Cofflin chuckled breathlessly as they coasted down the new-laid asphalt and braked to a halt. This thing had swallowed a lot of money- since the Event he'd gained a new appreciation of the way money represented crystallized sweat. And using it for one thing meant not using it for another.
Ronald Leaton was waiting for them in front of the office shack, wiping his hands on the inevitable greasy rag.
" 'lo, Chief, Martha," he said.
"Morning, Ron. Well, I'm glad we persuaded you to put this out of town, at least," Jared Cofflin said, dismounting and peering around with his hands on his hips.
The complex itself was built on cleared scrubland, the buildings constructed of oak-timber beams and brick beside new asphalt roadways, with a tall wooden windmill creaking beside an earthen water reservoir. Smoke smut and charcoal dust coated everything, making even the fresh-cut wood look a little shabby.
"It ain't pretty, but it works," Leaton said. The engineer was grinning, the way he usually did when showing off a new toy. "This is the smelting stack of the furnace," he said, pointing to a squat chimney-like affair of red brick fifteen feet high with a movable top like a giant metal witch's hat.
"So that's a blast furnace? Cofflin asked. It looked formidably solid.
"Cupola furnace, if you want to get technical, since it's for remelting metal, not for refining ore. That's where we melt down the ingots. Now, we could just melt down scrap and cast it straight-I've been doing that for a couple of years, on a much smaller scale-but we don't have an infinite supply of scrap. And we are getting cast iron in some quantity from Alba. Pretty damned good iron, too; those little charcoal blast furnaces can give you excellent quality and Irondale is doing very well."
Jared found himself giving the riveted boilers an occasional uneasy glance. There had been some nasty accidents with those in the beginning.
"That's for blowing the blast into the stack," Leaton said, pointing to the larger engine.
A long chuff came from the little donkey engine, and the tender threw a lever. The wooden links of the endless belt rattled, and the ingots began to lift toward the top of the furnace stack. When they reached it, they fell against the side of the conical plug with a loud, dull clanging and down into the furnace. Another wagon brought up big wicker tubs of charcoal, and they went up the conveyor likewise.
"So once we've tapped the molten iron from the furnace… over here, Chief-"
They walked around the massive construction.
"We take it in the holding car here and bring it over to the converter."
That was the second structure, twenty yards away. The core of it was a tubby egg-shaped construction of riveted steel plates twelve feet long; it was rather like a fat cannon pointing at the sky. Beneath it was more rail, and men and women in stained coveralls were unbolting the bottom with wrenches a yard long and lowering it onto a waiting cart with jacks and levers.
"You can see where they've got it open, the inside is firebrick and calcinated limestone… We really should have two, one up and one being relined. Anyway, we pour the molten iron in the top and blow air in through that removable bottom-it's called a tuyere, the long pipe thingie over there swings in and we get the blast from a blowing engine, two double-acting steam pistons."
"That what created that almighty racket last night? Had a couple of people riding into town hell-bent-for-leather, screeching that the Event had happened again."
"Ayup. Better than fireworks-exothermic reaction, great big plume of colored lights, flame… that's why we've got tile on all these roofs. Oxygen in the air hits the carbon in the iron and it burns. Took a while to get from theory to practice, but we're getting usable batches now. And heck, even the slag from a basic-process converter is useful, ground up fine for fertilizer. It's all phosphate and calcium."
Leaton's slim, middle-aged features took on a look of ecstasy; he'd run a computer store back before the Event for most of his living, but the little engineering shop in his basement had been his real love. He'd done nonstandard parts for antique automobiles, prototypes for inventors, some miniature steam engines for collectors. And he'd had a big collection of technical books; one of the most useful had been a World War II government handbook on how to do unorthodox things in small machine shops.
Seahaven was the island's biggest single employer now, if you didn't count fishing, and it had spawned dozens of smaller enterprises.
"And here's where the steel goes," Leaton went on. "We're using graded scrap in the smelter to alloy it. Hard to be precise with this Bessemer process, but it works in a sort of more-or-less fashion. Eventually we'll have to get manganese and alloying materials of our own, but for now… anyway, the converter pours the steel into this crucible, the insulation keeps the steel molten while we put a couple of batches in, we close it up and rotate it to mix 'em up and get a homogeneous product, and then we pour that into the mold."
The shape being swung up out of the timber-lined casting pit on an A-frame crane was nearly as long as the converter itself but much thinner, still radiating heat as it lay on its cradle with bits and pieces of sand and clay sticking to its rough-cast exterior.
"That's no steam engine cylinder," Cofflin said grimly.
"Nope," Leaton said regretfully. "Eight-inch Dahlgren gun. Still have to turn the exterior and bore it out, of course. The boring mill's going in over there." He pointed to a set of stone foundations and a pile of timber. His expression clouded slightly. "Marian did say her project had priority?"
"Ayup," Cofflin nodded grimly. "The Meeting agreed. Right now, that's the form progress takes. First priority, now that the Emancipator is off on its trials."
"You can see this is a lot of work, hard-sweat work, though," Leaton went on. "About that immigration quota-"
"Goddammit, Ron, save it for the Council meetings!"
The furnace belched smoke and sparks into a sky thick with geese heading southward. Their honking sounded forlorn through the rumble of burning iron.
Odikweos of the Western Isles heard the flat cracking sound of metal on hard leather and then the unmusical crash of blade on blade. He flung up a hand to halt his followers-right now, only a boy with a torch and a single spearman-and listened.
"Nothing so dark as a city at night," he murmured.
Not even a forest before the rising of the moon. Nothing that stank quite so bad, either. Sometimes he was glad his own rocky fiefdom was too poor to support such a warren.
The narrow alleyway where they walked twisted so that the light of the burning pine knot didn't travel far. High mud-brick walls rose on either side; this late at night few of the small windows set under flat roofs showed lamplight behind them. Only a scattering of stars glittered overhead, hidden by the high roofs-many of the buildings were enormous, three, even four stories tall, looming like black cliffs.
Voices now, men shouting in rage, and one shrilling scream of agony. He rubbed his beard. It 's the High King's business, to keep order in his stronghold, he thought, looking up to the citadel of Mycenae on its hill above. Plenty of lamps glowing there, even at this hour.
"But perhaps we should take a look," he said. "Follow me, and be careful."
He drew the sword hung on a baldric across his body and shifted forward the round shield slung over his back, taking a firm grip on its central handhold. The sword glinted cold blue-gray in the torchlight; it was the new type, steel as it was called, straight and double-edged and nearly three feet long. The hilt was bound with silver wire and the ring-and-bar guard inlaid with gold, as befitted a royal man's weapon-it had come as a gift from Agamemnon, part of the new wealth he'd found. Harder to put an edge on than a bronze sword, but sharper once you did, and much more durable.