“Th’ prollem is,” the mechanic said, “yer overstrainin’ the engines somethin’ fierce. Got enough horsepower, right enough—two seventy-five-horsepower saloon-car engines, right enough. But the torque loads more’n they wuz designed to stand.”
“Well, we’ll have to redesign them, won’t we?”
Jeffrey kept his voice neutral. The man was trying his best to do his job; it wasn’t his fault that engineering talent was so much thinner on the ground here in the western provinces of Santander. It was yeoman-and-squire country here, and always had been. Outside the eastern uplands, manufacturing was mostly limited to the port cities and focused on maritime trade and textiles. The problem was that this was prime tank country; the provincial militias here were actually interested in the prospect of armored warfare. Nobody but a few dinosaurs like General McWriter thought much of the prospects of horsed cavalry anymore, not after what had happened in the Empire.
Jeffrey felt his skin roughen. The machine guns flickered in his mind, and the long rows of horsemen collapsed in kicking, screaming chaos . . .
“Transmission,” he said. “We need a more robust transmission.”
“What’ve yer got in mind?”
Jeffrey pulled out a diagram. “Friction plate,” he said. “It’s not elegant, but I think it won’t keep breaking like this chain drive setup. Like you say, these tanks just have too much inertia for a system designed for three-ton touring cars.”
“Hmmmm.” The mechanic studied the diagram. “Interestin’.”
He looked up at Gerty. A couple of his men had gotten the engine grille up and were spraying water on the flames flickering there.
“How’d them Chosen bastids keep theirs going?” he asked. “Heavier’n this, I hears.”
“They use steam engines and mostly they don’t keep going,” Jeffrey said. “We need something reliable enough to do exploitation as well as breakthrough.”
The mechanic looked down at the diagram again. “Need some fancy machinin’ fer this.”
“Hosten Engineering can do you up a model, and jigs,” Jeffrey said. “They’ve got the plans.”
* * *
John Hosten leaned back in the chair and sipped his lemonade. Oathtaking was hot, as usual, and sticky-humid, as usual, and the air was thick with coal smoke. The hotel was close by the docks; they’d extended hugely since his last visit, new berths extending further into what had been coastal forest reserve and farmland. In fact, he could see one freighter unloading now from this fourth-floor veranda. It was a smallish ship of fifteen hundred tons, swinging sacks of grain ashore with its own booms and steam winches. As he watched the net fell the last four feet to the granite paving blocks of the wharf. Half the bottom layer split, spraying wheat across the stone and into the harbor. Screams and curses rang faintly as the cable paid out limply on top of the heap. Stevedores scurried about, overseers lashing with their rubber truncheons. Eventually a line formed, trotting off with the undamaged sacks on their backs. Others started sweeping up the remainder with brooms and dumping it in a collection of boxes and barrels.
God, I’m glad I don’t have to eat that, he thought silently. In this heat and humidity, they’d be lucky not to get ergot all over it.
He nodded towards the dock. “You’d get less spoilage if you moved to bulk-handling facilities,” he said mildly. “Elevators, screw-tube systems, that sort of thing.”
Gerta Hosten raised her eyes from the diagrams before her. “We’re not short of labor,” she said, with a smile that didn’t reach the cold, dark eyes.
Meaning they are short of the type of labor that bulk transport would need, Raj said thoughtfully.
An image drew itself at the back of John’s consciousness: short, dark-skinned men with iron collars around their necks loading a train—an unbelievably primitive train, with an engine like something out of a museum, an open platform and a tall, thin smokestack topped with sheet-metal petals. Each staggered sweating under a bundle of dried fish secured in netting, heaving it painfully onto the flatcars. Other men watched them, soldiers with single-shot rifles mounted on giant dogs. Occasionally a dog would snap its great jaws with a door-slamming sound and the laborers would shuffle a little faster.