He nodded. “Good work. We're running back to port. Just keep an eye on them and tell me if you score any hits.”
“Well, that was fun,” Kelvin commented. “That last shell was a little closer than I would have liked, but still.”
“Don't celebrate. We're not out of the woods yet,” Shane warned. He focused his attention forward and tried to keep their course as straight as possible.
Now, to find out just how well the enemies had taken their bait.
Brandon unbolted the last section of the torpedo tube.
“We're loose,” he said.
Jamie nodded and started to push one end. Brandon shoved the other, and the metal tube rolled off the deck into the sea with a splash.
“Those are a lot lighter without the torpedoes in them,” she said. “I don't know how Ryan and Shane managed to lift them all by themselves, especially because neither of them are brutes.”
Brandon shrugged and looked back at the enemy vessel, still trying to pursue them but rapidly losing ground. Even with cargo in the hold their vessel simply had too much power for their foes to catch up, especially when the enemy had to lug around heavy equipment like their steam cannon.
He pulled out his binoculars and looked through them, just in time to see a geyser of water shoot up from the enemy's bow. Another impact made it shudder and tore the front wide open.
“Jeeze,” he said, scrambling for his lookout position. Brandon reached it and opened the speaking tube. “Shane, two direct hits.”
“Is it dead?”
Brandon looked back at the stricken enemy vessel through his binoculars. “Torpedoes took the bow clean off. I don't think it was heavily armored, but still.”
“Those weren't full-sized ones either. Tell Jamie good work for me.”
“Got it.” He looked down at the deck. “Brandon said good shot.”
She shrugged. “I can't believe that this actually worked.”
Brandon felt a smile cross his face. “Yeah, that's our fearless leader for you. Understands how people act and think, and he can predict what they'll do pretty well. And he's good at using our skills to make a cohesive plan. Don't know if that's the kind of leadership you're looking for, but that's what he is.”
“It's something to think about,” Jamie said.
Brandon looked back at the enemy ship sinking below the waves and smiled again. He didn't feel an ounce of sympathy for one of their victims. And with any luck, they'd be adding more to that total.
“Well, thank you again,” Ryan said once they got back to port. “You saved us a lot of trouble. I'll try to compensate you-”
Shane held up a hand and shook his head. “Don't worry about it. We got a chance to shoot up a raider, and we were going this way anyhow. I'm just glad that we could give you some help.”
“Um. Yeah. Thanks again,” Ryan said, shuffling awkwardly.
Shane nodded and looked toward a trio on the dock with the crate of blood lotus. “Go on. Your guild's waiting for you.”
“I won't forget this,” Ryan said as he stepped off the vessel, waving. “Thanks again.”
Shane waved back and watched him leave.
“So you didn't get the chart,” Jamie commented.
“No, we didn't. We don't nee it right now,” he said. “What we need is some trust and goodwill, and I think we got it. Even if it's just a small guild.”
“A lot of risk for a small reward.”
Shane nodded. “Ain't that the truth. But enough of that. We've got some goods to sell.”
Chapter Fifteen
Bailey heard a clattering and a yell that made her stop dead in her tracks just outside the warehouse. She hesitated for a moment, wondering if she should step inside, but then another clatter and yell piqued her curiosity.
“OK, can we not keep throwing metal tools around like confetti?” a voice she didn't recognize said.
Bailey walked through the doorway to find Jocelyn, Teresa, and two others she didn't recognize. Jocelyn saw her coming and waved.
“Ah, so you're here.”
“Sorry, I got tied up with some other business. Had to do maintenance on our ship.”
“That's always the priority. Anyhow, this is Rami, and this is Dillon,” she said, indicating the other two. “They're Blue Frog engineers working on our little project.”
“Good to meet you,” Rami said.
“You have a lot of female engineers in your guild,” Dillon commented.
“Is there a problem with that?” Bailey asked.
He smiled and shook his head. “Nah, I don't have a problem with that. Just an observation. Not an unwelcome one either.”
“Don't even think about trying to put the moves on her. She's married, and her hubby is big enough to crush your head with one hand,” Jocelyn warned.
“Who says I was going to do anything like that?”
“At this point I think it's pretty safe to assume that, man,” Rami commented dryly. “Push it much further and you're bordering on being a creeper.”
“Hey, I resent that.”
Bailey laughed. “So was that what all the wrench throwing was all about?”
“Oh, that?” Jocelyn asked. She looked over at Teresa, who had a scowl on her face. “No, that's not the reason for it.”
“Then what is?”
“It doesn't work,” Teresa said bluntly.
Bailey frowned. “What doesn't work? The device?”
“No, no, the device works fine,” Rami said. “We built it and we tested it. We can produce synthetic fire crystal dust with it, but...”
“But it doesn't work, so what good is the machine?” Teresa spat out.
“That's not quite true,” Jocelyn said. “We've produced quantities of it, and it works. Just not how we intended.”
“OK, you're being really vague. What the heck is any of that supposed to mean?”
