Chapter 457 457 Infrastructure
As they flew back toward the Fae Forest, Cassie looked around the plane with disappointed eyes.
“This isn’t going to be big enough. If we’re bringing so much gear all the way across the Wastes, we need the ability to carry more gear, or we need more than one plane. Two isn’t going to be enough to keep up the supply lines this summer, much less during the winter when we’re actively helping forces in battle.” She informed Wolfe with a serious look on her perpetually innocent-looking face.
“You’re right. We definitely need more planes and more trained Pilots. We can’t keep sending out the same few Witches all the time and not anyone else.
If anything happened to one of them, we would be in real trouble with no replacement to keep our allies supplied. Do you think that we should have Ella and the team design a bigger plane, or should we work on more of these ones so that we don’t have to teach the Pilots a new control set?”
Cassie frowned. “I think it would be best if they were all the same, but we are going to need another spot to send all these flights out from. We can’t keep sending them from the village once the Grand Dutchies realize what is going on. It would be a disaster for the forest if they started to shell it with artillery.”
“What about using their airstrip? I can fly by on the way back and make sure that it’s still unoccupied. There is an old Magi home there as well. It’s all locked up, but we should be able to make use of some of it as long as we don’t do anything that will upset the spells that are active there.”
“You’re thinking of a second village?” Cassie asked.
“Not a second village, just a staging point. It’s up the river from us, so we can take the supplies there by riverboat, and the Grand Dutchies already built warehouses and such that might have been ruined by the local wildlife.
But we can fix that and put up some new barriers while we use the spot in the mountains as a staging point to fly our supplies out.”
Riverboats going north into the mountains with supplies were much less likely to be noticed by the mundane armies, who would be coming from the south and southeast. As long as they didn’t try to recover their old airbase, it shouldn’t be any problem at all for the people of Forest Grove to take it over as a staging point.
“I guess we should go scout it out and see what sort of shape it’s in. If we can land there, we can use it as a storage and shipping point at the very least. It’s no problem for me to create a bunker there to store supplies. We just need to make sure whoever is staying there to watch over them will be safe.”
Wolfe turned the plane toward the mountainside where the airstrip and the old Lumix household were located and gained altitude so that he could disappear into the low-hanging clouds.
Going up too high was a danger as well, as the cabin wasn’t pressurized, and the air would get very thin, but although it was mildly uncomfortable at this height, the incoming storm clouds were low enough to hide the plane as they ventured toward the mountains.
Once they were close, Wolfe dropped back down to where he could see properly and corrected his course to come into the airstrip from the East, as the Grand Dutchies planes would have.
It would also be their route in and out of this strip since the closer villages could still be safely supplied straight from the Fae Forest.
“You know, since we’ve got so many Witches, maybe a nice tunnel network would be the way to go. We could make it large enough for electric transport trucks and link together the villages near us. Then we could just go directly to them without being discovered or alerting the enemy to our movement.” Wolfe suggested.
“An underground highway? That would be a huge amount of magical effort to build.” Cassie reminded him.
“It wouldn’t have to go everywhere, at least not at first. But we could have it go to the largest villages, and then distribution could be done from there. They are usually clustered for safety, so there are always others relatively nearby.
It would also make the larger villages into trade centres and natural fallback points if a village were attacked, so we would only have to increase the fortification of a few spots if things got really bad.
The retreating villagers would take the essentials with them, leaving behind a shell of a village that wasn’t linked to anything, and then the largest villages could be fortified to repel the worst attacks.”
Cassie frowned as she considered it. The locals would hate to lose their villages, but it was a normal thing for them to be forced to move at least once or twice a year. This stability was a new thing for them, so they would adapt well to the tactic.
Still, leaving some of them as secondary villages felt wrong. Like they weren’t treating everyone equally.
“We can talk about it once we get to the village again. I’m sure that many of the others will have input, and it will take a lot of us to carve hundreds of kilometres of tunnels big enough for a truck to pass through.”
That was no joke. It would be a huge undertaking to just link the largest villages under the Fae Forest, much less their allies twenty and thirty kilometres away in the grassland.
But it would also give them the option to dig small entrance and exit tunnels to send out ambush teams. Assassins popping up from nowhere would be a nightmare for the Grand Dutchies forces this winter.
It would also solidify their alliance if they had a direct tunnel between villages. A secure and protected road network was one of the most essential parts of a functional nation, and they didn’t currently have the forces to maintain that above ground.