I NEEDED TO GET a look at the upstairs of Horritch’s factory, but that would have to wait till dark, and until I had a better idea of where to look for the refugees, I could do nothing on that front. Given how heavily guarded Montresat’s munitions works were, I really had no choice as to where to go next, though I went reluctantly. Norton Richter made steel, and he believed Bar-Selehm should be more closely tied to the Grappoli. If anyone had motive for the theft of the machine gun plans, it was him. The fact that he repulsed me, that he frightened me, could not be allowed to derail my investigation.
Remember the mask. Be composed. Neutral.
I knew his factory complex, though I had never worked on its chimneys. It was only a few blocks from the Seventh Street weaving shed in the area of the city known unofficially as the Soot. Richter’s Steelworks was a large, modern facility with a number of distinct parts, all red brick, all efficient and smelling—in a grimy sort of way—of progress. I thought I knew what to expect, so the scene as I reached the factory gates came as a surprise. A stage of sorts had been erected, and the area thronged with white people waiting for something to begin.
I hesitated, feeling uneasy, out of place.
My first thought was that this was some kind of protest, but I was quickly disabused of that notion by the cheering and clapping as Richter himself took the stage. He was clad in his gray and black almost-uniform, and flanked by similarly dressed impressive young men who stood like standard-bearers with a pair of flags, one for Bar-Selehm, one the red and silver lightning-fist of the Heritage party. Standing beside the stage in the same uniform, half master of ceremonies, half sergeant major, was Barrington-Smythe, and hanging at his waist in a purpose-built leather holster was a familiar little pickax.
I suppressed the urge to run.
Instead I lowered my head and pushed my hands into my pockets, skirting the edge of the crowd and trying to make myself inconspicuous. That at least was not hard. All eyes were focused on Richter, who had started to address the crowd like a general surveying his troops, speaking in sharp, clipped sentences punctuated with broad gestural flourishes like an actor in one of the larger theaters where you need to be big and loud to reach those in the back. I had never seen anything quite like it. There were torches set into the stage, and the foggy haze of the city seemed to glow about him like an aura, making him a figure of power and magic.
And there was the voice, ringing, precise, and sure of itself.
“Let me draw your attention to the marvelous edifice behind me. Ten years ago, the plant on this site produced three percent of the city’s steel. Three! Now we produce fifty-one percent! And the city’s overall consumption of steel has gone up by three hundred percent. A remarkable achievement made possible by what has come to be known as the Richter Conversion Process. Now, my competitors, such as they are, would have you believe that my contribution to the industry is all about quantity, but in this they are, as in many other things, mistaken. Yes, I produce a great volume of steel, more than they ever will in their wildest dreams, but how do I do that? What is the true heart of the Richter process? I will tell you. Because it isn’t about quantity. Quantity is a by-product of what we do here. The heart of the process is quality and, more particularly, purity.
“I see there are ladies in the audience, so I won’t bore you with a lot of confusing technicality, but the Richter process is about converting pig iron to steel. Now, don’t get me wrong, iron is a good material. It’s hard, and it—with luxorite—is the bedrock of Bar-Selehm. It’s what the city is built on, what it was built with. But iron is also full of impurities like carbon, and that makes it brittle. Give me a girder cast from pig iron, and I, if I find the right spot, could shatter it with a hammer.
“Not steel, though. Steel is strong and flexible. Steel is pure. And to make it, all I need is some of that pig iron, with all its imperfections, and a little hot air. Now, some of my critics will tell you that I have nothing but hot air, but I’ll tell you this for nothing: I know how to use it.”
The crowd cheered, but he waved them down and went on.
“I pour that molten, low-grade pig iron into one of my converters and blow the hot air up through the liquid metal. My competitors say, ‘You can’t do that! You’ll make the metal cold!’ And I say, ‘Really?’ And you know what? It isn’t true. It doesn’t make the metal cold. You blow the air through, and it makes the molten metal hotter still, and as the air comes out of the top of the converter, it blows out all the carbon, which burns up in a great blue flame like a torch, and all the manganese and silicon float to the top as slag, but the metal underneath is pure steel, and you can pour it off and make it into anything you want. It’s tough, it’s workable, it’s fifty times stronger than iron.”
More applause, though I found the speech a little baffling. Was this a political rally or a lecture on metallurgy?
“The city we know was built from iron, and like that iron, it is full of impurities which make it brittle, so that one day, when someone hits it in just the right spot, it will shatter. I offer you a new city, purged of its impurities, the blacks burned off like carbon, the Lani so much manganese slag to be tipped away, the half-breeds, intellectuals, homosexuals, and other deviants all purged in the fires of the process, leaving only what is strong and pure and bright as steel. That is the future! It’s what we want, what we need, what we deserve. Thank you for your attention and vote Heritage, vote Richter!”
The audience cheered and applauded, and I, suddenly cold and fearful, had to fight down the urge to slink away. I got ahold of myself and thought fast. Then, while Richter—guided through the crowd by Barrington-Smythe—shook hands and waved and kissed babies, I moved quickly around the perimeter wall, found a suitable spot, and with the aid of a dustbin, climbed over and in.
Some of the crowd were workers, presumably given time off to hear their employer’s political theatrics, which meant that the factory would be quiet, even deserted, but not for long. I chose the building which looked most like an office and made for it at a flat run across the cathead cobbles. In other circumstances, I might have hesitated, but the more his words resonated in my head, the more Richter stoked my rage. I fished the crowbar from my satchel with trembling fingers.