“It doesn't have the explosive power of regular fire crystal dust,” Dillon explained. “We don't have good instruments to measure its force, but when we tried it-”
Rami walked over to a table and grabbed something off of it. “Here, see for yourself. This is the results of one of our tests.”
Bailey took the slab of metal and looked it over. It had been buckled by a gigantic dent, but the piece was still completely solid.
“How much did you use?”
“A full load for your average three inch shell,” Jocelyn said.
Bailey nodded. “Oh. That explains it.”
With that much fire crystal dust the metal should have a hole in it, at least, and this wasn't even armored plating, just part of a regular thin hull.
“So there you have it,” Rami shrugged. “That's what we have It works, but yet it doesn't work how we'd like.”
“Great,” Bailey said. “So we just got taken for a ride by the guild that sold us the blueprints.”
“Well, they sold us exactly what they said it was,” Jocelyn said. “I guess we can't complain about that.”
“Caveat emptor,” Bailey agreed.
“Yeah, that makes us all feel so much better,” Teresa said curtly.
“Calm down. Throwing wrenches all over the place isn't going to do anything to help us.”
“They'll hit harder than the powder will.”
Bailey looked over at Rami. “So are we going to do chemical analysis on it?”
“We'll do what we can,” he said.
“A mixture is probably going to be our best bet, I think.”
“Yeah, the question is going to be ratios and amounts. And whether it's cost effective. If this stuff is nothing more than a stabilizer then it's not going to be worth messing around with it. There's other cheaper stuff on the market.”
“Is there some other way to do stuff with it?” Bailey asked.
Dillon spoke up. “I have a few ideas. We're just using loose powder, but there's so much more we can do with it.”
“Pretty much everything uses loose powder.”
“Bec
ause it's easier to manufacture. But there's other ways to do it. We could make a putty mixture, or bake it into solid blocks, compact it, that type of thing. A lot of different ways to make and use explosives,” Dillon said.
“Um, should I be worried that you know so much about that?”
Rami grinned. “Yeah, you should. Our mad bomber. Don't stand too close to him, or you're going boom.”
“Hey that's not fair,” Dillon protested.
Rami laughed and turned back to her. “Nah, he's an an air force vet. His specialty was explosive ordinance disposal, so I guess that makes him qualified to screw around with the stuff or something.”
“More qualified than you.”
“So that's it then,” Bailey said. “We're going to have to screw around with a bunch of research and development.”
“Isn't that half the fun of using the free crafting system?” Jocelyn asked.
“Well yeah, but I was kind of hoping we'd get a quick way to start making the guild ships go boom. But I guess that'd be overly optimistic. Having a machine that could make huge quantities of fire crystal dust cheaply would be pretty overpowered.”
“Gotta love game balance,” Rami said. “It's like having a referee standing there watching you beat each other to a pulp, but they don't let you get too far ahead, because that would be unfair. So they pull you off after a certain point.”
“They seem to have a pretty broad definition of what's unfair,” Bailey said, “but hey, I guess I'll take it.”
“Are you one of the find the exploit players?”
“If I can, but I don't rely on them. That's just asking for trouble when they patch it out.”
Rami nodded. “True that.”
Bailey nodded. “Well, looks like we've got a lot of planning and experimenting to do. And if we want a practical ship design to put this weaponry into we need to start work on that as well. So let's get to it.”
“That's quite a haul you've brought us,” Alex commented. “Even at the standard guild cut that's a fairly good sum.”
“We try. And we wanted to get as much as we could for ourselves and the guild,” Kelvin said. “So we're went for the most efficient route, in our opinion.”
“I heard you ran into some trouble.”
“An annoyance, more like,” Shane said. “They weren't any serious trouble.”
“They were flying the Iron Guild flag, though.”
Kelvin shrugged. “Well, we were anonymous. And they're raiders. Privateers, pirates, whatever you want to call them. It's not like the enemy's going to throw a fit over them.”
“Oh, I don't blame you for sending them to the bottom. But I'd also be concerned about trying that with other guild ships. They'll be more likely to go after you if you're fighting with their patrol vessels, and that could get their agents snooping around.”
“We'll be careful,” Shane said.
But their procedures would be far different from those of normal smugglers, Kelvin thought to himself. With their new ship and powerful engines they could outrun any enemy ship, and even packs coming from different angles would have trouble handling their vessel. On the other hand, the extra machinery and coal storage meant sacrificing most of their cargo capacity, and that meant they needed to make runs carrying small quantities of high-value merchandise.
And with their thin hull and no armament, a single shot in the right place could send them to the bottom with their cargo and their ship. Death wasn't a terrible setback in Age of Steam, but losing items and ships to the watery depths could be a crushing blow. At the very least, it would cost them a lot of cash. At worst it might put them back to the beginning where they could only afford tiny trawlers and would be forced to earn their way back up again.
They might have a powerful new tool, but they couldn't afford to get cocky. One round, one shot in the right spot and they'd be sinking into the abyss like so many others. They needed to stay sharp and alert if they wanted to keep this going.
