The telegram was short.
"Return to Paris. Immediate audience required. – Directorate."
Emil read it twice. Then once more.
No rank. No context. Just an order, dressed in bureaucratic frost.
He folded the paper and slipped it into his coat. The war outside had gone quiet again, like a wolf crouched in snowdrifts. Between the trenches and the trees, soldiers sharpened knives more than they loaded rifles.
They were waiting for something.
So was Emil.
And now, it seemed, so was Paris.
The capital smelled of smoke, but not the kind he knew. Not gunpowder or cordite or smoldering steel. No, this was the perfume of cigars and damp coal cellars, of committee rooms heated too long and polished shoes tracking dirt into marble halls.
It made Emil nauseous.
Fournier met him outside the Ministère de l'Industrie et Défense. His clothes were cleaner than usual. His boots, shined. He looked like a professor among soldiers — which, in a way, he was.
"They've been waiting," he said without greeting.
"For me?"
"For your machines."
Inside, they passed through halls lined with maps and portraits. Men in dark suits whispered near doors. Women in smart uniforms clicked typewriters in staccato bursts. No one saluted. No one looked up.
When they entered the chamber, the table was already full.
Twelve men. One woman. And at the center — Étienne Lavalle.
Director of Military Procurement. Minister in all but name. A vulture with a lawyer's smile.
He didn't rise.
"Laurant," he said. "So good of you to join us."
Emil said nothing. He took the only empty chair and waited.
Lavalle gestured toward the assembled officials. "Your designs have exceeded expectations. Your engagement record is unmatched. You've repelled armor assaults, enabled mobile gains, and disrupted enemy supply lines."
The flattery was barbed. Emil recognized the setup of a trap.
Lavalle continued. "But command structure remains... uncertain. You act with autonomy. You divert resources. You assign officers. All without oversight."
"I follow directives," Emil said. "Not delays."
"Which is precisely the concern."
The woman at the end of the table — Minister Claude, from Treasury — cleared her throat.
"Your foundry requisitions have increased fourfold in six weeks. You've consumed more copper, steel, and ceramic capacitors than the entire eastern artillery corps."
"And I've produced results."
"That's not the debate," Lavalle said. "The question is no longer whether your machines work. It's who owns them."
Emil's eyes narrowed.
"They're not factories. They're weapons. And I'll keep them out of hands that don't bleed at the front."
A few murmurs. One man scribbled something on a notepad.
Lavalle smiled.
"That's what we feared."
After the meeting, Fournier caught up with Emil in the colonnade.
"That went well," he said dryly.
"I'm being cornered."
"They're politicians. That's what they do."
"No," Emil said, his voice lower now. "They're building the case to take the Carapace program out of my hands."
Fournier hesitated.
"They wouldn't dare."
"They would if it suits their version of victory."
They stood in silence.
Then Emil said, "How's the production on unit three?"
"Delayed," Fournier admitted. "Gear housing cracked during pressure tests. We need a reinforced torque arm."
"Requisition it from civilian stock if you have to. I don't care if it comes from train rotaries. Just finish it."
"What's the rush?"
Emil looked toward the Eiffel Tower, now draped in camouflage netting and ghost-gray paint.
"Because Rainer won't wait for permission."
That night, Emil met with Amélie Moreau in a shuttered café on Rue des Trois Canons. The windows were blacked out. The cellar smelled of old wine and mold. She poured coffee into chipped porcelain and waited.
He sipped once. Then spoke.
"They're going to take it."
She didn't pretend not to understand.
"The Carapace?"
"The whole line. Fold it into armored command. Assign generals to oversee logistics. Cancel anything they can't quantify. Shift production toward conventional assets."
"Which they'll lose in months," she said flatly.
Emil nodded.
"Is there a way to stall it?"
Amélie paused.
"There's one."
He looked up.
She slid a small folder across the table. Inside — grainy aerials of German movements near Thionville.
"New rail heads. Reinforced bunkers. And this—"
She tapped a photo of an oddly shaped structure.
"A vertical lift. With armored shutters. We think it's a launch platform."
"For what?"
"We don't know yet. But if you could provide us something tangible... a prototype, a deployment, a win that makes them hesitate..."
Emil smiled. Grim.
"They won't cut my line if they still need it."
He returned to the foundry that same night.
The third Carapace was still disassembled. Sparks danced from the scaffolds. Crews moved like ants around a dying giant. Emil didn't sleep. He climbed the gantries, checked weld seams, recalculated turret rotation speeds, and rerouted the exhaust baffles for stealth dispersion.
By morning, he had a new name painted on the hull.
"Sévère."
It meant stern. Relentless.
And she would be.
Three days later, Sévère was operational.
And Emil had chosen her first battlefield.
A place called Bois de la Sueur Noire — the Forest of Black Sweat.
Named after the smell of the dead in the summer heat.
The Germans had fortified it for three months. Trenches ran like veins between bunkers and hills. Nothing had cracked it. Not infantry. Not shellfire. Not even flame.
Emil didn't plan to crack it.
He planned to bury it.
The morning of the assault, Emil addressed the joint crews of Sévère, Libellule-Chasseur, and Guillotine.
"This isn't a line-break," he said. "It's a message."
"To who?" one gunner asked.
Emil looked toward the east.
"To every man who thinks he can replace the mind with a gun."
The Sévère rolled forward just before dawn.
Behind her came fire, fog, and silence.
The war was listening.
And this time, it would remember.