Limping our way back to Huntsville, we were treated to an aerial view of the smoldering husk of our once-great and short-lived airship, Gemini. Her canvas envelope was still mostly in one piece—if burnt. Possibly we might be able to salvage it, or at least enough of the sailcloth to make a smaller version. But just from this attack, we were down an airship, several helicopters, and dozens of goblins. But we’d taken out another elf. And we still had work to do.
I circled the town and brought the struggling, beaten helicopter down in the southeast corner of the yard near the forges. I got out and tried to wiped the splatter out of my fur before giving up and taking a dunk under the cistern. Armstrong simply pulled out bug guts and fur in seemingly equal measures and it all went into his mouth. Sourtooth found us there, brace of ball-tipped javelins close to hand. I nodded to them. “What are those?”
“Elf blunts,” he said. “An elf would make a fine gift, if alive, one I can take. That your boglin friends managed it, a wonder it is. A king have they, said the one called George. True?”
I nodded. “True.”
“And you suffer this wretched creature to live?”
I shrugged. “He’s mostly harmless.”
“Captured King Apollo once, he did,” said Armstrong.
“Sort of,” I admitted.
Sourtooth raised an eyebrow.
“They hadn’t invented locks or even proper cages. I could have left—but the swamp was too dangerous on my own. Ringo even gave us a few secrets to help manage it.”
Armstrong continued, mouth full, “The boss sort’a set ‘im aflame and scarpered.”
“You did what?”
I shrugged. “Relations actually improved somewhat after that. We’ve helped them out from time to time.”
“A strange kinship, have you,” said Sourtooth, shaking his head. “Tis typical not, for a goblin king such a way to act. But then, so too is it queer to ride the wind on strange artifice.”
I grinned. “Regretting your decision to come with us?” I asked.
Sourtooth spat on the ground. “I regret every crooked decision that marked my twisted path through life, o’ king. I am architect and mason both of mine own tower of follies, ever mounting may it be.”
Well, at least the tart old orc took responsibility for his sourness.
The air group that had gone north came in for a landing, so overgrown with vines and creepers that they looked as though they’d donned the elf camouflage themselves. After they reported, I sent them back to start repairing their craft. The other chopper hadn’t managed to take out the third elf. He’d gone to ground in the swamp, evading the burn’em crews and the search lights. The stealth suits they wore made them effectively invisible in natural environments, while able to strike back against both the boats and the choppers from range.
Still, if Sourtooth’s guess was right, there were at least 3 elves still at large in the swamp and now 1 in the forest. They’d shown their hands, and we could put up a fair fight. The only issue was the elves were clearly not the type to fight fair. I probably wouldn’t if I was their size, either. Though, as a goblin, I wasn’t exactly physically imposing myself.
I shook my head. “Shame about Gemini. I wonder why they wanted it gone so badly.”
“Like, they thought, to find you aboard, I’d say,” said Sourtooth. “Saw you aboard through their familiars and assumed it to be your personal vessel.”
Armstrong nodded in agreement.
“Right,” I said, shaking the last of the cistern water out of my fur. “They’re hunting me. Can’t stay in one place for too long, then.” I considered. “And we can’t have them air-dropping in. That’s our thing. Send your boat boys to collect Ringo. And tell the scrapper crews to start destroying any bat or hawk nest they find in the swamp. I want to clip the elves’ wings. Anything large enough to carry an elf over the walls, I want it on a cook spit.”
Armstrong saluted and ran off.
“What will you do now?” asked Sourtooth.
“We can’t keep communicating with lights and flags and flares,” I said. “I want to build a version of the keeper beads.”
The old orc tilted his head. “Shaman magic, are the beads. Goblins can use them not.”
“No,” I said. “But there’s other ways to pass messages.”
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
I left Sourtooth and went to find Sally with her engineers. Luckily, she hadn’t been aboard the airship when the elves sabotaged it, but she wasn’t happy about being stranded in Huntsville—not that she’d tell you outright. But she had a grumpy aura about her, and she squawked and chittered at her engineers as they went through iterations of the simple radio designs I’d given them. She, herself, had several scorch-marks on her fur from working with the electric motors and basic transducers.
I started poking through the projects, seeing what looked close and what went on a completely wild goose chase. The audio diaphragms from the sound-powered phones were the hardest part, mechanically speaking. And that was done already. But the engineers still struggled with anything to do with electricity—and the sparkers were more like Frankensteins than Einsteins. Electricity had a tendency to arc through their whiskers and onto the nearest unfortunate goblin, which would invariably start a fight, which the rest would stop to either watch, cheer on, or pile into.
Eventually I ran out of energy watching the antics, stuffed some whistler jerky down my gullet, and passed out in the tower.
