EMPIRE: Intervention (EMPIRE SERIES Book 13)

by Richard F. Weyand

  Rumson seemed to shrink under her gaze.

  “One last thing, Mr. Rumson. While you have not held office for five years, a little research has turned up an accounting error. It seems you and the other Councilors have been mistakenly paid Council salaries the last five years. Those sums will be garnished from your Council retirement payments until they are clawed back. And those retirement payments will be calculated on your actual years of service.”

  Turley turned to Parsons while Rumson and Bertrand sat stunned.

  “Mr. Parsons, do we have someone who can escort our guests out of Government Center?”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  As he said it, four large soldiers in MCUs entered her office. All wore sidearms.

  “Good day, gentlemen. These men will show you out.”

  “But, but, but, ....” Rumson attempted.

  “You may leave with or without assistance, gentlemen, but in either case it is now time to leave.”

  The escort detail came forward, at which Rumson seemed to shrink further, but he and Bertrand got up and were escorted meekly out of Turley’s office.

  When the door closed behind them, Turley turned to Noyce.

  “That was less fun than I thought it would be, Minister Noyce.”

  “Ah, but you were not imprisoned for seven years under their benign rule, Madam President. I found it delightful.”

  “I suppose,” Turley said, “but I feel like I should have those chairs steam cleaned.”

  Noyce snorted.

  “I understand,” he said. “Are you ready now to sign those executive orders, Madam President?”

  “Absolutely. I wanted to wait until I met with them. I couldn’t quite believe your warning, Minister Noyce. But I think it’s time we start ripping down that edifice of stupidity.”

  Noyce nodded.

  “Mr. North, do you have those documents ready for me?”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  One of the staff pool came in from the outer office with a number of official documents and set them on the desk.

  “Let’s get started, Minister Noyce.”

  Turley walked over and sat behind her desk, while Noyce took a guest chair facing her.

  “The first one, Madam President, repeals by decree all the laws Mr. Mieland passed by decree after the Council was disbanded.”

  “OK. That one’s easy.”

  Turley signed the official hard-copy version and set it to one side.

  “The second repeals by decree almost all the laws the Council passed and Mr. Mieland signed during their official terms, Madam President.”

  “Almost all, Minister Noyce?”

  “There were a few we kept, Madam President, including the emergency powers act that, absent a court finding to the contrary, is the basis for your appointment and your powers.”

  “Ah. We don’t want to knock the prop out from under us, eh, even flimsy as it is?”

  “Indeed, Madam President.”

  Turley signed the document and set it aside.

  “The third is a blanket pardon for everyone we released from prison last week, Madam President. It also stipulates compensatory payments in the amount of the average annual income for the same period as the period of their incarceration.”

  Turley looked at the document. It explicitly exempted Colin Noyce from the terms.

  “You’ve left yourself out, Minister Noyce.”

  “Yes, Madam President. I could scarcely prepare a document of such a kind that would include myself and be even-handed about it.”

  “I see. Well, I can fix that.”

  Turley struck out the phrase exempting Colin Noyce from its terms and signed the document. She set it aside.

  “Thank you, Madam President. The last document is perhaps more controversial. It repeals by decree a number of laws that were passed by Councils in prior administrations and yet violate in one way or another your emphasis on liberty over all.”

  “The pebbles that started the avalanche, Minister Noyce?”

  “An apt metaphor. Yes, Madam President. They include things like libel laws, slander laws, firearms laws, laws enabling warrantless searches, laws loosening the required circumstances for arrest on probable cause. All that sort of thing.”

  “Excellent.”

  Turley signed the fourth document and set it aside. Having gotten to the bottom of the stack of folders, Turley eyed them with satisfaction. She turned her eyes to Noyce.

  “Well, Minister Noyce, that was quite a morning’s work. Would you care to join me for lunch?”

  “I would be delighted, Madam President.”

  Tractors and Seeds

  The refinery site was bustling. Once the big epoxycrete pad was poured for the refinery itself, the epoxycrete machine was dragged by the bulldozer to the sites for the storage tanks, both for inbound crude and for outbound products, including diesel fuel, fuel oil, and asphalt. The asphalt was important because the farm roads would be much more negotiable by fuel trucks and grain trucks if all of them were paved.

  One of the machines that had been brought along was a two-hundred-thirty foot crane, required to build and place the fractionating columns and storage tanks and to place other modules of the assembly. It had come in its own container, the boom being in three pieces to fit in the eighty-foot-long container.

  The refinery and its accoutrement had been designed to be shipped in containers, which made the design different than if it were to be built up from scratch on site. It wasn’t the most efficient design from a refining point of view, but it was cheaper to ship and went up fast, all the complicated bits being pre-assembled in modules.

  The tanks themselves were not round in cross-section, they were dodecagons, with twelve straight sides, so they would pack more densely into the containers. They would be built downslope from the refinery, so a leak or rupture didn’t threaten the complex.

  The heaters were packed in their own containers as complete assemblies, while the control room building for the whole refinery simply arrived as a completely assembled unit. In fact, the control room building was the container, with the cuts needed to install windows and doors pre-marked on the outside.

