on everyone else’s behalf.”

He looked at the seal, then at her. “I hate character development.”

He accepted the transfer. The companies, property, and future royalties still belonged to him. His carefully accumulated pile of money for doing absolutely nothing was another matter.

The System brought up the works forecast.

[PROJECT REPORTS RECEIVED]

Completion: 2.8%.

Forecast by day twenty-one at current staffing: Approximately 63%. Main bottleneck: Shortage of trained local technicians.

Secondary bottleneck: Host has not approved increased night-shift meal allowances.

[HOST COMBAT POWER]

89.4 million.

Relevance to electrician recruitment and freight scheduling: Minimal.

“Why is the dwarven overtime meal budget up two hundred and forty percent?”

Evelyn rapped her wrench against the table.

“Because people need food to work. We need more shifts, not exhausted smiths doing sixteen hours straight.”

“Capitalism was a mistake.”

He approved the food, shift premiums, and hazardous-work allowances.

Then he authorized better material, thicker conduit walls where the engineers required them, and three daily freight shifts on the

Vance armored railway. Cheap components were no longer cheap if someone had to cross a blizzard to replace them.

At the ten o’clock briefing, he presented his coordination plan.

“Vance Central Matrix. A central monitoring cluster in the capital, fiber links to the regional stations, rapid fault detection, and a consolidated cost ledger.”

He put down his pointer. “Opinions?”

An old engineer from the Northern Miners’ Guild stood in a faded fur coat.

“Won’t work.” Lucian blinked. “What?”

Outside, reporters had already learned about his reserve liquida-tion.

MERCHANT SAINT SACRIFICES RETIREMENT TO PURCHASE HUMANITY’S FREEDOM!

He saw the headline on a tablet between meetings.

“Capital expenditure,” he told it. “You financially illiterate vul-tures.”

The tablet did not print a correction.

* * *

At eleven that night, his rejected design lay on the desk. Eleanor sat beside him by the open window.

“Are you all right?” “No.”

“Regrets?”

Lucian watched another material train pull away through the darkness.

“About getting everyone out? No.” He glanced at the budget.

“About the price? Plenty.”

The northern engineer knocked and came in with the drawing.

He laid it flat and pressed a cracked finger onto the main cable route through the mountains.

“Build it exactly like this, Mr. Vance, and the first winter storm will sever that line. Three northern provinces will lose power.”

Lucian sat upright. “Explain.”