World-Ripper War (Mad Tinker Chronicles Book 3) (32 page)

“So, history coming full circle?” Madlin asked. “You’re worried it’ll only be you and me walking away from here?” She winked at him, trying to cheer him up.

K’k’rt sighed. “No, I think this time is different. The demon is dead. Ni’hash’tk is dead. And Fr’n’ta’gur is not the fool she was. History repeats so that we can do better each time. But …”

There it was
. “But what?”

“You have a plan to escape if this goes badly,” K’k’rt said.  It was always difficult to tell, given his shoddy Korrish, but Madlin heard no hint of a question.

“What if I did?” Madlin asked, staring K’k’rt right in the eye. Sitting next to him, they were of like height.

“The machine that sent you will snatch you back,” K’k’rt said. “You had the same plan when you argued with Fr’n’ta’gur. I have known madman humans, but you do not strike me as one of them. At the first sign of danger to you, you will sneak away.”

Madlin remained silent.
Assume all you want. I don’t have to tell you anything.

K’k’rt leaned close. “I want you to rescue me as well.”

Madlin pulled away, trying to get a full view of the wrinkled, grey-haired goblin as if seeing all of him would make his request any less bizarre. “What?”

“I can be of use,” K’k’rt continued. “Even if we sneak back, if the danger passes, I can cover your story. I can be a valuable ally.”

“You aren’t on my side,” Madlin said. “You’re keeping watch on me for the dragon, making a deal for your friends in Megrenn, and coming out ahead. I know where we stand.”

“We stand on the edge of a blade. I’ve been on it for a long time, but you’re new up here. You’ll want an expert.”

Madlin kept silent once more.

“Don’t answer me now. Eat your meal and get some sleep. The attack will launch before the dawn.”

Rynn found herself wandering the corridors and catwalks of the
Jennai
with no destination in mind. Madlin lay sleeping in an undersized tent, waiting for the sound of goblin signal horns to wake her for the battle. Rynn was no good at waiting, so she stalked the far corners of her ship, looking for distractions. There was activity even in the dark hours, though the most interesting construction happened in the daylight hours. Despite the scarcity of daylight as the sun crept over the western horizon, she headed to the belly of the ship—or more precisely, below it.

The great scaffolding that hung below the
Jennai
was all new. Rynn slung herself down by one of the larger support beams, and onto the makeshift walkway that ran to either side of her father’s latest project. Below her, clear to see through the metal mesh of a floor, was the sunset reflected from the sea a half mile below them. It caught her breath short every time she looked down, but there was not a spot anywhere along the scaffold where there was a gap large enough for her to fit through on purpose, let alone by accident. The welds were sound; she had checked them herself. She had even carved levitation runes on a belt she wore, ready to be activated in case of a fall. For all that, the feeling of doom when looking straight down from such a height never faded.

The enormous cannon was a product of Cadmus’s recent paranoia. The design and oversight of its construction had kept the Mad Tinker busy, but it was a ludicrous waste of resources. The bore was large enough for workers to crawl down on hands and knees. The copper wire had not been wound around it; the gauge was so thick it had to be hammered into shape around the barrel. Cadmus had constructed six dynamos to power the weapon. It was covered in split runes, ready to come together and make the barrel as massive as the whole of the ship for a brief moment as it fired. It was ludicrous on a scale that Madlin had rarely seen from her father. She had nicknamed it the World Ender Cannon, Version 1.

The problem was not that a coil gun wouldn’t work on such a scale; on the contrary, Rynn was convinced that it would. The problem was that there was very little worth firing such a weapon at. The
Jennai
had been harassed by kuduk airships from one nation or another from time to time, but between their own liftwing airships and the hundred or so handheld coil guns they had aboard, the crew had always handled the situation.

As a rule, machines don’t like to fly. The science of keeping one in the sky was finicky, and it didn’t take much convincing to send one back to the ground where it belonged. While the World Ender Cannon, Version 1 would certainly make short work of any vessel it hit, a far smaller bore would have been just as effective and much easier to build. Not to mention the small matter of aiming something mounted ventrally the length of the ship.
How many coil guns could we have made with all this copper?
Goblins or no, it seemed like a waste of resources. That was what puzzled her.

Cadmus Errol was not a wasteful man. He never had been, and it seemed like a peculiar time to start. There was a war to be fought, and Cadmus’s gun was a solution to a battle they had already won. The skies belonged to the rebels. Wherever the
Jennai
went was their home. Cadmus knew that as much as Rynn did. As she ran a hand along the wrapped copper coils, strolling the length of the barrel, Rynn tried to imagine what you could do with a gun like the World Ender.

The target would need to be slow-moving, preferably stationary. It would need to be well protected, something that would justify putting this much power behind it. Ideally, it would be of use to us in the rebellion against the kuduks.

Rynn stopped, the springs in her tinkers’ legs bouncing her once as they settled. A chill ran through her as she put the pieces together.
He wants to destroy the deeps
. Perhaps her flippant moniker for the cannon was not so far off the mark. It would explain the chuckle from Cadmus when she named it. If a coil gun could put a half-inch steel ball a few inches into rock, how far could this monstrous weapon send a three-foot diameter steel shot though stone? It had six times the power of a world-ripper … the math just eluded her. She had no idea.

