Chapter 9: Beneath the Skin of the Earth
The sun rose blood-red over the Congolese horizon as Victor Delcroix stepped out onto the terrace of his compound. Below him, Léopoldville stirred to life. The smell of smoke and roasted maize mixed with the faint tang of wet iron from the nearby workshops. In the distance, the turbines of the hydroelectric plant hummed steadily, delivering electricity to what had become a small industrial hub.
Inside the compound, the Delcroix Biomedical Facility ran at full capacity. A second shift of technicians was now active, and plans for the Katanga laboratory had been finalized. Shipments of penicillin moved out daily, bound for clinics, missions, and field hospitals across the region.
Victor sipped his tea slowly. The world saw him as a healer now. But he hadn't forgotten the other promise of the land beneath his feet.
The Congo was a vault of untapped riches. And much of it, in 1920, remained unknown to the world.
But not to him.
In the map room, Victor unrolled a surveyor's draft and laid it next to a modern geological map drawn from memory. Coltan. Uranium. Lithium. Rare earth metals. Diamonds buried under laterite. He marked key zones with a red grease pencil, then cross-referenced them with colonial property records.
Many were still "open territory" or claimed in name only by absentee European syndicates. That would not last.
He turned to Gérard. "I want discreet purchases made. Not through the company. Use shell corporations. Local intermediaries if necessary. But the rights must be airtight. Mines. Water. Surface and subsurface."
Gérard nodded. "How much land, monsieur?"
Victor tapped the map.
"Ten thousand hectares. And the hills west of Manono. They'll be the future of every battery on Earth."
Gérard raised an eyebrow but said nothing. He had long since stopped doubting Victor's instincts.
While his agents moved quietly to acquire mineral rights, Victor pushed biomedical development even further. His scientists had begun isolating new mold strains. Some were weaker, others more potent. One produced an unexpected byproduct with analgesic properties.
Victor touched the glass vial during a routine inspection.
The flash came instantly.
Painkillers. An entire class of synthetic opioids. Codeine derivatives. Anti-inflammatory drugs that blocked infection at the cellular level. Clinical trials. Pharmaceutical protocols. Global distribution.
He staggered back from the lab bench, breathing hard.
The potential of this land—and its biology—was only beginning to unfold.
He called for Elise.
"We're founding a research division. Dedicated to natural compounds. Fungi. Algae. Bark extracts."
She studied him. "You're turning this into a pharmaceutical empire."
He nodded. "And when the world realizes it needs what we produce, it will come to us."
By the end of the month, Delcroix Biologique had secured exclusive export licenses from the colonial administration. Victor personally oversaw the drafting of clauses that tied future profits to infrastructure reinvestment and local health services. It silenced critics in Brussels, who had begun to mutter about monopolies.
Meanwhile, land titles returned by courier, sealed and notarized. The territories he'd marked were now legally his.
To the outside world, they were still dirt and jungle.
But Victor knew better.
One evening, Elise found him on the balcony again, staring at the stars.
"When do you rest?"
"When the last fever is gone. When the last mine is safe. When the future is no longer something we dread."
She sat beside him.
"That may take more than a lifetime."
Victor didn't answer.
Because he intended to build something that would endure longer than that.
Chapter 10: Threads of Power
Victor Delcroix stood in the Governor-General's reception hall, its walls lined with mahogany panels and the high ceilings swirling with slow-turning fans. A servant passed him a glass of water chilled with rare ice. Around him, murmurs of conversation in French, Dutch, and English floated like perfume.
It was a gathering of colonial elites: bureaucrats in pressed white uniforms, concessionaires fat on rubber profits, officers decorated with foreign campaigns. And among them, Victor—young, sharp-eyed, and increasingly impossible to ignore.
"Ah, Monsieur Delcroix," came a smooth voice.
Governor-General Albert Delmas, tall and silver-haired, approached with the pace of a man used to being obeyed.
"I've been meaning to speak with you. You're making quite the name for yourself—medicine, electricity, now rumors of a second laboratory?"
Victor smiled, respectful but measured. "Only rumors if you prefer it that way, Excellency."
Delmas chuckled. "You've made allies in Léopoldville. But that doesn't always translate to the higher echelons of colonial policy."
"I understand. That's why I'm here."
"Go on."
Victor's gaze moved toward the wide balcony doors. Beyond them, the Congo River flowed past the city, and on its banks stood the colonial port—crumbling, underfunded, but vital.
"I believe the port could be ten times as efficient. With proper dredging, new cranes, automated loading systems. It's the artery of this entire region. But it's being run like a military outpost from the last century."
Delmas raised an eyebrow. "You want to privatize the port?"
"Not yet. But I want the right to audit its operations. To understand where it bleeds money, where it clogs. If I can offer a viable improvement plan, perhaps we consider a partial concession."
