This memorial is dedicated to the bravery and sacrifice of the men who gave their lives that day:
Captain Hans Richter, USEAF
Lieutenant Lawrence Wild, USEN
Gunners Mate Bjorn Svedberg, USEN
When he had finished reading, the young lieutenant came to attention and saluted. If anyone had been standing nearby they would have heard his soft-spoken words. "Mission accomplished, Gunners Mate Svedberg."
Boom Toys
"Come on, Nick. What's bothering you? You've been like a-what's the American expression?-like a bear with a sore tooth. All day, I might add, even at work. You can tell us; we're your house mates. And best friends. If you can't trust us with your secrets, who can you trust?"
Nicki Jo Pricket sighed. Tobias Ridley was a shrewd judge of character. It had been a mistake to let him be the odd man out in the three-handed game of gleek that Katherine Boyle, Solomon des Caux and she were playing. It gave him way too much time to ponder.
Katherine smiled. "Better tell them, Nick. They'll find out soon enough, as it is on Monday."
Nicki Jo nodded. "I suppose you're right Katy." Then she looked at Tobias Ridley and Solomon des Caux. "But don't talk to anyone until Monday, do I have your promise on that?"
Both young men nodded solemnly and Nicki Jo shook her head.
Almost three years since the Ring of Fire. How could she have suspected how much her life would change in those three years? Right after the Ring of Fire she had been nearly all alone in a hostile Grantville where she had effectively burned all her bridges by "coming out," exposing to the world her lesbianism by bringing her Fairmont lover to the Senior Prom. It hadn't seemed that important at the time. She'd gotten a full ride at WVU in Morgantown because of her grades in science, especially chemistry. She'd never expected to return to Grantville except for rare-very rare-trips home to see her dad and sister. Her dad hadn't been that concerned that one of his daughters was a lesbian, but her mom . . . her mom had stopped talking to her for good.
When her sister had called her the Friday before the Ring of Fire and told her that Mom would be out of town visiting relatives, she had seized the opportunity to get in a last trip home to pick up her few remaining belongings. Amy Kubiak, her best friend throughout her years in Grantville, despite being a class behind, had come home with her from Morgantown that weekend. And been caught like she was. Fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes was all that had separated them from being on the other side of the Ring of Fire.
At first Nicki Jo had blamed Amy and her bitterness and depression had lasted months before she finally made up with her friend.
But when she finally did, it had been Amy who had saved her, just as she had saved her in high school, by introducing her to Colette Modi who had hired Nicki Jo to help develop the Essen Chemical Company.
For months after the Ring of Fire Nicki Jo buried herself in her work for the biogas plant and in studying chemistry. At WVU Nicki had been taking both organic and physical chemistry her sophomore year, giving her as good an academic background in chemistry as almost anyone else caught by the Ring of Fire. But she needed more, especially practical experience, if she was to achieve her goal of getting a patron outside Grantville. She had been relieved to discover that seventeenth-century Europe was not as hostile to lesbians and homosexual men as she had thought. True, there were cases of women and men being tried for sodomy in Europe, but the cases were rare and usually involved women and men who were already on the margins of society.
It was odd, really. Right after the Ring of Fire Nicki Jo had cursed her luck thinking that she had wound up in a universe where Grantville, filled with her enemies, was the most tolerant town in the world instead of just a hick little village. Only gradually had she learned that homosexuality in the seventeenth century was tolerated, even ignored, except in certain rare cases. Of course, you didn't want to actually go out and flaunt your sexuality, but that was as true of heterosexuals in many ways as it was of homosexuals. So long as you kept things discreet and didn't go out and parade around for gay rights, people were willing to look the other way. It helped, of course, if you were rich and powerful, or had friends who were rich and powerful.
But even that wouldn't help if you weren't discreet.
The case of Mervyn Touchet, Earl of Castlehaven in England, had been a cautionary tale in the value of discretion.
In 1631 the earl and two of his retainers had been beheaded for sodomy. But the case would never have come before the courts if the earl's family life hadn't been highly dysfunctional. Besides being a sodomizer, the earl had also allowed-even encouraged-his retainers to rape both his wife and his new daughter-in-law. That alone would still not have been enough to draw the attention of the courts if he hadn't also threatened his son with disinheritance. In the end, it had been his son who had brought the case before the courts. Other noblemen, disgusted at the earl's inability to control the chaos of his manor-a chaos that they loathed even more than the earl's sexual barbarities-had applied pressure in the right places to ensure his conviction.
With that tale in mind, Nicki Jo and Katherine Boyle had invited Tobias Ridley and Solomon des Caux to share a house with them in Essen. Gossips would assume that they were living in sin, but the more normal and recognized sin of a heterosexual relationship between unmarried couples.
Only the couples themselves, and Colette and Josh Modi, knew that the relationships were homosexual ones.
"Okay," Nicki said, "This is the situation." Nicki thought for a few seconds and then continued. "We've been making toluene so we can methylate morphine to produce codeine efficiently, right?"
Both men nodded.
"Well, after we provided some codeine to the Essen Intelligence Service, the director must have mentioned it to someone, because the ordnance team for Essen Steel is now breathing down our necks to make tri-nitro toluene, TNT. Colette and I have been putting them off for a month, but they finally went to the Governor-General and he's starting to put the pressure on. So we've got to produce some explosives to get them off our backs."
Nicki Jo wrinkled her nose in exasperation. "Not that I want to. I want to save lives, damn it, not make boom toys."
Tobias laughed. "Boom toys are fun, Nick. Besides, the Republic can't afford a very large army, so we need to keep a tech edge."
"I know, Toby," Nicki Jo said, "but our feedstock situation isn't that great. Until we can get a steady supply of nitrates from Peru or Asia, we're limited in how much nitric acid we can produce. We can't produce it with electricity like Grantville can. At least, not profitably. And every ton we use for explosives will cut into our profit on stuff we can get higher margins on."
Tobias looked at Solomon. "Let me and Solomon work on it. We're good at nitration, aren't we you old catamite?"
Solomon gave Tobias a mock scowl. "Catamite am I? Who was on top of who last night, you sodomite?"
"Sodomite? Sodomite am I? Buggerer!"
The two men looked at each other and grinned. Nicki Jo laughed. "Please, guys, I don't want to hear about it. Male sexual bonding is not my thing." She smiled at Katherine, who smiled back.
She knew she shouldn't do it, of course. Tobias and Solomon just weren't quite ready to be on their own yet. Oh, they were good chemists, but they still didn't understand, deep down, how dangerous some of the processes were that they were dealing with. But it would get De Geer and the ordnance team off her back.