They were getting close to the incorporated area of the city. Diyarbakir had spread to the north and west of ancient Amida. The city walls to the south loomed on an escarpment, free of modern buildings, and the eastern boundary was the steep gorge of the Tigris – now and as it had been for millennia.
In the heavy traffic they were entering, bad brakes and the universal-tread pattern of the pickup’s tires made Kelly concentrate more on his driving than he wanted to. The rhythm of outside sounds and the greasy divorcement of the rain-slick highway were releasing Gisela’s tongue, however. They were in a microcosm of their own, she and Kelly; not the universe that others inhabited and one which had secrets that one must never tell.
“We could buy equipment easily,” the woman said. “Through sympathizers, sometimes, but easily also through those who wanted drugs or wanted arms that we could supply. However, there was no place on Earth where we could safely produce what we needed for the day we knew would come, when the Service would provide thousands of craft like Dora for the legions of New Germany to sweep away Bolshevism and materialism together.”
Brake lights turned the road ahead of them into a strand of rubies, twinkling on their windshield and on the rain spattering toward the street. A major factory, one of the few in a city almost wholly dependent on agriculture, was letting the workers out to choke the road with motorcycles, private cars, and dolmuses – mini vans that followed fixed routes like buses, but on no particular schedule and with an even higher degree of overloading than was the norm for Turkish buses.
“Turn here,” Gisela said with a note of disapproval. “You should have turned at the last cross street. We enter the Old City best by the Urfa Gate.”
Kelly nodded obsequiously. Colonel Schneider’s – Romer’s – daughter was telling him things now, in a state divorced from reason, which she had not told even when she was convinced that he had saved her and her Plan from Israeli secret agents. Then she had been willing to take him to those whose business the explanations were – but not to overstep her own duties. Irrational snappishness when he missed the turn to a location unknown to him was a small price for the background he was hearing.
Gisela cleared her throat with a touch of embarrassment as she ran her comment back. “I apologize,” she said in English. “Our office is to the right on the inner circumferential, facing the walls.”
“No problem,” the veteran answered in German. He inched forward, thankful for the rain-swept traffic that kept them from what might be the terminus of their conversation. “How did you get over the problem with fabrication, then?”
“By putting the assembly plant on the Moon,” said Gisela calmly.
Kelly, shifting from first into neutral, lost the selector in the sloppy linkages of third and fourth when his arm twitched forward. “Okay,” he said when he thought his voice would be calm. “I guess I thought maybe you had a satellite of your own. Like Fortress.”
“It was easier to armor against vacuum than it was the winds and convection cooling at Thule Base,” said the woman. “And the Moon had what neither Antarctica nor an orbiting platform could provide: ores. Raw material to be formed into aluminum for the skin and girders of the fleet. Dora had been built of impervium, chromium-vanadium alloy; but that was not necessary, the scientists who escaped with my father decided.
“The instruments and the drive units, the great electromagnetic engines that draw their power from the auras surrounding the Earth and Sun, had to be constructed here; but that was easy to arrange, since the pieces divulged little of their purpose. They are shipped as freight to our warehouse at Iskenderun and there loaded on a motorship which the Service owns through a Greek holding company. It sails with only our own personnel in the crew and, hundreds of miles from the coast, the cargo is transferred to Dora or one of her newer sisters.”
Traffic surged forward like a clot releasing in a blood vessel. The wall above the Urfa Gate was whole and fifty feet high, with semicircular towers flanking the treble entrances and rising even higher. Only the arched central gateway, tall enough and wide enough to pass the heaviest military equipment of Byzantine times, was used for vehicular traffic. It constricted the modern two-lane road; Kelly swore under his breath as he watched the cars ahead of them slither on the pavement, threatening traffic in the other lane and stone walls that had survived at least fifteen centuries of collisions.