Delmas sipped his drink. "That would require Assembly approval. Not to mention influence in Brussels."
Victor's voice lowered. "I'm not asking for a signature tonight. I'm asking to begin the conversation. The Crown Colony is becoming an industrial state whether we plan for it or not. I'd rather see it happen with order, investment, and vision."
The Governor-General studied him a moment longer. "You sound like a politician."
Victor smiled thinly. "I have no time for politics. Only progress."
Over the next weeks, Victor carefully widened his influence. He invited colonial administrators to tour the penicillin labs. Showed them recovery rates. Infrastructure spending tied to revenue. He framed everything as collaboration.
Behind the scenes, Gérard began collecting intelligence: which port officials were corrupt, who could be bribed, which administrators were aligned with French interests. Elise handled public relations, ensuring every article in the local papers framed Delcroix Biologique as a savior of colonial health and commerce.
Victor's engineers began surveying the port—"for safety," they claimed. But their notebooks captured inefficiencies. Their sketches imagined a new age of logistics.
He did not move too fast. He could not afford enemies yet.
But the seed was planted.
At a private dinner, Delmas finally spoke again.
"You may proceed with your audit. Unofficially, of course. But if you find waste, show me something better."
Victor nodded. "I intend to."
Late one night, Elise found him leaning over blueprints for automated dock cranes, lit by the soft glow of an acetylene lamp.
"You're building more than a company," she said.
Victor didn't look up. "I'm building leverage."
He tapped the corner of the map where the port met the railway.
"When we control this junction," he said, "we won't need permission anymore. We'll be the system."
Chapter 11: Artery of Steel
The wind off the North Sea carried the scent of salt, coal, and opportunity. Victor Delcroix stood at the edge of a dockyard in Ghent, boots planted firmly on damp cobblestones as he surveyed the narrow channel and rusting cranes.
This was not Antwerp. It was smaller, older, and more neglected.
But it was perfect.
Behind him, Gérard closed the ledgers and tapped his walking stick once against the ground. "The leaseholders are in debt. Their traffic is half what it was before the war. No one wants to invest here."
"Good," Victor murmured. "Then we'll buy their silence along with their space."
He knelt beside a rail, tracing the weathered steel with one gloved hand. In his mind, he saw the transformation: modular cranes, electric forklifts, ships shaped for volume and efficiency—not by the loose methods of 1920, but by the rigid logic of containers.
Standardized metal boxes. Twenty feet long. Uniform latches. Stackable. Trackable.
In his life before, they had ruled the world. He would make them do so again.
The meeting with the port authority came in a dark-paneled office that smelled of mildew and pipe smoke. The director, a man named Verschaeren, listened politely as Victor laid out his proposal:
A private lease of dock space and drydock facilities. A shipyard to produce new steam vessels under Delcroix Industrial. And a quiet permit to experiment with new "bulk modular transport methods."
Verschaeren frowned. "You want to build cargo vessels… for boxes?"
Victor smiled. "Not boxes. Units. Identical, load-balanced, sealed. No more hand-loading every sack of rubber or crate of ore. We'll load an entire train car's worth of cargo in five minutes. The same unit that fits a rail wagon fits a ship hold."
The director laughed skeptically. "And who else uses this system?"
"No one," Victor said. "Yet."
Over the next weeks, Victor moved fast. He acquired partial rights to a struggling slipyard on the Scheldt. Hired naval engineers with commercial experience. Drew designs himself—flat-deck vessels with reinforced internal rails. Each ship was to carry nothing but metal containers welded to spec.
The first prototype container was constructed in a shed behind the biomedical warehouse in Belgium. Two meters high. Reinforced steel. Hinged doors with a locking bracket. It seemed unremarkable to most.
To Victor, it was revolution in pure form.
He stood before it with Elise.
"This," he said, tapping the cool steel, "will multiply our trade by ten. No more waiting days to unload sacks. We bring one load, one crate, one seal. And when it arrives in the Congo, the same container rolls straight onto a rail line."
Elise stared at it. "It's… so simple."
"It's elegant. Speed is power. And we're going to sell time."
He drafted a charter: the Delcroix Maritime and Freight Company. Within months, keel-laying began on two ships in Ghent, and a third was commissioned for Léopoldville's river port, still under informal audit.
His engineers tested modular crane arms on a wooden rig. Dozens of workers were retrained. Supply contracts were rewritten to conform to the container model.
No one else understood yet.
But they would.
At night, Victor wrote in his private journal.
"If we control both ends of the river—Léopoldville and Ghent—we do not need permission from Antwerp or Brussels. The artery will flow only where we direct it. And once the trade begins to flow in bulk, no one will be able to keep up."
He paused.
Then added:
"Let them fight over ports. I will build the bloodstream of an empire."