World-Ripper War (Mad Tinker Chronicles Book 3) (4 page)

“What sort of things?”

Kupe grinned at Mull, who stood uncomfortably waiting for the pair to say their goodbyes. “Mull’s our new inside man at the thunderails.”

At the back of the farthest reaches of the back tunnel of the church, another couple sat. To all appearances they waited for the crowd to thin before pressing through, but they were no natives of Cuminol, nor any other place in Korr.

“Quite the speech. Gets the blood running hot,” said Juliana. She wore a plain wool dress dyed grey as stone and straight from the seamstress. It was less apparent when she sat, but she towered over the Korrish women. The tallest she had met only came as high as her nose.

“I take it you followed along? I didn’t hear you chanting the invocation,” Kyrus replied. He wore a workman’s coveralls, but had at least taken the trouble to rub them with grime to make it looked as if he worked. Though well taller than Juliana, men Kyrus’s size were not uncommon among the stock-bred humans, though he was thinner of limb than the crashball players and heavy laborers that were common among the very large.

Juliana shrugged. “Sure. Easier reading the stuff than listening to it, but daruu isn’t so bad to pick up. So, you going to join the rebellion, be a hero?”

Kyrus shot her a glare that would have had a sensible creature soiling itself. Juliana just snickered. “I’m no hero. Look at what these people are doing? They have nothing—or at least very little. Yet here they are, ready to stand up and fight against the people who control the whole world.”

“You could make it easier on them.”

“I could sully their victory, steal away their purpose and resolve, let them remain soft and beaten, but under a kinder master. No. There were real heroes in this crowd. I don’t know who they were—they don’t even know yet themselves—but someone here will shape a new future for our kind.”

“Their kind. They’re really not
our
kind anymore.”

Kyrus sighed. “No, I suppose not. Our kind are enough of a problem as it is. I’m not going to worry about them today, though.”

“Will they listen?”

Kyrus gestured to the church around them “I wish they could have listened to
this
. But they’ll listen to me. I won’t leave them a choice.”

Chapter 4

“It takes a thick skull to play crashball. You start lettin’ ideas into your head; you might think twice about playing at all.” - Gemno (“Hayfield”), star sweeper for the Steam Rats Crashball Squad

“Lord Eziel, grant us vengeance upon our enemies. Let us share our strength as comrades and become fearsome to our foes. I am your servant; teach me to kill in your name.”

Rynn spoke the words along with everyone else on the plaza, in a slow chant so that all the voices merged together into a single sound, far greater than any long voice could have managed. It was more than symbolic; it was demonstrative. The Human Rebellion was more than individuals. Pious Rascal, who Rynn could never seem to think of him as Henlon, kept his emphasis on the communal purpose being what would bring them victory. Rynn knew that it was helpful, but she suspected that coil guns and other rune-tech were going to prove the difference in the end.

“Rise, and part as brethren,” Rascal said, his voice carrying over a crowd that had fallen silent at the final word of the invocation. “We have the work of Eziel to attend.”

Rynn levered herself up from one knee, the posture everyone on the plaza had taken during Rascal’s sermon. The supports in the tinker’s legs made the kneeling easier on her than on probably anyone else in the rebellion. It hardly felt different than standing. With the springs and air pistons helping, the rise was cumbersome but not taxing in the least.

The crowd began to thin immediately. Most of the rebels had duties to resume. There was still construction going on over most of the ship. With every added floor inside the old vacuum tanks, the crowding in the crew quarters lessened. The liftwing hangars were taking shape, both in ease of use and in readiness to launch in haste. The cramped workshops cut through walls and set up more of the equipment that had been salvaged from Tinker’s Island. The
Jennai
was a great clockwork beast, being built from the inside out.

But not everyone had duties that pressed, and those who had odd tasks went about those as well. Certain idle and rowdy rebels loitered on the plaza, waiting for it to clear. After all, the plaza was painted with the boundary lines for two crashball pitches. The would-be player shifted nervously, trying to avoid the eye of their general as she watched them linger. A few guilty souls took themselves to find some useful occupation instead of waiting until they were among the lonely few left to explain why they hadn’t left the plaza.

Rynn took a quick count of the remaining rebels. “Sides of nine, friendly touch, no tackling,” she called out. Those who had been taking care to study the sky or gaze up at the windows of the vacuum tanks suddenly realized that their general meant to play. Rynn felt exposed standing in the midst of a group of her troops, out of place for the first time she could remember aboard the
Jennai
. Every one of the players seemed clipped from newspaper flashpops of crashball matches. Tall, broad, muscular, they exuded a jovial violence just milling around waiting for a match.

