Building a Viking Empire with Modern Industry-Chapter 224: Butterfly

Ragnar stared at the steel tube, a profound sense of displacement washing over him.

In another life, in the history he remembered from his old world, he knew exactly what was supposed to be happening in the ninth century. Right about now, the Great Heathen Army should have been carving a bloody path through Northumbria and East Anglia. They should have been forcing Alfred the Great of Wessex to his knees, eventually partitioning England to create the Danelaw.

His people should have been settling Dublin, turning it into the first great trading town of the Isles. They were meant to be colonizing the frozen shores of Iceland and the Faroe Islands. They were supposed to be the terror of the Mediterranean, raiding Spain, North Africa, and trading all the way to the gilded gates of Constantinople.

That was the timeline. But Ragnar’s reincarnation had smashed that script to pieces with a sledgehammer of industrialization.

By building blast furnaces early, and turning City Titan into the manufacturing capital of the world, he had caused a massive butterfly effect. Or, perhaps, the world had already been broken before he got here.

The fact that a rogue fleet of tens of thousands of Tang Dynasty soldiers had sailed across the globe to land in England suggested the timeline wasn’t just fractured; it was completely, undeniably fucked.

"Ivar and Ubba are going to be pissed," Ragnar muttered under his breath. "That was supposed to be their playground."

"What was that, Iron Father?" Leofric asked, leaning over the table, "And what in the nine hells is this? A fire-poker for giants?"

Louis the Stammerer, still pale from the news of exploding castles, "Is it... a wand?"

Ragnar snorted, "A wand. Right. Because when faced with a geopolitical crisis, my first instinct is to build a magic stick."

He picked up the weapon. It was a prototype. He had finished the flintlock mechanism just three days ago. There was only one of its kind on the entire planet.

"I know exactly what they have. They are primitive cannons. Cast bronze or iron, thick as a tree trunk, packed with low-grade black powder and rocks. They are devastating against stone walls, yes. But they take an hour to load, they weigh as much as a ship’s anchor, and they are about as accurate as a blind man throwing a handful of gravel."

Al-Hakam, ever the pragmatist, narrowed his eyes at the object in Ragnar’s hands. "And that little metal pipe is going to stop them?"

"This ’little metal pipe’, Vizir, is the culmination of three years of metallurgical trial and error,"

Ragnar gestured toward the iron doors of the solar. "Follow me. You need to see it to understand."

He led the three men out of the war room and onto the circular stone balcony of the watchtower. Below them, City Titan was a sprawling maze of black iron, smoking chimneys, and disciplined military patrols.

"Leofric," Ragnar pointed to a wooden crane stationed on a lower defensive wall, roughly a hundred yards away. Hanging from the crane was a steel-banded oak barrel used for hauling grain.

"See the barrel?"

"I see it," Leofric grunted.

Ragnar reached into a leather pouch at his belt. He pulled out a small, measured paper cartridge. He bit the end off with his teeth, spitting the paper over the edge.

Louis and Al-Hakam watched, utterly mesmerized, as Ragnar poured a small amount of fine, black powder into the priming pan of the lock. He then poured the rest down the long steel barrel. Next came a perfectly spherical lead ball, wrapped in a greased patch of linen.

He drew the iron ramrod from beneath the barrel and shoved the ball down with a series of sharp, precise thrusts.

Ragnar raised the musket. He pressed the wooden stock firmly into his shoulder, closing his left eye. He sighted down the barrel, aligning the crude iron sights with the swinging barrel a hundred yards below.

"Cover your ears," Ragnar advised calmly.

Ragnar pulled the trigger.

The flint struck the steel frizzen. A shower of sparks ignited the priming pan.

A massive plume of thick, acrid white smoke erupted from the muzzle, instantly carried away by the winter wind. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

Leofric cursed loudly, stumbling backward and instinctively drawing his broadsword. Al-Hakam flinched so hard he nearly toppled over the stone railing, his hands flying to his ringing ears.

Down below, a hundred yards away, the steel-banded oak barrel exploded. The heavy lead ball had torn through the thick wood, violently shattering the backside of the barrel and sending splinters raining down into the courtyard.

For ten seconds, the only sound on the balcony was the howling wind and the panicked shouting of guards in the lower courtyard who thought they were under attack.

Louis slowly lowered his hands, his mouth hanging open. He looked from the shattered barrel in the distance to the smoking steel tube in Ragnar’s hands.

"You see, Vizir?" Ragnar smiled, "It pierces scale armor, chainmail, and iron plate at a hundred yards. It requires a fraction of the training a longbowman needs. And right now, I am the only man in the world who knows how to make one."

Al-Hakam swallowed hard, "You said it was a prototype. How many of these can you actually make before the Tang warlord decides to march north?"

"Not enough," Ragnar admitted bluntly, stepping back inside the warmth of the war room.

The others quickly followed, eager to escape the cold and the ringing in their ears. "To arm my entire infantry, I’d need thousands. I can maybe churn out three hundred before spring if I halt all other ironworks. But I don’t need to equip the whole army with them yet."

Ragnar walked over to the chest where he had kept the musket. He kicked the bottom drawer open. Inside, resting in padded straw, were rows of iron spheres, each the size of an apple, with a fuse protruding from the top. Beside them were blueprints for short, squat, heavy-set iron pots.

"What are those?" Leofric asked, finally sheathing his sword,

"We’ve been stockpiling them for two months. You light the fuse, throw it into a tightly packed formation of Tang spearmen, and the iron casing shatters into a hundred lethal shrapnel blades. The blueprints are for siege mortars. Unlike the Chinese cannons that shoot straight, mortars lob explosive shells over walls and drop them directly onto the enemy’s heads."

Louis slumped back into his chair, "My uncle doesn’t stand a fucking chance, does he?"

"Our priority is England. If the Tang establish a permanent foothold in Northumbria, they will fortify it. They will start mining local sulfur and saltpeter. If we let them dig in, it will take a ten-year siege to dig them out." Ragnar said.

Al-Hakam’s eyes gleamed, "So, we strike first."