The impurities that would be burned away, the slag tipped out and discarded …
I thrust the head of the crowbar between the door and the jamb, and leaned on it till the lock splintered. What I was doing was criminal. Again. And I felt the terror of doing it in broad daylight and in this place where—more even than Elitus—I felt the venom directed at me and my kind like smog on the air. I shouldered the door in and made for the filing cabinets, levering them open with the same blind and unreasoning fury.
The murders, the human trafficking, the military support of the Grappoli. Richter was at the heart of all of this. He had to be.
There were books, great binders of work orders and contracts, inventories of raw materials and finished product, and I ran through them with unsteady hands, sweating with panic at the idea of being caught, but also with a kind of wild and dangerous desire for just that, as if I wanted a reason to turn the crowbar on whoever came through that door after cheering Richter on.
Purification …
I found those jobs commissioned the day after Darius’s theft of the War Office’s plans, the men and machines assigned to each, focusing not on the raw steel production—which was most of the plant’s output—but on the individual projects made on-site in Richter’s own milling, turning, and forging workshops. The largest order was for locomotive rails, placed by the Bar-Selehm West Transport Corporation. There were three others for reinforcing rods for use in concrete, one for bridge girders, and another for a made-to-order steamboat hull. Two other orders stood out. One was labeled BOLTABLE SUPERSTRUCTURE/TURRET, and I would have ignored it except that it had been commissioned by Montresat Industries, the arms company charged by the War Office to produce their machine guns.
Coincidence? The natural overlap of companies involved in related businesses? Or something else entirely? I couldn’t say, but then the other order seemed more telling anyway.
It was for a small project calling for only two hundred pounds of steel. It was labeled simply FIREBRAND: PROTOTYPE, and if it had been commissioned by someone outside Richter’s firm, that detail had been left out of the ledger.
It could, of course, have been anything. But my furious and terrified heart told me it wasn’t. It was a machine gun. Faster and more lethal than any made to date.
Firebrand. A flame-spewing tool for eradicating people as his converter eradicated impurities from metal.
The fear and anger that had been hot and swirling in me since I had heard Richter speak chilled and hardened into certainty.
Yes. This was it. The most deadly weapon Bar-Selehm could produce, in the hands of the man who wanted to see the likes of me eradicated.
The White Man’s Dilemma.… Which was what? When to shoot? Who to shoot? When to stop?
All of those.
But now I knew. For all his clever speeches, all that snide talk of metallurgical refinement applied to people as if they were so much industrial by-product, I knew, and I was going to stop him.
But why a prototype?
Why would Richter need to build a model of something already being produced for the military by his friend Montresat as if the weapon was still at the development stage? I drummed my finger on the book irritably and looked at the entry for Montresat Industries, mouthing the description softly to myself.
“Superstructure/turret.”
Meaning what?
Seeing the work itself might give me a clearer sense of what was going on. The projects were all assigned a number and a factory location. This one was designated B-3.
I slammed the book shut and left the office. I couldn’t conceal the damage I had done to the lock, so my break-in would be evident the moment the workers returned from Richter’s rally …
Which was now.
I saw them pouring in through the main gate, flowing up the railed drive toward the sheds and foundries. I came out into the cobbled yard, looking around for identifying marks on the various buildings around me, and spotted the designation B-1 painted in white over the door of one of the construction sites. I forced myself to walk rather than run, head bowed, as if I worked there, striding past the building to the second—marked B-2—and stopping at the next—B-3.
The structure was apparently half workshop, half transit depot and sat astride its own railway siding, the locked double doors designed to close a few inches above the rails and sleepers. I dropped to the track, shoved my satchel under the doors, and crawled after it as quickly as I could.
Though I could hear work going on close by—the ringing of hammers, the clank of machinery, and the drawing of heavy chain—this building was, at present, deserted. Stacked against one wall were large wooden packing crates branded with Richter’s lightning-fist emblem awaiting cargo, but the rest of the shop was an open assembly area cluttered with riveting and welding tools. There were bundled lengths of steel beams, buckets of nuts and bolts, vices, anvils, racks of hammers and pliers. The place was dominated by a small crane, beside which a gravity elevator gave access to an upper work station only a few feet below the roof.
The two pieces under construction—three of each, in various stages of completion—were what the logbook had labeled “superstructure and turret.” Each consisted of a girder frame closed in with thick steel plate. The one I took to be the turret was a slightly irregular box with a hole in the front and open underneath. There was a hinged hatchway in the top just big enough for a man to climb through. It looked vaguely nautical, like it might be the command tower of a steamship, though there were no windows or portholes. The bottom of the turret was flanged and seemed to fit into the other, larger piece, which I assumed was what the ledger had called the superstructure. It was also boxlike, though much shallower than the turret, and it too was missing its lower side. It was as long and wide as a two-horse carriage and did not look remotely boatlike. I was standing there, my head tilted one side, trying to make sense of what I was seeing, when I heard the sound of a heavy lock turning over.
I spun round in time to see the doors over the track pushed open and half a dozen white laborers coming in. One of them pointed and shouted, and then they were running. I did what I always do when life on the ground turned menacing. I went up.