Battle Hymn (10 page)

"Cost?" Andrew asked.

"We could go to Bullfinch, maybe take something from the Navy Department's budget."

"Cost?"

"Very fine tolerances on this one, sir, a lot of research to be done and testing at sea. I figure thirty or forty thousand at least for development, testing, and fitting our ships out with it."

Andrew shook his head.

"We've got full control of the Inland Sea with our monitors right now. The Cartha ships are falling into disrepair and there's no threat from that quarter. And the cost of building the new naval station on the Great Sea and launching the first monitors here is eating up the rest of the budget. Shelve it for now."

Chuck shook his head in disappointment.

"For the artillery, I'll see if we can shake some money loose at least to get one battery and a couple of thousand rounds of ammunition."

"I'd like to adapt the guns for airship use. A one-and-a-half-inch bore firing a two-pound shell. It'd give our gunner a hell of an advantage in range, sir, and up there range is everything."

"All right on that. Now, anything else?"

"Oh, just the things you already know about, sir. Improvements on the Sharps carbine, a far better design for the trapdoor breech-loading conversion I was thinking about for our Springfield rifles, some other things I was fooling around with concerning railroad engine designs for trapping the steam exhaust and reusing it, and a couple of by-product ideas for the oil we're throwing away after we refine out the kerosene."

"No surprises?"

He stared straight at Ferguson and saw his eyes flicker.

"Well, sir."

"Mr. Ferguson, there's been a couple of rumors floating around. There's no sense in hiding whatever it is you're up to."

"Well, there is one," Chuck finally said, and he led the way out of the workshop onto the landing field for the airships. Chuck walked down the row of hangars and Andrew paused at each of them to look inside. One was empty, the hangar for the airship that had disappeared the week before. As they approached the last hangar in the row, Andrew slowed down when he saw a crew at the far end of the building working on a roof over a recently added extension.

Chuck stopped by the open doors to the building and waited nervously as Andrew approached. The massive doors were wide open and Andrew looked up in awe when he entered the building. The wickerwork frame of a new airship towered above him and stretched the length of the building. Dozens of workers were scurrying over the basketlike framework, and the air was heavy with a pungent scent that made him feel light-headed.

"Damn it, Chuck," Andrew whispered, "you're building the big one, aren't you?"

"Well, sir, we had appropriations for replacements for the ships we lost last year. I just thought I'd sort of throw them all together."

"This is that four-engine design I looked at."

"Yes, sir, it is."

Andrew glared at Ferguson. "You know the spot this puts me in, don't you? Congress will have my hide over this."

"Well, sir, Congress is sort of a thousand miles away at the moment. We could say that we just tried hooking the ships together."

"We had appropriations for eleven airships in our fleet. Now we'll only have six and someone will want to know why."

"Sir. You can see they're starting to hang the skin on it now. It's that new canvas treatment I was telling you about. The smell is from a lacquer we cooked up to make it airtight and help to shrink the fabric onto the frame. It's a whole new design."

"I told you once before," Andrew snapped angrily, "that you're a loose cannon, Mr. Ferguson."

Chuck started to cough again, and Andrew waited patiently for him to recover.

"Sir, you can fire me at any time. I was right during the last war, and frankly, sir, I've got a gut feeling that we're heading into another one. This ship can give us the answer. It'll be ready to fly in a month. I think, sir, that in about four weeks, the day after this ship flies on its first mission, the issue of budgets simply won't matter."

Andrew turned toward Pat, who was grinning.

"No comment from you," Andrew snarled and stalked into the hangar.

Looking up at the airship, he silently cursed Ferguson for being so damned unexpendable and also so damnably right. Politically, he knew this ship would be the last straw for some, another argument that the military was out of control and Andrew was at fault. When the trainload of congressional delegates arrived later today to meet with the Nippon representatives, there was no way in hell that he could hide this thing. That was one of the reasons he had come out early, to see if Chuck had come up with follies that could somehow be concealed until after the elections. This—this was an elephant they couldn't drag out and bury someplace.