  The fractionating columns came in two pieces, and were to be stacked up using the crane, then joined by a robotic welder that rode on a track around the column, welding as it went. The smaller fractionating columns came packed inside larger fractionating columns, and connecting pipes came packed inside the smaller fractionating columns, so just getting all the pieces unpacked was a major job.

  That was the part they were working on now, getting it all unpacked and untangled. For Igor Voronin and his crew, it was all old-hat, a job they had done a dozen times before. For all the local workers, every day was something new.

  “Hi, Igor. How are things going?” Gulliver asked as he walked up to Voronin’s supervisory spot overlooking the site.

  “Oh, hi, Paul. We’re doing pretty well. Everything was spotted correctly by the shuttles, so as we drag the contents of each container out, everything ends up being where it needs to be.”

  Gulliver looked out over the site. That Voronin could see any organization in the mad jumble of containers and their contents strewn across the site was impressive.

  “Really. I’m surprised a jumble like this could be planned. It looks like a tornado hit a shipping facility.”

  Voronin laughed.

  “No. See the crane there? Where they’re assembling the boom? It’s right at the far end of the refinery pad, where the fractionating towers go. Now, see where the fractionating towers are being pulled out of their containers? The biggest pieces will be next to the crane, the smaller ones inside them, once pulled out, will be a bit further away, and the pipes inside them further yet. The crane is limited in what it can lift by the angle of the boom, so the heavier stuff has to be closer. We don’t want to tip the crane over. And that’s how it’s all coming out of the containers. It was all planned out this way. Doesn’t look like it, may
be, but it was, and it’s all going according to plan.”

  “If you say so,” Gulliver said. “It’s fascinating to watch. I’ll give you that.”

  Gulliver had supposed that, to assemble the boom on a crane like that, the pieces would all be connected together across the ground and then the boom tilted up into the air, but that’s not what was happening. The first section of the boom stood straight up from the platform of the crane, and the second section of the boom was being winched up the side of the first.

  There was a puff of smoke from the bulldozer, and Gulliver saw it pull the contents out of one of the containers. The bulldozer just dragged the whole thing out at once, a mass of pipes and valves. It was all sledded inside the container, and the bulldozer dragged it all out in one piece. The crew disconnected the bulldozer from the sled and they and the bulldozer moved to another container.

  Gulliver looked over to the clear concrete pad. A machine the size of a file cabinet was maneuvering around on the pad. It would stop for a while, spew a bunch of dust and smoke, and then move on to a different spot and do it again.

  “What’s that widget doing?” Gulliver asked Voronin, pointing to the epoxycrete pad.

  “The auto-locator? It’s drilling holes in the pad for mounting studs, then it epoxies the studs into the holes. There’s a locator beacon at each corner of the pad, so it located the refinery on the pad and is laying it out. When we mount stuff, we just bolt it down.”

  “How do you know which stud is which?”

  “It stencils an ID number on the pad next to each stud.”

  Gulliver shook his head.

  “It’s really going to go up fast, isn’t it?”

  “Drop by and see it again in a week.”

  Gulliver did drop by a week later. The site had been transformed. The big epoxycrete pad, empty last week, now sprouted several fractionating towers in a clump of vertical structures to one side of the pad. The heaters had been placed as well. The control room, too, had been sited on the pad. The crane was currently lifting smaller modules from the ground and moving them into place on the pad, locating the valves and piping that would connect the bigger pieces together.

  “Wow,” Gulliver said. “You said come back in a week. I’ll say. It looks almost done.”

  “It’s always like that,” Voronin said. “The big stuff goes up fast. We have a lot of welding and wiring and checking to do. That’s going to take a while. Then we need to start it up. That takes a while, and we’ll be slow at that because we have to teach it as we go.”

  “Did you find operating crews to train?”

  “Yeah. My guys have been keeping an eye on the workmen. Noting which ones stayed out of trouble, checked drawings twice before they did anything, that sort of thing. You know, the kind of guys you would trust to run something like this.”

  Voronin turned from the site to look at Gulliver.

  “The whole thing is basically a bomb waiting to go off. The number of BTUs in one of those fractionating columns under operation is truly impressive. So we need the safety-oriented guys. But we got some we’re looking at. Some of the former Secret Police guys. Mostly the junior officers.”

  “Good. Junior officers is OK. I think more senior officers might be security risks. True-believer types.”

  “We don’t have any of those. Just junior officers and patrol types. Some of the senior officers might be true believers, but what they don’t believe in is work, apparently.”

  Gulliver nodded. He scanned the site and noted the auto-locator robot was now laying out one of the smaller pads downslope on the other side of the refinery pad.

  “Setting mounting bolts for the tanks?” he asked Voronin.

  “That’s right. Once the crane is done moving modules into position, we’ll use it to build up the storage tanks.”

  “Well, it’s all really impressive. I’m enjoying watching it go up.”

  “It’s very satisfying work,” Voronin said. “I never get tired of it.”

  “It does mean being on-site though. Away from home.”

