Year 524The new reservoir has been filled with water pumped out of the old reservoir, emptying the old reservoir and allowing me to descend and inspect the interior.
I have discovered a Temple of Madness.
The water we've been drinking all this time once filled a broad hallway, permeating the strange machinery filling alcoves along the sides. Twin axle shafts run the length of the hall, connected at each alcove by a gearbox. The alcoves each contain a pump, with trenches on each side containing a pair of waterwheels hooked up directly to the pump. The dark, dripping paddles of the wheels have clearly not moved in some time, but from the wear on their bearings they just as obviously
have moved at some point in the past.
How? There is no source of water, no sink, no flow save for the gentle swirling as the water had been pumped out to allow access. I summoned Tirist Lazonol, our finest mechanic, to join me in the inspection and explain what I was seeing.
Tirist is of legendary skill, earned the hard way through work and experience rather than supernatural inspiration, and even so he was rather awed by the sight as well. "I've heard rumors of such constructions before but I've never seen one... and certainly never on a
scale like this. These are self-contained dual-wheel water reactors. The pump brings water up from below, here, and deposits it here. It then flows to either side, into the trenches, there. And that flow turns the water wheels, which powers the pump. The net result is excess energy, which is tapped by those gears and fed into these two parallel axle lines."
"So, it produces power from nothing?"
"Yes, quite so." Tirist walked with me down the dripping hallway inspecting the devices as we went. The machinery looked intact, though stone rubble littered the floor and half-filled the trenches - the Old Battlefaileders who had excavated the place had been quite sloppy in cleaning up afterward. Presumably this was not something that had been intended for anyone to set eyes on again. "There are eight pairs of dual-wheel units, they all look intact," Tirist reported at the end. He did some mental calculations. "That many waterwheels will produce 3200 Urists of power. The internal losses by the wheels and pumps alone would be 480 Urists, and it looks like the gears and axels collecting the power together accounts for another 127, give or take. So this system - should it be set in motion - would generate a net output of just under 2600 Urists."
I whistled. "What did Old Battlefailed need that sort of power
for?"
"There was an axle emerging from the reservoir when we first reopened Lower Battlefailed, remember," Tirist reminded me. "It ran down the hall to what looked like an empty pump stack shaft, the one we used for drainage when reclaiming the apartment stacks and then sealed up because it led directly down to some Forgotten Beasts lurking in the water."
I nodded. "Yes, I recall. We were urgently in need of wood and it obviously wasn't useful for anything so I had it dismantled." Tirist had a pained look at my mention of that but I couldn't feel any regret - as manager of this fortress I had to be pragmatic in balancing our needs and resources. I looked around at the waterwheels and axles filling the chamber. We were pretty short on wood right now, too, and there was a vast amount that could be salvaged from here. But before I gave Tirist a heart attack by suggesting dismantling this ridiculous apparatus I needed to think some more about its purpose.
Old Battlefailed had been a society under siege, pressed hard from all sides by danger. It had ultimately been unable to muster the force to withstand what had faced them. And yet they had spent a not inconsiderable amount of effort on this thing. Had that waste been their undoing? Or did they have a grand plan that required it, and their failure to complete it had been their end instead?
I returned to my offices to pour over the maps of Battlefailed that I had been compiling. There was the empty pump stack that this abomination had been intended to power. It had obviously never been completely dug out, its top led nowhere. The bottom end descended all the way down to the waters of the lowest cavern level.
Right next to the magmaworks... I blinked. There hadn't been much scouting done in the caverns, of course, but the ongoing renovations to the magmaworks had resulted in a detailed record of the
underside of the cavern, where the magma sea's roof brushed against its floor. There was a strange obsidian "stalactite" hanging directly underneath. The pump stack hadn't led to the water, not originally anyway, it had driven all the way through to the magma beneath.
A screw pump made of the right materials
could theoretically pump sufficiently fluid magma. I started doing some calculations of my own, and combed the old records of what pump components had been resting in Old Battlefailed's inventory when we'd first arrived here. They'd never completed the task, obviously, but...
I worked long into the night. At several points dwarves came to knock on my chamber doors, and when I emerged in the morning they were relieved that I had not become Peculiarly Secretive. I felt just as inspired as if I had, however.
"Gentledwarves," I announced, "I have figured out what Old Battlefailed had hoped to accomplish here in this terrible place. A project that would have protected them forever. And I believe I have
improved on that plan."
It would be a very busy year for Battlefailed, full of industry and activity.
The power generators we had discovered would be kept intact. I directed that additional drainage be dug for the trenches to allow the rubble to be cleared out of it. The floors would be resurfaced with worked stone to prevent the growth of any vegetation that might affect the system's operation.