* * *
What the hell?
The sparkers were even earlier risers than the rest of the goblins. Or so I thought. Turns out, they just never went to sleep with the rest of us. The baggy-eyed workaholics were practically dead on their feet by the time I pulled myself out of the sleeping mound and made rounds about the camp.
I walked around the workshop area, looking at the piles of discarded prototype iterations. The mounds of electronic waste made Huntsville look like a freshman electrical engineering lab after a tornado. The starkest change was the 10-meter wire hanging from the top of a sleeping tower, trailing down to an ensemble of parts, wires, coils, and a sound-powered handset. It was all hooked up to a small generator, and had blinking lights and flashers that, as far as I could tell, indicated nothing other than the fact that they were blinking and flashing.
King Ringo sat at the station, shouting at the exhausted-looking sparkers as he wiggled his remnants. Though whether they were exhausted from staying up all night working or from spending 5 minutes talking to Ringo was anyone’s guess. At least the Scrapper’s night operation had been a success. Admittedly, I’d been worried about how it would go without my direct intervention. But the tribe was growing, and I couldn’t do everything myself. Once again, I had to remind myself to trust my lieutenants to get the job done in my absence. They may have been blue, furry, and about a meter tall, but they were still more competent than half the middle managers at NuEarth.
“No, the elves! I wanna to talk to the elves!”
“King Ringo!” I said. “Glad to see you alive and well.”
The king startled and pulled himself around. “Apollo! Your whiskered fiends are attempting to deceive me! They claim this box will let you talk to people over great distances, but they’ll only talk to you.”
“I can’t imagine they’ve claimed much of anything,” I said. “They can’t talk at all.”
“Lies! Deceit! I’ve heard it!”
I looked at the nearest Sparker. He stared at me blankly.
I walked past Ringo and examined the equipment he sat at. Various bits were sparking and smoking, but I couldn’t spot any obvious shorts. Wires stuck out from leads at odd angles, thanks to the sparkers’ natural adhesive saliva just making conductive globs at each contact. I didn’t know how much juice exactly was being pumped into this primitive radio set, and I didn’t see a receiver or an amplifier anywhere for return communication. But I held out my hand for the handset, and Ringo reluctantly handed it over.
Rather than a push-to-talk button, there was a lever on the side of the box. I pulled on it. “This is King Apollo at Huntsville,” I said.
Nothing happened—other than a small electrical fire as two loose leads arced. Next to me, one of the sparkers went rigid, all of a sudden. His whiskers vibrated in the air, and he tilted his head back, mouth open.
“King Apollo! This is Eileen! Can you hear me?”
“King Apollo! Canaveral checking in, John here.”
Holy cow. We had a working radio! Even if the receiver itself was a goblin. And not only that, but the technology had already propagated—had it done so through the sparkers at other settlements over the radio waves so that they could independently build broadcast boxes? My mind reeled at the possibilities. Even just basic, 2-way communication would be a huge boon for coordination between bluffs that, until now, were relying on messages carried by glider, buggy, or clifford. But I also wondered at the propagation of the tech tree itself. I had assumed that functioning on proximity meant it was maybe a chemical signal. But was it actually some sort of quantum gestalt field? Some super-auditory process? Or was it simply System-driven?
I pulled on the lever again. “Eileen! Good to hear from you! What’s your mission status?”
“Down for repairs for a day on account of some fighting, but Gerty is going strong. We went to a bunch of bluffs, but most were empty. Good to hear from you, chief! This broad-cast’em is awesome! Bit heavy for Gerty, though.”
It was somewhat strange hearing Eileen’s voice coming out of the throat of a sparker and sounding so tinny and thin. But the chief of my air wing had lost none of her zeal, and she’d be back soon.
“Watch out for the elves on your way back. They’re small and mean, and they’ll hit you with animals. Fire and electricity are their weak spots.”
“You got it, boss!”
“Boss,” said John, “We got a situation at Canaveral. Night haunts are getting riled up. We’re makin’ reckless rifles but we could use some of our scrappers back. Maybe some wranglers.”
We’d gotten Ringo, but we still had a long way to go and the scrappers were the best tool we had against the elves. I grit my teeth. “Send a few along, keep the rest with you. I don’t want to lose Canaveral again.”
John’s reply was cut off as the sparker fell over and started snoring. I looked around at the exhausted sparkers and hung up the handset.
“Are you all serious? Get something to eat and go to bed!”
Staying up all night, working themselves ragged, and barely able to take care of themselves. Honestly. They were acting like… well… they were acting like engineers.
Still. They’d done the tribe a great service. I was certain I’d made the right call.
Shut it, System.