A Camper for My Wife
With Unhwa-style pistols in a dual-wield setup, Dang Un-hwa’s combat power was formidable.
An automatic pistol that needed no cumbersome reloading once you swapped the magazine was nothing short of revolutionary. The Hagyeongchong he had used before had already shortened reload time by letting him swap out the entire honeycomb-style cartridge cylinder of the revolver, but in practice it was still better to simply carry several loaded guns and blaze away. Dang Un-hwa, however, had gone further: he fashioned leather arm guards and magazine-retention mounts that he wore inside his sleeves, fastening three magazines to the inside of each arm and three more to the outside—six per arm, twelve in all—so that they hung there as if he were wearing a cast.
“Once you’ve finished shooting…”
Click. He pressed the release with his thumb; the spent magazine dropped free under its own weight. Crossing his pistols so that each brushed past the opposite forearm produced a sharp metallic snap as a fresh magazine locked home of its own accord.
“Like this. One quick crossing of the arms and the reload is done. I rolled up my sleeves for the demonstration, but it’s perfectly possible even under the loose outer robes of the Dang family.”
That’s actually pretty clever.
The reload method Dang Un-hwa had just shown did not exist even in the twenty-first century Hwi-yeom had come from—not because it was some stroke of genius, but because strapping magazines all over your forearms was cumbersome, and, more importantly, almost no one in real life dual-wielded pistols the way they did in movies. Anyone who had ever fired a handgun knew that even a pistol kicked hard; shooting one-handed sacrificed both accuracy and safety. If you were going to use both hands anyway, it made more sense to keep spare magazines on your belt and swap them when empty. There was simply no advantage to Un-hwa’s method—unless you were a martial artist who could keep a rock-steady aim with one hand alone.
Even so, Un-hwa’s technique was undeniably fast.
If it works for him, that’s all that matters.
Dang Un-hwa’s martial rank was not especially high, yet he was a direct blood member of the Dang family and had cultivated the Green Dragon Divine Art to a considerable depth (thanks to the perfect marriage of passion and profession). The acrobatic flourishes that would have put a gymnast to shame, combined with the way he stitched bullets into straw dummies, would not have looked out of place in a Hollywood action film. And when enemies were farther away, he simply used ignition compounds and explosive poisons produced by the Green Dragon Divine Art to incinerate whole areas at once.
Reminds me of a certain Japanese manga… though this isn’t alchemy, of course.
All in all, Hwi-yeom judged him more than adequate as a bodyguard. Of course, if a master of the Realm of Transformation came after me, none of this would matter… but masters of that level were hardly common.
Hwi-yeom ordered additional production of Un-hwa’s pistols and issued them to the escort detail assigned to himself, Eun Seol-ran, and Woo-ju, thereby completing the reinforcement of the guard force that would cover for Dang Su-jeong’s absence.
Dang Su-jeong herself looked deeply apologetic about not being able to accompany them.
“I really ought to go with you…”
“Nonsense. You’re expecting—you need to take even better care of yourself.”
Hwi-yeom and Sama Yun smiled and soothed her. The party bound for Beijing was sizable: Hwi-yeom and Sama Yun; more than a hundred escort warriors from the Sama clan; another hundred from the Dang family’s Dokwadae; Ye-eun and roughly thirty black-ops agents of the Minjeongwon disguised as servants; Dang Un-hwa and twenty researchers from the Innovation Hall under his command; plus Michelangelo and Paracelsus.
On a warm mid-September day, with autumn ripening toward winter and the goal of reaching Beijing before the deep cold set in, Hwi-yeom’s party left the Sichuan Dang Family estate.
The greatest beneficiary of the Sichuan Carriage’s development was none other than Sama Yun. She had always suffered badly from motion sickness on long journeys by horse or boat, yet she barely felt ill when riding the multi-passenger carriages the Sichuan Dang Family had built.
Before departure Hwi-yeom had commissioned a private carriage with specifications so exacting they bordered on neurotic. When Sama Yun and Dang Woo-ju stepped inside and saw the interior, their eyes lit up.
“Wow! What’s this? There’s a bedroom inside the carriage!”
“Waaah! It’s amazing!”
Exactly. What Hwi-yeom had built was a kind of camper.
Unlike the Sichuan Carriage—designed as a two-horse vehicle for use inside city walls with profitability and convenience in mind—this camper was a one-off creation meant for long-distance travel outside the walls, made specifically for his motion-sickness-prone wife. He therefore harnessed it to six horses and enlarged the trailing coach until, while it could not rival a modern full-size camp trailer, it easily matched the better mid-range campers.
Inside were a double bed for the couple, a child’s bed, a folding wardrobe, simple storage, a wall-mounted fold-away table, and chairs that could be stowed—every modern convenience he could pack in. Of course, riding such a splendid vehicle alone would have invited grumbling, so Hwi-yeom placed a bulk order through the smithy division. The versions for the Dokwadae stripped out tables and storage and replaced the couple’s and child’s beds with bunks on both sides, serving purely for rest on the road and sleep at night. Even that was enough to win rave reviews from the troopers. No more searching every evening for a campsite, no more packing the ground against seepage and stones, no more spreading tarps and pitching tents—how wonderful was that?
“But won’t it be a problem if we run into roads too narrow for a carriage this large?”
“We’ll avoid those roads whenever we can. And if we can’t, we simply take a detour.”
