“Of course, Sir. Let me-oh, I see you already have slippers.”
“Yes.” Sahlavahn looked down at the felt slippers on his feet. They were a little dirty and tattered-looking, the supervisor thought. “I thought it would be simpler to leave my boots in my office, since I had these lying around in one of my desk drawers,” the captain explained, and the supervisor nodded.
“Of course, Sir. Do you want an escort?”
“I believe I’m adequately familiar with the facility,” Sahlavahn said dryly.
“Of course! I didn’t mean-”
“Don’t worry about it, Lieutenant.” Sahlavahn patted him lightly on the arm. “I didn’t think you did.”
“Yes, Sir.”
The supervisor stood respectfully to escort Sahlavahn out of his office. He accompanied the captain into the anteroom and waited until Sahlavahn had left, then turned to one of his clerks. Like everyone who worked in the powder mill proper, the clerk was already in slippers, and the supervisor twitched his head after the vanished captain.
“Quick, Pahrkyr! Nip around the side and warn Lieutenant Mahrstahn Captain Sahlavahn’s on his way!”
“Yes, Sir!”
The clerk dashed out of the anteroom, and the supervisor returned to his own office wondering what bee had gotten into the Old Man’s bonnet. It wasn’t like the perpetually efficient, always well-organized Captain Sahlavahn to just drop by this way.
The supervisor was just settling into his chair once again when he, his clerks, Captain Sahlavahn, and the one hundred and three other men currently working in Powder Mill #3 all died in a monstrous blast of fire and fury. A chain of explosions rolled through the powder mill like Langhorne’s own Rakurai, rattling every window in Hairatha. Debris vomited into the sky, much of it on fire, trailing smoke in obscenely graceful arcs as it soared outward, then came crashing down in fresh fire and ruin. It shattered barracks and administrative buildings like an artillery bombardment, setting more fires, maiming and killing. Voices screamed and stunned men wheeled towards the disaster in disbelief. Then alarm bells began a frenzied clangor and the men who’d frozen in shock ran frantically into the fire and chaos and the devastation looking for lives to save.
Eleven minutes later magazines Six, Seven, and Eight exploded, as well.
“It’s not looking any better, is it?” Cayleb Ahrmahk’s voice was flat and hard, and Prince Nahrmahn shook his head.
The two of them sat in a private sitting room located off the room which had been Cayleb’s grandfather’s library. That library-added to generously by King Haarahld-had long since outgrown the chamber and been moved to larger quarters, and Cayleb had had the old library converted into a working office near the imperial suite. Now he and Nahrmahn sat looking out the windows which faced north, out across the waterfront and the blue expanse of Howell Bay in the general direction of Big Tirian Island. They didn’t actually see the bay, however. Big Tirian was almost six hundred miles from where they sat, but both of them were gazing at the imagery relayed from Owl’s SNARCs.
“I don’t think it is going to look any better,” Nahrmahn said quietly, looking at the shattered, smoking hole and the demolished buildings around it which had been one of the Empire’s largest and most important powder mills, and shook his head sadly. “I think all we can do is bury the dead and rebuild from scratch.”
“I know.” It was obvious the financial cost of rebuilding was the least of Cayleb’s concerns at this moment. “I just-” He shook his own head, the movement choppier and angrier than Nahrmahn’s headshake had been. “We’ve been so lucky about avoiding this kind of accident. I just can’t believe we’ve let something like this happen.”
“We didn’t,” Nahrmahn said, and Cayleb looked at him sharply as he heard the iron in the Emeraldian prince’s voice.
“What do you mean?” the emperor asked sharply.
“I mean this didn’t just ‘happen,’ Your Majesty. And it wasn’t an accident, either.” Nahrmahn met his gaze, his normally mild brown eyes hard. “It was deliberate. An act of sabotage.”
“You’re not serious!”
“Indeed I am, Your Majesty.” Nahrmahn’s voice was grim. “We may never be able to prove it, but I’m positive in my own mind.”
Cayleb pushed back in his armchair and regarded his imperial councilor for intelligence narrowly. No one else in Tellesberg, aside from the other members of the ‘inner circle,’ knew anything about the disaster at Hairatha, and no one would until sometime the next day. That rather restricted the number of people with whom they could discuss it, but Maikel Staynair, his younger brother, Ehdwyrd Howsmyn, and Bynzhamyn Raice were all listening in over their coms.
“Bynzhamyn?” the emperor said now.
“I’m not certain, Your Majesty,” Baron Wave Thunder replied. “I think I see what Prince Nahrmahn is getting at, though.”
“Which is?” Cayleb prompted.
“It’s the delay in the magazine explosions, isn’t it, Your Highness?” Wave Thunder said by way of reply.
“That’s exactly what I’m thinking about,” Nahrmahn agreed grimly. He looked at Cayleb. “Nobody, not even Owl, was watching when this happened. Perhaps that’s an oversight we’d like to rectify in the future, although I realize we’re already taxing even his capabilities with the number of SNARCs we’ve got deployed. Because we weren’t watching, we’ll never be able to reconstruct the events leading up to it-not accurately, and not anything like completely. But there was a significant delay between the main explosion in the powder mill itself and the explosions in the magazines. I’m no expert on the way powder’s handled and stored in the mills or what their standard safety measures may be, but I’d be surprised if it was easy for an explosion in one magazine to touch off an explosion in another one. And if that’s true, it should certainly have been difficult for an explosion in the mill to cause any of the magazines to explode, far less three of them. Yet that’s exactly what happened, and it didn’t happen simultaneously, which is what I would have expected if it had been a sympathetic detonation. And all of that suggests to me that the explosions were deliberately arranged with some sort of timer.”
“Owl?”
“Yes, Your Majesty?” the distant AI said politely.
“I know you weren’t watching Big Tirian or Hairatha, but did any of your SNARCs pick up the explosions, and if so, how close together did they come?”
“In answer to your first question, Your Majesty, yes, the com relay above The Cauldron did detect the explosions. In answer to your second question, the powder production facility itself was destroyed by seven distinct explosions occurring over a period of approximately eleven seconds. Each magazine was destroyed by a single primary explosion followed by a chain of secondary detonations. The first magazine was destroyed approximately eleven minutes and seventeen seconds after the first detonation in the powder production facility. The second magazine was destroyed thirty-seven seconds after that. The third was destroyed three minutes and nine seconds after the second one.”
Cayleb and Nahrmahn looked at one another and Domynyk Staynair swore softly over the com.
“I think Nahrmahn’s right, Your Majesty,” Howsmyn said quietly. “It had to be some kind of timing mechanism, at least in the magazines. I don’t know what kind of timer-it could have been something as simple as a lit candle shoved into a powder cask and allowed to burn down-but I think that’s the only explanation for how they could have come that long after the main explosion but still have been sequenced that closely.”
“Damn.” Cayleb shoved up out of his chair and crossed to the window, folding his arms across his chest while he stared out towards the invisible island and the pall of smoke still hanging above it. “How did they get in?”