The magmaworks renovations were nearly complete, but I'd been taking a leisurely pace overseeing the final steps since there'd been no pressing need for them.
Now there was a pressing need. The magma conduits under the furnaces were finally filled. I had a dozen magma smelters built to clear the massive backlog of old scrap metal that needed melting down - mustn't neglect ongoing cleanup operations just because one new idea has seized my interest - and the rest of the magmaworks were turned over to glass furnaces. We would need over a hundred sections of glass tubing and over a hundred glass corkscrews. The masonry shops were directed to produce a like number of stone blocks. Gabbro and mica preferred.
Tekkud and his miners were given a task too. The fantastic garbage chute they'd constructed for me would need some modifications and expansions dug.
And FAILCANNON... The masons received their orders. A redesign would be needed there. We'd already stripped off the old scaffolding and windmill platforms, so all that was needed now was the construction of new ones. Better ones.
I had long wondered just what the old Battlefaileders had been thinking when they'd constructed that ridiculous giant water faucet. I saw now that that had only been an interim state, a barely-functional stopgap measure. Now FAILCANNON would finally fulfill its promise and
succeed.
It was a time of renovation throughout the fortress. And a good thing, too. With the main hauling tasks of cleanup finally finished there had been less and less for the bulk of the fortress population to do, resulting in an increasing population of idle dwarves. Idle dwarves who had plenty of time to fraternize. As a trained fortress manager I could see the danger of this - I hardly need mention dwarven sociologist Urist Kedkol's seminal treatise on the subject, "On the Development of Criticality in Dwarven Interpersonal Relationship Networks". We had finally reached the count of 200 dwarves, the threshold at which even mad Queen Lem realized it was time to stop sending migrants to us, so we had plenty of dwarfpower on hand for the work. Everything proceeded very smoothly and quickly.
There was one interruption this year. During the height of summer our lookouts reported a broad swath of smoke on the horizon, rising through the shimmering heat of the sandy grassland of the Plains of Ooze. I didn't pay the report much mind since no caravans were due, no goods were outside to suffer damage, and even if the fire did find some path through the patchy vegetation it couldn't harm Battlefailed's walls. But soon the heart of the fire came within visual range. It was a brush titan named Lafo. It was a strange beast composed of flame, with a shell and a stinger and not much else identifiable in its infernal structure.
After some thought I weighed the risks and decided to allow Lafo into our gatehouse. I had our military forces wait below, just inside the entrance to Upper Battlefailed, to kill it once it had done the hoped-for work. The roaring knot of flame saw our home and its open gate and made a beeline for it.
I'm told the radiant heat was painful all the way up in the Sprinkler Head, where the lookouts remained in vigil, and the interior of the gatehouse turned into a veritable oven as it passed. The many layers of blood that coated everything in a thick patina shriveled and scorched, peeling off in flakes to rain down on Lafo like some sort of gory snow. The poisons layered in with the blood was also cooked into inert ash. The gatehouse was
clean.
When Lafo entered Upper Battlefailed the fight was brief and victorious. Lafo only managed to emit a single scorching burst of flame before being torn apart with our bolts and steel. It turns out that flame is not a very sturdy structural material. Alas, our strangely popular Mayor Fikod was one of two warriors who were caught in the burst of flame and perished of blood loss from his burns before he could be taken to the hospital. We'll miss you, Mayor Fikod, and your ridiculous mandates for native silver items that I have long ignored. May you be united with the stuff in death. An election was immediately held and he was replaced by Kel Kubuklalar, who likes iron and green glass. I'm sure we'll get on wonderfully.
With the gatehouse clean it seems that the only remaining reservoirs of poison in Battlefailed are the Stairway of Death (which has been sealed by a locked hatch for some time now) and our own clothing. This was confirmed by a joyous event shortly after Lafo's visit; a kobold thief was caught
inside Upper Battlefailed. The shoeless creature fled upon discovery and when last observed seemed to still be completely healthy.
