all to see. That the machines should run, that the factory should be productive, Pingge and the rest held to be a sacred duty. All the rest of it, about silence and deference and proper place, could go hang as far as they were concerned. They were artificers, after all, and not just slaves or common labourers. So long as they made quota they felt it was no business of anyone’s — no, not the Empress herself — how they went about their lives.
Or at least, that had been their sentiment until today. The foreman was absent, for a start, which they would have assumed meant he was sick almost to death, but then one of the overseers was missing too and, short of a city-wide plague, that was unthinkable. The remaining overseer, a stooped Beetle-kinden man a few years from retiring, was plainly worried enough that he just let them get on with matters. Had the machines been less of a inviolable trust — a symbol of the elevation of their status, however meagre — then things might have been let slide, and Consortium clerks might have been knocking on the door a tenday later, demanding to know where their trousers had got to.
The talk was slow to start up, but soon the familiar chatter of the machines soothed their nerves, and the comments began to fly, pitched over and under and beneath the constant hammering of the mechanisms, passing from ear to ear in ripples of hearsay and defamation.
‘… and she’s not been sleeping in a cold bed these last three nights, despite her man being posted to Shalk…’
‘… ask me, they put something in the water, never known a man less able to…’
‘… came in and stomped about the place and then had his dinner and went out, and never did look in the cupboard…’
‘… all that talk about flying the length and breadth of the city to bring me a bag of flour and he…’
‘… got sick, and her with three children at home, and what can you do…?’
‘… roach of a housing-master changed her to a smaller room again, all that talk of supporting the troops and it’s still bribe money doing the talking…’
Each train of chatter came down the line to Pingge, or was started by her, and Kiin added nothing, passing it on, her mouth pressed into a careful line to hide the smile, because you never knew who might walk in, and sometimes the Consortium clerks or army quartermasters took offence, and the foreman was forced to make some show of discipline, not that he was even here…
Then abruptly the foreman was there, the broad, stomping Beetle man entering hurriedly with the missing Fly-kinden overseer, and with a stranger in tow: a Wasp-kinden, a sharp young knife of a man looking altogether too keenly down the lines of the machines. Wasps actually visiting the factory almost always meant trouble for someone, but with luck it was trouble that the foreman’s bulk would absorb.
They remained near the door, which let in only a pre-dawn greyness, not enough to rival the lamps. The echoing noise all around masked what they were saying, but it was quickly evident that they had brought an argument in with them. The foreman was shaking his head until his jowls quivered, making quick, angry gestures towards the workers. They caught some notion of quotas, of penalties.
‘They’re going to raise us,’ Pingge observed, meaning that the quota would go up. ‘Bound to happen.’
Kiin nodded. Life would get harder in direct proportion to the new requirements, but they had lived through it before. The trick was to come out the other side with all your fingers still on your hands.
The foreman had made some particularly angry point, and abruptly the Wasp had a palm to the man’s forehead, freezing the Beetle into immobility, face now utterly still, almost expressionless save for a slight frown of concentration, no more than the girls might show, watching the repetitive round of their machines.
Abruptly Pingge fell quiet, and a peculiar focus had come over all the workers, bent over their machines as though oblivious, dearly not wanting to become involved.
The Wasp had to ask three times, louder and louder, before they heard him. ‘Stop the machines!’
It was unthinkable, unheard of, but now the Fly overseer had gone to the Big Lever, the one they never used unless the end of the world was only a yammer of the looms away, and had dragged it down with all the force of his wings and bodyweight.
One by one the great machines fell silent, stopped in mid leap, ruining an entire batch. It was a disaster. Nobody could think what the matter might be. Did the Empire no longer need trousers?
The silence that now fell on Factory Nine had never been known in living memory. The Wasp strode down the line unhurriedly, eyes sharp. He was not quite in uniform, or not any specific uniform, although a lieutenant’s rank badge was pinned carelessly to the sleeveless robe he wore over his tunic.
‘All of them women, really?’ he called back to the foreman.
Pingge exchanged an uneasy glance with Kiin, because there were indeed a few men working there, Beetle- kinden and a couple of halfbreed slaves; but of the Fly- kinden, yes, women all.
The foreman shrugged. ‘As you see, sir.’ He had not quite recovered from being a second away from death.
‘You, you, you.’ The finger stabbed out, selecting prey. ‘You, you and you, with me now.’ The last two at his finger’s end had been Pingge and Kiin.
For a moment nobody moved. Pingge’s eyes were on the foreman, whose face was a picture of misery. Losing his workforce — but not just for the day, she read there. Losing a half-dozen skilled workers for good. She felt a terrible sinking feeling in her stomach, her instincts crying for her to fly, seek the sky and get out of the city. But of course that was out of the question. She had family here and, besides, where was there to go?
‘Move!’ the Wasp lieutenant snapped, and the half-dozen were reluctantly leaving their stations, gathering in a fearful huddle close to him, but not too close. Pingge squeezed Kiin’s hand for mutual courage, as the Wasp turned on his heel and marched out.
Rekef, he must be Rekef, she thought. What have we done? It seemed impossible that anything anybody had done in Factory Nine could possibly have brought down the wrath of the Rekef Inlander. Was somebody using the machines for something else? Something subversive. Or maybe it was some other factory? You hear all sorts about Factory Five down on General Malik Street. The idea that the Rekef would just round up and shoot a few random factory girls because someone somewhere had done something wrong seemed entirely plausible. You heard about it happening all the time, in the next city, in the neighbouring district, on some other street.
They kept within six feet of the Wasp’s heels, and not one of them made a break for it. In retrospect that was what surprised Pingge the most.
Within two streets they had picked up company, another little gaggle of Fly-kinden, mostly women still but also a couple of men. Soon there were more than a score of them, pattering behind a few striding Wasp-kinden like orphans behind a matron, the occasional straggler flying to keep up.
‘But where are we going?’ whispered Kiin, the first words anyone had dared utter.
Pingge frowned. There were maybe a dozen places across the city that you emphatically Did Not Go because the Rekef worked there, but they were nowhere near those. Instead, this looked like…
‘Severn Hill,’ she said abruptly, and loud enough to draw an angry frown from one of the Wasps.
The Fly-kinden milled and clustered, and slowed noticeably until the Wasps shouted at them to keep up. Severn Hill was Engineering Corps territory, and that raised an entirely different spectre: not execution or torture perhaps, but everyone knew the Engineers got through a steady supply of slaves in testing their inventions. Perhaps they had run short of slaves?
Severn Hill itself was a grand ziggurat, the outside bustling with a few hundred Wasp artificers who spared the straggling Fly-kinden not a glance. The air was loud with strange mechanisms, not the familiar patter of the looms, and the drone of flying machines was a constant background noise as they shuttled to and from a pair of nearby airfields.
‘In,’ snapped the lieutenant, and they entered the shadow of the ziggurat, were hustled down low-ceilinged corridors until they were disgorged into a square, windowless room over-lit by the rearing flames of gas lamps.
There was a man there, another Wasp but a strange-looking one, bearded like a Spider-kinden and with a slightly manic look in his eyes, and yet with a major’s badge at his collar. He regarded them from the far side of a vast desk, the top of which was entirely invisible beneath a clutter of papers.
‘As requested, Major Varsec,’ the lieutenant reported. ‘All the Consortium would spare us at this time. All factory artificers, and used to handling machines.’
The major regarded them coolly. ‘Do you think Captain Aarmon will take to them?’ he asked, smiling slightly.
Pingge saw the lieutenant twitch at the question, for all it was plainly rhetorical. Whoever ‘Captain Aarmon’