But if they stopped work on it, then what? It would just sit in the hangar and rot.

Frustrated, Andrew toned back to Ferguson. "Finish the damn thing. But Mr. Ferguson, as of today, right now, you are fired as chief of ordnance."

Chuck's face fell, and Andrew looked at him coldly until he suddenly doubled over with another spasm of coughing.

Andrew put his hand on Chuck's shoulder. "Come on, son, you're going home with me. I need you elsewhere now."

He saw Emil, Vincent, and Varinia approaching. Varinia broke away and ran up to Chuck's side. Though his face was pale, he forced a smile for her.

"Guess we're going home," he said, and she looked at Emil, who put his arm around Chuck's shoulder and led him away.

As the group left, Andrew turned on Vincent. "You knew he was building this, didn't you?"

"Yes, sir."

"I should can you, too."

"I could say it was outside my department, sir. The air corps answers directly back to headquarters in Rus, sir." Pat shifted uncomfortably, and Andrew fixed him with an unwavering gaze.

"Are all of you in a conspiracy against me? Is that it?"

"Well, sir. We know you're going to run for president next year."

Andrew was so nonplussed he was unable to reply.

"Oh, Kathleen never said anything. Neither has Kal, though I daresay you've told him as well. It's just—we knew you were going to do it. Everyone in the old Thirty-fifth and Forty-fourth has figured on it for some time now."

Andrew turned away and stared back at the ship.

"So we figured we'd just keep it to ourselves, bury it in the books, as they say. If it came up, along with a couple of other things, the blame wouldn't come back on you."

Andrew knew that Ferguson was right. They needed this ship. They needed improved ironclads, another ten corps of infantry, a corps of cavalry, upgrading of seventy-five thousand smoothbores for rifles and rifles to breechloaders. They needed all of that … and that was why he was going to run.

Andrew surveyed his two generals and friends.

"Thank you, but I'll take responsibility for this. After all, I'm in command."

"Ah, Colonel, darling," Pat beamed, "you'll make a dandy president—if the Republic is still here to vote for you come next year."

I am in hell.

It was an unending refrain, played out in a monotone rhythm … I am in hell …

He raised his head and gazed around. The vast foundry was wrapped in a stygian darkness of fire and acrid smoke, waves of heat washing from the glowing cauldrons. Hunched stick figures, iron puddlers, moved like tormented souls, stirring the liquid fires … the ever-present demons standing with arms folded, whips hanging from their belts, ready to lash out if any should falter even for a second.

"Hans!"

Sergeant Major Hans Schuder turned and looked up into the dark, glowing eyes of the foundry overseer—Karga.

"It goes slow. Why?" The overseer's voice rumbled darkly, and once again Hans felt the cold revulsion that he had come to understand their speech and now would reply in kind. Yet another loathsome concession, even the act of speaking. He spared a quick sidelong glance at the iron puddlers; they were hunched over their work, but he knew they were aware … terrified that today would be the day they were chosen as "the example." Though Ha'ark had extended his "protection," Karga always found a way to bend the rule, claiming the worker was insubordinate or not longer protected because he failed to do his job.

Hans shifted the quid of tobacco in his cheek, aware that his mouth had suddenly gone dry.

Maybe today is my day, he thought. Why do I still cling to life? he wondered. Am I not now a traitor? I oversee the running of this foundry, the source of the machines that will one day be turned against humans all over this world, and against my own Republic.

The Republic—it seemed now like a distant dream, like a lover of childhood lost; that and Andrew Keane, the boy he had turned into a general. But he pushed that thought aside, for to contemplate that issue was to take the path to the ultimate paradox of his existence, a contemplation that could drive him into final madness.

He studied Karga. It had taken a long time to learn how to interpret the facial expressions of this race properly. To human eyes the features were perpetually set in a visage of rage. But there were subtle yet distinct differences which could be learned if you survived long enough. He could see, though, that today the master was indeed building to an explosive outburst. The features were coarse, leathery, always towering above him, like some ancient predator. Karga's visage was made even more terrifying by the scar from a Merki arrow that had cut his left eye out, leaving the socket a twisted mass of knurled flesh. He could see that the master was in a foul mood, accentuated by the scratch marks that crisscrossed his cheeks. There had been another fight with his mate, or a concubine, and now someone would pay.

