by David Weber
“Why, sounds like a pretty fair idea to me!” Praigyr replied. “Except, of course, that after I’ve taken her around it’ll probably be time for you to try your hand at the wheel here before we go do all those other things.”
“I know you’re only trying to keep your arse out of your office as long as possible,” Delthak said repressively, then chuckled. “And in this case, it worked. Come on! Let’s see this thing move a little faster.”
* * *
“Looks like you’ve come up with another game changer, Ehdwyrd,” Merlin Athrawes said much later that evening.
The Duke of Delthak sat beside the Duchess of Delthak, leaning back in his armchair while a tiny infant girl drowsed on his shoulder. Her name was Sharleyan Elayn, and for all her tiny size she was as much a miracle as her twin brother, Maikah Rhaiyan, who slumbered more deeply in his mother’s arms.
Zhain Howsmyn had been born the daughter of an earl, but Sir Maikah Traivyr was a Charisian earl. That meant he’d been blissfully immune to the sorts of prejudice aristocrats and other realms felt for those “of no blood.” She was ten full years younger than her husband, but the Earl of Sharphill, had approved wholeheartedly of her marriage, and not simply because he’d already realized Ehdwyrd Howsmyn was going to wind up far wealthier than most mere aristocrats. That had been a factor in his thinking, although even his wildest imagination had fallen immeasurably short of the wealth Howsmyn had actually attained. Far more importantly, however, his daughter—his only child—had clearly adored the short, stout young commoner who’d won her heart.
Over the years, his common-born son-in-law had become the son he’d never had and Sharphill had never regretted approving the marriage. Indeed, his only regret had been that it was a childless marriage and that the Sharphill title must pass to one of his nephews or one of their children upon Zhain’s death. It wasn’t that he hated any of those nephews; it was just that they were nephews, not children or grandchildren. Even more than that, though, what he regretted was that as much as his daughter loved children, she clearly wasn’t going to have any of her own. She and her husband had sponsored over a hundred and fifty Siddarmarkian orphans as their foster children, and she had filled her life by pouring her motherhood into those kids, and into the dozen orphanages the Duke of Delthak’s privy purse financed all over the Charisian Empire. Yet her father had always mourned for those biological grandchildren he would never know.
But Sir Maikel hadn’t known about Nimue’s Cave or an electronic person named Owl, either. And he hadn’t known about the medical science of the Terran Federation or ever heard of something called polycystic ovary syndrome. Zhain Howsmyn was fifty-three years old, but those were Safeholdian years, not Standard Years. By the calendar of Old Terra, she’d been “only” forty-seven when Owl’s medical unit diagnosed the problem, corrected the hormone imbalance, and injected the medical nanobots to correct the long-term damage to her ovaries which had prevented her from conceiving.
Her father had been eighty-four Safeholdian years old when he’d held the tiny, fragile, infinitely precious grandchild bearing his name, and his twin sister, named for her long dead grandmother. Of all the miracles Merlin Athrawes and Owl had made possible, Sharleyan and Maikel were the two for which Ehdwyrd Howsmyn was most grateful.
“Not me,” he said now, keeping his voice low and shaking his head gently to avoid disturbing his daughter. “That was all Stahlman’s idea. Oh, Owl and I—and don’t forget Zhanayt!—helped with the mechanics, but the idea was all his. You’re right about its being a game changer, though.”
“In so many ways,” Merlin agreed.
Steam had already been applied to several different vehicles, but all of them were huge and bulky, like the steam shovels and agricultural tractors the Delthak Works had been turning out for several years now. That was because boilers, feedwater tanks, and coal took up a lot of space. They’d used oil in some of their designs, but that hadn’t brought down the size of the boilers and oil was substantially more expensive than coal. So if the vehicle had to be big enough for the boiler, it might as well be big enough for at least some coal stowage. And it wasn’t as if construction equipment or farm tractors needed a lot of range before they refueled.
