The Plains of Pluto
Copyright© 2025 by Lumpy
Chapter 4
Devnum
Hortensius was bone tired as he hurried toward the main munitions factory. He was already stretched thin trying to work out the larger screw mechanism on the new ship, which was causing more issues than they had first thought it would, when he’d received an urgent message from one of his assistants. He’d left the young man to oversee the final stages of the new cartridges while he was working on the naval program.
The metal cartridges themselves were finished, along with their primed bases, and all that had been left was to determine the right load of powder. The Consul had provided guidelines, but as with anything produced, the ranges of the powder they were making varied somewhat, not just from the Consul’s initial instructions, but also on a day-to-day or week-by-week basis.
So it was up to his engineers and Sorantius’s people to figure out the correct loadout. As tasks go, it shouldn’t have been difficult, which is why Hortensius had felt comfortable leaving it to them and going to Devnum to supervise the mechanical end of that project.
Unfortunately, as great as the telegraph was, it did not have the speed of back-and-forth communication to work out these kinds of details. So he found himself hustling back to Factorium to discuss it in person, after which he had to hop back on the train and make the reverse journey for an early morning project conference about an alteration to the screw design.
He found Sorantius and his men and Hortensius’s own engineers all gathered together, waiting for him in the middle of what looked like an intense debate that stopped abruptly when he walked in.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Sorantius said, not even bothering to feign a smile as he glared over at Hortensius’s man.
“I was just saying...”
“Wait,” Hortensius said, holding up a hand. “I don’t want to come at this from the middle. You were here to discuss the new cartridge, which, the last I knew, was finished and just waiting for load specifications. Where are we on that?”
No one gathered seemed pleased with that as a starting point, since they were clearly already in the middle of a heated debate about something, but Hortensius didn’t like to set himself up to be in a biased position.
“We’re having issues with variations between production batches, and I believe it’s mostly in the quality of the nitrate.”
“That is a problem. I thought we worked out our consistency issues last year.”
“We did. The problem was manageable until the production demands for more gunpowder increased. As we entered the new phase of the war, where our armies are in combat almost constantly, the demand for powder spiked. Since then, we’ve fallen behind almost sixty percent from what the legions are requesting.”
“Sixty percent?”
That was far worse than he’d imagined. He was so stretched between so many projects that he’d had to delegate out more authority to his subordinates. He’d hoped that, in the event of a major shortfall, they would have notified him.
Clearly, that hope had been misplaced.
“Why wasn’t I told?”
“Because it wasn’t immediately apparent,” Sorantius said. “We were still meeting the quotas, but doing so by supplementing more and more with the powder stores created over the last several years, before the fighting recommenced. Even then, we were falling behind slowly enough that the deficit took some time to be noticeable. However, once the new artillery shells were introduced, the volume of needed powder became an avalanche. To keep up with demand, which was not stopping, we began to pull nitrate early, before it reached its fullest potency. Not all at once, but it snowballed. A bit at a time until, when it became enough that failures began happening in quality assurance tests, we had built up a deficit we could not come back from.”
“That is where we were when you came in,” Hortensius’s man said. “I appreciate that we have an issue with production schedules, but if we continue using the substandard material, we risk catastrophic failures.”
“Which leaves us with an impossible choice,” Sorantius continued. “We can either maintain quality and accept severe shortages, or meet quantity demands with powder that might get our soldiers killed.”
He could see the dilemma. Neither option was acceptable, but he knew that Sorantius was thorough enough that, if he said those were the options available to them, then those were the options available to them.
Still, he had to try to think of alternatives.
“What about expanding the number of beds? If we double or triple the current setup...”
“We’re already pushing the limits,” Sorantius cut in. “The manpower requirements for managing the beds are staggering. Factor in the constant combat demands, the powder-filled shells and the fuses ... No. And that’s before considering the new powder formulation the Consul wants us to start working on as soon as this project is done.”
“Have you looked at the numbers on total manpower needs?”
“Even if we conscripted every able-bodied person not already in the legions or essential industries, we might not meet the production targets. Even I know that is not realistic. This is an unsolvable equation, Hortensius.”
Hortensius didn’t say anything right away. Instead, he paced the length of the workroom, which he often did when stuck with a difficult problem. Often enough that the others knew to wait and let him pace out his thoughts.
“You’re right, of course. Which leaves us with the only other option available. I’ll contact the Consul today and lay out the problem for him. He may have solutions we haven’t considered.”
“The Consul can’t conjure nitrates from thin air,” one of the younger chemists muttered.
“No,” Hortensius agreed, “but he’s delivered what seemed impossible before. Until we hear from him, continue maximum production with what we have. Maintain quality. That’s absolutely necessary, particularly for the new shells. We can’t risk catastrophic failures in the field.”
