Desch Ituri nodded respectfully as he entered the hospital lobby. Behind him came Aurobindo Ghosh and Igor Stryski. Though Kalico could barely place him, she vaguely remembered that Stryski was a mechanic who worked on the equipment.
She had chosen the waiting room since it was the only place that offered even a hint of formality. She had summoned them here today since, for the first time, with her wounds healing, she dared to actually wear clothes.
“We’re so delighted to see that you’re improving, Supervisor,” Ituri greeted, standing uncertainly in the middle of the room, hands laced before him. The others nodded in agreement, eyes respectfully lowered.
“It’s taken longer than anticipated. Raya may actually remove some of the stitches from the smaller wounds tomorrow. I should be back to the mine in a couple more days. Meanwhile, I need to hear what’s been happening. How is production?”
Ituri carefully arched an eyebrow. “We’re running at about sixty-five percent, Supervisor. I think, within a week, we’ll be up to one hundred. I’ve had people on another project.”
“What project?” she almost snapped.
“Building the shot tower, ma’am.”
Kalico glanced irritably around the small waiting room, feeling cramped and frustrated. “And what, pray tell, is a shot tower?”
Ituri glanced over his shoulder at Stryski. The mechanic swallowed hard, obviously intimidated. “Well, uh, ma’am, it’s a tower. About twenty-five meters tall. Hollow on the inside. With a furnace at the top. Structurally it’s designed to withstand the weight—”
“Mister Stryski, I could give a good God damn. What’s it for?”
“For creating shot, ma’am,” Ghosh interjected when Stryski froze in terror.
“What in hell is shot?”
“Lead pellets, ma’am,” Ituri told her. “At the top the tower we melt lead. It’s poured out, molten, over a screen. The liquid lead then dribbles through the screen before falling the twenty-five meters. As it falls, the molten droplets cool and harden before landing in the soft material at the bottom. We end up with round pellets of shot. Round pellets have a ballistic property that allows a predictable dispersion of shot.”
“What are we shooting?”
“The cannons, ma’am.” Ghosh swallowed hard. His eyes wary in his full-moon face.
Kalico took a deep breath. “Cannons?”
Ituri, Ghosh, and Stryski glanced uneasily at each other before Ituri nerved himself enough to ask, “Didn’t Lieutenant Spiro tell you?”
“Apparently not.” Spiro again. What the hell was wrong with the woman? She hadn’t seen Spiro since Felicity was killed. Kalico was already prepared to rip a new patch off the sulking lieutenant’s ass; now it appeared she’d rip two.
“We radioed,” Ghosh quickly interjected. “Explained the whole process.”
“Well, I didn’t get the message. What cannons?”
“Smooth bores,” Ituri continued. “Made from three-meter lengths of that sialon piping. We’re reinforcing the breech area. Fenn Bogarten is manufacturing a slow-burning nitro-based gun powder. Something that should work to give us about three hundred meters a second at the muzzle.”
“Wait. Back up.” Kalico raised her hands in frustration. “Who authorized the building of these things?”
Ituri winced. “Uh, I did, ma’am. It’s the only solution.”
“Solution to what?”
“The mobbers, ma’am.”
“Cannons?”
Ituri and Ghosh both nodded anxiously. Stryski looked like he was about to throw up.
Ituri shrugged expressively. “Think of them as oversized shotguns, ma’am. Shotguns with ten centimeter bores on pintle mounts that we can swivel, aim, and shoot into the mobbers. Given our shot patterning experiments, with the discharge of all four guns, we should be able to decimate an entire flock. A quick reload, and with the next round, our sky should essentially be clear.”
Kalico closed her eyes, seeing it unfold in her head. “Why didn’t you just say so?”
“Um, we did, ma’am. Two Spots said he’d relay it to Spiro. Thought she was keeping track of things while you were, uh . . .”
“The mobbers have been back?”
“Every two days,” Ghosh told her. “It’s like we’re now part of their rounds. They’re regular enough that we’re ready for their arrival. Keep everyone under cover while they prowl around. Takes about a half an hour before they lose interest. We stay under cover for another half hour, just in case.”
“How soon before these cannons of yours are ready?”
Ituri glanced at Ghosh and Stryski. “Three or four days? We need to pressure test the barrels, make sure Bogarten’s powder is safe. Figure out what our operating pressures are so we don’t blow ourselves up.”
She gave them a slow smile. “I want to be there. I want to see those vile little bastards blown out of the sky.”
“We’ve got the lead, ma’am,” Ghosh told her. “It’s just making the shot and testing that still stand in our way. Then it’s just a matter of getting the flock in the right position where we can concentrate our fire, and, well, they’re in for a hell of a surprise.”
Kalico lifted an eyebrow. “What about production? Sixty percent, you say? Surely not everyone has been working on the cannons.”