But Stahlman Praigyr’s new brainchild was different. In fact, it was very similar to a steam engine designed back on Old Terra by brothers named Doble. Instead of a conventional boiler, it used a single coiled spiral tube which contained only about a gallon of water—a minuscule amount, compared to a conventional boiler. It was heated to an extraordinarily high temperature and pressure, however, which was only made possible by combining its concept with Zhansyn Wylsynn’s new “white oil.” Kerosene forced through nozzles under high pressure burned as a vapor, at intensely high temperature, and the high-pressure steam from the spiral boiler fed a two-cylinder uni-flow engine. The prototype installed in the vehicle he and Delthak had tested that afternoon produced twenty dragonpower, or about forty-five Old Terran horsepower, but he was already designing engines that would be ten or fifteen times as powerful. And compared to any other boiler and engine, they were tiny.
Delthak’s contribution to the project, courtesy of Owl and the library computer in Nimue’s Cave, was the duplication of Doble’s closed condenser, which captured and recondensed the water any steam engine vented as steam. Praigyr had practically salivated at the notion, since it cured the greatest weakness of steam as a mobile system: the need to refill any vehicle’s feed water tank at frequent intervals. His current estimate, which Owl’s analysis suggested was low, was that he ought to be able to achieve something on the order of a thousand miles on Mainland high roads on twenty-five gallons of water and twenty-five gallons of kerosene. And given the exposed area of the boiler coil and the combustion temperature of the kerosene, his new engine should be able to raise steam in under a minute even in sub-zero temperatures. Alcohol would have to be added to the water supply to keep it from freezing, but Safehold’s average temperature was substantially cooler than Old Terra’s had been, which meant antifreeze had always been a staple of its hydraulic systems.
“It’s going to be interesting to see how this shakes out in combination with the railways,” Merlin continued. “I don’t see any way for it to supplant them. Even back on Old Terra, highway trucking could never challenge railroads’ ability to haul thousands of tons of cargo over long distances. Not before counter-grav made surface lorries and trains obsolete, anyway! Over shorter distances, and as the final distributive stage, though, they had a tremendous effect on the transportation industry. And we’re about to introduce vehicles that can move tons of cargo under their own power on a planet with high roads as good as most superhighways back on Old Terra at the same time we’re building the first railroads.” He shook his head. “I don’t have any idea how that’s going to play out!”
“As you say,” Duchess Delthak said with a chuckle, “it will be interesting to see.” She smiled at her husband. “Between the pair of you, you’ve made sure we’d be living in interesting times even without the Jihad!”
“Well, I know how you hate being bored, love,” Delthak teased, and she snorted.
“Of course, that diesel you and Sahmantha Windcastle have been working on could shake things up even more, if the Old Terran history I’ve scanned is anything to go by,” she said more seriously.
“I’m just as happy we’ve all agreed to hold that one in reserve,” Merlin replied, shaking his head. “Steam we’ve pretty much established is acceptable under the Proscriptions. Internal combustion, even without electricity, might be a little more iffy. Besides, if this works out as well as Owl is projecting, we may not need diesels.”
“No, not immediately, anyway,” Delthak agreed. “They will be more compact, though.”
“Yeah, but they’ll also need transmissions,” Merlin pointed out. “Stahlman’s brainchild—and if I have anything to do with it, these things will end up being called ‘Praigyrs’—is direct-coupled to the drive whe
els. Can’t do that with a diesel.”
“True,” Delthak acknowledged. Power-for-power, a properly designed diesel would weigh somewhere around half as much as the new “Praigyr”—and, he admitted, the name was probably inevitable, even without Merlin getting behind it and pushing—but it would also have to operate at a far higher number of revolutions per minute. Some form of a geared transmission to step the rpm down would be essential, and that would eat up most of the diesel’s weight advantage over a Praigyr.
“Speaking of transmissions—” he went on.
“Not going to happen,” Merlin said.
“But it makes so much sense someone else is likely to think of it before we get it introduced,” Delthak argued.
“No,” Merlin said again. “I don’t know that I fully agree with Cayleb and Sharleyan—and Domynyk and Dunkyn, for that matter, let’s not forget them—on this one, but they’re pretty insistent. And if I don’t fully agree with them, that doesn’t mean I don’t think they have a point. That’s one reason I’m so pleased to see the Praigyr as an alternative to diesels. For now, at least. Besides, you have enough new toys coming off the Delthak idea train to keep you busy without it.”
