BXBX NOVEL Chapter 336 We need him here by yesterday
"Cheers!"
And in response…
"Hurray!" a crowd of soldiers, both mercenaries from the earth and the selected few from the imperial army raised their cups in response.
After a grueling day of messy organization, intense work, and constant struggle to keep everything from falling apart, the sun has finally reached the line of the horizon, announcing the end of the first workday in the camp.
"Bottoms up!" Makary cheered again before tilting his cup and chugging down the drink as if there was no tomorrow.
And all over the camp, everyone did pretty much the same, celebrating the new beginning with a can of a proper beer each.
"Haaa…" To my side, Fay exhaled after downing half of her cup in a single go, a satisfied smile growing on her lips as the warmth of alcohol heated her insides.
"From now and until the bell rings, you are all free to rest after the day of hard work. Once the bell rings, everyone is to go to get your well-deserved sleep, so that you will have the energy to eat breakfast tomorrow!"
Even though the six thousand people in the camp were separated into a bunch of groups no bigger than a hundred men each, the voice-transmission technology in the form of speakers connected to each other by a mess of cables allowed Makary to coordinate the entirety of the party all at once.
"So once again, to the future!"
Shouting once again into his mouthpiece, Makary then raised his mug again, drowning his own exhaustion with the remaining half of the beer.
"I really don\'t get what you all see in alcohol," I muttered silently, more to strike up a conversation with Fay than to judge something or someone.
I took a sip of my own beer, only for my face to twist under the influence of its sour aftertaste.
"You will grow into it," Fay cheered while snuggling up to my side and leaning her head over on my shoulder.
Soon, the last semblance of order vanished as people started to walk around and either drink their share of beer or snack on the huge amounts of meat provided for every brigade of workers for them to grill over the fire themselves.
The ambiance of the plain changed, from the spirit of hard work permeating through everything and everyone into an atmosphere of merry rest, soon followed by the general tendency to lay down for some rest as soon as the bell rang in the air.
"Peter, if you could stay for a moment," Makary asked right as I was about to grab Fay and leave the dying party so that I could get some rest myself, preceded by a bit of intensely apologizing to Fay for entertaining Etaria before.
"Sure, what\'s up?" Happy to delay the prospect of breaking the news to my girl, I turned myself on my heel and approached the spot Makary picked to sit at.
"We can\'t do it."
At first, I pulled my eyebrows down, confused by Makary\'s sudden and perfectly casual statement. Then, as its potential meaning flared up in my mind, my eyebrows moved up instead, allowing my eyes to widen.
"And what exactly do you…"
"We can\'t keep the work on this camp going with just the stuff we can procure ourselves," Makary elaborated a little over his earlier statement. "I mean, sure, we could try… But it\'s going to be one heck of a waste of time and the manpower we have at hand." Find your next read at empire
To a degree, I could understand where Makary was coming from.
Sure, in just one day of hard work, by abusing whatever resources we could gather and the insane amount of workers at hand, we made quite a lot of progress.
A total of forty shed tents was completed, housing a fourth of a brigade each and split between twelve people on the elevated floor, twelve people on the ground floor, and then the brigadier\'s private room along with the brigade\'s warehouse in the underground floor.
Obviously, those tent sheds could hardly be considered proper housing, with how they were made with simple, steel frames glued together by a set of floors made with freshly cut wood and then covered with three layers of industrial tarp.
Still, as basic as those tents were, they allowed us to secure a place for over a thousand men to live while free from rain or winds.
And with a whopping two hundred further sheds only lacking the floors and the cover of the tarp, it was only a matter of day or two before we could move on to the construction of more complex housing, one that made better use of the underground space to implement some sort of heating solution along with crude heat isolation of the walls and roof.
The blueprints for those more advanced sheds assumed each would house a total of ten men, with their sleeping area at the top floor, living and leisure quarters on the ground floor, and the storage, workshops, and all sorts of utility kept in the basement.
The construction of those more advanced and longer-term solutions to the housing issue would take a lot more manpower to complete… But that was the one thing we didn\'t lack, especially with how the workers would continue to improve their skills.
No, the issue that put a hard limit on how many of those more advanced sheds we could construct lay in the accessibility to the materials needed for their construction. And while we could obtain steel frames in virtually unlimited amounts…
How were we going to source an insane amount of isolating material? What about the basic furniture to turn those tent sheds into proper housing? Then how about equipping each of the advanced sheds with a stove large enough to fulfill the needs of all the men living inside?
"I figured," I muttered after taking quite some time to think about what I saw happen through the day.
Things were moving forward at a satisfactory rate… but that was only because it would still take a day or two for our workers to catch up with all the resources we\'d managed to stockpile. And once that reality would come to pass…
"We need to find a way of not only sourcing more machines and resources but how to move them through a lot quicker than we can do now," Makary spoke out into the air, not targeting anyone in particular with this remark.
"Aren\'t we going to move the gate to a better location tomorrow?" I pointed out the easiest solution to the latter of our problems.
"Yeah, we are. But that only means we will move the choke-point from here to earth. In other words, we are reaching the limit of how quickly we can push stuff through the hangar. And don\'t even get me started on how much of a pain it is to move cargo through to the hangar…"
Makary shook his head.
"But even if we improved the throughput, even if we could push all the cargo through that we want…" Makary lowered his head and drilled his eyes into the ground. "In two to three days, we will run out of basic materials. In a week, we will exhaust our supply of tools. Three more days and we will be out of fuel."
Hearing Makary list out the things we lacked, I finally started to appreciate the seriousness of our situation.
It was one thing to watch how the camp turned from an empty plain into a seedling of a city, but to learn just how quickly we were burning through our assets to achieve this rate of development was something entirely else.
And with that in mind, I could already tell what sort of solution Makary had in his mind and was trying to slowly ease me into.
"Just give it to me straight," I suggested with a sigh. "What do we need to do to keep going?"
Makary raised his eyes and gave me a long glance, only to finally turn his head right back to where it was before and once again lock his eyes on some random pebble in front of him.
"We need to get that magistrate bastard here. He\'s the only one who can get us the resources and tools we need within any reasonable timeline. But for him to commit that hard…" Makary shook his head, refusing to look back as he continued with the topic. "I believe we need him to see this place with his own, two eyes. And not in a month or two," Makary stated only to stand up and turn on his heel.
The middle-aged man then grabbed my shoulders and looked directly into my eyes with an intensity that made me, for just a moment, question his sexual orientation.
"We need him here by yesterday."