Sichuan’s terrain was mountainous and full of narrow paths, yet under Hwi-yeom’s direction roads had already been opened throughout the province, leaving its highways better than most other regions. Once they left Sichuan, the route along the Yangtze to Wuchang crossed broad plains. From the Henan plain north to Beijing they could likewise stick to open flatlands and avoid the rugged mountains. Ordinary travelers would never choose such wide roads—too exposed to bandits and too slow—but the Dang people had no such concerns. The mountain bandits were allies, and any horse bandit bold enough to charge a column of three hundred men flying the Dang banner high would not be a bandit at all but a demonic cult strike force.
Sama Yun adored the comfort the camper provided, and knowing her husband had built it expressly because of her severe motion sickness moved her deeply.
“You were already busy enough to die, and you still found time to make something like this…”
At her flushed words Hwi-yeom smiled gently and drew her into the circle of his arm.
“If we’re talking priorities, building this was the most important job of all.”
“Honestly, my husband…”
The look they exchanged was so heated that, had a second child not already been growing in her belly, they might have confirmed their love then and there. Hwi-yeom cleared his throat and blushed.
“Ahem. Woo-ju likes it too.”
“Yeah! Woo-ju likes it!”
It was Dang Woo-ju’s first long journey; she found the scenery sliding past the window so fascinating that she stayed glued to the window of her little bed, endlessly exclaiming “Wow, wow!” When Hwi-yeom mentioned her, she spun around, toddled over, and latched onto his thigh. The adorable display made him laugh as he stroked her silk-soft hair.
“Does our Woo-ju like it? Do you like the Woo-ju-car Daddy made?”
“Yes! I love it! Daddy’s the best!”
“Hahahaha…”
While Hwi-yeom laughed with delight, Sama Yun took up the conversation.
“She’s right. Anyone would pay a fortune for a carriage like this. How on earth did you make one that doesn’t shake and doesn’t make people sick? Even the Sichuan Carriages rock more than this…”
Praised so thoroughly by daughter and wife, Hwi-yeom was in excellent spirits. He slipped his hands under Woo-ju’s arms, lifted her into an airplane ride, then hugged the squealing child close and began to explain to Sama Yun.
“Well… the way this got developed is…”
The success of the Sichuan Carriage developed by Lee Jinmyeong had been both welcome news and a new challenge for Hwi-yeom. He had ridden the finished vehicles, including the luxury models, yet none of them delivered the ride quality he had in mind. Even modern automobiles could make him carsick; as someone who still carried twenty-first-century memories, rubber tires and coil springs under the seats were simply not enough.
“…In the end it comes down to road condition and suspension.”
Road condition was beyond him. He could hardly pave a highway all the way to Beijing. So he decided to introduce suspension to the rigidly fixed axles of contemporary carriages and set about designing it.
Suspension—also called a running gear—linked axle to body so that vibration and shock from the road surface would not travel straight into the chassis, protecting both vehicle and cargo while improving comfort. He had never built one, but he understood the principles well enough that he expected no great difficulty.
He was wrong, and it did not take long to realize it. The performance he had calculated simply failed to appear.
“Strange. According to the numbers this should be damping the vibration just fine…”
Once again the culprit was metal quality. The springs and suspension bars he had designed could not absorb impact the way modern steel alloys would. “…This is a problem that needs better chemistry and materials science. There’s nothing more I can do on my own.” A few alloy recipes he knew; beyond that was impossible. Even the progress the family had made in only seventeen years would have been unthinkable without the Dang family’s unique martial arts and technology, and without Sichuan’s rich mineral deposits.
“Fine. Let’s try again.”
But who was he? Once competitive fire lit in Hwi-yeom, no one could stop him. After months of effort he finally produced a suspension modeled on the MacPherson strut. Strictly speaking he could not build a pure MacPherson strut, so he supplemented it with multi-leaf pack springs of the sort used under military two-and-a-half-ton trucks, hung beneath the axle.
In this era a carriage’s wheel axle simply ran straight through the frame and was bolted solid to the body. When uneven ground made a wheel rise or fall, the axle and the entire body rose and fell with it, producing a violent rocking. A MacPherson strut, by contrast, did not lock the axle rigidly to the body. Thick double spring struts were mounted to the chassis; a swivel knuckle at the lower end carried the wheel. That allowed each of the four wheels to move more or less independently, which in turn required a host of precise secondary parts—steering knuckles, upper and lower control arms, steering-gear tie rods, radius rods, coil springs, and the rest.
Hwi-yeom, however, remembered a certain army driver who had once repaired a military Retona by the cheerfully barbaric method of ignoring every one of those components, simply stacking several leaf springs into a pack, bending them under the axle, and bolting the whole thing to the underside of the chassis. He used the same method.
The resulting carriage delivered a ride almost indistinguishable from a modern automobile.
“That’s roughly the process we went through.”
When Hwi-yeom finished his explanation, Woo-ju’s eyes sparkled; she flung both arms wide. He tilted his head in puzzlement and opened his own arms, whereupon she sprang into them with a happy bounce.
“Daddy’s amazing! Daddy’s the best!”
“That’s right~ Our daddy’s the greatest, isn’t he~?”
Sama Yun smiled softly and kissed both Hwi-yeom and Woo-ju on the cheek. In that gentle atmosphere the camper carrying Hwi-yeom’s party rolled on toward Beijing.
And when they finally arrived, with winter already breathing down their necks, they found themselves face to face with an unexpected situation.
“…? Is something wrong with the Beijing Railway?”