IronStar (27 page)

“Besides, you’d rather discourage
any adventuring before it starts to show a profit. Can’t say I disagree, Luce.
Tell you what, just to show you what an agreeable Admiral I can be, you can
have your ‘whole task force’ right now. Take, um…” gaze averted, more tapping,
“…take the
Belleville
, I know she’s got a new Captain, it’ll do them all
some good.”

“Aye, Sir. Uh, Joe, did you say, ‘
Take’?
”

“Well, unless you’d rather
delegate, I know the skiing is going to be pretty good after this fresh
snowfall…”

“Sir! No, Sir!” she replied, like a
plebe on inspection. A broad grin split the seamed face of the older man, an
expression more appropriate to a shark than any show of mirth.

“Touché, Joe. Do I get my pick of
escorts?”

“Ahh, we’ll negotiate. I want a
few
tin cans left around here, just to keep up appearances. Although perhaps a
light cruiser would be fitting, you know we’ll have to bring the Mercantiles
along. We’ll keep the Kruss out of it of course, but the Mercs’ll be falling
all over one another to get at that hablet. Standard waivers should cover Fleet
indemnity.

“Tell you what, you draw up a list
of five or six, in order of preference, I’ll tell you who you can steal. And at
least two of them should be from the
Belleville’s
own group, I think
they’ve got Wallace and Steuben, both good hands. Let’s see if we can get this
show on the road in, mmm, four days?”

“On it, Joe. And …thanks.”

“Thank me later, if you still feel
it’s appropriate. Good hunting, Admiral.” The screen went blank. Outside the
window, the falling snow continued to sway and wheel,
like a task force on
maneuvers,
thought Admiral Dunning.
Now, just who is that cagey old
horse trader going to let me pull away, and how much do I have to pad this
list, to get the ones I really want?

“Imagination is the one weapon
in the war against reality.” - Jules de Gaultier, 20
^th
century A.D.
philosopher and writer; Terra

Lieutenant Rash’koi crept carefully
forward in the moonless darkness.
That’s close enough.
Spread in an arc
ahead of him, the campfires of the Wrth blazed, strung out at two hundred
hab’la intervals around his city. Behind him, a score of archers followed in
silent single file. Each carried four of the bulbous-tipped new arrows their
Warmaster had designed for them. At his signal they spread into a line facing
the second-nearest campfire to their left.

Following their meticulous drill,
each man twisted the five by ten centimeter bulbs a quarter turn on their
shafts, releasing the cunning spline-and-pin arrangement so that the head could
slide back a few centimeters when it impacted. Rash’koi had examined the inside
of one of the devices, and seen how the flint chip rubbed against the scored
steel wire when the end was struck, making tiny sparks fly inside the hollow
metal bulb. Now the bulbs were filled with the black star-powder and metal
chips. Who but their new Warmaster would have thought the powder they used to
amuse children and idle citizens with pretty lights in the sky, could be a
weapon?

With his four arrows armed, the
Lieutenant checked his men. Everyone was signaling ‘ready’. A final scan: there
were the Wrth sentries, standing watch eighty or ninety hab’la from their
fires, two for each fire. These heavier bulb-tipped arrows had little more than
half the range of the
bodkin points
, but they could still carry a good
four hundred fifty hab’la.
Ready, then.
He touched the shoulder of the
woman beside him in the darkness, the woman from the small star-thrower’s
guild. She planted the arm-long tube she was carrying, inclined toward the
raiders’ camp. Hand signals to synchronize the archers, three, two, one,
fly
!
As the first flight lofted into the overcast night sky, each man reached for
his second arrow and let fly, almost in unison, at the nearest campfire
directly ahead of them. At the same moment the woman touched a smoldering cord
to the wick of the star-thrower, and the tube
chuffed.
As they turned to
the campfire on their right for a third flight, from the left almost in unison
came twenty quick yellow-orange flashes and twenty thunderous explosions rolled
into one nightsplitting volley. To the right now,
fly
! Twenty bows
beside Rash’koi thrummed deeply. Now ready the fourth flight.