Rynn slumped against the side of the scaffolding.
He’s going to try to wipe them out.
In moments of anger, Rynn had wished for the extinction of all kuduks, but when her temper cooled, she could not sustain that wanton vitriol. They weren’t
all
bad, and even if they were, that wasn’t justification for wiping out their whole race. Rynn had proven that the rebellion could evacuate humans from the deeps. Get that operation working on a larger scale, and they could pull the humans to safety and bury the kuduks—and daruu, she supposed—beneath the stone of their own cities.

“You all right?” a voice called from the far end of the catwalk. Sosha. Her dark skin made it hard to pick her out in the fading light, but the voice left no doubt.

“Yeah,” Rynn shouted back. “Just out for a walk while I wait for the rusted goblins to attack.” She leaned back against the scaffold as Sosha approached.

Sosha wasn’t dressed for the night air, shivering in a light dress. Wherever she had expected to find Rynn, it hadn’t been outdoors. “What are you doing down here?”

“Just checking on my father’s bloated coil gun,” Rynn replied, patting the coil-wrapped barrel.

Sosha nodded. “You could almost fire a person out of that thing.”

“Don’t even say that,” Rynn snapped. She glanced down, even though her tinker’s legs were hidden by her trousers, she knew exactly what lay beneath.

“Sorry,” said Sosha. “I just wanted to see how you were faring. Big war starting tomorrow, right?”

“Any time now, actually,” Rynn replied. “Goblins plan to start it in the middle of the night.”

Sosha tugged her arms tightly to her body and shifted behind Rynn for shelter from the wind. “Good thing it’s you there, not me. I’d be all in pieces by now.”

“If this is where you try to get me to admit that I’m scared, you can quit it,” said Rynn. “I’m heading up to the world-ripper as soon as Madlin wakes up. Anything goes wrong, I pull her out of there. I hope you’re a bit more subtle when it comes to getting Cadmus’s mind off his troubles.”

Sosha snorted. “Mad Tinker or not, he’s still a man. He’s dense as stone about anything as squishy and non-mechanical as feelings. He’s actually much easier to manage than you are. He doesn’t push me away or avoid me.”

“I don’t need any help; I’ve still got Madlin. Ever since my father got one-worlded, he hasn’t quite been the same.”

“He doesn’t feel as invincible anymore,” Sosha said. “He’s not so dead-sure certain he’s going to win.”

Rynn bobbed her head. “Yeah. That sounds about right. He stopped acting like he was carving his own tunnel to his destiny.”

“How about you come inside,” Sosha suggested, jerking her head toward the near end of the catwalk. “I’ll put on some tea and we can stay up, watching the battle.”

Rynn eyed her suspiciously. “Fine. But I just want you to know I’m on to you.” Sosha smiled and Rynn chuckled as they headed for the kitchens.

Madlin awoke to the sound of a war horn. There was no preparing the slumbering ears for the sound, even knowing in advance how the goblins would begin their assault. What amazed her upon peeking out her tent flap was that the sound was not the wake-up alarm, but the call to charge. Somehow the entire army had prepared themselves for an assault without waking her. Madlin was under no illusion that they did it to spare her a few moments of extra sleep, but nonetheless, she was astonished at the stealth the small creatures could employ—and the organization.

Fumbling amid her belongings, Madlin found her coil gun and sighted through the optics. Nothing. There was starlight to see by, but cooking fires that had burned throughout the night kept the camp better lit than the walls.
Why would they leave the fires burning? Won’t that make them easier to see from the city?
Goblins milled around the fires, cooking, chatting, acting as if there was no army massing to assault the walls. Someone who could only see by the firelight might think the goblins were well settled in their camp.
A trick, then.
Madlin filed that away in her mind, should the goblins ever be on the other side of a wall from her.

“Settle in for the show,” she muttered to Rynn. Madlin could taste the ginger tea Rynn shared with Sosha, but the sensation was already fading. Rynn was more likely to see through the world-ripper’s viewframe than through their twinborn connection.

The horn sounded again, playing three notes. There were no whoops, no battle cries, no wordless snarls of bared ferocity. The goblins simply moved forward as a mass, as if someone had rolled a sack of marbles down a shallow slope, gathering speed until the whole army was at a dead run. Madlin’s vantage was high enough that she could see the army flowing into the plains and up the low road that wound back and forth up the mountainside. It might have taken half an hour for the first of them to make the mountain’s base, but Madlin was too engrossed in the spectacle to check her pocketclock.

The first she saw of the actual battle was surreal. The night was lit by a plume of flame erupting from the goblin ranks. So far from the action, she could barely hear the tiny, chittering shouts of alarm. Even after the initial burst, the flames lingered, clinging to distant, frantic forms, rushing around in their final chaotic moments. The defenders on the wall had struck first, with magic.

From the ranks of goblins, a volley answered. Whoever was commanding the goblin forces had ordered waiting until the goblins were almost to the wall before unleashing their secret weapons. All along the wall, Madlin saw blue glowing ripples, like pebbles thrown into a pond, each representing the strike of a single shot from a coil gun. Madlin wished she could take a flashpop, but the still image, rendered in two-tone color, would have come off as a paltry imitation of the wondrous sight.