“Smelter’s been running at about thirty percent, ma’am.” Ituri shifted uneasily. “We’ve been concentrating on lead production. Lead’s easy. Low melting point. You know that one upper-level vein in Number Two that was rich with lead? We’re mining that as fast as we can. We kind of made that decision on our own. Figured the mobbers were problem number one.”
She nodded her approval. “Good work. What about the farm?”
“Lost another acre or so,” Ghosh growled. “We tried hooking an improvised ripper bar on the back of a hauler in hopes we could sever the roots, drive the trees back. Damn near lost the truck when the trees grabbed the ripper and pulled back.”
“At this rate, how long before the forest reclaims the whole farm and smelter?” she asked woodenly.
“Maybe a couple of months?” Ghosh hazarded. “But that’s just a guess. I’m not a biological science kind of guy.”
“Remember how you laid out a line of that toxic smelter waste?” Ituri gave her a sidelong glance. “I don’t know what to say except this is Donovan. The trees never even hesitated. Radioactive or not, they just rootched their way across.”
“Rootched?”
“That’s what we’ve been calling it. Sort of a mix between roots and ruts and wiggling through the ground.”
“How’s morale?”
Again the three looked at each other. Ituri, to his credit, bravely said, “Supervisor, I’ll be honest. It’s like we’re under siege. I mean, sure, the cannons will probably deal with the mobbers. Shooting those freaking shits out of sky will be a definite up for our folks. But then what? People are wondering what’s coming next. Down at the smelter, it’s the trees. Right there before your nose. They’re closing in. Sure, we can blast them out again. But the forest is endless, and it’s going to eventually overrun the smelter.”
“And up at the mines,” Ghosh added. “Sure, we’re working, piling ore. But what’s the point? Where does this lead us? Who knows if a ship is ever coming back to Donovan? People are starting to wonder if this is the rest of their lives. If they’re going to be making hole until they die. Especially after what happened to you.”
Ghosh hesitated. “Supervisor, for the moment, the only thing they have to live for is a chance to rotate back to Port Authority for a little relaxation. They’re starting to lose hope.”
Ituri spread his hands. “Somewhere soon, ma’am, they’re just going to quit. Figure it’s better to be shot by Spiro’s marines than keep living this shit.”
To Kalico’s surprise, Stryski chimed in. “Worst part was seeing you go down, ma’am. You’re like the rock under our feet. There every day. Until the mobbers got you, we all thought you were invincible. And if you were, we were. But seeing you go down?” He shook his head. “It’s like, what if you die? Then what do we do?” He raised his hands in palms-up surrender.
Kalico took a deep breath. “So help me God, I will not lose what we’ve built. Even if I have to blast that damn forest back with a nuclear device.” She smiled wryly. “Assuming we can build one in time.”
Ituri shot Ghosh a relieved glance. “Well, ma’am, most of your bosses and crew chiefs are behind you. I mean, a lot of us were skeptical at the beginning. Working with you, having you there, sharing with us every step of the way, we want this to work just as badly as you do. One of the reasons we three came was to see if your heart was still in it, or if you’d given up after what the mobbers did to you.”
“I do not give up.”
“That will make a lot of people happy, ma’am.” Ghosh actually smiled his relief. “But what about the forest? It’s going to win in the end. It will either overrun the smelter, or we’ll have to disassemble it and move it somewhere closer to Port Authority.”
Kalico stared out the window at the avenue where Mark and Dya’s aircar still sat. She’d long ago grown used to the small knot of men and women who hung around with rifles to keep an eye on the hospital in hopes the quetzal would step out so they could shoot it.
Damn, these people hated quetzals. After all this time, worry about Rocket hadn’t abated in the least.
But the aircar . . . was there some clue?
“Any of you gentlemen know anything about that model of aircar?” She pointed.
As they crowded close to look, it was Stryski who said, “Sure. It’s a Beta. Dad had one when I was a kid. Mostly modular construction, but the performance parameters could be remapped for increased acceleration. I used to race Dad’s. Nothing formal. Just for beer money.”
Kalico considered. “So, could you tell how far that one ran to get here?”
Stryski said, “Sure. All it takes is a teslaometer to read the elon ratios on battery performance. The system’s algorithms are designed to maximize charge based on travel history. It won’t take me but a couple of minutes. I can tell you how far it flew and at what speed.”
“Can you tell which direction it came from?” she asked.
“Not on Donovan.”
“Then, Mr. Stryski, why don’t you go unravel that aircar while Ituri, Ghosh, and I enjoy a cup of coffee.”
As she watched Stryski step out into the warm sunshine, Kalico smiled happily. So her people were on the verge of despair? Maybe a deserter, a wounded little girl, a juvenile quetzal, and local herbalist had just handed her a whole new lease on Corporate Mine.