‘Uracus!’ Javier snapped. ‘What was that?’

‘It’s down near the quayside, I think,’ Coulan said. ‘Eastwards, too. There are some companies around there that deal in yalseed oil. Big barrels.’

‘Crud,’ Slvasta grunted. ‘Did we order that?’

‘No,’ Bethaneve said. ‘And I don’t like the timing.’

*

It took two days to get the warehouse fires under control, and the city authorities were lucky it rained on the second night. Smoke hung over Varlan for another day as the ruined buildings three streets above the quayside smouldered. Exploding barrels had thrown flaming yalseed oil a long distance, and the volunteer fire crews were scared to venture too close for fear of more barrels detonating.

Eventually, when all that was left was a circular area of blackened walls and piles of rubble, hospital staff and fire officers started to pick their way through the tangled debris, ex-sight probing the stone and charred wood and smashed slates, hunting for bodies.

Twenty-three business premises were destroyed. Fortunately, given it was a commercial district, and late at night, fatalities were minimal. Only eight people were known to have died. But it was another blow against the city’s economy, with insurance companies hit hard. Everyone’s premiums would be going up.

*

Kysandra was deep into the farm’s accounts when Russell rode into the compound. His arrival gave her an excuse for her u-shadow to fold the spreadcube files away and free up her exovision. When they’d started planning the revolution, she’d been so enthusiastic and excited, never thinking she’d spend hours – days, weeks – having to manage the basic finances of the enterprise. But as she’d swiftly learned, shoving a government aside wasn’t cheap.

‘Our insurrection doesn’t even have to work,’ Nigel had said. ‘Not permanently. We just need time to get in and out of the palace. All we really need for that is anarchy.’

‘It should work,’ she objected. ‘Otherwise we’ve let down so many people.’

‘You can’t afford to think like that. The radicals who make up the movement are just another set of tools to help us complete the job. Nothing more.’

‘But . . . they have to believe that their lives will change for the better to commit to the cause. You’re asking them to risk everything they have.’

‘And that risk will be repaid a thousand-fold. Not by replacing one set of useless, corrupt leaders with another, but by liberating them from the Void. You have to learn to see the big picture, Kysandra. No more small-town thinking, okay?’

‘Okay.’ But it was difficult. People, real people, were going to get hurt. She just had to keep telling herself it was all worthwhile, because: this was destiny they were working to achieve.

Russell jumped off his horse as his teekay fastened the reins to the paddock fencing. ‘Slvasta won the Langley election,’ his ’path shout informed the compound. ‘Democratic Unity is now a legitimate opposition party.’ He waved a couple of Varlan’s gazettes above his head. ‘It’s official.’

Kysandra hurried out of the house and met him on the veranda. ‘Let me see,’ she said, and took one of the gazettes. It was a large edition, printed yesterday, she noticed – fast delivery to Adeone. She kept her shell hard so she didn’t reveal the swirl of disappointment that came from reading the results. Only Slvasta got elected to the National Council? We put candidates up in five constituencies. And just six new boroughs with Democratic Unity in the majority? In her heart she’d been hoping for so much more. Some public validation from the people they were about to set free.

‘I’ll go and show Nigel,’ she said with a cheery smile. ‘You go in and ask Victorea for some lunch; she’ll make you up some sandwiches.’

Russell touched the brim of his hat respectfully. ‘Thank you.’

Kysandra set off across the compound. It was barely recognizable now. So much had changed, so many buildings added. There were over thirty barns and storehouses, some of them vast, with iron I-beams supporting the wide span of their roofs. Eight of them were used purely for the farm, housing the mod-apes, horses and dwarfs needed to tend the crops and herds of terrestrial beasts that now covered almost the whole valley. The two timber mills were as busy as always. And the bulky steam engines thrummed away at the side of the engineering shops. Labourers and the dominated used two long barns as dormitories, dividing them up into snug but comfortable private rooms, with communal washrooms at one end. The three that housed the weapons factories were quiet now, their machines idle. Enough guns and ammunition had been manufactured and sent to the various radical groups they’d established, with the majority delivered to the capital. The mod-dwarfs that had worked on the production lines were now sitting in their stalls, doing nothing but eating and sleeping.

But it was the launch project she admired the most. Four long sheds lined with racks of ge-spider cages, spinning out vast quantities of drosilk. Nigel had introduced that particular variant to Bienvenido, of course; but not directly. Marek had travelled halfway up the Aflar peninsula to Gretz before teaching the adaption to a small family-run neut stable. That way it wouldn’t be yet another innovation emerging from Blair Farm. After some experimentation, Nigel had found that to produce the best drosilk, ge-spiders should eat leaves from the deassu bush. If everyone else was breeding ge-spiders and producing drosilk for the clothing industry, there would be nothing odd about Blair Farm buying deassu leaves in considerable bulk.

After the ge-spider sheds was the booster bunker, which had been dug deep into the soil. Here the drosilk was wound carefully and precisely onto a long iron cylinder (precision milled, which had taken months) and sprayed with resin before being cured in a huge kiln. There were nineteen layers in all, each of which needed to be flawless. Only when sensors linked to the Skylady had confirmed that the last layer was unspoiled did the cylinder get taken out of the tube. Despite their very best monitoring and quality control, they only managed to get one perfect cylinder for every three attempts. Finished cylinders were wheeled into the second half of the booster bunker, behind thick iron and concrete wedge-shaped doors so heavy that they needed a set of train wheels to roll across the chamber on their own tracks.

That was where the process was finished, filling the cylinders with propellant, turning them into giant solid rocket motors. She could still remember the first test firing, with the booster standing vertical, its exhaust nozzle pointing up into the sky. Even standing a kilometre away, the roar of sound was like a solid force as it punched across her. The fire plume was incandescent, searing purple after-images across her retinas for minutes, while the smoke jet soared ever higher into the clear sky, reaching for the clouds above. It was as if the universe had somehow cracked open, allowing a gale of elemental forces to howl through the gap.

Afterwards, staring in astonishment at the still-smouldering booster casing while her overloaded senses began to calm, she said simply: ‘You cannot sit on top of that. You just can’t.’

‘They’re perfectly safe,’ Nigel said contentedly. ‘People flew into space on chemical rockets for decades before Ozzie and I put a stop to it.’

‘No! Just . . . no!’

But of course there was no choice. So the production of the solid rocket boosters went ahead, despite her fears. Nigel had chosen an ammonium nitrate-based fuel, which was one of the easiest to make – especially given the production method they had discovered. Again it was all about keeping a low profile; he didn’t want to add chemical refineries to the farm compound as well as everything else. Fortunately, the Fallers had given them an unexpected alternative in their slave species.