Sorrow Space Read Online Free Page A

were more vehicles inside, including several jeeps in use, a flatbed truck and two helicopters. The helicopters were still in the process of being built, their exposed shells looking like something ravaged by locusts.
    There were other things being constructed in the factory, too. Kane recognized several types of weapons, including his favored Sin Eater, trundling along a production line and spewing from a buzzing mechanical unit overseen by a half-dozen women in overalls. The whole factory was a cacophony of noises, buzzing and hissing and clanking and whirring, as various units pressed and popped and moulded and shaped a plethora of items. Despite the harshness of that wall of noise, it sounded somehow tranquil after the heavy thrumming of the Chinook’s rotors.
    Striding with the grace of a swan in flight, Kane’s paraplegic liaison led the three Cerberus teammates across the vast room, past the groups of packers and checkers who huddled at various points around the conveyor belts like trained rats in a maze awaiting their food reward.
    “Looks like a broad variety of items being constructed here,” Brigid observed, raising her voice over the discordance of the factory floor.
    Buchs nodded. “Guns, ammo, rigs—you name it,” he trilled with pride. “We’re looking to start up a line of Sandcats.”
    “How can you produce such variety?” Grant asked. “Stuff like this involves a lot of technical know-how.”
    “We acquired one of the databases out in Cobalt,” Buchs explained. “Computer full of designs, just needed to get things up and running here so we could start making them wholesale. Took eighteen months to get this far—and we’re only just getting started.”
    “But all of this takes money,” the paraplegic continued as they passed a production line of minicannons, portable antitank devices that required two men to move them. “And that’s where you boys come in, Mr. Kane.”
    Kane nodded. “Well, let me assure you, I like what I see here. Reckon we can make a solid return on our investment.”
    The mustached negotiator slapped Kane on the back. “We ain’t in the Deathlands now—people expect to get paid for working. But you’ll get back double, mebbe even triple what you put in in the first year alone. I can guarantee you that.
    “Let’s go meet the chief.”
    With that, Buchs led Kane and his companions up a flight of wrought-iron stairs that ran alongside the wall of the factory. The staircase led up two flights to a high L-shaped platform that abutted two adjoining walls of the factory, running the full length of both, high above the workstations. Buchs’s fiberglass legs clanged against the iron stairs.
    As they ascended, Brigid called out to Buchs from behind Kane. “I’m wondering how you manage the distribution once your product is complete, Mr. Buchs.”
    Buchs peered back over his shoulder as he reached the midlevel flight of the staircase. “There are tracks through the ravines,” he explained. “Hard to spot from the air, but they’re there. The smaller stuff we can cart out of here on people or mules. The larger items—well, they make their own way mostly.”
    “Sounds like a tidy arrangement,” Grant muttered as he trudged up the clanging stairs behind his companions, the five sec men following.
    While Kane, like his companions, took pains to conform to the illusion that he was a businessman looking for an investment opportunity, he also used the walk up the stairs to surreptitiously secure a better idea of the factory layout. A conveyor belt of newly completed guns ran beneath the edge of the staircase, their smooth bodies each made of a single vacuum-molded piece. Given the rate of the conveyor belt, Kane estimated that this factory was pumping out upward of two thousand of the handblasters a day. He knew then that he and his team were right to shut this place down; whatever came out of the factory, its ultimate result was more human misery.
    Buchs reached the