The Sands of Saturn - Chapter 16

Walking through the city, the damage wasn’t as bad as Ky had feared, and most of that was centered around the west gate where the bulk of the fighting had been.

Thankfully, despite being where the battle started and, at least part of it, ended, the docks were in good shape. Although the emperor had already decided to keep Devnum as the capital of the empire, there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that Londinium would eventually reassert itself as a major center for trade and commerce. Its river borne trade and road connections to major southern ports was why both the Carthaginians and the Romans, before they’d been forced to the north of the island, had based their capitals there in the first place. Its docks were a key part of that and would be helpful in bringing in supplies for rebuilding the damaged portion of the city.

The population wasn’t as lucky. Thanks to the governor’s decision to keep nearly all of the food for himself and the soldiers, the population that had come into the city for protection had been all but starved for a month, and legionnaires conducting a survey of the city for survivors and looking for soldiers in hiding had found the bodies of more than a few families that had starved to death unnoticed in their homes.

Ky had ordered food supplies brought in, but they were running into problems there as well. Between feeding the legions now spread over two islands and the large number of prisoners they’d managed to acquire, food supplies were starting to run low and the harvests were still months away.

Prisoners were less of a problem. To keep his men fighting to the last, the governor’s lieutenants had spent the previous months drilling into their heads the brutal ways they could expect to be treated by the Britannians when the city fell. Although Ky couldn’t see how they could have possibly believed some of the tales that were communicated to him, they clearly had, as the bulk of the city’s garrison had refused to surrender, choosing instead to fight to the last man.

Although Ky didn’t like the idea of slaughtering any enemy when their situation was hopeless, this time it cost the lives of hundreds of more Caledonians than necessary, which he very much regretted. Part of him thought that, if he’d been there instead of chasing down the governor, he might have been able to make a difference and save a lot of lives, but he knew that was just a soldier’s guilt talking.

Although he hadn’t yet been able to introduce things like debriefings or after-action reports, that could help the officer corps learn from battles and pass that experience to the next batch of officers, he did spend some time interviewing the men there personally. From everything he could tell, the men had fought well and hadn’t taken any undue risks, or at least, no undue risks from the Caledonian point of view. Unless he’d been prepared to kill every Carthaginian single-handedly, it was unlikely the death toll on their end would have been any lower.

In the end, there were less than a hundred survivors from the Carthaginian forces, and most of those were Carthaginian conscripts, laborers who had migrated to Britannia for a chance at prosperity on their empire’s frontiers but had ended up as cannon fodder. While the low number of prisoners meant there weren’t as many mouths to feed, these were the exact people that were agreeing to walk away from the Carthaginians and become Britannian citizens instead, since all they were looking for was a chance at prosperity.

“I understand you’re having a supply problem,” Lucilla said in his ear as he made his circuit of the east wall, to see how that side of the town fared through the siege.

“I see Sophus has been talking to you,” Ky said.

Although he valued the AI’s input, which had been invaluable in keeping him alive, it had developed a habit since gaining sentience of telling on him to Lucilla if it didn’t like a decision Ky was making. It was an annoying development, to be sure.

“Only because we have been dealing with the same issue here and I’ve been working on some solutions that might help.”

“I’m glad to hear it. We did a good job getting the harvest in before winter, but the increased size of the legions and all of the prisoners are starting to take a toll. I’d hoped the Caledonians would be able to help blunt some of that, but they saved less than we did. I don’t suppose the Ulaid have supplies we can buy from them?”

“No. In fact, that’s part of why I’ve been working on this problem already. Velius has asked for supplies of food, clothing and medicine for the civilians there, since entire villages have been wiped out by raiders, brigands, and the Carthaginians.”

Ky sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. Thanks to his altered biology and the medical nanobots swimming through his system, he didn’t get stress headaches, so the gesture was more of a habit he’d picked up from the locals than something to relieve actual pain.

“That sounds less like a solution and more like a compounding of the problem.”

“It isn’t my solution, just an explanation of why I’ve been working on one.”

“Okay, then what’s the solution?”

“I’ve been talking to some of the Scandi traders, and I think we can get them to begin bringing food shipments here on their return voyages after taking our finished products to the eastern markets to sell.”

“Scandi isn’t exactly a major food producer. As I understand it, near the end of winter they have to get a lot of their food from external shipments themselves. I find it doubtful they’d have much excess to sell on to us. Even if they did, we’re also buying up all the raw materials for the foundries we can, and pound for pound, they’d make more money on those shipments than they would on foodstuffs. I’m not sure how much we can rely on the charity of Scandi traders to give up profit in order to bring us food.”

