The Steam Age: Gears and Bones

Chapter 55

That extremely faint signal was like a thin, weathered thread, broken deep within the background noise.

Allen repeatedly adjusted the capacitor plate, sweeping the frequency from beginning to end three times, but there was nothing in the headphones except for the static crackling and the distant howling of the cold wind blowing into the crevices of the cliff.

After the third scan, he took off his headphones and shook his head at the people guarding the transmitter.

"Can't get in touch." His voice was very soft, as if he were saying to himself.

Morris squatted down next to the spark gap oscillator, repeatedly adjusting the gap between the copper plates with his frozen red fingers, and checked the wiring between the antenna and the transmitter again.

The wiring is intact, the oscillator is operating normally, and the output voltage of the hand-cranked generator is also very stable.

All devices are working properly, but there is no response from the headphones.

The people surrounding the transmitter remained silent. Ludwig took the headset from Allen, put it on, and listened for a while.

His expression remained unchanged, but the knuckles of his fingers gripping the headphone cord were slowly tightening.

He heard the same thing as Allen—only continuous static noise, no signal, and no artificial, regular pulses.

He took off his headphones, handed them back to Allen, stood up, walked to the knights on night watch outside the cliff, stood there gazing at the dark wilderness to the south, and remained motionless for a long time.

Cherzov sat on the ammunition box, his rough fingertips unconsciously rubbing the pistol at his waist.

Sabel opened the Book of Scriptures, bowed her head, and began to recite the scriptures. Her voice was very low, so low that only she could hear it, but her lips kept moving.

The flag captain went to inspect the sentry posts. When he returned, he passed by the radio transmitter, glanced at Allen and Morris, asked nothing, and simply placed a pot of freshly boiled water at their feet.

The entire camp was plunged into a state that was more unbearable than fear.

It wasn't panic, it wasn't collapse, but a kind of bewilderment—not knowing where to put your hands or which direction to look.

The soldiers leaned against the pile of rubble at the base of the cliff; no one slept, and no one spoke.

Someone was cleaning a gun, cleaning it over and over again. The barrel was so clean that it reflected a blurry image of the person who was cleaning it, but they were still cleaning it.

Someone was counting the remaining paper-packaged ammunition in the ammunition box. He counted it three times, and the number was the same each time, but he still counted it one more time.

The gun crew members covered the canvas on the gun carriage tightly, and then the three of them sat side by side next to the gun carriage, none of them closing their eyes, just staring at the dark wilderness in front of them.

They knew what losing their way meant—on this frozen land, locked down by both the infected and the bitter cold, marching without a destination was tantamount to a slow death.

Allen hung the headphones around his neck, stared at the spark gap oscillator for a while, then suddenly squatted down, opened the toolbox, and pulled out the roll of spare copper wire that Perfit had told him to put in the experimental box before he left.

The copper wire was very thin, and under the oil lamp light, it had a dull silver-gray luster.

He then took a small section of copper pipe and a few ceramic insulators from Morris's toolbox, and then pressed his hand directly onto the surface of the copper pipe to activate a basic material shaping array.

Pale blue alchemical light flowed along the surface of the copper tube. Under his mental guidance, the metal was reshaped, and the copper tube gradually extended into a thin copper wire with a uniform diameter and a smooth surface, as if it had been processed by a precision wire drawing machine.

He wrapped the shaped copper wire around his fingers and lined it up on his knees.

Morris saw his actions and immediately understood.

He picked up a few pieces of copper from the scrap heap, weighed them, then squatted down next to Allen, took out a special piece of chalk, drew a basic material shaping array on the ground, placed the copper pieces at the array's eye, and activated the transmutation array by pressing his hands on the edges of the array patterns.

The copper material decomposes and recombines in a pale blue light, being shaped into several narrow, elongated copper strips with smooth, flat edges, precisely sized to fit into the pre-reserved positions of the antenna structure.

"The output power of the spark gap oscillator still has margin, the problem is not at the transmitter." Allen spoke quickly while using alchemy to shape the copper wire into a spiral shape, as if he was simultaneously organizing his thoughts. "Our current antenna is just a cartwheel spoke, it's not long enough, and the impedance matching is also wrong."

No matter how high the transmission power is, if the antenna itself is mismatched, most of the energy will be reflected back as heat and dissipated, and it will not be able to radiate out at all.

I need a longer antenna, preferably directional—even just roughly directional, to concentrate the transmitted energy in the direction of the Northern Army. That would be much better than omnidirectional scattering.

Morris used a small-scale levitation technique to suspend the shaped copper strips above his palm and check their flatness one by one, replying without looking up: "The receiving end also needs to be adjusted synchronously. If the other side is also transmitting at low power, their signal may be completely drowned out by environmental noise."

I can connect a simple frequency-selective circuit in parallel next to the capacitor board to filter out some low-frequency noise, making it easier to capture mid-to-high frequency signals.

But we need an extra inductor coil. Do you have enough copper wire on hand?

"Enough." Allen held up the shaped spiral copper wire and looked it up at the oil lamp to confirm that the number of turns and spacing met the requirements. Then he stood up and walked toward Ludwig, who was standing next to the cliff.

"Major, I need a long pole. The longer the better, preferably metal."

Ludwig turned and glanced at him, without asking why, and went straight to the pile of equipment of the gray-armored knights, pulling out two spare knight lances.

The spearhead is made of steel, and the handle is nearly three meters long. Its surface has been worn smooth and shiny from long-term use.

He placed two spears side by side on the ground and asked, "Are two enough?"

Allen glanced at the length of the spear, then estimated the antenna height he needed, and nodded: "That's enough. But we need to connect them together."

He took out a special piece of chalk from his waist and drew a basic material fusion array at the point where the tips of the two spears met.

Pale blue alchemical light flowed along the metal surface of the spear tips, and the joints of the two spears were reshaped by the magic array—metal molecules permeated and fused with each other at the contact surface, and the gaps between the spear tips completely disappeared in the light, merging into one.

When the alchemical light faded, the two spears had transformed into a single, nearly six-meter-long metal rod, with a smooth, flat joint, showing no signs of entanglement or binding.

Allen gripped one end of the long pole and tested it; the overall structure was stable and did not wobble.

He wound the previously shaped spiral copper wire along the shaft, and then used alchemy to fuse and fix the copper wire to the surface of the metal rod at several key points, making it tightly bonded and preventing it from coming loose.

The spiral copper wires are evenly distributed on the pole, with about one foot of the wire left at the very top.

After the antenna was completed, Allen had two gray-armored knights erect the long pole and tamp the bottom with gravel and frozen soil to secure it.