02 Plyometrics

Steel was still looking in all directions, but his attention was where it should be now, on the construction work. The yard was piled with cut stone and construction timbers. Now that the ground was thawing, the foundations for the inner wall were being dug. Where it was still hard, Steel's engineers were injecting boiling water. Steam rose from the holes, obscuring the windlasses and the diggers below. The place was louder than a battle field: windlasses creaking, blades hacking at dirt,复件 (4) 复件 air max1, leaders shouting to work teams. It was also as crowded as close combat,复件 (68) air max, though not nearly so chaotic. Steel watched a digger pack at the bottom of one of the trenches. There were thirty members,复件 (80) air max2, so close to each other that their shoulders sometimes touched. It was an enormous mob, but there was nothing of an orgy about the association. Even before Woodcarver, construction and factory guilds had been doing this sort of thing: The thirty-member pack below was probably not as bright as a threesome. The front rank of ten swung mattocks in unison, carving steadily into the wall of dirt. When their heads and mattocks were extended high, the ten members behind them darted forward to scoop back the dirt and rocks that had just been freed. Behind them, a third tier of members hauled the dirt from the pit. Making it work was a complicated bit of timing -- the earth was not homogeneous -- but it was well within the mental ability of the pack. They could go on like this for hours,复件 (60) air max, shifting first and second ranks every few minutes. In years past, the guilds jealously guarded the secret of each special melding. After a hard day's work, such a team would split into normally intelligent packs -- each going home very well paid. Steel smiled to himself. Woodcarver had improved on the old guild tricks -- but Flenser had provided an essential refinement (actually a borrowing from the Tropics). Why let the team break up at the end of a work shift? Flenser work teams stayed together indefinitely, housed in barracks so small they could never recover their separate pack minds. It worked well. After a year or two, and with proper culling, the original packs in such teams were dull things that scarcely wanted to break away. For a moment Steel watched the cut stone being lowered into the new hole and mortared into place. Then he nodded at the whitejackets in charge,02 Plyometrics, and walked on. The foundation holes continued right up to the walls of the starship compound. This was the trickiest construction of all, the part that would turn the castle into a beautiful snare. A little more information via Amdijefri and he would know just what to build. The door to the starship compound was open just now, and a whitejackets was sitting back to back in the opening. That guard heard the noise an instant before Steel: two of its members broke ranks to look around the side of the compound. Almost inaudibly,复件 (12) air max, there came high screams, then honking attack calls. The whitejackets leaped from the stairs and raced around the building. Steel and his guards weren't far behind. He skidded to a stop at the foundation trench on the far side of the ship. The immediate source of the racket was obvious. Three packs of whitejackets were putting a team's talker to the question. They had separated out the verbal member and were beating it with truncheon whips. This close, the mental screams were almost as loud as the shouting. The rest of the digger team was coming out of the trench, breaking into functional packs and attacking the whitejackets with their mattocks. How could things get so bloody screwed up? He could guess.