  “Sure, but then I get a month off at home with nothing to do. By the end of that, my wife is begging me to leave.”

  Voronin smiled and Gulliver laughed.

  The next time Gulliver stopped by, Voronin came out of the control room building to meet him.

  “You’ve moved your headquarters down off the hill.”

  “Yes,” Voronin said. “Most of the heavy work is done now. We’re checking the operation of valves and sensors, one at a time. It’s a tedious business, but it has to be done, and done carefully.”

  “I suppose you have spares.”

  “Oh, yes. The facility has to be able to be maintained, and we know what the failure rates are on all the pieces.”

  “I see you have most of the tanks up,” Gulliver said.

  “Most of them. They’re going to set a couple today. Come on. This’ll be fun to watch.”

  Voronin led Gulliver down the rise to where a bunch of workers were standing around the contents of a container. The crane was being waved over into position.

  “They’re all standing well back,” Gulliver said.

  “Now they are. We had a guy killed last week. Standing too close and the load shifted. Crane operator felt really bad about it, but it wasn’t his fault. People only give half an ear to safety lectures until somebody gets killed. Then you get both ears.”

  The load that had been pulled out of the container was twelve rectangular pre-fab panels. On top of them were two stacks of six triangular pre-fab panels. The acute points of the two stacks met in the middle. It looked like a gigantic propeller.

  The crane hook came down and grabbed a lift-eye at the point where the two triangular stacks came together. It lifted them and, as it did, both stacks fanned out until they almost made a complete circle. The crane swung the assembly to one side and lowered it, and then workers came forward. They connected come-alongs to the corners at the gaps and pulled them together. One fellow put a locating pin in a hole, and the result was a shallow circular cone in twelve panels. The crane set the assembly down, and two workers put a welder robot on one of the seams and started it going.

  “OK. Now that’s impressive,” Gulliver said.

  “We call it the beanie. It’s the roof of the tank. Now watch this.”

  At one end of the stack of rectangular panels, there was a chain from each of the panels to a collector ring. The crane hook dropped down and waited there. When they got the clear from the crane operator, two workers came forward and put the collector ring on the hook. They moved away, and then the crane lifted the whole stack of panels by that end, levering them up off of the container sled.

  As the panels were lifted, Gulliver could see they were connected in a zigzag by hinges on the corners. Once they were up off the sled, hanging vertically, the crane operator moved the stack to one side, clearing the sled. Workers came forward then and began unfolding the panels one at a time, and putting locator pins in flanges that held the panels at an angle, each to the next. When they had completed, they had nearly a circle. The workers attached a come-along to the two panels on either side of the gap and winched them together until another worker could drop in locator pins to hold them together.

  “Wow,” Gulliver said.

  “Yeah. That one’s fun.”

  The crane lifted the barrel of the tank a couple more feet, then swung it out over the epoxycrete pad that would be its home. With workmen guiding and locating the heavy tank, the crane operator slowly lowered it down onto its mounting studs. Workers with pneumatic nut drivers drove the big nuts down on the studs and bolted the tank down. Once bolted down, two workers climbed up the handholds to the top of the tank. They mounted a come-along on the gap between panels where the seam was, pulled the gap together, and dropped in locator pins to hold it.

  The crane hook had been lowered to put slack in the chains. One worker clambered up the handholds at each corner to unhook the chains from the tank,
and the crane lifted the chains out of the way. The crane lowered the chains to the ground, and a worker unhooked the collector ring.

  “And now you just put the beanie on?” Gulliver asked.

  “Yes, once it’s all welded up. Then we weld up the tank sides and we’re done.”

  “Why doesn’t it leak out at the seam between the tank and the epoxycrete?”

  “You maybe didn’t notice, but there was a big bead of an epoxy caulk that ran between the mounting studs,” Voronin said.

  “That’s what I saw oozing out when they drove the mounting nuts down.”

  “That’s right. They’ll check that it oozed out all the way around. That’s all we need to make a seal.”

  “Well, that was fun,” Gulliver said. “I never would have guessed that’s how you did it.”

  “Lotsa ways to do it. All the rest are more work. This way’s easy.”

  “So when will you start the whole thing up?”

  “Another week. We still have to connect a bunch of the storage tanks up. And the pipe over to the other refinery over there–“ Voronin gestured to the existing refinery a quarter-mile distant “– isn’t completely in yet. We want that pipe so either refinery can restart itself using product from the other. Get that stuff done, finish our testing, some other minor stuff. We’re getting close.”

  “Well, it’s amazing. And it will make a big difference here.”

  On Sunday night six weeks after the overthrow of the Mieland administration, Turley and Gulliver were laying in bed cooling down.

  “How close are they to starting the refinery?” Turley asked.

  “They’ll start it this week. The construction phase is over.”

  “Won’t that be something? And how are we for delivering product to farmers?”

  “We have tanker trucks standing by.”

  “That’s great. And the seeds?”

  “The Jason B. Montgomery is due in on Wednesday. She has containers of seeds on board. We’re going to drop off the fuel and seeds directly to the farmers. Right to the farm.”

  “What kind of seeds?”