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In My Head Theatre had been running scenes from the “Spy Guy” story from my Opera Magique world, but now that I seem to have got a reasonably complete plot put together, it’s been switching things up a bit. Today it was the Across a Jade Sea sequel featuring Batiya’s oldest brother. (Don’t get excited, anyone. I won’t be writing it any time soon. It isn’t even in the queue yet.)

Working out plot points for the “Spy Guy” story in advance seems reasonably benign — with the flex of a totally rewritten history to work in, I don’t think further research into Germany circa 1700 is going to destroy a plot about a bunch of smallish political entities vying for control of a magical item.

But do I really know enough about the technical challenges facing an Army Engineer in WWI/WWII to be able to put that kind of a plot together at this point?

Mirrored on My Website.

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I recall that the US Army Corps of Engineers used to give out some of their back stock for free--some interesting books there, and right now it looks like you might be able to just go to their website and hit them up for PDFs. I'm slightly confused by their website redesign but you are probably smarter than I am.

The premise as my brain currently seems to want it (once it has decided what happens, it can be dislodged by a heavy dose of "you are breaking the laws of physics" but not much else) is that that our hero is the commander of a unit of engineers. (He's actually more of a "design and build machinery" type engineer than a "design and build bridges" type engineer -- but he's also got combat and command experience, and it's not like the machines aren't important, so it should be okay to have his second-in-command the bridge designer?). They have been ordered to build a road through some very vertical mountain terrain, in order to get a bunch of his side's soldiers somewhere where the other side really doesn't want them.

So his group has come in, and started off by building a bridge across this nice big gorge that has been blocking off any movement in that direction, and then he sends the survey teams on ahead, while he starts getting the rest of his men and equipment across the bridge, and this, of course, is when an unexpectedly effective enemy offensive ends up cutting them off from the rest of the army, along with a armored vehicle unit ( yay, tanks?) and a few other stragglers (including a mobile hospital) who mistakenly retreated across the bridge in the confusion and are now trapped on the other side with nowhere to go.

So he says, why don't I leave a small group behind to pretend to be us, while the rest of us head off through these mountains and end up somewhere the enemy not only really doesn't want us to be, but also knows we can't possibly get to... because it's impossible to drive anything through this terrain, let alone a tank, and of course he can't build a road when he's been cut off from his supply chain, that's just crazy.

But he doesn't actually need enough supplies to build an entire road... he just needs enough to build enough of a road to hold his guys, their equipment and the armored vehicles and a little extra. He can then tear up the road he just finished building for the materials he needs to build the next section of road...

I would happily be a reader of this story, but since I know nothing about engineering I cannot possibly comment on feasibility. I assume you can find an actual military engineer type to check this, though.

I've got engineering and military in the family, but I'm going to need to do a lot of reading on my own in order to be able to write it well enough that there's something there for the readers to check. :)

One of the nice things about those stories that let me know what's going on in advance: I have more time to find and consume appropriate reading materials. The ones that are "you'll find out what happens as it happens" keep me frantically trying to read just ahead of myself, or I give up and just cross my fingers and hope.