Chapter 577: A solution only leads to more complications
Workharder shook her head negatively at my question.
“I can give you a list of alternatives, and they are all so much worse that perhaps even to keep using the trains will be better! Oh, see for yourself, Father.”
She raised her hand and began counting on her fingers.
“Mechas can’t even work under this ash. Humans could, but they are so clumsy! And they are slower than trains, even the smaller ones, and aren’t very reliable either. Carts pulled by beasts will get stuck in the ash as much as trains do. Boats would work, but they can only travel where rivers go. And that’s it. Ah, workers can just carry items on their backs—but this is just silly! Even if we count dragons. We don’t have this many dragons, and they never were tamed for carrying large loads.”
I scratched my chin.
Workharder didn’t mention planes, but planes had difficulty flying under the ash rain for the same reasons mechas did.
“If this is so, then we must keep the trains, but put more people to clean the tracks. Can at least larger trains get around without extra help? They have these… shovel-things in front of them, after all.”
Workharder nodded.
“Yes, they can. The mud-cleaners work well against ash as long as it doesn’t reach a third of the train’s height.”
The “mud-cleaners” were analogous to the so-called “cow-catchers”—grills attached to the front of Earth trains, whose purpose was to push objects off the tracks. In the times of the Wild West, these objects were often cows, hence the name.
Our trains had similar devices, but instead of a grill, mud-cleaners had a shape more similar to the bow of an icebreaker ship. It not only pushed objects away, but also got rid of mud carried over the tracks by storms.
Helped against ash, too. At least until there wasn’t too much of it, as Workharder said.
I recalled a map of train tracks in the Central Region of the Bee Empire. There were a lot of old train tracks with small, bee-sized trains that must’ve been covered to their tops by ash by now.
Newer train tracks were usually wider and made for larger trains. The largest of these trains could fit even humans and Queen-class mechas; middle-sized trains could fit Princess-class mechas and dodos.
We only had a few of the Queen-size train lines, but hundreds of Princess-size train lines, many of which ran through the Central Region.
But there still were way, way more bee-sized trains. If I sent workers to clean them all by hand, it would take more working hands than could be pulled from repairs in other places at the moment.
However, what if…
“Use dodos to clear the tracks,” I said. “The ones we have for blood right now are very tame and obedient, aren’t they? Cleaning ash from tracks isn’t rocket science, they can do it. A single dodo could clean a lot of kilometres of railroad in a day, I bet. With a tamer on its back, of course.”
“What? These beasts? They know how to dig a little, not how to clean…” Workharder frowned, but then perked up. “Oh, but we can make them pull something… something plough-like behind them! I will ask Researchina to design something like that, and Craftsmen will craft it real quick… If you permit me to request them, of course. Father.”
I chuckled and smiled.
Workharder was so eager to execute her idea that she forgot that we lived in a planned economy, and she couldn’t just ask other advisers directly.
(She could, actually—they all had some “reserve” budget in resources and manpower specifically for relatively small requests that didn’t have to be approved by me. However, at the time all these reserves were already placed on recovering the infrastructure damaged by the quake, and if Workharder went to Things-Things, she’d get a reply that all her bees were busy.)
“I do. This is important enough. We can still pull the resources from more faraway regions, but if the train network stops working as intended, even this will become harder.”
Workharder nodded eagerly.
“Thanks to your wise advice, Father, I will surely resolve this now! Well, I, and my subordinates and my sisters-Advisers… But I will be in the lead!”
With this, she left my office, and I returned to my other business.
***
Several hours later, Things-Things came to me, decisively unhappy.
“Father, you ask me to make things for Workharder, yes, but my sisters can’t do it, no-no! Researchina brought me the designs, and they aren’t as simple as Workharder claimed they are after she looked at them!”
To demonstrate, Things-Things waved a sheet of paper with a blueprint in front of me.
I deftly caught it out of her hands and looked at it.
The design on it really looked way more detailed than an ordinary plough. Parts of it were wooden, and other parts were metal. There were wheels—to lighten the load on the dodo, I realised—and other parts, clearly made to clean the tracks better… But certainly not to make this detail easier to craft.
It also had to be 50 meters tall. The sum of materials required was sizable.
“And how many of these Workharder needs?” I asked, already dreading the number.
With how many train tracks there were…
“A hundred and twenty! And she wants them as soon as possible, yes-yes—this is impossible. Is this project really so important, Father?” Things-Things lowered her hands and looked at me seriously. “We can wait for materials to be delivered—a week or two. We can take them from somewhere else. Steel for these things—has to be steel, yes, or they will-will rust—it isn’t smelted around Hive Supremo. The largest smelters are in the mountains, far away…”
Although Things-Things was rambling, I guessed where she was leading.
“But we have steel here, is this what you want to say? If we just sacrifice and dismantle something that we own already…”