George was hesitant at first to reveal the location of King Ringo. He trusted us about as much as I trusted him, after all. But ultimately, we were an uncertainty in our loyalties, while he knew exactly where the elves stood. Tribe Apollo was the lesser of two evils.
As a boglin, he slept mostly during the day and was most active at dusk and dawn. By the time he woke back up, I’d had more choppers brought over from the main bluff to supplement the fan boats and was in the process of retrofitting them to fight the elves.
Recoilless rifles weren’t going to do us much good against anything smaller than a thundercleave, so I pulled them off and replaced them. I’d also put a series of live wires around the outside of the frame to make a sort of anti-bug cage to help deter the red swarms the elves commanded. The forges and furnaces went full-blast (sometimes literally) all day, pumping out glass, iron, and ceramic. The goblins were a manic workforce the likes of which existed nowhere on Earth, and Sally had brought over dozens more of her engineers to make use of the new materials. Huntsville was so packed that we began to run out of space.
The sparkers, like the canoneers, it seemed, were natural artists. It wasn’t long before all the choppers were festooned with tribal tech tree imagery and nose art of various forest and badlands beast jaws, of which I thoroughly approved. When it came to actually working with electricity, they were about the best wire rats I could have asked for, wriggling through the tightest spaces to route cabling and their saliva worked as a natural conductive adhesive so they didn’t even need solder. I wish I’d had about a dozen of them back home on Earth.
I’d set Sally to task, as well, building a basic functioning radio transmitter using diagrams rigged up by a canoneer, but she hadn’t unlocked anything by the time we were ready to push out with the boats and helicopters. We’d have to go one more night without them. Buzz’ assigned sparkers had already rigged Huntsville with inner and outer lighting, including several search-light batteries—which is how we caught the attack on our north wall coming.
A cry of alarm went out as I was securing fast one of the final connections on a chopper, with a goblin sentry banging on an iron bell, and then the boom of a wall-mounted gun going off. A few moments later, something big crashed into the gate on that side. Half the tribe flinched and looked at me.
I spun my finger in the air. “Mount up!” I shouted.
The goblins hooted and hollered, running to boats at the canal and climbing aboard choppers. Engines revved to life. I myself mounted up in the chopper I’d been working on, and for once, Armstrong didn’t complain. I guess the new anti-elf countermeasures were enough that he thought I’d be as safe in a chopper as I was on Gemini. Or maybe he just wanted to man the new guns. Either way, I pulled on the ear cups, and we lifted off.
Without the multi-stage missile and the recoilless rifle magazines, these choppers were significantly lighter. Our engines were getting more efficient as well—even if they did vibrate twice as violently in lockstep with their increased horsepower. An ifrit in the engine kept it running smooth and clean—for goblin tech, anyway, so I was reasonably sure it wouldn’t explode.
We rose above the walls and I dipped forward at the same time the portcullis hauled up and boats began to speed out of the waterway. Armstrong trained the new weapons down, and their linked spotlights illuminated the hulking form of a croc-knocker alpha and several of its smaller kin, striking the gate with coordinated shots from their bulbous tongues—too coordinated to be the natural instinct of the beasts, and they’d come further up out of the water than I’d ever seen them before. The elves’ magic was at play, here.
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Defenders at the top of the wall fired down at them with rifles and tesla wasp blowguns, as well as slingers loaded with nets. The crocs started returning fire with their knockers. I saw multiple goblins struck as the alpha hit the battlements with a tongue that must have had a 50-kilo lump of iron in it. The fortifications literally shattered under its assault, sending goblins flying. Sourtooth appeared on the rampart, barking orders and rallying the defenders. His orcs were experienced beast hunters, and they started throwing javelins and heavy poppers down at the attackers. But it seemed like the croc-knockers were focused more on keeping the defenders’ heads down than breaking the gate.
What’s more, I saw other beasts behind. Two of the heavy lizard primates towed ballistas behind them, dragging the wooden weapons through the mud, with bolts that would punch right through the wooden gates. The implication that the elves could have their mind-controlled minions use devices was troubling, at best.
Where’s the elf? I wondered, scanning. The stealthy invaders wouldn’t readily show themselves—it was only by providence that the boglins had managed to capture one. Still, our primary concern was those siege weapons. I tilted us down. “Light ‘em up, Armstrong!” I shouted into the sound-powered handset.
My scrapper chief revved up the generator tied to his weapon. A pair of compression pumps began to spin, forcing air through a set of nozzles on the front. As we dipped low on our attack run, He kicked on a secondary pump which began to feed fuel into the compressors. They kicked on, pulling in even more air and fuel. The stream of aerosolized fuel met with a set of sparking live wires and ignited, sending a helical jet of flaming gas spiraling down to the swamp floor.
It is now, System!
If using laminar flow principles to turn a primitive turbine engine into a goblin flamethrower wasn’t maximizing the potential of the Goblin Tech Tree, I don’t know what was. The first ballista burst into flame, along with the lizard who towed it. The other choppers opened up as well, spraying fire down in a flare of flame that turned night to day.
“Boss, we got ‘em!”
We sailed past the ballista. I tossed a glance over my shoulder at the wreckage and saw a red wedge climbing skyward from the lizards.
“Heads up!” I shouted.
I banked us around, pulling up on the collective pitch to tighten the turn, and then hauled back on the cyclic so that we flew in reverse. I had to trust that we were above the treeline, but it gave Armstrong a clear shot at the swarm giving chase. He swept his beam through the swarm, which actively tried to dodge with some success. Roasted, flaming bugs fell by the thousands, but it kept coming on. As it got close, I yanked down a toggle on my dash, and an electric buzz and snap started to fill the air, along with the smell of ozone overpowering even the smoldering fuel fire.
I pulled down my new goggles as the bugs hit us, sparking against the live wiring on the outside of the chopper. More still splashed against my goggles, and I had to wipe away red goo. One of the sparkers climbed onto the outside of the chopper and shorted himself between two live wires. He went stock-rigid, and electric arcs started climbing between the tines of his whiskers like a Jacob’s ladder. Every bug near him popped with a tiny flash, like hitting a humanoid (goblinoid?) bug zapper.
Armstrong cheered and then coughed as he inhaled a dozen red bugs. I jammed the stick full forward and reversed our course, now plowing through the swarm like an icebreaker through a frozen fjord with our electrified sparker prow. The swarm parted around us, sizzling and popping. More still were chewed up by the rotor blades, which started to struggle as carapace and bug juice crunched through their moving parts. We bifurcated the swarm and exited out the other side of the decimated magic bugs, craft filthy and dripping. The sparker turned around and climbed back into the craft, white grin the only spot on him that wasn’t covered in blackened, sizzling husks. He opened his mouth and strummed his fingers over his whiskers.
Take that, tiny bastards! I thought. They were going to need more than bugs and lizards to get the best of Tribe Apollo.
“Boss! The village!” called Armstrong.
I wheeled us around, bringing Huntsville into my field of view—and my stomach dropped.