“Wise, is caution, all I say,” said Sourtooth.
“And caution I’m taking,” I said. I moved back toward the other end of the bluff where the long range radio antenna had been erected. “It’s not like I gave them the keys to the kingdom. Canaveral is a tertiary bluff now. At one point it was critical to keeping the tribe fed, but now its importance is based on its location. An observatory to track and measure celestial objects is a requirement once we start putting spacecraft into orbit. If they’re willing to front the bill for that, then so be it.”
Sourtooth scowled and rubbed his stubble. “Tis queer, little brother mine. They seek more than they say. Long have the Midnighters sailed clear of these shores. They are devious.”
“As devious as orcs?” I asked.
The sour old hunter barked a laugh. “Few are. Nay, none are. Though many try. An honor most singular, have we.”
I chuckled. “It also makes you see plans within plans. Come on, I want a second opinion with a little less paranoia.”
I dipped into the radio hut where a trio of sparkers were tinkering with the equipment—by which I mean they were hopelessly tangled in a nest of sparking wires and crude electrical components. They snapped to attention when they saw me, though I’m pretty sure one of them was only rigid because of the current arcing between his whiskers. A taskmaster sat at the vox transmitter, looking absolutely exhausted and more than a little singed.
“Call up bluff Apollo. I want to talk to Taquoho.”
“Aye, boss,” said the taskmaster. He nodded to his charges.
The operators saluted and began throwing switches and twisting dials as they tuned the frequency in to contact the home base radio room. He squawked his request into the mic an the response came by way of sparker voicebox.
“I shall bring him here, o’ emperor,”
I waited for a minute, watching the sparkers continue to fiddle, until a bright flash of blue lightning and a buff of smoke sent them scattering. I held up my hand for protection as blue flames licked out of the radio set.
“Jesus!”
“King Apollo?!” asked a familiar rasp.
“Taquoho?” I said. I lowered my hand. The faint blue flames I was seeing on the vox unit were not, in fact, the result of an electrical fire. “Did you just… transmit through the radio?”
“We are not entirely sure. This is…. a disorienting experience. I feel as though I have been stretched quite thin.”
“I bet,” I said.
Another series of pops and flashes startled the sparkers further, though their taskmaster just seemed too resigned to even care—even when his fur began to smolder. More colorful fires spread through the equipment.
I waved my hands. “Vessels!” I ducked out of the hut and shouted to goblins nearby. “We need Ifrit vessels! Now!”
The goblins scrambled to obey, and within a few minutes, we had a half-dozen jars and brass bottles suitable for Ifrit to relieve the stress on the overloaded radio while I tried to wrap my head around what had just happened. Taquoho and his kin had piggybacked on a radio signal and effectively teleported from one bluff to another. There was no earth-science precedent for that kind of thing except maybe quantum entanglement. But there wasn’t really an earth-science precedent for the Ifrit themselves, either—unless you counted genies and other mythological creatures.
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Still, it had me wondering yet again at the true nature of Ifrit. As far as I could tell, they had no mass themselves—unless it existed in higher dimensions. Yet they did somehow exert force against brass and zinc. They were magical fire spirits, but they had mountains of information stored somewhere. And the entirety of their being could apparently hijack a radio wave.
How long would it take to transmit the entire neuro-network of a human brain? Petabytes of information were mapped across neurons in the squishy grey matter inside our skulls that would take minutes, if not hours to transmit across optimized Earth connections. But several Ifrit had jumped over the crudest connection possible in less than a minute. Was there a distance limit? Heck, could we use a radio to send them home?
Many of them were disoriented. Their vessels wobbled drunkenly. I had to imagine traveling through a goblin radio was akin to their version of a tilt-a-whirl, or maybe a very rickety roller coaster. Still, it opened up a world of possibilities if I could transport a living, thinking being through a radio.
Armstrong had returned from the fight and wrangled up a spare flying vessel for Taquoho, but the ifrit struggled to get it airborne after his experience on the radio.
“This union is quite disoriented, King Apollo,” he said. His rotors spun, but he kept tilting in one direction or the other. “I must offer apology, this is an unseemly sight, I am sure.”
I waved my hand. “Just looks like you’re a little tipsy is all. I’ve seen worse.”
“You refer to the corporeal state of inebriation, to which I am not susceptible.”
I shrugged. “First time for everything.”
Sourtooth shook his head beside me. “Tis a mad, cursed land, this. Had not you a query for the asking?”
I snapped my claws. “Right! Taquoho, what’s your take on the Midnight Queendom? They want to build an observatory here.”
“Here?”
“Bluff Canaveral.”
“Ah. We thought this looked different.” The blue flame flickered, and I got the impression of someone shaking their head to clear it. “The Ifrit have little contact with these newcomers. They avoid the desert and the territory of the null devil. Presumably it interferes with their magic—but they also show little care for clockwork outside their star-measuring devices.”
I sighed. “So, nothing you can tell me about them?”
A blue tendril of soft flame rose and waved. “Oh no, King Apollo. We can tell you many things. Tabun has made diligent study of the Servants of the Midnight Sea. Firstly, they are not to be trifled with.”
Sourtooth snorted beside me.
“Secondly, they are a furtive people. Plans within plans, always.”
Sourtooth snorted again. I shot the sour old orc a glare, but that just widened his leering grin.
“So, wanting to build an observatory? That was a lie?”
“We doubt they would risk blinding themselves by Raphina’s shadow for a mere observatory. They may wish to build one, but do not mistake it for their only purpose here.”
I ran a finger across my chin.
“Most important of all is this: In reading the future, they believe themselves its keepers. Therefore, any action they take, for good or seeming ill, they will see as justified—even if they would strike another down for taking the same action.”
“All evil they commit is necessary to stop the evils others commit,” I said, sighing. I held a hand up to Sourtooth. “Don’t say it. Where I’m from we have a saying: keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Until we know what the Midnighters are really after out here, better to have them where we can keep an eye on them.”
“Aha! Lo there are those in your homeland having a drop of wit and tactic, after all,” said Sourfang. “Not all of your world’s wisdom comes in form of contraption flying or engines bursting.”
I put my hands on my hips. “I’ll have you know, my world has a long and storied military history of great leaders being cruel to each other in the most clever ways. Sun Tzu, Alexander of Macedonia, Caesar, Napoleon, the list goes on and on and on. Libraries are full of their exploits, and people make entire studies of their lives. We just also had great scientists and explorers. Nikola Tesla, Einstein, Magellan, Neil Armstrong. People who changed my world with the mark of a pen and the first brave step into new unknowns. And of the two sets, I know which I’d prefer to embody.”
Armstrong perked up at the mention of his namesake. “Wot did your Armstrong do?” he asked.
I pointed upward. “He was the first man to walk on my world’s moon. And he did it without a lick of magic or fortune telling. Just a team of brilliant scientists and mathematicians, a slide rule, and a computer less powerful than the ones most people carry in their pockets.”
Sourtooth looked askance. “Alright, o’ little brother, mine. No offense did I mean to give.”
I left out the part where Neil Armstrong, myself, and everyone who had worked together to put him into space had been human. Somehow, I didn’t think that would endear the old orc to me.
“I, eh, noticed my name wasn’t on that list, boss,” said Promo, looking a little perturbed.
“Your name comes from mythology,” I said. “Prometheus stole fire from the gods.”
“How’d they take that?” he asked.
“Look, that part of the story’s not important. Let’s get back home before nightfall.”