“I wasn’t planning on appealing to their charity. I was planning on appealing to their greed. The new, stronger steel, along with heavy plows and arcuballista, although we are allowing only a small number of those to be sold, are in high demand in the northern and eastern ports, so we’ve put a high tax on them. My thought was that we reduce, or even eliminate, that tax if they agree to allot at least fifty percent of their hold space on the return journey for foodstuffs, which will also not be taxed. While they still make less money on the food, eliminating both the export and import taxes will change that math enough that I think we can get them to agree to those terms.”

“That’s a good idea, but it doesn’t solve the other problem. The Scandi don’t have an excess of food to sell us, and neither do most of the free Germanic tribes. The Carthaginians are the only ones with that kind of harvest, and we’ve already told them none of our products may be sold into Carthaginian markets, and that we’d cut them off from our ports entirely if we find out they have been selling to them.”

“Apparently, they have an Asian port in the east that’s accessible to them that leads to a lot of grassland and tribes that have excess food to sell. Now that the ice is thawing, it’s accessible and close enough that it be profitable for them to buy from those markets.”

That was a good point as well. Although Ky had not forgotten about the Eurasian ports on the Baltic, the tribes that lived there in his timeline did only small-scale trading with the people from Scandinavia and were more often a market to sell finished goods into rather than a source of raw materials. He’d assumed the changes in this timeline, which had led to tribes pushing into Roman lands hundreds of years before they should have, would have also destabilized the region as a whole, leaving less organized villages and conglomerates to trade with.

That was a problem he needed to get over, thinking of these regions as they were in the original timeline instead of investigating the situation as it really was now. It wasn’t hard to do locally, where he could see, or at least get regular reports, on conditions and determine where those changes had a direct effect on him. It was much harder to do for faraway places. Even Ramirus, with his far-flung net of spies and sources, knew little beyond Europe and the Mediterranean. He knew cultures existed and some goods still made their way from China and India, or what would be China and India in Ky’s timeline, but not much else beyond that.

The Carthaginian control of the Middle East meant that only their agents made the difficult trek through the traditional trade routes, and sailing technology hadn’t developed to the point to allow boats to circle the Horn of Africa and take the long way around. What information Ky did have came from the Steppes tribe - Scandi pipeline, which was much less reliable than traditional trade routes, at least with information.

“That’s interesting. Do the traders you’ve spoken to say they’d be interested in that option?”

“They do. They wanted to skip paying any export taxes now, and they aren’t happy that, instead, we’ve told them we’ll give them a credit for it once they bring in the foodstuffs, but everything they’re saying is hedged with “if’s” and “maybe,” as far as what food is available to import. They’ll get over it and do it though, I think. Money always wins out.”

“Good. Good,” Ky said.

“Now that that’s settled, let’s talk about you putting yourself in unnecessary danger,” Lucilla said, her voice getting much more serious.

***

Devnum

Lucilla paced in her room, equal parts bored and annoyed. Bored, because she’d been stuck here all day and annoyed because she had a lot to do, and this was wasting too much time. She’d had multiple meetings scheduled for the day, not the least of which was a trip to the foundry, where several of Hortensius’s assistants were trying to keep up with his vision and staggering workload to continue all of the projects he had going. She couldn’t fault them for how hard they were trying, but none of them had the overall picture and foresight that their boss had, and every project was falling behind.

She’d visited the gunpowder works, temporarily in a commandeered wheelhouse that they quickly expanded with a covered area for production, and that, at least, was moving along more or less as it had. The actual process, once they got it down, wasn’t difficult, just dangerous. Thankfully, because of their need to keep the moisture levels regulated, the nitrate beds had been located elsewhere and hadn’t gone up with the explosion. Likewise, steel production had more or less settled into a process that the foremen could maintain for a time without Hortensius’s help.

The semaphore towers, new glass works, and cannon production, however, all still needed the manufacturer’s input and direction and were falling far behind schedule. For the glass works, thankfully, Hortensius had found an artist who’d been doing glass, had some talent for it and had been running with the ideas given to them by Ky. He just needed to be focused and reminded that the end goal was the lenses he was making. That much, at least, was within Lucilla’s abilities.

The towers were also being erected in spite of Hortensius’s absence, but he had made alterations to the plans shortly before his injury for the next series to be built. She’d spent the last several days visiting the construction sites of the first towers, since they were being built on Ky’s original plans. The original plans called for basically a large platform with pulleys that would allow the operator to raise and lower a series of flags on one of six branches that extended up above the tower, designed to be visible from the next towers in the series.

Hortensius’s new design still had the pulley system, but had an added setup where the pulleys had additional connections, and rotated around. This would let one person “load up” the message, so the next series of flags could go up quickly. Lucilla was concerned that if the operator raised the flags too quickly, the person looking at it through one of the ‘telescopes’ that Ky had described might miss the message. She also wasn’t clear on the changes in the pulley design, which looked like an attempt to keep the flags from jamming in the mechanism, but seemed over-designed to her. She did like that it was designed so that lanterns could be raised or lowered in the place of flags for use at night, and it looked as if the lanterns would never turn over, always keeping the candles within upright.

