Pathspace: The Space of Paths (39 page)

He shrugged. “When necessary.” He turned to
the priest. “Are you all right Father?”

The man in priestly garb let his pipe fall
with a clang and bent down trembling to kiss the rooftop. “Never in
all my life did I know how blessed it is to feel something beneath
my feet.”

Mrs. Timberstone observed this in an
interested silence.

“
We had a bit of a close
scrape,” Xander explained. “A very storybook scene, peasants with
torches ready to burn Lester at the stake. All it lacked was a
lightning-lit castle on a hill.” he turned to the priest. “I hope
you don't regret accompanying us, Father. I could have dropped you
off along the way.”

“
Not at all.” The priest
seemed to be checking to make sure all his parts were still
attached, and then he froze as he realized he was being observed by
Aria and her teacher.

Xander rescued him. “Mrs. Timberstone, Aria,
I present to you one Father Andrews, recently of Texas. Father,
this is Mrs. Timberstone, an esteemed tutor, and Aria D'Arcy, her
current student.”

Father Andrews sketched a slight bow to
them. “I must confess, ladies, that you do not catch me at my best.
Even so, the pleasure of meeting you both shall do me a power of
good in recovering from the harrowing journey north.”

Behind him, Lester looked
a little unhappy that the two newcomers had crowded his return. She
caught his eye and winked, and he brightened up immediately.
Inwardly she smiled.
Men are so easy.
“I'm glad you got away,” she told him. We were all worried
when you didn't make it back, especially Xander.”

“
Nonsense,” the wizard
snorted. “I just didn't like to lose an apprentice in the middle of
his training. Would be such a burden to have to go find another one
so soon.”

“
Don't listen to him. We
had to put him under armed guard while he recovered or he would
have been off to retrieve you before he was up to it. However did
you manage in prison?”

He opened his mouth to say something but
Xander jumped in. “It's a long story, and I look forward to hearing
it as much as you do. But let's get in out of the cold and grab
some lunch, shall we? The jailers took Lester's boots and his toes
must be getting chilly.”

Lester tried again. The black pawn rose
wobbling slightly from the chessboard and drifted forward a square
before settling down. He wiped beads of sweat from his
forehead.

“
Not bad,” said Xander.
“Your vortex control is improving steadily.”

“
I don't see the point of
this,” he complained. “The Honcho isn't going to try to take Rado
from the Governor with pawns and bishops.”

Xander's knight rose and executed a precise
forking attack, threatening both Lester's rook and his king.
“Check,” he said. “And you are wrong, you know. His Excellency will
definitely use pawns. Armed, living ones, but pawns nonetheless.
And they will arrive in horseless vehicles moved by fuel for which
he can thank the bishops of the TCC.”

“
Whatever,” Lester
grumbled. “So why aren't we preparing to fight?”

“
We are,” said the wizard.
“I realize it might seem trivial, to you, weaving tiny vortices in
pathspace like this. But the point is to have fine
control.”

“
I should be making
swizzle guns, not playing board games!” Lester gritted his teeth,
making his king evade the check by moving it diagonally in front of
his queen.

“
And we shall spend some
time doing things like that,” said Xander. “But you must also be
developing precision. When you were a child, your arms would wave
around blindly when you wanted something. We all pass from gross to
fine motor skills, so that now you can reach forward and lift a
glass, without thinking and without knocking over other things on
the table. You need the same sense of automatic precision with your
pathspace. In the heat of battle you will have to act quickly
without having to think about it, as an archer knocks an arrow to
his bowstring without considering how to do it.” His knight rose
fro the table and drifted over to drop on the square occupied by
Lester's rook, which then rose and moved off to the side of the
board.

“
Where did they go?”
growled the Honcho, even though he was pretty sure he already
knew.

“
North,” said Jeffrey. His
voice had an impatient edge to it. “Back to Rado, of course. Where
else would they go? The question is, what can we do about
it?”

“
Nothing. If we had the
fuel, and could get an ancient airplane working, and had a trained
pilot ready, then maybe we could intercept them. But we don't.”
Peter sighed and rested his chin on his first, his elbow on the top
of his desk. “So the answer is, there is nothing we can do...except
speed up our timetable. Now that Ricky's going to give us the
swizzles and everflames we need, we'll start getting some fuel for
the vehicles soon.”

“
Maybe we should invade
someone else first.”

He shook his head. “Can't do that. If we
wait too long, Rado'll be building up their own army equipped with
swizzle guns. They have at least two people who can make 'em now.
So we have to get up there before they have time to make a lot of
them. And there's another reason.”

“
What's that?”

“
From the reports of the
men, when the wizard rescued the Governor's daughter they were at a
comm site reporting in. So Rado knows about the rail-bangers
now.”

“
You think they'll tell
other countries?”

“
Not at first. I'm betting
the first thing they'll do is try to set up their own version. But
it's only a matter of time before it leaks out from
them.”

It was already getting hot by the time he
got there. Wiping sweat off his brow with his left hand, the Runt
lifted his right to return the salute. “How's it going,
Jenkins?”

The sentry shrugged. “All quiet here on the
perimeter, sir.”

The Runt sat there in his saddle, pondering.
“No incursion attempts at all from Rado?” This troubled him. Surely
Rado knew from its spies what was being done here. So why hadn't
they tried something...at least a little sabotage?

Jenkins shook his head. “Maybe the savages
don't know what's going on.”

Now it was Jeffrey's turn to shake his head.
“More likely, they're too busy trying to build up their defenses.
Carry on, Private.”

As he rode past the sentry the Runt frowned.
What were they waiting for? If they could pop down to break a
prisoner out of jail in the heart of enemy territory, why wouldn't
Rado be making efforts to slow down the fuel production?

