John nodded. “Don’t worry about the orders,” he said. “Plenty of new lines going in, what with the double-tracking program. And the Chosen are buying for their new lines in the Empire.”
That brought the conversation behind him to a halt. He looked back at the expressions of clenched disapproval and grinned; it was not a pleasant thing to see.
“You’re selling to the Chosen?” the engineer said.
“I prefer to think of it as getting the Chosen to finance our expansion program,” John replied.
What’s more, it’s good cover. Several times over. It gave him a good excuse for traveling to the Land, which helped with his ostensible work as a double agent in the employ of the Chosen. The shipments were also splendid cover for agents and arms to the underground resistance.
“And besides the sheet-steel rolls, you’ll be getting heavy boring and turning lathes soon. From the Armory Mills in Santander City.”
That rocked the man back on his heels. “Ordnance?” he said. “That’ll cost, sir. We’ll have to learn by doing, and it’s specialist work.”
John nodded. “Don’t worry about the orders,” he said again. “Let’s say a voice whispered in my ear that demand is going to increase.”
He touched the cane to his hat brim again and shook hands all around. His senior employees had learned to respect John Hosten’s “hunches,” even if they didn’t understand them. Then walked across the vacant yard to where his car was waiting by the plant gate under a floodlight.
“Back home, sir?” Harry Smith said, looking up from polishing the headlamps with a chamois cloth.
“Home,” he said. “For a few days.”
“Ah,” the ex-Marine in the chauffeur’s uniform said. “We’re going somewhere, then, sir?”
John nodded and stepped into the passenger compartment of the car as Smith opened it for him, tossing hat and cane to one of the seats. There were six, facing each other at front and rear. One held Maurice Hosten, sleeping with his head in Maurice Farr’s lap; the older man looked down at his five-year-old namesake fondly, stroking the silky black hair that spilled across the dark blue of his uniform coat. Pia glanced up, with a welcoming smile that held a bit of a frown.
“Even on your son’s birthday, you cannot keep from business?” she said.
“Only a little bit of business, darling,” he said, settling back against the padded leather of the seat; it sighed for him. “Quietly, or you’ll wake him.”
Maurice Farr chuckled. “After the amount of cake this young man put away, not to mention the lemonade, the spun candy, the pony rides, the carousel, and the Ferris wheel, a guncotton charge couldn’t wake him—you should know that by now.”
“He does; he’s just using that as an excuse.” Pia’s hand took John’s and squeezed away the sting of the words. “This one, you wave the word ‘duty’ in front of him, and he reacts like a fish leaping for a worm.”
“And the hook’s barbed,” John said ruefully, nodding to Smith through the window that joined the passenger compartment and the driver’s position up ahead. The car moved forward with a hiss of vented steam.
“Your lady’s been running an interesting notion past me,” Admiral Farr said.
“This Ladies’—”
“Women’s,” Pia corrected.
“Women’s Auxiliary?” John finished.
“Yes. If we get into an all-out war with the Land, we could use it. Though I’m not sure how the public would react; there was a lot of bad feeling during the agitation over the franchise, a decade or so ago. People claiming it was the first step to Chosen corruption and so forth.”
“I don’t think that’ll be much of a problem,” John said thoughtfully. Center provided the probable breakdown of public sentiment in various combinations of circumstance. “After all, Pia’s idea is to have women take jobs that release men to fight. There are already plenty of women in the nursing corps—have been since the last war with the Union, you know, whatshername with the lantern and all that.”
“And if the big war happens, we’ll need every fighting man we can get,” the admiral said thoughtfully. “We’ll not win that one without a damned big army, and the fleet’ll have to expand, too. We won’t be able to spare men for typing and filing and whatnot.”