Two more volleys of explosions
rolled across the plains, more ragged than the first carefully timed round, but
no less potent. Around the fires, Wrth were rousing and scrambling.
And
dying
, Rash’koi saw with approval. Dazed, some bleeding, some just not
rising. Now the bodkin points released by two hundred archers behind him began
to hail down onto the confused Wrth’s campsite. Like a field of hay before a
scythe, the standing raiders fell. High overhead, the star-maker
popped
and
a flowerburst of brilliant red sparkles blossomed over their enemies’ central
campfire.

There, from the far left, a handful
of Wrth were mounting.
Here they come, ready the fourth volley… fly!
The
third flight of a hundred bodkinpoints thudded into flesh and earth around the
campfire over his right shoulder. As the scatter of Wrth riders came charging
out onto the dark plain, more grenade-arrows slammed in and around them. Horses
reared and screamed, riders fell, none rose.
Time to go
, Rash’koi
concluded. His detail trotted silently over the springy turf, single file, back
to the relative security of the main body of archers. As they moved, two
kilometers off to the east another series of explosions echoed, and another red
star carved the dark sky, marking the second raiding party’s strike. A quarter
hour later, both groups were safe behind the city walls.

On top of the walls, a pair of
green eyes looked on with approval.
You can ring my city
, Kirrah
thought,
but not for free, not any more
. Tomorrow, the first suit of
chain mail armor would be ready for testing.

Five dawns later, after nightly
raids and one failed Wrth counter-raid, the sun rose over an empty plain. The
alarm bells rang over and over, bong-bing-bing - ‘all clear’. Half the city
seemed to be on the walls or in the streets cheering, the other half heading
for the fields with the spring planting on their minds and backs. At noon, a
full Council meeting conferred on Kirrah the gratitude of the city and an
honorary citizenship. By late afternoon, she had dispatched half a dozen
parties of scouts to determine where exactly the Wrth had gone, and to bring
back reports from the Realm’s border patrols.

Two days later, she and Akaray and
Peetha went visiting to the smithy. The river chains were finished and sitting
in
very
heavy heaps of forearm-length iron links on the riverbank by the
west wall, awaiting installation. Work was already well underway with her next
project.

“Warmaster! Good to see you!”
boomed the basso voice of Wai’thago, who for size could have been the brother
of Lord Tsano. However this gentleman was about the hairiest human Kirrah had
ever seen, heavy gray and black curls around his crown and a near-pelt covering
all exposed parts of his arms, chest and lower legs. Bright smoky-green eyes
were set in a broad, smile-wrinkled face.

“Good Ironmaster! How goes my
washtub
?”
Kirrah asked, using his term for her current project –
a rather skeptical
term
, she thought -
yes, at least skeptical.

“Come and look,” he exclaimed,
lifting Akaray down from behind Kirrah’s saddle with one massive hand. The four
of them trooped through the din of the shop’s smoky interior to the back, where
a pair of steel plate cylinders rested on timbers. “Are you sure this is the
way to join them? It looks like, well, a mistake in the smithy,” the giant
craftsman declared dubiously.

“That’s right,” said Kirrah. “The
big one is like a kettle, and that tube connects it to the smaller one. When
water boils in the big one, we call it a
boiler
, the steam will come
through the tube, and push on the …wings inside the smaller pot, and make that
axle turn. We call the smaller pot a
turbine
.”
Actually, a
three-stage turbine, which although not as efficient as a reciprocating piston
steam engine, is a lot faster, operates at lower pressure, and requires fewer
close-tolerance parts. We still have to invent the drill press and milling
machine, but I am surprised and pleased to see your shop already has a primitive
lathe
.

“Well yes, Warmaster, we can see
that the steam will come in
here
, and push
there
, and then escape
out
here
… but why do you then capture the steam and put it back in the,
the kettle? There is plenty of water in the sea, why not just add more fresh water?”
Akaray’s head was up inside the hole in the turbine, looking curiously around.
Peetha was watching with wordless interest.

“Good question, Wai’thago.”
Ahhh,
how do you say, ‘thermodynamic efficiency’?
“If you keep putting in fresh
water, it will be cold, and the fire will have to heat the water. But if you
use water that is already almost as hot as steam, then it still has some of its
force. Like working a piece of iron on your anvil, if the iron is kept hot, you
can work it sooner.

