Part 88 (2/2)

Burke shrugged. ”If Remillard has his way, there won't be any gate. No-the King's arguments were very persuasive, and he sure as h.e.l.l picked the right man for the job. With the river up the way it is, I should be able to comb the entire five hundred odd kilometres between here and the sea in a week to ten days.

I'll farspeak the King on a regular sked all the way. If his schooner's not there, I'll have had a nice excursion to liven up my last days in the Pliocene.”

”And if you find it-”

”I'm no Crazy Horse. All I do is report her position and haul my tush on out of there full speed ahead. From the mouth of the Seine to Goriah is about a week's journey by sea. A little mazel, I won't even have to miss the Grand Tourney!”

He untied the line, jumped lightly into the canoe-which barely rocked as he settled onto his haunches-and lifted his paddle in salute.

”Tana guide you,” said the Lady of the Howlers.

Burke lifted his instrument-equipped wrist. ”And the Messrs.

Plain.”

”Well, what's the hoo-ha?” the King asked Tony Wayland.

The metallurgist thrust a sealed bottle containing a silvery rod under Aiken's nose. ”This. It's taken the prospecting team all this time to locate a suitable dysprosium ore, what with dodging renegade Howlers and having the Norwegian locale turn out a b.u.mmer. And now that they've settled in to refine thalenite instead of the xenotime and we finally have an abundant source of ore, the b.l.o.o.d.y idiots are sending down dreck like this.”

”What's the problem?” The King controlled his impatience.

”Contaminated,” said Hagen gloomily.

”Simply lousy with holmium,” Tony said. ”And any sort of impurity in the dysprosium core screws up the resistivity factor of the wire something chronic-I mean, quite badly.”

”Is it the fault of the equipment, or what?” asked the King.

”The machinery we sent up should be able to do the job,”

Tony said. ”They have a high-speed Ramsgate extractor for the ion separation and a nice little electroliser for production of the metal. I think they're skimping on quality control somewhere.

Perhaps in the beginning stages of the ore feed.”

”I sent up Candyman, our industrial chemist,” Hagen said, ”but he couldn't spot the problem. He's really an organic specialist. The crew on the job are experienced mining engineers. They ought to be able to-”

Tony glowered darkly. ”You remember that I expressed certain reservations about Yobbo Ruan and Trevarthen when I first learned they'd been put in charge. They may have done well enough mucking about the Amalizan gold mines, but rareearth refining demands finesse.”

”The niobium-dysprosium wire is vital to the project,” Hagen said. ”This f.u.c.k-up means delay at best, and failure if we can't lick it.”

The King studied the bottle with its pencil-sized ingot. ”You can't complete the purification process here in the labs at Castle Gateway?”

Hagen said, ”We'd have to take the extractor away from the mining crew, and we only have the one. Since we need forty kilos of the stuff, and the basic run-through will take three weeks-”

”Oh, for s.h.i.+t's sake,” said the King irritably. ”You know there's only one answer to this. Get properly refined metal from Fennoscandia in the first place. Solve the problem at the source.”

Hagen nodded. ”I want to be sure you appreciate the risk, though. Some species of gigantic Howler lives up there.

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