“I know,” Delthak acknowledged. “I just want to get the conceptual foundation in place as early as I can. That way it’ll be less of a leap when the time comes. Maikel and Paityr may have made sure the Church of Charis is a lot more relaxed where the Proscriptions are concerned, but we still can’t just kick them over. The more prep work I can do on anything new, the less likely the conservatives are to start muttering about ‘demonically inspired abominations’ all over again! Trust me, that’s something I still hear a lot.”
“I understand your point, Ehdwyrd.” Merlin frowned. “And you’re right; we do have too many examples of new hardware springing forth like Athena from the brow of Zeus.” Delthak chuckled at the analogy no one outside the inner circle could possibly have understood. “On the other hand, Domynyk and Dunkyn have a point. If we put the ‘conceptual foundation in place,’ one of your people is going to grab it and run with it sooner than any of us really want to roll it out. That’s your fault.”
“My fault?” Delthak arched both eyebrows, and his wife chuckled again.
“I didn’t say it was a bad problem to have,” Merlin told him, “but in this case it is a problem. We have gotten everyone accustomed to the way those infernal Charisians keep kicking over the applecart, and the job you’ve done in recruiting innovators and then pushing them even harder to innovate is a big part of that. I’ll admit, you had a head start, given how Charisian attitudes towards innovation already differed from those of the rest of Safehold, but the way you’ve gotten behind that is truly remarkable.” Merlin’s expression was sober, now, his tone serious. “I know I tease you about it sometimes, but the truth is that you’ve probably done at least as much in that direction as Cayleb and Sharleyan or Maikel. So as soon as you started musing about the concept, one of those innovators of yours would grab it and start turning it into hardware.”
“Would that really be such a terrible thing in this case, Merlin?” Zhain Howsmyn asked. “We’ve done just that with a lot of ideas that were far more of a challenge to the Proscriptions than this would be!”
“I agree. In fact, that’s part of where Domynyk and Dunkyn are coming from on this one. There’s not a single new theoretical concept involved, only a matter of engineering and design, so it’s unlikely anyone would condemn it as a Proscription violation. Their concerns are based more in terms of military strategy than industrial or religious strategy.”
“Excuse me?” The duchess looked puzzled.
“I understand their thinking, sweetheart,” Delthak said. “They want to keep an extra ace tucked up our sleeve.”
“What you talking about now?” she asked. “I’m sure it’s something devious. You were such a straightforward person before you fell in with Merlin.”
“Evil companions,” he told her, leaning across to kiss her cheek. Then he settled back as Sharleyan stirred sleepily. He put a gentle hand on the back of the baby’s head, nestling her into his shoulder.
“Right this minute,” he said, “Charis is the shipbuilder to the world even more than we ever were before. Every steamship in existence was built in a Charisian yard, and we’ve got a backlog of orders that’s big enough to keep us expanding our shipyards for the next five years even if no one ever orders a single additional ship. But we won’t be the only shipbuilders forever, and that’s good, a big part of the Nahrmahn Plan to drive other realms into actively fostering their own industrial development.” He shrugged—very gently, mindful of his sleeping daughter. “One of the reasons Cayleb and Sharleyan have officially proscribed any foreign warship construction is to push other rulers to build their own yards because the only way they’ll get modern warships of their own is to build them themselves.”
“Oh, that much I understand,” Zhain told him. “I even understand why you’re building all those ‘joint-venture’ shipyards in places like Dohlar and South Harchong.”
“It’s a pity that idiot Zhyou-Zhwo shot himself in the foot before we got the Yu-shai yard off the ground for him,” Delthak sighed. “If the stupid bastard had just waited one more year—just one—he could’ve expropriated an entire operational shipyard of his very own. And he would have felt so clever at having ripped us off that way!”
“Stupidity and bigotry are their own worst enemies,” Merlin agreed.
Outside the inner circle, no one on Safehold could possibly have guessed just how hard Delthak Enterprises and the Charisian crown were working to lose their current generation of “industrial secrets” to any competitor they could find. They might not have been so eager to do that, despite their need to spread industrialization as widely and deeply—and quickly—as possible if they hadn’t had so many centuries of technological advantage banked in Nimue’s Cave, though. That advantage wasn’t infinite, however, especially since it had to be filtered through the limitations imposed by the Proscriptions. Which was rather the crux of Domynyk Staynair and Dunkyn Yairley’s argument in this case.