I have unleased probe cats to confirm the situation. The few remaining stray spots of contaminant inside Battlefailed will be cleaned by constructing and removing grates over them. Here's an example of one that a cat found, possibly left by Buqui's corpse:
That excitement aside, the year was one of solid labor. One year, just a single year of work. I set that as our goal arbitrarily since otherwise there'd be too much temptation to relax and plant the seeds of Kedkol's predicted doom. A steady stream of sand bags flowed down from the surface, where a collection area had been designated in one of the unused side-caves of Upper Battlefailed. Finished pump components flowed up, stockpiled in the old dining hall. The old power output gear for the water reactors was removed and the hole sealed over, and a new main power shaft was dug and installed leading in the opposite direction to the west. Since the reactors were destined to be flooded again once the rubble was cleared I took extra care to ensure that no water could follow the shaft all the way to the magma pumps, to spill in and clog the mechanisms; I had the drive shaft rise up a level when it had to make a bend anyway, and in addition I added an overflow drain to the cavern outside that would intercept any pressure-driven water that made it over the rise just in case something unexpected occurred.
FAILCANNON received some more renovations. The archery range was moved down into Upper Battlefailed and the structure's "barrel" was simplified to allow a small room for ammunition to be maintained. A new archer post was established one level above the Sprinkler Head, carving arrow slits directly into the giant bone skull. A system of nickel drawbridges was built inside FAILCANNON's barrel to allow leftover fluids to be quickly and completely cleared between firings, and a set of gabbro doors was installed at the tip of FAILCANNON to allow the fluid pressure inside the cannon to build up before being unleashed.
The nickel purge system is very important to the new design. You see, the original FAILCANNON, as it was when we arrived here, had two windmill-driven pump stacks that drew seawater up from the surface of the ocean. I presume there were two merely to increase the water flow rate. Since the magma was ultimately going to be delivered from the deeps by just a single pump stack, only one magma pump stack would be needed within FAILCANNON itself. The other pump stack was still rebuilt, however. I had it extended downward by an additional level to tap into the ocean a full level
below the surface. This gives this single pump stack access to fully pressurized ocean water and should allow a far greater sustained water flow rate than the old dual stack unpressurized-source design.
FAILCANNON will be able to shoot both hot and cold running fail. An important note to all future operators; make very sure to purge the barrel of one substance before switching to the other. A messy and damaging obsidian jam will occur otherwise.
The garbage chute was quickly converted into a fully-equipped magma pump stack. I broke with the design philosophy that the other pump stacks of Old Battlefailed had used by not relying on direct contact from one pump to the next to transmit power. Instead I had each pump fully supported by an intact floor and installed a 110-level-tall gear shaft beside the pump stack to transmit and distribute power among the pumps. This required 156 additional mechanisms and 111 additional axle segments, and increased the power requirement per level from 10 Urists to 18.5 Urists. The tradeoff for this additional complexity is a far more robust system. I had seen firsthand the fragility of the more efficient pump-supported pump stack several years earlier when Aci had smashed a pump at the bottom of the old stack that had used to run next to the Staircase of Death in the first cavern level. With that one pump destroyed the entire stack collapsed. Furthermore, such a stack can only be constructed one pump at a time starting from the bottom and working up. And there would be no way to replace the components of a single pump should it happen to be accidentally constructed of non-magma-safe materials. We had sufficient power resources, and mechanisms required only stone that we had in great abundance so I saw no real downside here.
The only thing we lacked was wood. The additional axles would need a lot of it and we were about 30 logs short. I wasn't concerned. Last time the dwarven caravan had come they'd brought more logs than that, and I had told the trade representative from Mountainhome that we would pay a premium for more. I was sure that come Autumn we would be adequately supplied and the final touches could be put on it all. Autumn was eagerly awaited. We finished everything else ahead of schedule, leaving me time to work on a new control room to house the levers for all of the complex mechanism Battlefailed had sprouted. Finally the caravan came and I rushed down with our broker to see what bounty they'd brought.
Eight logs. Eight measly logs. "We said we'd pay a premium for wood," I told the caravan leader. "You brought me barrels of eel blood. When have we ever purchased eel blood?
Twelve anvils. Anvils are not consumable, you realize. We have plenty of anvils. I've had half our anvil supply melted down recently for being a waste of metal and space. If I needed more anvils I could have fifty forged by the end of the month, each one worth more than your entire load of useless scrap! Why did you only bring me eight logs of wood? I would have paid you a thousand dwarfbucks apiece. Ten thousand. As many silk socks as your mules could carry!"
"Would you like some fine prepared sea serpent brain?" The caravan leader asked me instead of answering. "It has excellent value for its weight. Or how about some leather? Fine tanned skins from creatures all across the land. Also excellent value for its weight."
I have to admit, something inside me snapped. I left our broker to deal with these idiots however he liked and stormed down to the armor stockpile in Lower Battlefailed. I already wore steel high boots, a protection against poisonous floors should I step outside of the safe zone, and the ringing of metal on stone must have borne the note of my furious resolve as many of my fellow dwarves stopped what they were doing to watch. "Kikrost, what're you doing?" One asked.
