So it is done

General James Ironwood did not like to act in a hurry. In fact, no one liked it, especially in the army – exceptionally so for those in senior positions – and anathema when it came to saving lives. Haste in such an important and sensitive matters led to casualties, to waste, to problems and to mishaps.

But, for all his dislike of it, James Ironwood knew how to act in haste, because for all its disadvantages, it is much preferred than being late. Being too hasty in a rescue might lead to unnecessary damage or, worse, lives needlessly wasted – but being late?

Being late means saving no one at all.

So when assembling and preparing his ships for departure, for the long voyage across the oceans to Vacuo to save millions, James received an urgent message from Ozpin to hurry – he had no opportunity, no time, no desire to doubt. Oh, how much he would have loved to rebuke everyone, from Ozpin to the last poor fucker who had spotted the appearance of the Vacuan horde. For every mistake, for every carelessness – and especially for the fact that the 'reliable' information given about the Super-horde's behavior ended up being false.

But James had no time for pointless actions.

The previously leisurely loading, with soldiers lazily setting off on their tasks, the routine checking of the knights' readiness, needed to be cut down. Still, such a clumsy pile of army bureaucracy and human laziness was not easy to subdue.

But James Ironwood knew how to act swiftly, if not always beautifully.

What should have taken another three or four hours with the preparations for departure, with the departure itself taking another hour at least, was finished in twenty minutes.

In twenty minutes full of swearing, shouting and general anger he had burnt at least two million nerve cells in his brain. But it was done.

The flight, which would have otherwise taken twelve hours with a tailwind at that, turned from a lazy drift into a high-speed race of giant whales – Atlas' warships pushed to the limit of what is possible.

Under normal circumstances, the warships were not maneuverable or at all fast, for all their power and formidable appearance, giving both assurance to civilians and terror to the enemy – if that enemy could feel terror at all, Atlas warships were... Not the most cost-effective weapon in the world.

Atlas' battleships were super weapons.

In the sense that they were super expensive, super sophisticated and super functional – in a bad way.

Each airship was thirty to fifty thousand tons of steel, lifted into the air by the minds, hands – and money – of men. And Dust, lots and lots of Dust.

What unrealistic amount of dust did it take for such an airship to simply stay in the air? Tons – per hour. In Lien, it costs such a sum that a mere man could not even look at the figure, simply confused by the number of orders and the arrangement of numbers.

However, after their first take-off, such battleships, despite the colossal expenditure of dust, were almost always in the air, almost never sinking to the ground. The reason was not that Atlas' army had nothing to spend the money on, it was simply more economical to do so. After all, an idling airship could have its consumption of Dust minimized, one that is lifting its titanic bulk to rise from the ground couldn't. With the amount of false alarms and drills run almost every day, that cost would soon balloon and bankrupt even Atlas.

In other words, given that it took thousands of taxpayers' Lien to keep such a machine in the air every second – the cost of getting it to go anywhere was impossible to even estimate.