From: Capitaine Philippe Jean-Lireux
Clandestine Field Operations Division
Forward Research Facility, Americas
To: Code Name Marcel
Special Projects
Regional Command, Montreal
Sirs, I must be perfectly frank about our position in the Americas and for that I ask that you pardon the many breaches of protocol and courtesy that follow. Our grip on this region and its resources is tenuous at best. Following the explosion of the Bellwether Corrienne there was so much speculation about just what it was carrying and why a Continental messenger would need to go so far inland. The loss of her Captain was a devastating blow; she had a charisma that naturally drew men to our cause. Losing Emaliene and her crew is a wound we should all feel, both a personal loss and a bitter wound to the Subversion. Charlinger is still operational but Schrödinger is crippled and blind, and the rest of them gone.
Within hours of the Corrienne going down, we had Nahlia and her team scanning the wreckage for the substance. Brienne, her Labratorian, believes we must design a special set of filters to detect the scattered particulate matter. She is working on that now at the Hazelton facility. Those three girls from New York are amazing, and I don’t just mean the æther-blooded girl. In just the few years since we got them out of Manhattan they all have found a place in the Subversion.
We did pick up a new recruit though. Charlinger introduced him as an engineer from Bolger Field Airship Station. Schrödinger says him and Emaliene were sweet on each other. The Captain prattled on like a schoolgirl, the cat tells me, about her daring gentleman back in Bolger right until the storm overtook them and her attention was needed. What we actually picked up was none other than Thaddeus Lowe! I thought he had died from malaria twenty years ago. The man basically invented modern hydrogen production! It’s amazing, the shape he’s gotten himself into since the Bellwether explosion six months ago. He’s sixty years old and running six miles a day. The rest of his day he spends in Pennsylvania, down in the lab with Bree. Something unnatural in the old man’s eyes, that. But he won’t beguile that girl; he’s a genius but she’s just as smart, at least. Just as well, I suspect from her youth in that awful factory she is well skilled at fending off lecherous old men.
Even Clamine has found her calling in organizing political dissent. She has planned her own insertion for her last seven missions. Most recently she arrived in Los Angeles and found work as a sandwich girl delivering lunches to the steel workers. She is fearless that girl and impressed the men by riding to the top levels and walking right out on the beams to bring them their food. It helps that she still looks to be thirteen years old, but I wonder if that business in Manhattan did more than she lets on. In any event it wasn’t long before the stories of worker uprisings across the country and her own experiences in the textile mills of New York had those men eating out of her hand. She is ice-cold, that Clamine, certain of herself as a slide-rule is certain of a calculation; but she melts men with those eyes. Even myself, if I wasn’t afraid of her.
Things became bad in Los Angeles when some opposing agencies sought to protect their own interests by using the worker's movement. The names and aims of those agencies still elude us but they are vicious. They are ruthless and will target civilians to achieve their goals. Even worse, like ourselves, they have identified the worker movement as a greater source of power than the wealthy capitalists. But instead of operating to ease the tension between the two or, at the extreme, dampen the harm caused by unchecked power; they have been steadily ratcheting up the tempo and strength of their attacks.
Our previous agents in Los Angeles had been working within the Los Angeles Times newspaper offices, directly with Harrison Otis. We had successfully convinced him to take a radically hard line against the unions. It was Clamine’s mission objective to “find” our incriminating documents on Otis and bring them to the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers leadership. They would trust her; it’s impossible not to even as she’s slitting your throat. But in this case the objective was to force a détente between the two mundane factions and get progress on those buildings moving again. Of course the secondary objective, to get the wages for bridge and Iron workers raised, was just as important. I think it had switch places with getting the workers back to work in Clamine’s head, but that’s alright. I wanted her motivated. The strikers were arguing for a fifty-cent minimum wage. Clamine tried to convince them that a one-dollar wage would be better. The workers took it as a joke and chided her for “thinking like a doll, empty headed and fragile”. Clamine was absolutely right about the wages. The wages in this country are so low, they attract the lowest denominator. Illiterates. Criminals. When the choice is barely getting by on a farm or barely getting by in a factory it is hard to get the people needed to the factories.
It never ceases to amaze me how capitalists will hold up the success of a business with no competition as proof of their superiority. Of course a business will succeed if you have an army by your side to destroy the competition, but that slows progress. If our primary mission in the Americas is to succeed then they must progress faster. The United States, in particular, has made some excellent progress, but so much of it is coming out of the farms. We need science and industry here for the Subversion to take hold. It is getting too expensive to gather scientists in Europe and relocate them.
When agents provocateurs planted the bombs at Otis and his staff chief’s homes, at the hotel, at the city building there, and at the newspaper itself Clamine made the decision to let the mission fail so that she could shut down the explosives. The way she tells it in her report she had to work on one of the McNamara brothers with a ball-pein hammer to get the locations. She was able to defuse all of the bombs except the one at the newspaper office. Clamine indicates that the detonator was far more advanced on this larger explosive. The mechanism actually detected that she had opened the casing and cammed and locked shutters into place to protect the ignition device. Then when our agent dissected the locks on the shutters and removed them, she found they also functioned as part of one of the timer’s escapements.
The countdown sped up to triple-time and Clamine was only able to remove the secondary charge before the primary fuses flashed. The main charge of the bomb, a pentaerythritol based explosive, indicates an outside influence as well as far more sinister motives in this bombing. If it had gone off as intended far more would have died. Clamine didn’t even clear the ally when the dynamite exploded. She counted out her paces and at the last moment buried herself and the pentaerythritol cylinder in a refuse pile shielding it with her body. I want to pin a commendation on her, when the surgeons are through, and a promotion. She’s earned it. Please put that through immediately, nothing less than Sous-Lieutenant.
This must conclude today’s general report. There is still much to report, but I am confident in our new network of couriers and will bring Regional Command up to speed over the coming weeks. Just now though, I am called away to a demonstration of Prof. Lowe and Brienne’ new ‘excitation fluorescence’ visor. The executive summary describes its application as a tool for locating energy emitting substances such as the payload of the Bellwether Corrienne. I hope it is incorporated into a convenient device for mounting it to ones face. Having to hold something like that in your hands would be cumbersome.
I shouldn’t form any opinions before I see it. If it is like everything else that shop has created they will be fantastic.
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