March To The Sea

demonstrations of the weapons by now that the workers froze.

The mastoid analogue behind a Mardukan's ear wasn't quite as susceptible as the same point on a human, but it would do. The hardwood bludgeon bounced off it nicely as the shop manager was driven to his knees.

Julian ran a length of chain around the stunned foreman's ankles and gave a thumbs-up to Fain, who began hauling on the pulley arrangement. The sliding crane was designed for lifting multi-ton crucibles of boiling steel, and it made short work of lifting the three-meter Mardukan into the air. As the manager recovered, Julian threw a rope about his horns and used it to drag him along until he was suspended in the flaring heat over one of the furnaces.

'Here's the deal!' the Marine shouted to the head-down Mardukan. 'Springs are very important in weapons, and you, Tistum Path, are very important in the manufacture of springs. This is a vital position you hold, and one that I hope you are worthy of! Because if you're not—' the human hawked and spat into the furnace, but the glob of mucus exploded before it hit the surface of the bubbling steel '—it would just be a senseless waste of Mardukan life.'

'You can't do this to me!' the Mardukan screamed, coughing and squirming frantically in the fumes blasting up from the furnace. 'Don't you know who owns this place?'

'Of course we do, and we're going to be visiting him next. He's going to be terribly disappointed to learn that one of his employees misunderstood his orders to produce the best quality material, and damn the cost. Don't you think?'

'That's not what he said!'

'I know that.' The Marine shook his head. 'But there's no way he's going to admit that he told you to cut the cost, no matter what kind of shit you produced. So we're going to explain to him, in a gentle way, that while profits are the lifeblood of any economy, the contract he signed was supposed to include a reasonable profit margin without cheating. And we're already paying top dollar, so since we can't figure out which springs are shit and which ones aren't, he's going to be taking them all back. And replacing them. With good ones.'

'Impossible! Who's going to pay for it?'

'Your boss,' the Marine hissed, stepping into the blazing heat from the furnace. The red light of the boiling steel turned his angular face into a painting of Satan gloating over a new-caught sinner. 'And the next time I have to come back here, both of you are going to be nothing but trace elements in the steel. Is that perfectly clear?'

* * *

'These humans are insane!' the councilor complained hotly.

'All the more reason to support getting them on their way,' Wes Til replied, rolling a bit of spring in his fingers.

'They threatened me—me! They said they'd melt me in my own steel! I want their heads!'

'Hmmm?' Til looked up from the spring. 'Wouldn't have anything to do with cracked revolver frames, broken springs, and exploding barrels, would it?'

'Those aren't my fault,' the other Mardukan sniffed. 'Just because a few of my workers were cutting corners, probably to line their own pockets—'

'Oh be quiet!' Til snapped. 'You signed contracts. From the point of view of the humans, you're responsible, and you know as well as I do that the courts would back them up if there was time for that. But there isn't time, and they don't really seem to be very interested in half-measures, now do they? So, under the circumstances, I suggest that you do exactly as they say, unless you want your heir to be the one who does it.'

'Is that a threat?'

'No, it's more on the order of a statement. They seem to have the most remarkable intelligence system. For example, they've already tracked down the person who ordered the attack on Rus From. Or so I would guess. You notice that Ges Stin hasn't been gracing us with his presence lately?'

'Yes. You know something?'

'No. However, it's lately become common knowledge that it was Ges Stin who ordered the attack. It's even common knowledge who planned the attack at his orders and actually paid those unfortunate assassins. None of them, however, are anywhere to be found.'

'Ges Stin has many shipping interests. He could be in the southern states by now.'

'Hmmm. Perhaps.'

'What does Turl Kam think of this?'

'He thinks that he's down one competitor for the fisherman's guild vote,' the merchant said with a grunt of laughter.

'I will not be intimidated,' the other councilor declared defiantly.

'The sliming on your forehead gives you the lie. But you don't need to be,' Til replied. 'Just make sure your shops produce what they promised. Instead of weak crap.' The spring he'd been flexing broke with a pop. 'You really don't want a few thousand people with rifles in their true-hands . . . discussing the problem with you. Do you?'

CHAPTER THIRTY

Dersal Quan stood on the foundry floor and watched in disbelief as the human-designed device sliced through his best bronze as if it were qwanshu wood. He'd had even more doubts than he'd cared to express to Wes Til when he discovered just how many pieces of artillery the insane humans and their Diaspran henchmen expected to cast in the ridiculously short time limit they'd imposed. Now it looked to him as if they might actually manage to meet their preposterous production schedule.

The Quan foundries had been among the largest and wealthiest in K'Vaern's Cove for generations. They'd provided over half the Navy's total bombards since Quan's father's time, and at least a third of the bells hung in the Cove's towers to the glory of Krin also bore the Quan founder's stamp. Quan had never doubted that his modelers and patternmakers could produce the forms or that his casters could pour the guns, but pouring bronze wasn't like pouring concrete. It had to be done right, and there were no corners that could be cut unless one really liked bombards which were honeycombed with flaws and failed when proofed . . . or blew up in combat, always at the most inopportune time possible. And even after that time requirement had been allowed for, the need to bore out the guns was the single most time-consuming element of the entire process.

The true secret to a bombard of superior accuracy lay in the care taken in the preparation of its bore and the shot it would fire, although it had taken the gunners generations to realize how critical things like windage and uniform bores truly were. In fact, Quan's own father had begun his apprenticeship in the family business manufacturing cannonballs out of stone, and the art of cutting and reaming bores properly had been practically invented by one of Quan's uncles. It was a multistage process which required days for each piece, and no one had ever imagined that someone would demand so many guns in so short a time period, which meant that no one had the machinery to bore out more than a half dozen or so guns simultaneously. Not only that, but the crazy humans had insisted on a shot size which no one in K'Vaern's Cove had ever used, which meant that none of the boring equipment which already existed was the right size, and that the foundries also found themselves forced to produce new shot molds even as they cast the gun tubes themselves.

But the humans had insisted that there were ways around the problems, and so Quan had accepted their contracts, trusting Krin to prove the diminutive foreign lunatics knew what they were talking about. And trusting in the Cove's courts to absolve him of legal responsibility for failure when it turned out that they didn't.

As it happened, they had known what they were talking about, and now he watched in lingering disbelief as the ebony-skinned human called Aburia switched off her device and pushed the transparent goggles up on her forehead while one of her K'Vaernian assistants spun the handcrank which retracted the boring head from the new piece.