“I trust that you did it for the right reasons. Jamie seems to think so, even though she might have disagreed with your methods, or even your choice of doing so.”
“Yeah, I got that impression,” Shane said.
Kelvin decided to speak up. “Can I ask you something?”
Alex leaned back in his chair. “Of course. What do you want to ask?”
“Why send someone who's not even in our guild at the moment?”
“Why indeed? Of course, you'd need to ask yourself why she's not in the guild in the first place. Or whether an affiliation marked down in the guidebook will really tell you where someone's loyalties truly lie.”
“So this is about Frostwind Guild, I guess? More particularly, them being infiltrated by the Iron Guild. And you're nervous that they'll track us down and bring down the hammer if you start letting people in from their guild, is that right?”
“That's a concern, yes. The Iron Guild is devious, and while we have our own weapons against them, I don't want to push our luck. They seemed to have been able to sneak quite a few agents into Frostwind without our knowledge. Luckily we've kept the information compartmentalized, so Rho wasn't outed.”
“But you're leery of that risk, so instead you're making them associates of the guild. How are they getting money, though? It's not like you can pay them without people taking notice.”
“There's all the standard ways to make a back-alley deal, of course. And we'll continue to work on that. In the future there will hopefully be another way to do this all in a more organized fashion.”
“You mean the new guild you want to found to take it to the Iron Guild, right?” Shane said.
Alex smiled and leaned forward. “Ah, so I imagined she discussed that with you, hm? She failed to mention that to me.”
“Should she have?”
He shrugged. “Well it wasn't like it was that big of a secret, at least not to those inside the guilds. We don't want this leaking back to the Iron Guild, of course, but then there's a lot of things we discuss that we don't want them to know.”
“Is that the solution?” Kelvin asked. “To make a new guild for all the players that have come from destroyed guilds?”
“That's a plan we're considering. A lot of them have nowhere to go. Many of their comrades end up quitting, they lose a lot of their money, and like us many of the other guilds won't take them in. They're too afraid of the Iron Guild coming after them.”
“So why not found it now?”
“Because we don't have the resources. Not the ones we need,” Alex said. “Once they're founded the guild is a target, and we can't put their offices in a zone like Low Falmath. The Iron Guild would send real troops in to smash them up, not just the gangs.”
“So we need an expensive office in one of the safe zones. Can't we get money from guilds like Blue Frog?”
“We can, but the money is always traceable, if you know where to look,” Alex said. “They might not be able to access the records, but with their spy net I'm not exactly confident they won't be able to follow us.”
“So the new guild is going to need a way to come up with money by themselves. They need members. And they need weapons. Sounds like a ton of fun,” Kelvin said.
“You should be in charge of getting that together,” Shane said. “Seems to be your kind of thing.”
Alex nodded. “That might not be a bad idea.”
It took a moment for Kelvin to realize what they were saying. He frowned.
“Um, is this a joke?” he asked.
“No joke. Why would you think that is?”
“Because I've only been in the guild for a short while, and now you want to trust me with some important project. Are all you people completely insane?”
“I have my reasons.”
“Care to share them?”
Alex shrugged. “Fine, I don't have an issue with that. First, you may have only been part of Rho for a short while, but you've proven to be trustworthy. You've had plenty of chances to sell us out, but you ha
ven't. None of you have.”
“Yet.”
Alex laughed. “Why, are you planning on doing it anytime soon?”
“You have to know that's a real threat, though. Not from us, I mean, but just in general,” Kelvin said. “You have to know that after what happened to Frostwind Guild. So if you're not taking precautions after that...”
“We have our ways.”
“You mean that you're confident your spy will tip you off to anything that might be dangerous to the guild, is that right?”
“It might be. It might not be. Who knows?”
“If it is, then you're playing a dangerous game. Or at least making a dangerous assumption,” Kelvin said. “Who says they're going to be able to discover everything you want them to?”
“That's always a concern. But it's lessened somewhat when the person that your observing has proven to be trustworthy over time. And your actions speak for themselves. Either your cover is ridiculously good, or I'm correct.”
“OK, as much as I hate that you're gambling on something like that...”
Alex smiled. “Oh, what's the worst that could happen? The Iron Guild finds out and crushes us, and then we're forced out of the trade. We'll just be in the same spot you were before, smuggling in secret.”
“Not an ideal place.”
“Even so.”
Kelvin couldn't think of anything else to argue. He appreciated Alex's ability to trust them, but he wondered if that would be their downfall. They didn't have much of a choice, since the other alliances had fallen apart due to a lack of that trust, but the Iron Guild's threats still hung in the back of their mind. With enemies willing to infiltrate guilds for weeks or even months to bring them down, everyone remained wary of newcomers.
“Well,” he said, “you're braver than I am. I wouldn't trust me, if I were in your position. But I guess that makes you a better man than me.”
“Or a bigger fool,” Alex said lightly.
Kelvin smiled. “You said it, not me.”
“Truthfully, though, there's other reasons. You've jumped around a bit between guilds. If longtime members start abandoning us then the guild takes notice. You're more… what should I call it?”
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