Vance stood on the second floor catwalk of the UTC machine parts manufactory, peering out into the street below. "The Anvileers were genuinely lucky that Tsung was streetside. If they had tried to go through with their plan, the mercenaries would have cut them apart."
Kyris shook her head. "I find it doubtful the Anvileers were all exposed in the street." The ranger checked the tourist pamphlet, helpfully emblazoned with 'Canardmort Affairs Sights to See' across the head. "They were miners. I would have expected some of them to brave the sewer lines or tunnel through, something the mercenaries probably wouldn't have anticipated."
"We'll never know for sure, but if I was there, I definitely would have anticipated it." Vance gestured. "It would be hard to cover with only a five-mercenary team, though. Kind of hard to imagine a bombing these days."
"And harder to imagine some ponce ETI agent putting themselves in the way. The last time I talked to ETI they were trying to convince me that the new premium they wanted to charge for insuring my bow was justified to 'market conditions'. What market, for family heirloom weaponry?" Kyris frowned. "The age of the First Princeps, filled with brave derring-do type folks, huh."
"Well, that's only according to all the books that got left behind." Vance stretched his arms and adjusted his waistcoat. "Half the time it's all lies anyway, isn't it? Where would you even get a shipment of dead ducks, here in Patino?"
The Conflict
Prelude
Power distribution in Patino is always a tense affair; while the Patino Waterworks produce incredible amounts of Power to drive the manufactory lines, the motive force is not infinite, and the manufactories closest to the waterworks support more industrial throughput by minimizing their distribution losses. This does not mean that opening a new manufactory is impossible or destined to fail; simply that the distribution of power between the various auto-weaver and macro-assemblage machinery is tightly regulated and allocated, with new allocations being negotiated at the start of every season by the Joint Consortiums.
The Anvileers of Red Mountain, fresh off of a windfall profit selling Oreichal claims to the Copper and Ironworker's Brotherhood, sought to open their first major manufactory in Patino, the Machine City, a vertically integrated line of business from their heavily dispersed smelter and refinery operations. To support this, the Anvileers negotiated for a certain amount of power delivered to run their auto-mills, but the amount of power provided was only enough to run a single daytime shift, an amount deemed appropriate by the Joint Consortiums and the Patino Council for a new and untested manufactory arrangement.
The Anvileers were impatient to scale, and began to run a second shift of operations in violation of the agreement, drawing additional power in the late evenings. Power draw is carefully regulated because most machinery expects a certain amount of motive force from the power-delivery clutchplate, from central mains, with generally poor outcomes if power delivery is below the input requirement. In well designed machines, a timing mechanism trips when a cyclic gear fails to complete a rotation in time, and the machine is disconnected and halts. In poorly designed machines, underspec power can lead to timing-based collisions between moving parts, causing significant damage to the works.
The UTC manufactory next door, which was on the same power mains delivery leg as the Anvileers, suffered significant damage to its machine parts line as a result. Because they brought their own machines offline, power delivery was sufficient for the Anvileer operation, and the Anvileers rebuffed the UTC when they attempted to investigate the cause. The UTC in turn sabotaged the power delivery main to the Anvileer manufactory.
An extensive tit-for-tat followed over the course of the season; the Anvileers had no desire to reveal their breach of power delivery agreement, whereas the UTC did not want to be embarrassed by their use of low quality machinery on their principal manufactory line. Thus, each consortium did their best to stop the other manufactory from functioning, eventually leading to the headline incident, where the Anvileers found their internal reciprocating flatrod network jammed and destroyed, with hundreds of pounds of duck corpses wedged between the gearing and rods. The damage was so extensive, the Anvileers prepared to simply destroy the UTC manufactory with mining explosives, potentially killing the employees there.
The Unified Trade Consortium was aware of the effort by the Anvileers. With the Mercenary's Guild on retainer, they sent a team of first-rank mercenaries to defend the factory, five experienced fighters led by their captain, a veteran of
The War of Unification, tasked with waiting for the saboteurs to attempt to plant explosives, killing them, and disposing of the bodies quietly.
The Anvileers, for their own part, had bribed a number of local Patino guardsmen to safeguard the operation while the explosives were planted around the UTC manufactory. This fact was unknown to the UTC and presented the greatest risk of
Principality of Etoile involvement and intervention.
The evening the Anvileers had scheduled for the bombing of the UTC manufactory, a claims investigator from
Etoilean Term Insurance arrived, one Byron Tsung of the
Etoile Capital City, there to investigate the pig incident. Through the course of his investigation and after tracing some of the plots, the ETI investigator found himself literally in the middle of the fight, with Anvileer miners aiming crossbows at the Mercenaries defending the UTC consortium at the hour of twilight.
Tsung, a gifted improviser, managed to bluff both sides into being convinced that ETI had known about the sabotages all along, and that he was the vanguard for a task group of Magistrates that would arrest (by one account, summarily execute) any who threatened the peace and stability of the Principality.
Byron Tsung's gamble had worked to avert the immediate bombing of the manufactory and the resultant bloodshed, but he had only a small amount of time to attempt to resolve the situation before his bluff was called, and the presence of local Patino guards in the conspiracy meant that he couldn't simply contact the local guardhouse. Incredibly, he managed to convince the Anvileers to load all of their explosive into Tsung's power-wagon, ostensibly as evidence of some sort of fanciful insurance retainer claim that would pay out handsomely for the Anvileers.
As soon as it was loaded, Tsung made for the port and drove the wagon into the sea (hopping out at the last second), with the explosives igniting when the wagon impacted the water. The massive explosion rattled windows even in the Upper Ward and drew the attention of the garrison at
Naval Redoubt, Patino, which arrived shortly to investigate. The presence of the Principality ground forces coincided with the arrival of the
District Commander.
Tsung's full investigative report, coupled with the recommendations of the Patino District Commander, caused both the Anvileers and UTC to become persona non grata in Patino for a period of fifteen years; their manufactory lines were surrendered to the state and auctioned to other consortium interests, though nobody specifically went to prison over the incident. Tsung himself received a commendation for his efforts, and later published his own account of the incident as a semi-faithful adventure novel to wide sales in the
Etoile Capital City.
Historical Significance
The belligerence of the Anvileers was tempered over time, as the Joint Consortiums threatened to eject them from
The Great Pavilion of the Joint Consortiums and move collectively to seize their assets if they wouldn't obey contract terms. In the modern era, both the Anvileers and the UTC consider the incident to be a historical embarrassment, unworthy of Progress.
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