Devil's Due (Destroyermen #12)(12)

That had been a conscious planning decision, not only to spread the load, but also to build in future competition. With the ratification of the constitution, it was agreed that all manufacturing facilities would—someday—be broken into competing companies. Letts had worked hard for that, since the labor and treasure of all the people had gone into making them. Those same people who’d worked so hard for so long—before they were even paid—would have shares they could keep or sell. It would be a nightmare to implement, but it was the right thing to do, not only for the people but also for the future. Competition was good. That would have to wait, however.

The powder mills and magazine complexes (now situated on the other side of the bay, northeast of the Baalkpan ATC), were frighteningly monstrous, but there was redundancy now. Most industrial Homes or land-based “states” in the Alliance had powder mills of their own, and numerous secure magazines. The Grik zeppelin raid on Baalkpan hadn’t hit the one they’d had at the time, but that was sheer luck. They’d never risk such a devastating blow again by keeping all their explosive “eggs” in one basket.

The only exception to that was the Smokeless Propellant Works on Samaar. There weren’t enough Sa’aarans, a race of Grik-like Pacific islanders that Saan-Kakja, the high chief of the Filpin Lands, had taken in, to expect them to contribute troops. Only one, with the unlikely name of Lawrence, was currently under arms for the Union. But in their gratitude to Saan-Kakja, the Sa’aarans desperately wanted to be of use and actually lobbied to have the dangerous installation built in their midst. The fact that Samaar was overrun with a kind of plant that produced an ideal type of cellulose for the project was advantageous. And there’d be other installations of the type soon, in Sular and on Respite Island, importing the “guncotton” plants from Samaar. But the demand for regular gunpowder still surpassed the need for the “smokeless” variety, and probably would for some time to come.

The Baalkpan, Maa-ni-la, and now Imperial naval arsenals were responsible for making everything from small arms—such as the “trapdoor” Allin-Silva breech-loading rifles, carbines, and shotguns—to torpedoes, mortars, bombs, and ever larger naval rifles. With the associated heavy lathes required, they were also tasked with making other large machined parts such as propeller shafts. Each of these endeavors, and those devoted to making the new automatic weapons, pistols, bayonets, cutlasses, and even canteens and helmets, was under the supervision of various division chiefs, as was the production of the thankfully small variety of fixed ammunition for all standard weapons. Alan imagined dismally that they had several regiments’ worth of division chiefs alone, scattered around the Alliance. Napoleon was wrong, he realized. Armies don’t move on their stomachs. They slide along on the slippery heaps of paper bureaucrats excrete like brontosarry shit. How the HELL did we manage all this before we even had paper?

In addition to reporting to Ordnance, each division made duplicate reports to the Ministry of Industry and Supply, which coordinated the production of all other combat gear, from shoes and sandals to field smocks, cartridge boxes, rations and medical supplies, transport wagons, and field-comm gear. And then, of course, there were the thousands of “little” things that troops needed in the field—like shelter. Alan still managed to find a measure of ironic amusement that all their ’Cat soldiers and Marines slept under shelter-half pup tents. But each of those had to have stakes, ropes . . . The list was endless. Finally, Supply had to figure out who needed what, when, and where, and arrange to get it there. That’d been Alan’s primary job before his acclamation to chairman—and the one he missed least of all.

The only reason any of this is working, he thought, as Ambassador Forester continued to describe the self-serving shenanigans of the Sularans, besides the fact we’re in an existential war, is because stuff is so cheap. He’d helped institute a financial system more than a year before, the first the Lemurians had ever really known. Before that, their various economies were based on barter and carefully tabulated indebtedness founded on numerous standards. The closest they’d come to the gold standard in use in the Empire of the New Britain Isles, and that Alan had roughly copied here, was a barrel of gri-kakka oil as a reference for relative value. But with so much dependent on petroleum now, gri-kakka oil was in the tank. It still made better lamp oil and flux for a wide variety of natural lubricants—including bullet lube—but the industry was probably almost as dead as the sea monsters they killed to get it. But metal, any metal, had real value, and gold, being the most durable of all—and least useful for turning into bullets, blades, and airplane engines—set the standard for the relative, representative value of other metals that could be made into things. Copper, iron, zinc, lead, all had value relative to their weight in gold, and gold was the “money” they exchanged in their place.

The most valuable metal in the world, for example, was aluminum, worth ten times its weight in gold. They needed it for a number of very specific things, primarily to do with aircraft, and simply couldn’t make it yet—if ever. All they had was what remained of the old PBY Catalina, a few wrecked P-40s, an old “Betty” bomber they’d found crashed in the jungle of Borno, and a few other curious relics that turned up from time to time. Not long before, for example, a prospecting team recovered the carcass of a P-40 lost in the raid on Madras. They’d been looking for it specifically and had a good idea where it was, but then another team discovered the wreckage of a Japanese dive bomber on the southwest coast of Java, near Chill-Chaap. So there was always hope that other “leakers” from another war-torn world might appear.