Ahead of him he could see the remains of an
old derrick lying in the weeds. Idly, he wondered if it had toppled
from rusted supports, or if the Honcho had ordered it pulled or cut
off the ancient well to make it easier to get at the well itself.
Part of him was saddened at the destruction of a relic, but then ,
he reflected, it would not go to waste. No doubt the Honcho or his
advisors already had plans to reuse all of that steel.

Up ahead he could now see the well itself. A
complicated contraption was welded onto the wellhead, with a hose
leading to a off to a newly-built structure off to one side. As he
watched, two men hauled on a metal wheel. He was puzzled by this
only for a moment, and then he realized that it must be an
oversized metal valve of some sort. When they seemed to be finished
with what they were doing, he rode up to the two men, who
saluted.

“
I don't mean to interrupt
you,” he said, returning the salutes, “but tell me, what is it you
were doing?”

The taller of the two answered him.
“Shutting off the flow, sir.”

His brow wrinkled. “Why would you want to
shut it off?”

“
Well, sir, the refinery
can only take so much at a time.” The man glanced to the building
the hose led to. “So we fill the boiler every few hours and then
shut it off. Made a hell of a mess the first time, before we
learned that.”

So that was what the big valve was for. With
the swizzles in place in the well itself, there was no way to get
to them to turn them on or off. In the apartment buildings some of
them had come from, they had been used to fill roof tanks. The
weight of the water pressing down from the filled roof tanks would
balance the upward thrust of the water and stop the flow. When
someone took a bath or otherwise used some of the water in the
tanks, the down ward pressure would be reduced, allowing the
swizzles to push water up into the tanks until they had enough
water-weight to stop the inflow again.

But the system developed by the ancients
would not work here, he realized. The oil sucked out of the ground
filled a tank for boiling, and the tank was at ground level. There
wasn't enough pressure pushing back on the swizzles to stop the
outflow from the well. So the crude but effective solution was a
mechanical valve on top of the well to shut off the flow.

He supposed the Honcho could have emulated
the roof-tank design, by building a tower and putting the boiling
vessel up at the top. But it would have required more materials
and, more to the point, more time to do so. And giving Rado more
time to prepare for the inevitable invasion would not be a good
idea.

He rode over to the distillation building
and dismounted, handing the reins to the second sentry at the door
before passing inside. “Who's in charge?” he asked the man, not
caring if he sounded ignorant for not knowing this already.”

“
Tomlinson's the chief
engineer, sir. Captain Tomlinson.”

He pulled open the door an stepped in. The
first thing he noticed was that the air in the place stank of oil.
In seconds he was feeling greasy just moving around in it.

Spotting a man at a desk giving direction to
a couple of others, he strode up to him. “Captain Tomlinson?”

The man looked up, annoyed at the
interruption. “What?” One of the men whispered in his ear. “Oh,
it's you,” he grunted, and made a tired salute. “What can I do for
you, sir?”

He had been wondering why
his father had sent him to get a progress report when there were
plenty of soldiers who could have relayed the information. Now,
however, he realized that there was a reason for it: he needed to
be recognized by the troops. And for that they needed to meet him.
It was said that the Ancients had something called a
photograph
that could capture an image, so
that one's face could be distributed to the lower ranks instead of
meeting them personally. But evidently the technology had been too
complex to survive the Fall.

“
I'm here for a progress
report,” he said. He glanced down at the paper spread out on the
desk top. “What's this?”

“
Plans for a bigger
refinery. What we have so far is working, sort of. But to fuel
anything more than a short action, we're going to need a lot more
gasoline and diesel than this setup can crack off.”

That made sense. “But won't you need more
swizzles and everflames than we have, to be able to build a bigger
one?”

“
Of course,” Tomlinson
grunted. “But with any luck we'll capture more of them when we
invade Rado.”

“
Right.” Now he felt
foolish. Naturally the Honcho would have planned on expanding the
fuel production using artifacts from the captured territories as
the Empire expanded. Before he asked another foolish question,
Jeffrey gazed about him.

The interior of the building was all one
huge room, dominated by an enormous metal tank, supported by
massive legs, under which a grid of everflames nestled in a metal
tray. The flames were all off at the moment. On top of the boiler
he saw piping leading off to the condenser. Another pipe stuck out
of the bottom of the condenser, with a spigot on the end of it. As
he watched, a couple of men turned off the spigot and screwed a cap
on a tank resting on a wagon. Then they pulled open a large double
door and waved at the wagon's driver, who flicked the reins and
pulled out of the building. The two men then closed the double
doors, trotted across the floor to another set of double doors, and
hauled them open. Another tank-carrying wagon rolled in, its horses
snorting as they muscled the weight of all that iron into the
building and around a U-shaped path that ended up beside the
condenser. There the driver halted.

Jeffrey blinked. Even his eyelids felt
greasy. “Why does it stink so much of oil in here, Captain? Do you
have leaks?”

Tomlinson grinned humorlessly. “Absolutely,
sir.” He pointed to the top of the boiler.

Squinting, Jeffrey could see steam escaping
from a valve. “What's that for?”

“
Well, sir, naturally,
when we are filling the empty boiler, it compresses the air inside.
Have to let it out, or the pressure could build up and bust the
boiler. It's not thick metal, not like the Ancients used to have,
so we have to go easy on it. We close the pressure relief valve
when we're cracking, of course.”

“
Where does the steam come
from?”

“
Some of it's water mixed
in with the oil. The boiler is still warm from the last
distillation run, and water boils at a lower temperature than the
fractions we want, so we vent it.”