“I bet we could round up better than that for a friendly,” Hayfield shouted over from the sidelines. He was among a number of well-wishers who clung to the games but didn’t get involved. He drew eyes away from Rynn as he crossed the painted lines that separated prospective players from spectators. With a solid decade over the next oldest player in the plaza, his arrival signaled a change in the tone of the game. A few other hangers on slipped over the barrier of white paint that might as well have been a chain fence just moments earlier. Too young, too small, too timid, or too female, these others had found reason to steer clear of the miners, soldiers, and freight handlers who dominated most matches. Now they joined Hayfield and Rynn with the prospect of a gentler game.

“C’mon, old timer,” one of the barrel-shaped lads complained. “We need to steam off a little. Can’t be havin’ kids and girls out here.”

“There’s two pitches painted,” Rynn said. “We can have a game of each. We can play friendly here, and you boys can knock each other’s teeth out on the other.”

A certain sort of lad never liked to be compromised with. There was a bit of a bully in many of them that liked when they could bull and bluster their way over obstacles, getting their own way. Such a lad might have been inclined to tell a girl of nineteen years and half his size that she could well clear off his pitch and take over the free one. A slightly smarter sort remembered that he would be arguing with his general, a woman who could order him to the fore of a charge, have him tossed off the ship, or just shoot him herself. It wouldn’t have been the first time she’d done it.

The lad nodded. “Awright.” He jerked his head toward the other pitch and led his goons to the other playing field.

Her goons. As much as Rynn looked down on their oafish antics, those goons were soldiers of hers, the sort who could brawl with kuduks—knockers or militia—and win. If they haunted the plazas and the bars aboard the
Jennai
in their off hours, it was a small price to pay when it was time to raid.

Someone tossed Rynn a crashball, and she juggled it before latching on and taking hold of it. It was an oblong leather-wrapped ovoid with a wood core and a layer of wool padding between. Rynn had only handled one a few times in her life. She was no athlete. The only serious attempt she’d made to play crashball was a children’s game in the tunnels of Eversall Deep when she was eight. She’d ended up with scraped knees, a twisted finger, and a bloody nose. Ever since then, she had steered clear of the game.

They ended up with twenty-four players. Rynn and Hayfield took captaincy and chose sides. As they took turns picking, Rynn wondered just how late she would have been picked if she wasn’t on a team by default. She certainly wouldn’t have picked herself (or Madlin, had she been among the candidates) over anyone waiting to be selected.

Once the two teams had been selected, they flipped a five-gorm to see who would take the ball first. Hayfield flipped, and Rynn called ‘sky’ before it landed—sky-side up. Hayfield’s squad huddled up in their half of the pitch and prepared to kick away to Rynn’s.

Rynn and her team spread out in their half, ready for wherever the kicked crashball headed. “Let’s have a nice clean one, everyone. No broken bones. You might need one of theirs backing you up with a coil gun in hand someday soon. Keep that in mind when you’re tempted to tackle.”

Hayfield handled the kick himself. There was a dull thud as his boot connected with the ball, sending it tumbling end over end into, arcing through the air into Rynn’s half. Rynn saw a parabolic arc in negligible wind. She figured its flight at landing somewhat shy of a symmetrical arc, accounting for wind resistance. It wasn’t heading her way but over her head and to her right. She bounced on her tinker’s legs to get ready to spring into action once someone fielded the kick.

There was a slap and a thud as a skinny lad tried to catch the kick, and it bounced off his hands to the plaza. The oblong shape made predicting bounces nearly impossible. Four of Rynn’s players scrambled to corral the crashball as Hayfield’s team barreled down on them. Had they been playing full contact, a flubbed catch on the kick was a prelude to carnage as both teams fell on it like packs of wolves. In a friendly, Rynn took up her duty trying to block the path of her opponents, knowing they had to avoid body to body contact.

The sight of a man bearing down on her kept Rynn hunkered down and ready to spring away. He was mechanic in his coveralls, and not nearly the size of the players who’d opted for the rough game, but more than Rynn could have fended off had he wanted to bowl her over. She kept her arms out in front of her, elbows slightly bent as she’d seen other players do and wondered if she ought to have lugged a few more sacks of wheat flour in her life. There was no tool to help her, nothing but her own flesh against her opponent’s. In that moment she saw the appeal—for those lads with arms like thunderail pistons. Strip away the money and artifice, and you were left with animal combat. Of course, there were rules to keep it civil, but Rynn had always relied on wit and tinkered machines over brute force. As Hayfield’s team closed in, the plaza shook under their feet. Instinct told Rynn to take cover, to dive out of the way and bring her arms up to protect her head. The arms stretched out to take an impact drew closer and closer to her body.

