“Forgotten your hotel girl?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Melissa—”
“It’s all right. It’s nice that you say it. And we have our duties.” Suddenly she was all business. “I have a surprise for you.”
“Pleasant, I hope.”
“The war isn’t going well.”
“Depends on what you mean by well. We’re not losing.” He waved expressively at the factory. “But we’re putting effort into the war that ought to go into building civilization.”
“Have you thought of negotiation with—with Croser?”
“Sure,” Lysander said. “All he wants is for us to dismantle everything that brought us here. Build a welfare state and all that implies. No thanks. But the worst of it is, I think we’re just a sideshow,” Lysander said.
“Sideshow?”
“Something like that. The real war is political, and it’s being fought in the Grand Senate. If the CoDominium would help us—hell, just stop helping the God damned enemy!—we’d end this damned war and get on with our lives. Including our wedding.”
“It’s bad, then.”
He grimaced. “Bad and getting worse,” he said. “The enemy can move faster through the Dales than we can down in the lowlands, and they’re starting to stick their heads out again. Nothing decisive, but they’re killing ranchers— We’ve got to move faster and hit harder, or there won’t be a ranch standing within a day’s ride of the hills come summer.”
“Well then, come see the present I’ve made for you,” she said, leading him down another staircase into Bay Six, past a bank of humming fabrication machines. “We made, I helped.”
He spared the machines a glance. Smooth man-high shapes, with nothing on the exterior but a console, screen and the ingress and egress ports. Put your metal in one end, program, and any possible shape came out the other, formed by everything from powder-deposition to an ultrasonic beam, untouched by human hands. Earth-made by Hyundai, bought forth or fifth-hand, and still representing an investment so huge that the Finance Ministry had had to handle it. Here they were the tiny heart of the great plant; making machines to make machine tools that human operators could use to do the actual production work. Some day . . . Some day Sparta would have real factories, robot-run.
They went through a big sheet-metal door with two armed company guards. Inside white-coated technicians were working around an armored vehicle, with parts of several more nearby. “Here it is!” Melissa said. “Behold: the Cataphract.” She stood to one side and clapped; there were good-natured cheers from the technicians doing the final testing.
“Your Highness, Miss von Alderheim.” A bow from the chief engineer.
“Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Azziz,” Lysander said absently. Suddenly even the woman at his side receded from consciousness for a moment as he looked at the sleek gray-green bulk of the machine before him. “I didn’t think you could actually come up with a tank worth building,” he said.
“More of a light armored gun system, sir,” the engineer demurred; his swarthy face split with the smile of a professional who sees a difficult problem solved. “We’re just not up to cermet composites, and no realistic thickness of steel is much use. Miss here did it, on that CAD-CAM machine over at the University.”
Melissa made a dismissive gesture. “Just playing with the program,” she said, blushing. “Thank Andre Charbonneau.”
“Charbonneau?” Lysander said.
He knew the name, a French materials engineer arrested for illegal research and sentenced to transportation by BuInt thirty years ago. The Frenchman had been lucky enough to be sent to Sparta, and had been a fixture of the von Alderheim industrial empire for two decades. The single-crystal iron-chrome alloy he had developed was one of Sparta’s few really cutting edge products and a staple export.
The new vehicle was a box about six and a half meters long and three and a quarter wide, no more than two and a half tall, sharply sloped in the front and sides. Suspension was on broad treads with seven road wheels and drive sprockets at the front; the wedge-fronted turret mounted towards the rear of the hull carried along cannon and coaxial machine gun.
“The armor’s a sandwich,” Azziz said, slapping it affectionately. “Twenty mm of steel, then a layer of interwoven Nemourlon and iron-chrome thread in insulac, then another 20mm of steel. With this on top.” He held up a square of some hard glossy material, on a sheet-metal backing. “High-stability explosive. Fire a shaped-charge warhead at it, and it explodes and disrupts the plasma jet. Old Dayan idea.”
