Tirnwitz’s lips thinned in frustration. The Windstrider’s boats were lashed down and tight in their davits; nobody could have hoisted one aboard in the time they’d had. Nor could a whaleboat have made it over the horizon in the yacht’s shelter . . . although possibly the men on one could have scrambled aboard and pulled the plug on their boat.
He could see that thought going through Tirnwitz’s head. “I must make inspection and question your crew,” she said after a moment.
“Impossible,” John replied.
Jeffrey moved up to his side. “And to paraphrase what my father said in Salini last year, if you want to start a war, this is as good a place as any.”
Pia waved a steward forward with a tray; it looked rather incongruous when combined with the cutlass and revolver at his waist, and the short rifle slung over his shoulder.
“Perhaps the Leutnant would like some refreshments?” she said with silky malice. “Before she returns to her ship.”
The sailor behind the Chosen captain growled and half moved, then sank back quivering with rage at a finger-motion from her. She stared at Pia for a moment.
“An Imperial. The animals are less insolent in the New Territories these days,” she said. “Teaching them manners can be diverting.” She nodded to John. “Someday we may serve Santander refreshments, a drink you’ll find unpleasant. Guten tag.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The blast furnace shrieked like a woman in childbirth, magnified ten thousand times. A long tongue of flame reached upward into the night, throwing reddish-orange light across the new steelworks. John nodded thoughtfully as the bell-cap was lowered down onto the great cylinder, like a cork into a bottle taller than a six-story building. The flames died down as the cap intercepted the uprush of superheated gases from the throat of the furnace, channeling them through pipes where they were cleaned and distributed to heat ovens and boilers. A stink of cinders and sulfur filled the air, and the acrid nose-crackling smell of heated metal. Gravel crunched under his feet as he turned away, the small party of engineers and managers trailing at his heels.
A train of railcarts rumbled by, full of reddish iron ore, limestone, and black-brown coke in careful proportions. The carts slowed, then jerked and picked up a little speed as the hooks beneath them caught the endless chain belt that would haul them up the steep slope to the lip of the furnace.
“Nice counterweight system you’ve installed, sir,” the chief engineer said. “Saves time on feeding the furnace.”
John nodded. Courtesy of Center, he thought.
“Saves labor, too,” the engineer said. “God knows we’re short.”
“How are those refugees shaping up?” John said.
“Better’n I’d have thought, sir, for Wop hayseeds. They’re not afraid of shedding some sweat, that’s for sure.”
“Pay’s better than stoop work in the fields,” John said.
A lot of the Imperial refugees who’d left the camps outside the cities on the south shore of the Gut ended up as migrant workers following the crops across Santander. They’d jumped at the chance of mill work. A couple of them snatched off their hats and bowed as he passed, teeth gleaming white against their soot-darkened olive skins. John touched the gold head of his cane to his own silk topper; luckily white spats were out of fashion, or Pia would be even more upset than she was likely to be with him anyway.
“No damned strikes, either,” the plant’s manager said.
“Shouldn’t be, with the wages we pay,” John said.
Off to the left a huge cradle of molten iron was moving, slung under a trackway that ran down the center of the shed. It dropped fat white sparks, bright even against the arc lights, then halted and tipped a stream of white-hot incandescence into the waiting maw of the open-hearth furnace. Further back, beyond the soaking pits for the ingots, the machinery of the rolling mill slammed and hummed, long shafts of hot steel stretching and forming.
The engineer nodded towards them. “We’re fully up to speed on the rail mill,” he said. “If you can keep the orders coming in, we can keep the steel going out.”