Chapter 105: The Colossus of Coriba

The brake pads clamped down on the steel rails with a long, metallic shriek that all but drowned out the ocean. The custom-built locomotive, hauling the steel-plated Royal Carriage behind it, shuddered and hissed to a halt at the newly expanded Coriba Coastal Terminal. Pressurised steam rolled across the concrete platform in great white plumes. As it thinned, it revealed a city that had cut its ties with the medieval world entirely.

Emperor Regis stepped down from the carriage and was met at once by a roar that never seemed to pause for breath. It was the sound of a city that had forgotten how to be quiet.

Coriba had once been a modest coastal trading town. Now it was a sprawling, restless boomtown running at the very limit of its capacity. The evening sky had turned a faint, chemical orange, lit from below by electric floodlights whose glare never flickered, all of them fed by Inori's dynamos. Wherever the Emperor looked, human and Dwarven labourers worked shoulder to shoulder. They poured foundations, lashed steel reinforcing bars into rigid cages, and hauled materials along streets that seemed to have been dug up and rebuilt since the last time anyone had walked them.

Prime Minister Takuya Kazuha was stepping onto the train platform. His charcoal suit was immaculate, though the air around him smelled of diesel exhaust and curing concrete.

'Welcome to Coriba, Your Majesty. Princess Seraphina,' he said, with a light bow that was crisp and exactly as deep as protocol required. 'I should warn you that the city is expanding continuously, and will be for some time. The shipyard's supply chain demands it. So many contractors, architects and naval engineers have arrived that we had to build a lodging house for them, and that is where we shall be staying tonight.'

An escort led the royal party to a convoy of reinforced steam-carriages. They glided out of the terminal over asphalt boulevards so smooth and well drained that Seraphina could not help glancing down at them. She was thinking of the mud and cobbles of the old capital, where a carriage wheel could be lost in a rut after a night of rain. Before long they reached a tall hotel near the commercial heart of the city.

Inside, both of them noticed the same thing at once. There were no gilded statues, no ornamental gardens, and no velvet hangings. The building was made of reinforced concrete and enormous panes of glass, and every line of it was straight and plain. It had clearly been designed to house the merchants and industrialists who paid for the empire's growth, and it made no attempt to flatter them.

'It is purely functional,' Takuya said, leading them across the bright lobby. 'Coriba is a place of work, not leisure. And given how late you have arrived, and how much ground we must cover tomorrow, I would strongly advise an early night. The industrial zones are not something one can take in on a tired mind. You will want to be fresh for them.'

Regis, whose senses had been battered by the thrum of the city after a long day of travel, agreed without argument.

By morning, the sea breeze had lost the fight. The air smelled sharply of ozone, hot iron and burning diesel, and it stung the back of the throat.

The royal party stood on a raised observation deck above the Coriba Mega-Shipyard. It covered two hundred thousand square metres of unbroken coastline, and even from that height it was hard to take in. Emperor Regis had commanded armies and reviewed fleets in the past, and he still could not find a comparison for it.

It was not Takuya who came forward to lead the tour, but Viscount Inori Kazuha. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow, a pair of brass safety goggles sat pushed up on his forehead, and his eyes had the bright, slightly feverish look of a man who had not slept and did not care. Beside him, moving easily across the smooth concrete of the deck, came young Lucian Sterling in his wheelchair. Inori had designed it himself, with a light steel frame and geared push-rims that gave the boy far more speed for each push than an ordinary chair would. Lucian kept pace with the engineers, and at times he had to wait for them.

'Your Majesty, Princess Seraphina, welcome,' Inori said, almost bouncing on his heels. 'Welcome to the end of wind-driven shipping. That is not an exaggeration. In five years nobody will bother waiting for a favourable breeze.'

Seraphina looked out over the complex, and her mind began sorting the chaos into categories, as it always did. 'The logistics must be staggering, Lord Inori,' she said. 'A site this size eats materials. How do you get enough of them here from the capital without the supply lines simply seizing up?'

Inori grinned and pointed down at the network of iron railway tracks running into the shipyard's perimeter from the inland side.

'Machines, Princess, and lots of them,' he said. 'The rails do the heavy lifting between cities. Inside the yard it's these.' He gestured towards a swarm of small, boxy four-wheeled vehicles buzzing between the outer warehouses like beetles. 'We call them temporary steam-wagons. They run on external combustion boilers fired primarily by coal, coke, or sometimes wood and they're small enough to squeeze down the narrow corridors between the buildings, so they carry tools and light materials to wherever they're wanted.'

'But they are only the start, Your Highness,' Lucian put in, wheeling a little further forward. 'Once the ships begin to be built, we shall need to move the cargo they carry. Lord Inori's teams in Dian City are finishing the chassis for heavy-duty semi-trailers now. They are enormous, free-roaming machines that can haul fifty tonnes of steel over ordinary asphalt.'

'And then comes the really clever part.' Inori clapped his hands together. 'Containerisation. We're building standard steel cargo boxes, all exactly the same size. A ship docks, the trailers drive straight down to the quayside, and steam-cranes lift the containers out of the hold and lock them onto the truck beds. Nobody unpacks anything by hand. Something that used to take hundreds of men several weeks will be done in a matter of hours.'

Regis said nothing. He was trying, without much success, to picture a harbour where cargo no longer moved on the backs of men.

The party set off along the elevated catwalks and began to descend towards the heavy manufacturing sectors. The air grew steadily hotter. A low, rhythmic thudding rose through the metal grating and settled into their bones.

'To build a mountain of iron that floats, we had to break the whole job into six zones,' Inori shouted over the din, waving a hand at the yards spread out to their left. 'Zone Two is Material Preparation and Storage. Everything the fleet needs is over there, catalogued, sorted and waiting. If you want a particular plate of steel, someone knows exactly which shelf it's on.'

