“If not the sailors,” Tekela muttered, earning a stern look from Lizanne.
“It looks as if I’ll have need of your secretarial skills once more,” she told her. “I trust you can find a note-book somewhere.”
“I thought I’d take the Firefly up again,” Tekela said. “Have a scout around.”
“Firefly?”
“The aerostat. I decided she should have a name.”
“Very nice, I’m sure.” Lizanne turned and started towards the derrick where Ensign Tollver was preparing a launch to take them to shore. “But I’m afraid your aerial adventures will have to wait.” She paused as an angry murmur rose from the direction of the docks. Two of the refugee groups had begun to jostle each other, voices raised as pushes and shoves soon became punches and kicks.
“Be sure to bring a revolver along with the note-book,” Lizanne added. “I believe we’re about to have a very trying day.”
“We work or we starve.”
The assembled crowd hushed as Lizanne’s words swept over them. She stood atop a raised platform in what had once been a shed used to house the locomotive engines for the incline railway. It was the largest covered space in the town and therefore a useful place for a general meeting. It also benefited from a scaffold of elevated walkways where a number of riflemen from the Viable had been stationed. She was flanked on either side by Captain Trumane and Madame Hakugen, and had hoped that the presence of the refugee fleet’s leaders, and the riflemen, might moderate any discontent. At this juncture, however, the assembly seemed unimpressed and certainly not cowed.
The hush that followed Lizanne’s statement was soon replaced by a babble of discontented voices, rising in pitch and volume. “We are not slaves!” one woman near the front shouted as she and a dozen others struggled against the line of sailors positioned in front of the platform. “I have children!” shouted another. “Corporate bitch!” added someone else.
Lizanne pressed the first and third buttons on the Spider and let loose with a blast of heated air, spread wide enough to prickle the skin but not set anything alight, along with a hard shove of Black, which sent the refugees at the forefront of the mob sprawling.
“I apologise,” Lizanne said, breaking the silence that followed. The crowd stared at her now, fear on most faces, but also plenty of defiance too. “Clearly I did not introduce myself properly,” she went on. “My name is indeed Lizanne Lethridge and I truly am a shareholder in the Ironship Protectorate. But I have another name, one I earned at Carvenport. They called me Miss Blood, and it was not a name I came by accidentally.”
She paused, scanning the crowd. She was quite prepared to send a concentrated blast of Black into the face of anyone who shouted another insult, but for now they seemed content to remain silent. “At Carvenport I organised a defence that saw thousands to safety,” she said. “I did so because those people gave me their trust, as I gave them mine. So I ask you to trust me now as I set out, in clear terms, the reality of our current circumstance.
“We have been provided with this haven, ugly as it is, not because our hosts desire our company or because their hearts are swollen with compassion at our plight. We exist here because I promised them weapons. You will make those weapons. If you do not the best we can expect from our hosts is to be told to leave. I don’t think you need a great deal of imagination to deduce what the worst will be.”
She allowed a few seconds to let the information settle, seeing a measure of defiance slip from some faces, and the fear deepen on others. “But know that the weapons we will construct here will not just be for our hosts,” she continued. “Sooner or later an army of monsters will come for us, and there will be no corner of the world left in which to hide. Running before this storm is no longer an option. I told you we work or we starve, and that is true. What is also true is that we fight or we die.”
She let the subsequent silence string out, hearing a murmur of tense discussion but no more shouts. “This facility will be run in accordance with corporate law,” she said, adopting a brisk, managerial tone. “With the addition of certain provisions in the Protectorate Disciplinary Code. Desertion will be punished by death. Shirking work will be punished by reduction of rations. Repeat offenders will be flogged. Every adult of fighting age will receive two hours’ military training a day. Crèches and schools will be organised for the children.”
She pointed to the rear of the shed where Ensign Tollver and a group of sailors had begun to set up a row of tables. “Please form orderly lines. Provide your name, age, previous work history and any useful skills. Any Blood-blessed will also make themselves known. We will be conducting a blood lot eventually so if you have the Blessing there’s no point trying to hide it.”
“A little to the left!” her father called from atop the scaffold. Lizanne injected an additional measure of Black and concentrated her gaze on the bulbous steel container she had manoeuvred onto the twenty-foot-tall bottle-shaped brick chimney. There were several such chimneys scattered about the town, usually found in proximity to the slag-heaps. Lizanne had initially seen little of interest in them so was surprised by her father’s enthusiasm for what he called “coking ovens.”
“Stop!” he called, waving his arms. Lizanne halted the flow of Black and the container settled onto the chimney-top with an ugly groan of metal on brick. “Excellent,” he said, then called on his assigned group of workers to start shovelling coal into the aperture in the chimney’s base. Once the oven had been filled he turned expectantly to Lizanne. “I think this would go quicker if you would . . .” he said, gesturing at the Spider.
Lizanne moved to crouch at the aperture, injecting a dose of Red before concentrating her gaze on the mass of coal. She stepped back as a deep red glow blossomed in the pile, then jerked aside as the whole thing burst into fiery life, the jet of flame coming close to singeing the sleeve of her overalls.
“Close it up,” the professor commanded and a labourer came forward with a long iron pole to secure an iron door over the blazing aperture. Lizanne climbed the scaffold to peer over her father’s shoulder as he stared at a dial fixed to a valve in the container’s side.
“It’s working,” he said as the dial’s indicator began to inch upwards. “We have ourselves a gas-plant.”
“Coal-gas will work as well as helium?” she asked.
“It doesn’t have quite the same lifting power but we can compensate for that with an expanded envelope. It does benefit from being less flammable than hydrogen. But given that we have neither helium nor hydrogen there seems little alternative in any case.”
The sound of a ship’s siren drew Lizanne’s gaze to the docks. She could see men running to their stations on the deck of the Viable Opportunity whilst smoke blossomed from her stacks. The reason for the commotion soon became clear as she saw a sleek Varestian sloop approaching from the eastern stretch of the Sound. She was flying a truce flag but it seemed Captain Trumane wasn’t willing to allow the Viable to remain at her mooring with a potential threat so close.
“Our hosts have decided to pay us a visit,” she said.
“Good,” her father said. “I hope they brought some copper.”
“Did you know?” Arshav Okanas glared at her with dark, angry eyes. He had arrived on shore with a ten-man escort led by the perennially stern of face Mr. Lockbar. Lizanne decided to meet Arshav with a squad of riflemen under Ensign Tollver’s command. The two groups eyed each other across the wharf whilst Lizanne stepped forward to offer her employer the most polite greeting she could muster. Today, however, conversational niceties didn’t seem to concern him.