"Okay, I'll let you guys have building number one. But you've got to be careful. That was our original pilot plant and it just doesn't have the safety features we've built in to the major production facility. Remember . . ."
Tobias and Solomon laughed, then chorused together, ". . . it's hard to make miracle drugs when you've blown up the chem lab." Nicki Jo had had that sign posted in three different languages at all entrances to the Essen Chemical Company's facilities and laboratories. It seemed to have worked because they'd had no major accidents except for some minor burns, spills, and inevitable glass cuts. But there was always a first time.
Nicki Jo shook her head and wagged her finger at them. "I'm serious, guys. Watch your damn purity. Distill, distill and then distill again. If you even suspect you have too many impurities, destroy it. And for God's sake, make small batches. Just telling the ordnance team we're starting to work on it will keep them satisfied for a few months. Understood?"
Both men nodded solemnly again. Nicki Jo sighed. Now she knew what it felt like to send children off into the world where you couldn't watch them every step of the way. It wasn't a pleasant feeling. She resolved to drop in as often as she could to check up on them.
"Okay, Toby, your turn to play gleek. You still owe me two guilders from last week."
****
Three weeks later, Nicki Jo was deep in conversation with her head chemist, the Hungarian Banfi Hunyades, when Katherine Boyle came hurrying through the door of the Essen Chemical Company's main research lab. The lab was an impressive assemblage of glassware, earthenware and stoneware. Alembics, retorts and ovens were everywhere and the building had been designed to take into account the needs of a down-time chemistry lab that had to depend on seventeenth-century materials and apparati. The majority of the glassware, thermometers and other instrumentation was manufactured by the Essen Instrument Company, a separate subsidiary started up by Colette Modi, Nicki Jo and Katherine, with financial backing from Essen Steel investors. Stoneware came from the Raeren workshops south of Aachen. Ovens, alembics and other metal apparati were built to spec by metalworkers in the Steele area who worked for or contracted with the Essen Steel Company. To the eyes of a twentieth-century chemist, the lab would have seemed a dangerous Rube Goldberg mishmash filled with safety hazards. In the down-time universe it represented the best state of the art chemical research lab in Europe, outside of Grantville.
When Nicki Jo saw Katherine's face, her guts began to twist inside her. Normally there was nothing that could get Katherine Boyle upset. So the worried frown on her face was not a good sign.
"What is it, Katy?"
"I really don't know if it's that much of a problem," Katherine said, "but Tobias and Solomon have kept it a secret for a week, so I thought I better tell you as soon as I could."
"What?"
"According to Franz Dubois, Tobias and Solomon decided they weren't getting enough toluene out to work with, so they decided they'd try distilling out phenol and nitrating that for an explosive instead."
Nicki Jo's face turned white. "Oh shit."
Banfi Hunyades shook his head. "Young fools. Don't they remember the lectures? Or do they simply think they are immortal?"
Of all the alchemists and chemists hired by Essen Chemical Company from the members of the Acontian Society, Banfi Hunyades had the most experience. A man in his late fifties, Hunyades not only came from a long line of Hungarian alchemists, he had also instructed students in chemistry and chemical medicine at Gresham College in London. His experience and intelligence had enabled him to easily pick up on the principles of up-time chemistry and help adapt up-time laboratory techniques and methods to seventeenth-century materials.
"What?" Katherine said. "Is it that much more dangerous than working with toluene?"
Hunyades nodded. "Tri-nitro phenol is also known as picric acid. Many of the metal salts of picric acid are highly unstable, even more so in some ways than mercury fulminate. And you know what kind of precautions we take in its manufacture."
"So what are we going to do?" Katherine asked.
"Tear those boys a new asshole, for one," Nicki growled. She looked at Hunyades. "Will you back me up on this one, Banfi? Sometimes I think Tobias and Solomon are still stuck in male dominance mode. If you help ream them out, it might make more of an impression."
Hunyades nodded. "Whatever you wish, Miss Pricket. Do you want to go now? The experiment still has an hour to run."
"Yeah," Nicki Jo said, "let's shut it down. We may not be back in time and I don't want to leave this up for someone else to stumble across." It took them five minutes to break down the apparati and arrange for a clean-up crew.
Building one, two hundred yards away from the main research lab, had been the first coal tar pilot plant built by the Essen Chemical Company in the spring of 1633. It had been mainly a proof-of-principle plant, designed to establish the needs for a more sophisticated coal tar distilling facility.
Banfi Hunyades, Nicki Jo and Katherine Boyle were thirty yards from the plant when it blew up.
****
It all could have been much worse, of course. Banfi and Katherine were hit by non-lethal splinters from the door while Nicki Jo was knocked unconscious when a bigger chunk dug a groove along the left side of her head. The plant itself had been designed with a weak west wall in case of a hydrogen explosion and that fact helped save the lives of the ordnance team and Solomon des Caux who had also been protected by heavy equipment between them and the blast. The only serious injury was Franz Dubois, who lost an eye to a splinter.
But the three men closest to the blast, including Tobias Ridley, died.
****
It was the fourth day after Tobias' funeral when Nicki Jo's subconscious baggage forced itself into her fore brain. She was in the dark, alone, in her bedroom.
You piece of shit, Prickett. You knew they weren't ready. You knew it was dangerous. And you wanted to absolve your conscious. So much easier to tell yourself you were busy, to let the oversight slide, wasn't it?
Her self-loathing, buried for years, made her choke. Carefully, quickly, she cut her wrist with the small dagger she always carried. Not a dangerous cut, just a nice shallow cut. For the pain. Take that, you bitch. Again, another shallow cut. It had been years since she'd even thought of cutting herself, let alone done it.
It all started in sixth grade. Stephanie Baxter, the Queen Bee. Pretty, petite, popular. She'd hunted around for someone she and her friends could pick on, someone they could all hate with a passion. Her sights had fallen on big, awkward Nicki Jo Prickett. It helped, of course, that Nicki Jo was smarter than any of them.
But that still wouldn't have been enough for Nicki Jo to turn to self-injury without her mother. Karen Prickett had had a difficult time with her first daughter, Angela. She had been bound and determined to do it right with Nicki Jo. The pressure to be perfect had been intense. Nothing Nicki did was good enough. When Nicki Jo protested, tried to rebel, her mother, a hefty woman herself, beat her, often after half-a-dozen whiskey sours. When her dad or sister tried to intervene, they were screamed at and beaten, too. She loved her dad, but he'd been too weak to deal with her mother. So he went passive-aggressive and retreated. Angela did what she could, but by the time Nicki Jo was in sixth grade, Angela had left the house to live with relatives.
So Stephanie had been the tipping point. It hadn't helped that Nicki Jo's burgeoning homosexuality had made her feel attracted to Stephanie. That only increased her self-loathing. By the time Amy Kubiak was in middle school and able to really help, the cutting addiction was already in place for Nicki Jo Prickett.