He’d also added a wheel that allowed the platform to turn, that extended down into the tower, so that the operator would turn with it, allowing one tower to point its flags at more than one destination, since to gain the full effect, they needed to be looked at straight on, so the person seeing them could work out what flag they were looking at. This allowed for a station to be a “node” as he called it, splitting a line of stations to go different directions or cross without having to have multiple stations put in.

The explanations made sense, but it all seemed over-engineered and complicated, and the men in charge of having them built had questions she couldn’t answer. Sophus tried, but her descriptions were sometimes not good enough for it to determine what the best answer was. Originally, she’d thought to just put it aside and get the first few towers built and then wait on Ky to come and see the changes for himself, since Sophus could see through his eyes and finally understand what she had been describing.

That had also been her plan for the canon factory. Even when Hortensius was mobile, they were getting close to the point that they had to have Ky there to inspect the finished molds and first test castings. It had been made clear to her numerous times how important it was that there be no impurities or imperfections of any kind, which was fine, except the imperfections could often be so small as to be undetectable by the human eye. From where she stood, looking at the one piece that had been finished, it looked good to her, but without Ky’s ability to examine it fully, she was at a standstill.

Ky had another solution, since he thought it would be a couple of weeks before he could make it back to the capital, and he didn’t want to wait that long. The evening after the victory in Londinium, he had dispatched a crate to her under guard, which had arrived that morning. Inside was the small disk he called a drone that he sometimes sent into the air to see things at a distance or from a different vantage point. Sophus said he could alter its firmware, whatever that meant, so that it could operate the drone using her comms device, similar to how it operated the small devices Ky had put into her body to help her stay healthy.

Unfortunately, she had to be wearing it for the comms unit to be active, Sophus had no idea how long the alterations would take, and she had to stay near the drone because of something Sophus called ‘signal degradation.’ All of that was why Lucilla had been forced to stand in her room and wait while some kind of light on the bottom of the thing occasionally gave off a faint blue light, and then promptly went dark again. While this was an indication that at least something was happening, that was the only thing to tell her she wasn’t wasting her time. Sophus hadn’t replied to her or connected her to Ky since they started this process. Although the only time that had happened before was when Ky had fallen into that unwaking sleep, she was pretty sure that wasn’t the case  now.

Of course, it didn’t help relieve her boredom and frustration, and the gods only knew what her guards thought she was doing all day in her rooms by herself.

“I have finished,” Sophus’s voice suddenly said, breaking the quiet.

She’d been pouting, yelling, holding both sides of an argument where she played out yelling at Ky and Sophus for wasting her day, when its voice made her jump in surprise. She turned towards the device, which was now hovering a foot from her at eye level.

“Finally, can you … ohh.”

“It is pleasing to see you, Lucilla.”

“You can see me?”

“I can. More importantly, this unit has the sensor suite necessary to do a full check of the cannon molds, although it is advisable to move everyone out of viewing distance before we activate it.”

She found it an odd sensation, looking at this thing hovering in front of her while hearing Sophus’s voice in her ear. It was hard to not think of this thing as Sophus while talking to it, so the voice coming from another location was a bit disconcerting.

“Okay. It’s late, but we can at least go to the foundry, since it’s still running. Will you float behind me, or …”

“I am not inside the drone, simply controlling it through your comm unit. I believe it would be best to conceal the drone until you get to the foundry and have the building completely cleared, before releasing it onto the shop floor to examine the molds and first castings. Although you’ve seen the drone before and have had time to adjust to my presence, it is possible that technology this advanced will cause disruptions among people with less exposure.”

“You’re probably right. Do I need to put this back in that crate, or …”

“No. The crate used to transport it here was a precaution to keep it away from prying eyes. The drone itself is able to compact itself for storage, which is how the Commander is able to put it in a thin pouch in the leg of his uniform. I can give it a command to shrink to storage size, which is a little smaller than the palm of your hand.”

“I could put it in a coin purse,” Lucilla suggested.

“That should suffice, although it is important that no one takes that purse or it gets misplaced. While it is unlikely you would be targeted by thieves, given the guard that follows you, it is still important to be mindful.”

“I have a purse that hangs around my neck when I wear ceremonial robes, since they don’t have drawstrings or belts to attach a coin purse to. It is smaller than the normal coin purse, but it should be large enough to hold something as small as you described and it can open very large if need be.”

“Good, that should work,” Sophus said.

As she found the coin purse and prepared to leave, Lucilla was just happy that they were finally ready to move forward.