I reached the bins that contained my goal and, as I began suiting up in full steel plate and chain I bellowed "Coastal Ships, Occult Wheels, Glowing Roads, to me!" These were our archers and our best melee fighters, essentially the whole professional military force of Battlefailed. "They mock us with their useless trade goods! The year is nearly up, the project
will be complete on schedule. If all we need is wood I shall HEW THE WOOD FROM FLESH AND BONE! TEKKUD!" I saw our chief miner passing and raised a masterwork axe high to beckon him. "I'll need your pick too! With me!"
The growing troop of dwarves marched with me down the hall to my managerial office where the maps of Battlefailed were spread over every surface. "We need wood," I repeated once everyone was assembled. "And we
have wood. Nigh on a hundred fungal trees, perhaps more, grow in the second cavern layer. They are guarded by three Forgotten Beasts, all of them ground-bound but one composed of flame and thus immune to Battlefailed's poisons. We have relied on those poisons for too long. We've forgotten what Dwarven steel can accomplish. We're going to
take that cavern layer, TODAY."
There was a murmur through the room. My fierce speech had clearly caught the hearts of many, warriors who had never done more than spar were nodding hungrily at the thought of facing even such fearsome foes. But Stukos had seen more battles than any, he bore real scars and he had the real experience necessary for proper caution. "You've never been one to jump into something risky on impulse, Kikrost," he spoke up with a quiet but firm tone. "Tell me you haven't simply become enraged."
I smiled grimly. "Of course I have a plan. The only thing mightier than Dwarven steel is Dwarven engineering. Delving deep, striking the stone. Here's what we're going to do."
It all came to me quite quickly, but perhaps because I had subconsciously already been planning this for a long time and had only needed this final push to make me realize it. The plan was foolproof and also had provision to account for the cases in which it failed anyway. The spiral ramp passed quite near a wall of the second cavern layer, and passing through that narrow wall was a tall vertical shaft that had been dug for some unknown purpose long ago by Old Battlefailed. I would have Tekkud's miners dig a passage to this shaft, and then we'd place stone grates over it to allow access to the far side. Miners would then penetrate the wall into the second cavern layer, and all of our forces would retreat up the spiral ramp just around the corner out of sight.
Forgotten Beasts seem to instinctively know when a path opens to Dwarven prey and unerringly follow it. They also destroy whatever works of Dwarven construction that they encounter. The Beasts would come, and then as they reached the grate-covered shaft they'd do one of three things. One, they would destroy the grate before crossing over it. That would strand them on the far side of the pit and allow our archers to kill them in safety. Two, they would destroy the grate
while crossing it. Perhaps the ideal case, this would result in the Beast falling seventeen floors to smash to death in a low-traffic hallway outside the old nobles' quarters (why the Old Battlefaileders dug this shaft I will never know). None of the beasts have poisonous blood so no dangerous contamination should occur. Three, the Beast destroys the grate after crossing. Less optimal, but it will cut off any reinforcements from additional Beasts and allow our warriors to charge around the corner and swarm it all on one.
The passage was carved and low-quality grates were laid. The cavern layer was breached. The first Beast roared in, smashed the grate the moment it saw it, and then stood in befuddlement at the far side of the pit trying to figure out a way to get to us while the marksdwarves rained death upon it. The grate was replaced and the second Beast repeated the pattern. Then the third. Then the cavern was ours.
The Beasts were hauled off to the butchery, adding our first non-poisoned Forgotten Beast meat to the larder, and our warriors wandered off to resume sparring with both relief and disappointment. A great wave of woodcutters went forth and we had our wood. Later, I had a drawbridge installed beyond the grates; in the event of future Beasts that were not so easy to deal with the cavern could be sealed once more. Hopefully it wouldn't come to that.
As winter came upon us there was only one remaining task; refilling and restarting the refurbished water reactors. Unfortunately the only water source for this task was the stack of thirteen manually-powered water pumps drawing water up from a small channel in the third cavern layer. I had not appreciated just how slow a trickle this would produce. By the end of the year only a handful of reactor chambers had sufficient water in them to operate. But it was enough to prove the concept. The internal resistance of the decoupled reactor complex alone is just over 600 Urists, so four reactor chambers would produce enough power to get the entire system running at an idle. I sent four dwarves in to manually prime the pumps of these chambers and sure enough, they started the whole system going. We didn't quite hit our target of a fully operational FAILCANNON in just one year, but it seemed inevitable now. Everything was working. We just needed to wait for the trickle of cavern water to finish reaching the rest of the reactor chambers.