They stopped above a row of huge covered structures. Flashes of blue-white light strobed through the gaps in their walls, and from within came the flat crash of drop forges.

'Zone Three,' Inori went on, 'Fabrication and Modular Assembly. We don't build these hulls the way shipwrights always have, from the keel upwards, one plank at a time. That's far too slow. Inside those sheds, Dwarven master-smiths and human engineers forge the metal into great prefabricated blocks, each one a section of the hull with its framing already built in. Then we haul the finished blocks out to the dock and weld them together, like pieces of a very large puzzle.'

The Emperor watched a block being drawn out of one of the sheds. The metal did not look like any iron he knew. It was dark, with a deep and perfectly even sheen.

'What sort of steel is that?' he asked.

Seraphina had already leaned over the railing, and her eyes narrowed. 'It hasn't got the mottling that wrought iron gets when it starts to go,' she said slowly. 'And it looks denser. Much denser.'

'You've a sharp eye, Princess,' Lucian said, and there was real admiration in his voice. 'That is the backbone of the new fleet. It is an ultra-dense, high-tensile super-steel, only perfected a few weeks ago at the Premier Metallurgy Research Institute in Bergran. Elderly Dwarven master-smiths worked side by side with human chemical engineers there. They joined the old forging techniques to our new electrical induction furnaces, and this was the result.'

'It won't rust, and it takes an impact better than anything else we've got,' Inori added, nodding hard. 'We're producing it here on site now. The Dwarves run the blast furnaces, because nobody reads a furnace like they do. My people manage the carbon and slag separation, drawing off the impurities so what's left is clean, strong steel. Honestly, it's a perfect partnership, in the metallurgy and in the people.'

They walked on, deeper into the yard.

'Behind us is Zone Four, Support and Logistics,' Inori said, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder at the great iron tracks. 'That's where the railway from the Dian City steel mills comes in and meets the coast. Up to the north you'll see Zone Five, which is a huge freshwater reservoir. We need it to keep the labourers hydrated, and to stop the steam-cranes boiling dry and seizing up in the middle of a lift.'

They passed Zone Six, the Heavy Workshop. Through the open sides, Emperor Regis watched enormous hydraulic presses groan down onto plates of super-steel that were several inches thick. They bent them as easily as a man might fold a sheet of card, and every curve came out exactly as Lucian's drawings required. The Emperor found that he had stopped walking.

At last the catwalk brought them out to the edge of the sea itself.

'Zone One,' Lucian said, and his voice dropped without his seeming to notice. 'The drydocks.'

Below them, colossal concrete basins had been sunk into the shore itself. Coal-fired steam-pumps thrummed without pause, sending many thousands of gallons of seawater back out to the ocean and holding the great cavities dry, so that men could work on a hull the way they would on a factory floor.

In the largest basin lay the skeleton of the first supersize container vessel, and it really was a mountain. The immense ribs of rust-proof Bergran steel enclosed a space large enough to swallow an entire royal keep, towers and all. It was nowhere near a finished ship, only the bare bones of a leviathan waiting to be given its skin. Even so, its size made Regis's stomach turn over.

'The old Frisian galleons depend on wind and paddle wheels,' Lucian said, gazing down at the hull he had drawn a hundred times in his sleep. 'This ship uses a screw propeller instead. It is a great brass spiral set deep below the waterline, and it bores through the sea as a wood screw does through timber. It pushes the ship forward all the time, wind or no wind.'

'And to turn a propeller that size,' Inori cut in, pointing to an enormous, many-tonne block of iron and steel dangling from cranes on the dockside, 'you need that. A sixteen-cylinder, two-stroke marine diesel. It fires on every turn of the crankshaft, every single revolution, no waiting. The piston compresses the air in the cylinder so hard that it gets scorching hot, then diesel is sprayed into it and the whole lot ignites from the heat alone. No spark needed. Each engine makes thousands of horsepower, and the torque is brutal. It just doesn't stop.'

Regis studied the skeleton below him and understood, all at once, what it would do to trade and to war. 'It is a marvel, Lord Inori,' he said quietly. 'Master Lucian. But something of this size… when will it actually touch the water?'

Some of the fever went out of Inori's manner, and the engineer took over. 'We have to respect what the materials can take, Your Majesty,' he said. 'What you're looking at now is only the skeleton. The outer plating still has to be forged and fitted. The diesel blocks have to go in. Every modular block has to be sealed, and then every seam has to be tested, because we won't know how the super-steel behaves under real loads until we've tried it. That all takes time. Realistically, I'd say fourteen months before this one's ready to launch.'

'Fourteen months is an acceptable price for the monopoly of global trade,' said Takuya, stepping out of the shadows at the back of the deck. His voice was calm and level, and it carried through the roar of the yard without effort.

He walked to the balustrade, rested both hands on the rail, and looked past the commercial yard to the jagged coast on the south side.

'But commerce is only half of what keeps an empire alive,' he went on, and his tone had grown colder and more exact. 'While we spend the next year building the merchant fleet here, we must also secure the waters that fleet will sail through.'

Regis and Seraphina followed his gaze. Several miles down the coast, well clear of the commercial shipyard, stood a huge and forbidding military installation. Thick walls of reinforced concrete sloped up from the cliffs, and heavy rifled cannon pointed out towards the horizon, silent and patient.

'Your Majesty, Princess Seraphina,' Takuya said, and a thin, ruthless smile crossed his face. 'That, is the new headquarters of the Cynthia Naval Marine Army, and to our maritime defence base. No enemy will break it. It is under the command of Count Sterling himself.'