The mechanic veered aside. Rynn knew her job was to sidestep and block him off, force him even farther out of his way, but she leaned away from him instead.
The legs can’t move laterally that fast
. It was an excuse for later, nothing she believed. Another of Hayfield’s players brushed by to her left. Rynn spared a glance over her shoulder and saw that her squad had recovered the ball and were passing it back and forth to keep it away from the onrush of opponents. It was a peculiarity in the friendly game that would never have stood up in full contact. Forced to go around one another, Rynn’s players kept Hayfield’s at bay simply by forcing them off their intended path, tossing the ball to a free teammate when the opponents got too near. Played so wide and loose in a contact game, one team or the other would have knocked a path clear to score or steal before long.

Rynn looked to Hayfield’s side of the pitch and saw that only two players had stayed back as safeties. No one was paying her much mind either. She took two hopping strides to get a feel for the plaza floor, then raised an arm and waved to her team. “To me!”

It had been the thing to do. She was no great fanatic of crashball, but she knew the call. She said it without much thought to what would follow. The teammate with the ball heeded her. Whether his general’s voice held some thrall over him, whether he took pity on the left-out player, or whether he naively believed in her ability to score, the ball lofted her way. The oblong crashball wobbled through the air with the narrow ends to the sides, like it was trying to paddle a canoe. Players from both teams turned to watch its flight and to follow its course. Rynn was suddenly the center of attention of twenty-three other players.

Rynn judged the ball in flight and shuffled her feet to position herself under it. She tried to ignore the pounding boots growing closer by the second and kept her attention skyward, on the little glint of open air between the
Jennai’s
forward vacuum tanks. It hung in the air for hours, it seemed, growing larger rather than nearer.
Too fast. Step aside.
Fielding the ball on a bounce was a dice roll as she saw with the kick. She had to try.

“Oomph.”

The ball hit Rynn in the chest, and she cradled it against her body as it knocked the breath from her lungs. To her credit, she held it tight and regained her composure before looking to see how close the pursuit had come. Too close.

Rynn tried to twist, but the bulk of the tinker’s legs made it into the movement of a compass—one point stabbed into the paper as the other swung in an arc. Once she got her legs lined up, it was time to field test them. She ran. All the joints of the legs were spring stabilized, which was nice for stopping the momentum of the heavy steel mechanisms, but it was also meant to store energy on the move. She couldn’t manage the churning piston run of a normal human sprint but bounded like a two-legged deer once she worked out the gait after three steps. Higher and higher she bounced with each stride, longer and longer each bound until she reached the limit of what her muscles could manage with the load of the springs. The two player’s Hayfield’s squad kept back took an optimist’s angle to cut off her charge and found themselves left in Rynn’s wake as she sped between them like they were statues.

She heard the shouts of encouragement as her own teammates broke off pursuit and cheered her on. There was no one to stop her from crossing the score line. She pressed on, full steam ahead until she reached the far painted line of the pitch and broke into an exultant grin as she scored.

Slowing proved to be a different matter. Rynn eased off her sprint, but forward momentum carried her onward. At each bounding stride, the springs in the tinker’s legs returned much of her kinetic energy to her. Leaning back to ease up, she felt her balance faltering and stumbled to catch herself.

The edge of the ship. It was too close. The
Jennai
was massive, with the plaza running the full length of the ship, but it was still finite. And Rynn had rediscovered that fact in alarming fashion. There were no safety rails or nets at the end of the plaza; its core function was as an aerodrome, not a sporting stadium. Even non-tinkers have a sense of certain applications of physics, quick scratchwork within the brain that tells them how to aim a rifle or catch a crashball. Rynn’s internal scratchwork needed neither her exact velocity nor her distance to the edge of the airship to tell her she was about to pitch headlong into the sky.

The only way Rynn foresaw went against her body’s preservation instincts. It became a test of will; her instincts told her to keep herself from falling to the unforgiving steel of the plaza against the reasoning that it would hurt far less than a fatal fall from above the clouds. Rynn let the crashball tumble from her hands and braced herself as she put her feet together and used the muscles in her foot to catch a toe on the plaza floor. She felt the instant panic of falling, putting her arms out to cushion her fall. Rune-balanced for weight though they may have been, her tinker’s legs still carried their mass like the steel constructs they were. Rynn slammed face-first to the ground, dragged down by the mass of her legs to hit far harder than she’d have liked.