“And the regular powder supplies?”
“Keep pushing as hard as you can without breaking the workforce. Add in as many beds as you can with the manpower you can get now. Until the Consul delivers us a miracle, we will just have to do the best we can.”
Carthage
Medb was tired, and her head hurt. It had been two weeks since the visit from Geral’s friend with his last message, and progress had been achingly slow since then. Unlike the search she’d had Geral doing, looking for people when she didn’t know who they were or where to find them, she knew exactly where to look. She’d thought that would at least make the search a little faster.
How wrong she’d been.
She still hadn’t recruited a good agent, since the loss of Geral, who could do the leg work on this for her. She just didn’t have the connections here to uncover new ones. She’d been lucky to find him in the first place, and she hadn’t found another agent of his caliber since.
Which meant that she’d had to rely on a much shadier network of paid informants, who had their place, but were not great for the more detailed work. Most of those agents couldn’t know who they were working for, because of how unreliable and double-crossing they could be, so she’d had to deal with them through cutouts and middlemen who were at least somewhat less shady.
It meant that her instructions to them were limited in detail, since much of it would get lost in the passing of messages, and consequently limited the detail she could get back from them.
Not that they had been completely unproductive. It had taken weeks, but a pattern was starting to show itself, from both direct observation and gossip from the seasoned hands working the docks. For months now, there had been intermittent ships coming in displaying odd behavior.
They would sail in late in the evening, empty or nearly empty, load up a shipment, and be gone before the sun rose. Carthage was a busy port, and it wasn’t unusual for ships to arrive at night and leave early in the morning, but it was unusual to see the same ship do both.
For one, it made no economic sense to have a ship come in empty. Ships required men, who had to be paid and fed on the voyage, and sailing wore on the ship itself, which was one more trip closer to needing an overhaul or heavy maintenance. Which meant that any time a ship left port, it needed to bring in revenue, and a ship coming in empty would not be doing that for half its voyage.
That didn’t even count the crew. Even if the ship only plied the Middle Sea, they would still be spending weeks or at least days on the water and would want more than a few hours in port before going out again.
Still, if it had only been one ship making the same kind of journey, she would have written it off as a shipmaster who’d either worked out some kind of deal to make the trip make sense or who had a set of habits she couldn’t explain.
But it wasn’t one ship. It was hard to tell all of the times this had happened, but those whose names her informants had provided, including one that had come into port in this time period, were all different ships.
That went beyond something explainable.
It was a pattern, and in her line of work, a pattern meant something she needed to investigate further. Which was where her current problem came to light. She’d reached the end of what her web of paid informants could do, and she needed to get more information on these ships, or place someone aboard one of them, if she could.
And that meant she needed loyal agents. The one thing she didn’t have.
Which was why she’d sent for Claudius almost thirty minutes prior. She was trying not to be impatient, as he had a lot of work to do being in charge of the praetorians in the city, but she was not a woman who liked to be kept waiting.
Thankfully, a few minutes later, there was a knock on the door, followed by the praetorian being ushered in by the guards outside, who knew not to keep her waiting.
“Tribune, thank you for coming,” she said as he entered, gesturing to one of the chairs across from her desk. “I trust everything in the city is quiet.”
“As quiet as the city ever gets, my lady,” Claudius said, standing next to the chair instead of sitting on it. “Though I suspect you didn’t summon me to discuss the daily patrols.”
“No. I called you because I need your help. Or rather, I need to borrow some of your men for a task. One that requires more ... discretion than their usual duties.”
From Claudius’s expression, it was clear he both guessed what she needed and was skeptical about it. She wasn’t surprised by either. Claudius had shown he was no fool and there was only one thing the Empire’s spymistress would need him for. He was also a soldier through and through, in spite of his assortment of police duties. He’d shown ability to handle intelligence gathering tasks, but he’d been vocal about his displeasure for it at every opportunity.
“As co-regent of the city, the praetorians, of course, serve at your command, but we are soldiers, not spies.”
“You do yourself a disservice. You could be very good at this, I think. Besides, sometimes a soldier must act as something else to serve the Empire. Here is my issue. For the past several months, ships have been arriving in port under suspicious circumstances. They come in empty or nearly so, late in the evening. By dawn, they’re gone again, loaded with cargo.”
“That’s unusual, but not necessarily...”
“Different ships, Claudius. Different crews, different flags, but the same pattern. No crew stays in port more than a few hours. No shore leave, no drinking, no whoring. Just in and out, like they’re afraid to be seen in daylight.”
“Smugglers?”
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