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“Then it was good of you to… Lay them off? Is that what you call it? So they could attend a palaestra. Because I’d think that if you were teaching them, they’d be the last ones you’d want to send home.”
“They were,” Swallow told her shortly.
Chenille had been looking at the largest ladle Silk had ever seen, a great cup of scaly pottery large enough to hold a man. “Is this what you melt the iron in?”
“That’s right.” Swallow was himself again at once, brisk and all business. “It’s heated in this brick furnace here.” He went to it. “It burns charcoal with a forced draft, and it takes a lot. Those bunkers you saw against the wall where we came in were for sand. Every casting we make uses up a little, and they’re our reserve. These bunkers hold charcoal and steel scrap. We fill up that crucible with scrap, lower it into the furnace, and put the lid on. When it’s been in long enough, depending on how much scrap was in it, we lift it out the same way and pour.”
A slightly smaller crucible stood on the other side of the brick furnace; reaching into it, Chenille displayed an irregular scab of shining yellow metal. “This looks almost like gold.”
Oreb flew over for a closer inspection.
“It’s brass,” Swallow told her. “A talus’s head requires some pretty complicated castings, and brass is easier to cast than iron, so we use that for the head.”
Silk said, “Some taluses wear helmets, I’ve noticed, while others don’t.”
“The helmet’s actually a part of the head,” Swallow told him. “Or you could say it takes the place of the skullplate. Would you like helmets on the taluses we’re going to build for the city? I can specify them in the contract.”
“I don’t know. I was wondering whether a helmet furnished better protection for the head.” In his mind’s eye, Silk saw the talus he had killed; the shimmering discontinuity that was the blade of the azoth he had thought Hyacinth’s had struck it below the eye, vaporizing metal and inflicting a mortal wound.
“Not really.” Swallow clapped his hands to brighten the lights. “Over here we have the forms for various head designs. They’re made so the parts can be switched. Say you like the nose on one head, but you’d rather have the mouth on another. We can give you both without any additional charge. We cast the nose you want and the mouth you want, and after the castings have been cleaned up, they’ll fit together.”
“How thick is the metal?” Silk inquired.
“Two to four fingers, depending on where you measure. It has to be at least two, to get enough melt through the space.” Proudly, Swallow gestured toward a row of somewhat worn-looking wooden heads, each nearly as tall as he was. “There they are, Calde, twenty-nine of them. Since all of them trade parts, there’s almost no limit to the number of faces we can provide.”
“I see. Is two fingers of brass enough to stop a slug?”
“No shoot,” Oreb advised from Chenille’s shoulder.
“It depends, Calde. How far away was the trooper when he fired? That can make a big difference. So can the angle it strikes at. If it hits square on, it might go through if the trooper was standing close. I’ve known that to happen. The talus has its own guns, though, and unless it’s out of ammo, an enemy trooper that close isn’t likely to be alive.”
Chenille gri
“What we’ve found,” Swallow continued, “is it’s pretty rare for a trooper to shoot at the head at all. The thorax plate and the front of the abdomen are bigger targets, but they’re steel. I’ll show you some in the welding shop.”
“Will a slug penetrate them?”
Swallow shook his head. “I’ve never known it to happen. I won’t say it can’t, I’d want to run some tests. But it’s very unusual, if it happens at all.”
Silk turned to Chenille. “You and Auk were riding on the back of a talus when it encountered some of the Ayuntamiento’s soldiers in the tu
She nodded. “Patera Incus was with us, too, Patera. So was Oreb here.”
“Later on, one of the wounded soldiers?”
Chenille nodded again. “The talus stopped to shoot, I guess that’s why it stopped anyhow, and Auk got on Patera about not bringing the dead ones Pas’s Pardon. We could see a bunch of dead ones in back of us. There were lights in that tu
“I understand.”
“So Patera did. He got off the talus. Auk was just — he couldn’t believe it. Then the talus saw what had happened and said for Patera to get back on, and he said only if you’ll take this soldier too. That was Stony, we found out his name later.”
Maytera Marble asked, “Wasn’t this nice talus that let you ride on it killed, dear? I think you told me about its death, and how the holy augur who was with you brought it the Pardon.”
Silk nodded. “That’s the point I particularly want to hear about, Chenille. How was that talus killed? Where did the slug strike it?”
“I don’t think it was a slug at all, Patera. Stony said it was a missile. Some of the soldiers had launchers — I got one myself, after — and they were shooting them.”
“You’ll have to excuse my ignorance,” to relieve the pain in his ankle, Silk backed to the crucible and sat down on its rim, “but I’m not familiar with those. What’s the difference between a missile and a launcher?”
“The launcher fires the missile, Calde.”
“That’s right. Just almost exactly like a slug gun shoots a slug. Maybe they ought to call a launcher a missile gun, but they don’t.”
“You had one of these weapons, Chenille? Where is it now?”
“I don’t know. Stony took it to shoot at the Trivigaunti pterotroopers. That was while me and Auk were in the pit with Trivigauntis flying all around and you talking at us from that floater up in the air. Somebody yelled for us to get back in the tu
Swallow said, “A missile’s a very different proposition from a slug, Calde. A slug’s just a heavy metal cylinder. It hits the target a lot harder than a needle or a stone from a sling, but that’s only because it’s heavier than a needle and going faster than a stone. Missiles carry an explosive charge, and that lets them do a lot more damage.”
“Missiles are heavier, I think, too,” Chenille told Silk. “I’ve seen troopers carrying forty or fifty slugs—”
“Cartridges,” Swallow corrected her.
“Whatever. They had them on a special canvas strap, and they were walking around fine. I think if you loaded a trooper down with forty or fifty missiles, he couldn’t hardly stand up. My launcher was nice and light when I found it, but Stony helped me load it, and it was really heavy after that.”
“Director Swallow.”
“Yes, Calde?”
“You mentioned a part called the thorax plate. I take it that’s the part covering what I would call the talus’s chest.”
“Exactly right, Calde.
“Chenille says the soldier Patera Incus befriended felt that their talus had been killed by one of those things — by a missile fired from a launcher. Are those the terms?”
Swallow nodded; Chenille said, “That’s it, Patera.”
“But if I understood her, he was on the talus’s back at the time that it was shot. How could he have known?”
Swallow fingered his chin. “He lived through this, didn’t he? He must of, since the young lady said he took her launcher later. If he had a chance to see the talus afterward—”
“Man see,” Oreb a
“In that case, Calde, it wouldn’t have been hard for him to tell the difference between a wound from a slug gun and one from a missile.”
Silk nodded again, largely to himself. “Was this a facial wound, Chenille? Do you recall?”
She shook her head. “He talked to us after. I’m not sure where he was hit, but lower down.”
Silk stood up. “You mentioned your welding shop, Director. I want to see it — and ask a favor. May we go now?”