She shook herself out of her grim thoughts and peered up at the burly fabrications engineer holding Senator’s blueprints. His thick, calloused fingers were covered with the scars of his trade. She asked again, patiently, “Can you build this, Mr. Umlani?”
“Well, yeah,” Umlani nodded, frowning down at the blueprints, “we’ve got the tools and the necessary materials to build these things, no problem. Simple as dickens, ain’t it? We can even make the glass balls pretty quickly, I’d think, using the ore smelting equipment and ordinary sand. There’s a whole hill of the stuff in the mine spoils. It’s easy enough work, even the kids could handle it.” He glanced up, curiosity lighting his dark eyes. “You say this thing really existed? Was used in battle, I mean?”
Alessandra smiled. “Indeed, it was. Senator found a mention of it in his military history archives. Dates back all the way to Old Terra’s First World War, he said. It was fielded for a while alongside machine guns and poison gas. How many of them can you build? And how quickly?”
Umlani grinned, teeth white against the exhausted darkness of his face. “Lots and very.”
“Good. Get cracking, if you please. The sooner they’re built and in place, the better I’ll feel. Particularly since the weather appears to be clearing out there. God knows how many warriors the Tersae will throw at us, once this freezing rain stops.”
“Right.” Umlani hurried away, bellowing for his fabrication technicians.
Alessandra hunted up Ginger Gianesco and found her handing out cups of coffee salvaged from the supplies as half-frozen miners came in from the work crews. Alessandra accepted a cup with a nod of thanks, then asked, “What can you tell me about the refinery?”
The operations director blinked in surprise and raked limp, silver hair back from her face. “What do you want to know about it?”
“Aside from why it’s here at all, what’ve you been cracking the crude into? Diesel fuel? Gasoline? Heating oil?”
The older woman’s face rearranged its series of wrinkles. “We built it to provide ourselves a cheap, local source of fuel. Oh, we don’t need it now, but we’re going to grow, or planned to, anyway, and it won’t take much growth to outstrip the snap generators we brought along. Equipment like that is expensive to freight all the way out here.” A grimace touched her mouth. “You wouldn’t believe the hell we caught, putting in that refinery. There’s a xeno-ecologist over at Eisenbrucke Station who sent her research assistant out to us a couple of months back, to set up wildlife monitors and conduct studies. I couldn’t say what the xeno-ecologist’s like, but that assistant of hers . . .”
Gianesco shook her head, eyes dark with pain. “Stupid, greenhorn kid,” she said roughly, the tone of her voice belied by the shimmer of wetness in her eyes. “Brought himself out here with a brand-spanking-new degree and a bunch of crazy notions about not spoiling virgin wilderness. We didn’t come out here to admire the birds and the bees, we came out here to mine saganium. And build a colony our kids will inherit. That boy threw an honest to God tantrum over the refinery. Didn’t speak to anybody for weeks, after construction started, just glowered like we were mass murderers and muttered under his breath about industry raping yet another world.”
“What happened to him?”
She blew unhappily across her coffee cup. “He spent most of his time communing with his data recorders. God knows what, exactly, he was looking for out there, but he obviously preferred it to us. Poor fool went into shock when the Tersae attacked. Literally couldn’t believe it was happening.” She stared bleakly into her cup. “He didn’t survive the first attack wave.”
Alessandra wasn’t surprised. She’d seen the type before. Gentle, liberal, very young. Full of sincere and noble ideas. Dangerously naive. They died fast and messy when war broke out around their ears, the way it had on Thule. She frowned then, trying to pinpoint something Gianesco had said, something useful. Then she had it. Wildlife monitors.
“Did his equipment survive?”
Gianesco blinked. “Yes, I think it did.” She consulted the inventory list on the handheld unit clipped to her belt. “Most of it, anyway. Yes, here it is.”
“May I?” Alessandra held out one hand.
