Once again, we sent scrappers out. Once again, they took a mauling—but not near as bad. And they found dead boglins—not killed by us—who were missing the tips of their ears. Another kerosene derrick went dark, as well.
In the morning, with the scrapper priority pushed to max, we now had more scrappers than we’d started with. The search lights on the boats seemed to ward off the ambushers, but I worried they might also be scaring the boglins. We were still a way off from night vision and thermal imaging, so they’d have to do.
As the scrappers made their way to Huntsville throughout the afternoon by wagon, buggy, foot, or even airdrop, we continued iterating and improving on the lights and electric motors. The swamp village was filled with the electric zaps and ozone smell of poorly insulated wiring shorting out. Electric motors whirred and buzzed as they were fit to fan boats and lights flickered atop pylons. Occasionally, something sheared or exploded. But that was business as usual for the tribe.
Armstrong had exercised his secretive service skills to make it clear again in no uncertain terms that I would not be riding a patrol boat, or one of the choppers retrofit with lights instead of guns. I threatened to fire him, but the scrapper chief wouldn’t budge. So, we’d reached a compromise. The airship was a much more secure platform, more easily defended, and we could supplement the patrol boats by putting search lights on the bottom—which I worked with Sally to do as the rest of the tribe worked glass and wrapped wiring.
Once lighting was set up, I started in on a second project. Since we were already making copper cones and simple transducers, it was a natural leap to integrate a sound-powered phone hand-set to the deck and rig it up to an electrically amplified horn on the bottom. The effect was about as incomprehensible as you’d expect, sounding somewhere between a tornado warning siren and an outdated high-school PA system manned by a two-pack-a-day vice principle. It also sparked whenever I spoke through it. But it would at least let me bark orders at the boats from altitude.
As the light began to fade, we fired up the engines on the airship and cut loose from the dock, hovering overhead as the scrappers and their teams carried the river patrol boats—now outfit with search lights and recoilless rifles—down to the waters of the swamp. I stood on the deck with Armstrong while Promo worked the engines and one of Eileen’s pilots steered. The airship itself had also been augmented with the latest generation of goblin weaponry. It still sported a pair of slingers with net launchers, but the main armaments were now the three recoilless rifles and a nozzle and hose hooked up to a bladder of kerosene with a dedicated pump goblin.
“Take us to where they found the boglins last night,” I ordered the pilot. She saluted and cranked the rudder. By no means fast, the airship still made good time and could fly over islands that the patrol boats had to navigate around. The bog was fed from several tributary streams and rivers from the mountainous terrain to the northeast, and it was there that I wanted to focus the search. My stomach growled, but it was necessary to be hungry in order to stay awake into the night.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
Armstrong looked back at me from the bow. “She needs a name, boss!”
“What?” I shouted back.
“Like Gerty.”
“Oh,” I said, considering. This was the tribe’s second airship—and unless we could secure access to more canvas, these two twin sisters would be it for the foreseeable future. Hmm… Twins…
“Gemini!” I shouted up to the front. “Her name is Gemini.”
The sun dipped below the horizon. At the bow of the airship, I flipped the switch for the search-lights, and the engines sputtered for a moment as the generator added to their load. Two brilliant columns of amber light from two new sponsons split the air ahead of the ship. Twin circles of illuminated swamp tracked back and forth as the operators swung the lighting arrays around.
I leaned over the side of the airship, watching the loose canopy below for signs of activity. The problem, if anything, was too much activity. Lanclova’s nights were more active than its days—which is probably why most goblins are diurnal, being perpetually level 1 at all. Large, shifting shapes moved throughout the bog—larger than the croc-knockers. Still, it all seemed endemic, and I saw none of the strange behavior I associated with the red spirits.
For two hours, we moved from one tributary to the next, watching from overhead as the patrol boats maneuvered up the narrow waterways looking for signs of the boglins or their mysterious attackers.
I began to wonder if we’d find anything at all, when one of the search-light operators began squawking from his station.
“Armstrong, with me,” I said, dashing to the port gunwale and looking over the side. Below us, the amber light had lit on the wreckage of a patrol boat—not one of the new ones, but one of the missing scrapper teams.
“Good work,” I told the operator, who puffed out his chest with pride. If there was wreckage, maybe there were survivors holed up somewhere. “Armstrong, get on the big voice and let the boats know to search that area.” I looked at the operator. “Bring us down a bit lower for a better look.”
Our pilot tilted us down and let some of the hot air out of the envelopes to sink us closer to the canopy where the search lights were a bit better at dispelling some of the gloom. The boat was in bad shape. It had been warped as though struck with immense force, and the engine had torn completely off. I moved to the bow with Armstrong, getting a closer view while he barked orders into the big voice. It was a bit surreal, hearing a goblin voice amplified and broadcast over the air. The swamp muted any echo it might have had, but I still saw the lights on several boats slow as they lowered their throttles to better hear the updates. Several of the lights turned and began heading in new directions. Not all of them were going the right way, and Armstrong struggled to call out specific boats to get them on track.
We need radios, I thought to myself, and not for the first time. If each of the boats had a callsign and a radio operator, we could more easily coordinate the search from the airship. Hell, that might be the next priority. The badlands had crystal. I’d seen quartz and other types in the rock formations of the whistler canyon and in the pylon we’d knocked down. Crystal radio receivers and simple frequency modulation transmitters are simple electronic devices, and it would be a trivial matter to integrate the speaker tech we’d already solved to—-
“Boss, look there!”
I shook myself out of the musings and followed where Armstrong pointed. A flicker of bright flashes, partially hidden by canopy, had broken out somewhere north of the wreckage site on one of the bigger islands. A few moments later, the sounds of rockettes and poppers reached us.
There was fighting in the forest, and it was using goblin weapon tech.
“Have any of our boat teams gone ashore?” I asked.
Armstrong shook his head. “Don’t think so.”
“Lights!” I shouted. the two searchlights panned across the terrain, and I caught a flash of movement through the foliage, something small and blue being chased by something big and green. Survivors from the wreckage, being pursued by something. “Armstrong, do we have any boats close enough to help?” I asked. Armstrong shook his head. I muttered to myself. “Battle stations! Break out everything we’ve got. Armstrong, have the boats converge. Pilot, take us down!”