“So, we capture the steam, and we
cool it in that long tube with many bends, but just enough so it changes back
to hot water. We call that tube the
condenser
, and when the steam turns
back into water, it makes lots of room for more steam to come through the
turbine past the wings. That box with the two gears, the pump I showed you, is
how we force the water back into the
boiler
.”

“But why is the
turbine
at
an angle like that? It looks, well, wrong.”

“That is so the propeller shaft
will angle downward, and come out at the bottom of the boat, so the …wings, on
the propeller will be in the water.”

“And you, Warmaster, not I, will be
telling Maka’ra the shipwright that he has to make a hole in his hull, under
the waterline?”

“Just so, Wai’thago’
jasa
. He
is already preparing a second hull, just to test this device. How soon will
this be completed?”

“If Kirrah Warmaster means, ready
to test with a fire under the kettle, that should be in two more days. If all
our joins and seals hold the first time. Plus time to transport this to the
river, to test it.”
Spoken just like a yard grunt on Trailway
, thought
Kirrah.

“We can test it here, Wai’thago,
just build a water trough around the condenser. I want to see how well it
performs, as soon as we can. The O’dai will become impatient if we do not
prepare our surprise for them.” The big craftsman nodded thoughtfully.

“Now, since you are making such
good progress, I thought you would like to see our next surprise. You know how
the starthrower guild uses those steel-wrapped tubes to throw their pretty
sparkles up into the sky? Well, I think if we make a tube of about the same
size, and wrap it with heavier steel, or perhaps more layers wrapped in
opposite directions, then it could throw something farther than the starthrower
does. Also something heavier, I have some drawings here, see… like the
grenade
warheads you made for the archers, only bigger…”

That night, as Kirrah was tucking
Akaray into his bed in the small room next to hers, he asked:

“Kirrah, why is Peetha so nice?”

“Nice? Why shouldn’t she be nice?”

“She is
Wrth
. She, her
people, killed my mo… my family. My village. How can she do that, and be nice,
too?” Silence followed. Then:

“Do you like Peetha?”

“I don’t know. Yes. My insides like
her. Sometimes my outsides are afraid of her.”

“Mine too, Akaray. Most of her
life, she was taught to do whatever she was told, and not to think about
whether it hurt anyone. She is a skilled warrior. Now, she begins to think
about things. It is hard for her too. She says so little about it. Do you think
she likes you?”

“Yes, Kirrah.”

“If you feel unsafe,
aska
,
tell me, or tell someone.” The boy’s tired face lit briefly at her use of the
intimate form, ‘
beloved’
.

“But why do you feel safe with her,
with all the Wrth you let into the city?” the boy persisted. “From the first
day, you treated her as a friend.”

“I’m… I’m not sure I can explain
it,
aska
. But I never had any doubts, not inside. I thought the most
important thing to a Wrth was to be the best possible warrior, so that’s what I
offered them, to make them stop fighting. When they stopped, and allowed
themselves to be bound and delivered to my training area, I knew they were not
surrendering because they feared death. I thought it was because they really
wanted to learn from me. That is what Peetha told me, later. So, I decided to
teach them, and learn from them, and watch closely, to see what happened. They
have never done anything to make me sorry.”

Kirrah looked down to see his
energy fading quickly.
Lucky you,
she thought, bending to kiss his forehead.
I still have to finish the sketches for the mortar rounds. I think if we lay
a fuse in a circular run in the base, and have a rotating plate with a hole
over it, we can use the propellant burn to ignite the fuse and rotate the plate
to get an adjustable delay… God, I’m tired
.

Late the next morning, there was a
summons from Lord Tsano. Kirrah, Irshe and Peetha hurried to the palace, to
find the King’s Court already coming into session. Lord Tsano beckoned her to
sit on the bench beside him, and five prisoners were brought in, chained and
shackled. Two were Kirrah’s ‘students’, a Wrth man and woman; two were Talamae
infantry recruits and one was a corporal in the regular militia. All were
bruised and bloodied to some extent, none apparently seriously enough to keep
them off their feet. One of the Wrth, the man, had a badly sliced scalp and
ear, freshly bound up and still bleeding slightly under the bandages. At a nod
from the King, the clerk rose and read the charges.