The operations director handed over the slim unit and Alessandra scanned the list, lips pursed thoughtfully. “I’ve been worried about how to spot the approach of war parties in those gullies out there, since Senator has only a limited number of aerial survey drones on board. Those model airplanes Harry Bingwa scrounged from the recreation workshop will help, since we can mount cameras in them, but the Tersae are likely to shoot those down as fast as we put them up. This,” she tapped the palm-sized screen, “just might do the job. You said there was a map of the terrain immediately surrounding the town?”
Gianesco nodded. “It’s a geological features map, pinpointing the richest saganium deposits in the region. We’ll have to pull it up on the main computers, though. I don’t have it loaded on my hand unit.”
She led the way past crates and cartons of supplies and forlorn piles of personal goods scavenged from damaged houses and headed out through the open doors on the far side of the warehouse. A blast of icy wind caught them as they made their way across the frozen ground between the warehouse and the surviving meeting hall. The hall was crowded with refugees: people injured in the defense, volunteers trying to administer dwindling supplies of medications, harried mothers trying to cope with young children exposed to far too much trauma.
Gianesco stopped at their hastily rigged “war room” and tapped commands into the computer system they’d brought up from the underground bunker, installing it here as the colony’s new command center. The map flashed onto the screen, showing narrow gulches, deep gorges, and snaking fissures spreading in every direction, as though Rustenberg were the center of a web spun by a spider on hallucinogens. Alessandra leaned down and jiggled controls, zooming the magnification. “Hmm . . . ordinary claymores and jump mines aren’t going to work very well, are they?”
“Why not? And what’s a ‘jump mine’?”
“A mine that detects the approach of infantry and propels itself up to about here,” she measured her own chest with one hand, “then detonates. Messy as hell. Effective, too, against unarmored personnel. Which I understand the Tersae are? Unarmored, I mean?”
Gianesco nodded. “None of the ones we’ve seen have worn anything but fur and weapons belts.”
“Good. As to the other” —she tapped the screen with one fingernail— “the way these fissures twist and turn, an ordinary mine, even something relatively directional like a claymore, won’t be very effective, because the blast won’t go around these corners. We need something that will.”
“Like what?” Gianesco frowned. “What kind of weapon turns corners?”
Alessandra smiled. “You might just be surprised. What kind of industrial gasses do you have on hand? Anything heavier than air will do.”
Light began to dawn in the older woman’s tired eyes. “Good lord, yes. Fuel-air explosions, down in those ravines . . .”
“Exactly,” Alessandra grinned.
The look in Ginger Gianesco’s eyes made Alessandra feel about eight feet tall. To see a woman go from bitter, exhausted hopelessness to the dawning realization that there was something her people could do, after all, besides cower behind the Bolo’s malfunctioning guns, went a long way toward erasing the worst of the hell Alessandra had suffered against the Deng.
Gianesco flagged down one of the older kids detailed to courier jobs. “Jennifer, go find Hank and Amanda. Tell ’em we need to bleed off the main natural gas tank at the refinery, into every portable gas cylinder they can lay hands on.”
“Yes, ma’am!” The girl sped off, vanishing through the doorway with a slam of the meeting hall doors that set the nearest little ones whimpering.
Alessandra thinned her lips, seeing that. She coldly hated the Tersae for creating the fear she could see shining in the children’s wide eyes, trembling on unsteady little lips. She’d seen, as well, the bodies of children who’d died with guns and spotting scopes in their hands, defending the walls as their parents finished the desperate effort of pouring the last stretches of defensive perimeter. And she’d seen the eyes of the kids who’d survived, eyes that would’ve looked old and hard in a fifty-year-old’s face. The Tersae would pay for what they’d done here. Pay dearly. She and Senator had only just got started on ways to make those furry bastards pay.
“What else can we do, Captain?” Gianesco asked quietly. “And how can we deliver the fuel-air cylinders to the targets?”
Alessandra frowned down at the map again, unsure how to answer the second question. “About that refinery. You never did mention what you’re cracking the crude oil into.”