“From Earth, really,” Melissa said, smiling indulgently at the enthusiasm of the men. “But I dug it out of a big load of datadump we bought as part of a job-lot from them with those used shuttles.”
Azziz nodded and dropped the plate of explosive casually to the deck of the Cataphract.
“Whole thing is bulkier than cermet, and gives about 75% of the protection for the same weight,” he said. “It’ll stop most light antitank weapons if they hit on the frontal slope. Thirty tons total weight; the track’s woven Charbonneau thread again, with inset tungsten cleats, the suspension’s hydrogas units taken from our heavy mining truck, and the engine likewise—seven hundred horse-power turbocharged diesel, top speed of 80 kph and a range of 700 klicks. Three versions, this one with the rapid-fire 76mm gun, one with a 125mm rocket howitzer, beam-guidance, and an infantry fighting-vehicle.
“Nothing but basic four-way stabilization on the weapons and a laser range finder, I’m afraid,” he continued, with gathering excitement. “But if we could get modern electronics and sensor kits to upgrade them, I swear there’d be a big export market. Not quite as effective as the stuff North American Motors or Daimlerwerk Friedland AG put out, but a lot cheaper—a fifth the cost, and hell of a damn sight easier to maintain on a nonindustrial planet.”
“Toys for the boys,” Melissa said. At their surprised glances: “It’s just machinery to me, Lynn. I don’t get that, ah, sensual satisfaction from it. We’ve done up a set of duplicate jigs, by the way, for the plant in Olynthos, and we’re starting series production immediately. We can—”
Whunnnnng. The explosion seemed to go on forever, vibrating from the pressed-metal internal partitions and off the high ceiling of the plant.
“Where was that, where was that?” Lysander barked, hand clearing the sidearm he was wearing with his undress grays. Nobody was down, nothing burning. But close. The communicator on his belt squawked:
“On the way. Prince!” Harv, with the headquarters reaction squad. Thank God I let him talk me into bringing them, Lysander thought.
The technicians had taken cover; an alarm klaxon was blaring. Melissa had vanished. A moment’s panic, before he saw her head emerge from the Cataphract’s turret. Smart girl. Probably the safest place in miles. The prince cocked his head; his ears were still ringing, but he knew where those screams were coming from. Azziz was at his side, one hand clutching a piece of steel bar stock.
“Stay back, man,” Lysander snapped.
“Stay back, hell,” the engineer said, although he did drop behind a little. “I didn’t sell everything I owned on Earth and move here to lose it all to convict scum.”
They dodged through the door to the next bay. “My God!” Azziz exclaimed in horror.
Lysander did not think the emotion was for the two workers lying on the ground; Harv’s reaction squad was there, spreading out to search and giving first aid to the wounded. The object of the engineer’s attention was the first of the four Hyundai fabricators. The exterior telltales had gone dead, and one side of the boron-fiber outer sheathing was bulged and blackened.
“Ruined!” he screamed, slapping his hands to his head. “Two million CD credits and a year’s shipping time, and it’s ruined.”
His piece of bar stock clattered to the floor as he rushed over to the machine. Harv rose from beside one of the wounded technicians and went over to a robot trolley stacked with sections of 75mm steel-alloy square beams, bent to examine them and lifted the end of one, then another.
“Think I’ve found it, sir,” he said, saluting. “Quick work, Sergeant,” he replied. Harv Middleton, body guard and Phraetrie-brother, would never qualify for a commission, but then he wouldn’t want one. All he wanted was to stay close to his Prince.
“Sabotage, Prince. The operator there, he said he and his buddy came round and fed the square steel billets there into the machine every half-hour or so, and saw that the bin of parts moved off.”
Lysander walked over and looked at one of the neighboring fabricators. There was a feed-arm that gripped the raw stock, with an automatically adjusting chuck to hold it while the interior mechanisms got a firm grip.
“They had a fresh trolley here. They put the first one in, turned away to check on the finished parts, and just when they walked around behind it blew. Must be something in the steel, sir.”