“Assuming your husband is his usual efficient self, there’ll be shipyards in every major Mainland realm in the next few years, Zhain,” he continued. “Zhyou-Zhwo may not have thought about that before he kicked Charis out of South Harchong, but Symyn Gahrnet in Desnair is certainly thinking about it right now. The Desnairian approach to industrialization sucks wind in a lot of ways, but that doesn’t mean it can’t ultimately succeed. After a fashion, at least. In fact, I’m sure Gahrnet will succeed in building a Desnairian industrial sector; it just won’t be as large or as efficient as it might have been if Mahrys were willing to adopt the Charisian model.”
“He can’t,” Howsmyn interjected with an edge of satisfaction. “Not unless he’s prepared to overturn the fundamental basis of Desnair’s social order.”
“No, he can’t,” Merlin acknowledged. “Bottom line, that’s Zhyou-Zhwo’s problem, too, although it’s going to be interesting to see how that ultimately works out now that he’s lost the entire northern half of his empire. South Harchong was always a lot closer to the Charisian—or at least the Siddarmarkian—model than North Harchong. Now he’s trying to force-feed the South on the North’s way of doing things. It’s entirely possible he’s going to find himself facing another revolt if he’s not careful. But unless he does, I think it’s inevitable he and Mahrys will find themselves drawn closer and closer together. Desnair and South Harchong might be uncomfortable partners, but Mahrys and Zhyou-Zhwo are definitely birds of a feather.”
“One way or another, though, I’m sure Ehdwyrd will still get those shipyards built!” the duchess said loyally.
“Oh, indeed I will!” Her husband smiled evilly.
“Now what are you up to?” Merlin sounded suspicious.
“Well, it just happens that Stywyrt Showail’s about to hire one of Delthak Shipbuilding’s top people right out from under Nahrmahn Ti
dewater,” Howsmyn told him.
“Shallys?” Merlin’s eyes narrowed.
“Shallys,” Howsmyn confirmed, and Merlin chuckled.
Dymytree Shallys had been one of the talented artificers Nahrmahn Tidewater had recruited for Delthak’s original canal building yard on Lake Ithmyn. He’d gone with Tidewater to the larger Larek Yard, where the new Delthak Shipbuilding subsidiary of Delthak Enterprises built its deepwater steamships, including over half the Imperial Charisian Navy’s growing number of steam-powered warships. He’d risen to assistant yard manager and been assigned as Delthak’s primary liaison with the Navy, because he’d proven almost equally talented as an administrator.
He was also ambitious and unscrupulous. Those were two traits Master Shallys had gone to some lengths to conceal, but Nahrmahn Baytz had become aware over two years ago of his plans to steal his current employers blind. What Shallys hadn’t suspected was that those current employers were just fine with that.
“So Showail’s ready to make his move?” Merlin shook his head. “I hadn’t realized he was getting so close. On the other hand, that’s more up your and Nahrmahn’s alley than it is mine right now.”
“Yes, he is,” Delthak said with a nod of understanding. “And Shallys will be relocating to Desnair the City with him. I’m sure they’ll both make buckets of money helping Mahrys ‘steal’ our technology. Although Showail probably won’t be able to figure out which makes him happier—the money or putting one over on me.”
The duke chuckled, and his wife laughed out loud, then shushed a sleepily stirring Maikel Rhaiyan.
“Such a straightforward person when I met you,” she said then, mournfully, a twinkle in her eye. “That poor man has no idea you’ve been playing him like a fiddle for years, Ehdwyrd.”
“And if that ‘poor man’ wasn’t such an unmitigated prick, I wouldn’t have been able to, either,” Delthak riposted. “The only thing I really regret about it is that there aren’t any child labor laws in Desnair and I know damned well that that son-of-a-bitch will have kids in his manufactories and his shipyards.” The duke’s round, cheerful face turned grim. “That’s another thing he’ll do to spite me, and some of those kids are going to get killed and some of them are going to get crippled and just … thrown away.”