"Explain, cattle. Only half the iron needed has been poured today."

Hans nodded in agreement. There was no sense in denying the obvious.

"My master," he began, the mere words grating on what few vestiges of his pride remained, "I told you before, you need to shut down furnaces three through seven for at least two days. The slag in the ovens has to be cleaned out. And the bellows, they're riddled with cracks, we're losing more air than we're blowing in."

Hans nodded toward the array of leather bellows, each one the size of a small house, which were hooked to treadmills, each treadmill standing nearly twenty-five feet high. Inside each mill were dozens of Chin slaves, heads lowered, as they walked endlessly upward on the wooden rungs, their pitiful weight used to turn the drive shafts that powered the bellows.

It was a hellish medieval sight that chilled Hans every time he saw it. Dozens of treadmills, each filled with half a hundred men, women, and children, powered most of the machinery in this nightmare world he now commanded. They walked for sixteen hours a day, with two brief breaks for their daily ration of rice cakes and water. It was the final step in their lives. Few lasted longer than a month before, spent with exhaustion, they collapsed and were dragged out to be hung up like the cattle they were in the slaughter room.

His skilled laborers, those to whom Ha'ark had extended his protection, were dying off as well. After three and a half years, disease, which swept the slave camps regularly, had taken many. Though their rations were better than the ones given to the Chin laborers, they were still barely enough to keep his people alive and working. Suicide was becoming more and more common—the day before, he had lost a skilled Cartha iron master and his entire family, wife and two children found in their bunks with their throats cut, the iron master dangling from a rope beside them. Though Karga was annoyed at the loss of a skilled worker, he was amused by the several hundred pounds of meat thus harvested, which would not be reported but would go directly into his personal stores.

His people lived in the north compound adjacent to the factory. They even had barracks, their food was almost adequate, and they did indeed have one day in seven to rest. As for the Chin laborers living on the south side of the factory, he didn't even want to contemplate the conditions and terrors they were forced to endure.

Three or four steam engines could have humanely replaced all the brute labor on the treadmills, but that was not even worthy of consideration for the Bantag. After all, they held tens of millions of humans under the yoke. A precious steam engine was their new sinew of war and the mere suggestion of such an arrangement would have been met with complete disbelief.

The overseer looked down at him coldly. Long ago he had learned to live without fear. Fear was the blinder, the killer of souls in this nightmare. Whether he was alive or dead within the next minute no longer mattered. He knew that unless he committed a grievous act, he was protected by the word of the Qar Qarth, but there were other ways to torment him. On occasion one of his people would be killed, perhaps for a mistake, often for no reason at all, the death explained away as an accident. The fact that he had wrung a concession of protection from Ha'ark seemed to infuriate Karga even more. Karga was a daily presence to deal with and Ha'ark a distant being who would not question why one lowly cattle was reported dead.

"We have not reached what is expected today. I will not report that we failed." There was a veiled threat in the words.

"Karga, what I tell you is fact."

The language of the Horde rumbled in his throat, and he felt as if each word were an obscenity. Karga stood silent before him, eyes filled with dark contempt, right hand drifting down to rest on the handle of his whip. Hans ignored the gesture. He had seen the whip crack out a woman's eyes and tear strips of flesh from shoulders to buttocks and or wrap around a throat, then be drawn tight in slow strangulation.

Karga's gaze drifted from Hans to the workers lining the edge of the cauldron of molten iron.

"If you kill one of them as an example it will not change fact," Hans said quietly, not letting even a flicker of emotion show through. He knew the work crew was listening, terrified to turn around and thus single themselves out, all of them waiting for a flash of rage, a killing of one, ten, perhaps all of them for no reason other than a foul temper, a slight upset of the stomach, a mating of the night before refused, or just for no reason at all … for after all, that was the fate of a pet of the Bantag.