World-Ripper War (Mad Tinker Chronicles Book 3), page 9
The ceiling of the cavern was cut into furrows where successive passes of the auger had left parallel circular channels. Spark lights anchored to the walls with rock bolts cast striped shadows along the ruts. It might have seemed like a Korrish deep except for a two important differences. For one, the rock was pale grey, with a chalky texture to it; no kuduk architect would think to build a city through it. The other was not apparent to anyone observing through a world hole but unmistakable to anyone present.
Madlin bounded across the world-ripper room of the new secret headquarters of the rebellion. With each step she lofted into the air head high and floated back to the floor like a puff of dandelion.
“Would you stop that?” Cadmus snapped. “This isn’t a nursery.”
“I don’t see why we can’t enjoy the gravity. Besides, it’s the quickest way to get around. I’ve been testing it.”
“Rusted nuisance is what it is,” said Cadmus. He twisted himself to get beneath the control console of one of the three world-rippers that the headquarters now boasted. With six dynamos, an array of spark lights and other modern spark conveniences, and a small workshop with two of every piece of equipment they might need, the third world-ripper was the last item to check off before the base was functional.
“Is that your excuse for not being done yet?”
“I took on the least ready of the three. Of course, it’s a slower job.”
“I still got two of them operational and calibrated before you finished yours. Want a hand? I can show you how to—”
“If you don’t mind, I’ve got work to do. Go ... recheck your wiring or something.”
“Air getting too stale for you? I can open a hole from here now ... using one of the rippers I just fixed.”
Cadmus pulled his head out from under the console. “That reminds me. If you’ve still got enough of a connection to Rynn, have her scramble the dials and disconnect the lunar compensator. We won’t be needing it anymore. All travel will be initiated from this side.”
“Oh, you know what? That would be a great idea,” Madlin said sarcastically. “Let me just have Rynn reinstall it and set it back to our coordinates so she can do that.” Madlin huffed. “The Jennai is already decoupled from the locking runes and under power. If we’re going to be cooped up together in here, you’re going to have to stop treating me like I’m an imbecile.”
“Since when have I ever?”
“Just now. I’m not six anymore; I have this all under control.”
“Just like when you nearly killed yourself playing crashball with those meat-for-brains soldiers?”
“That was field testing!”
“And how’d that work out? I could have told you that plan wouldn’t hold pressure.”
Madlin fought the temptation to throw a screwdriver at Cadmus. It felt feather-light in her hand, but its mass was unchanged. She could hurt him with it, just as she might on the surface at full gravity.
“Well, I guess you should have said something. If you don’t need me here, I guess I’ll go try out the stove and make some soup. Call me if you can’t figure it out.”
Cadmus muttered something under his breath as he climbed back under the console, but Madlin had to use her imagination to fill in the words.
“Oh, one other thing,” Cadmus shouted, his voice echoing from inside the steel enclosure. “Figure out how you’re going to generate the extra power we’re going to need with only one sixth of the gravity for the waterwheels.”
“Already have some thoughts,” she replied. Perpetual motion with two world-rippers was one of the key innovations she had planned for the base. If she could get it working, they could cut their reliance of building aether-powered dynamos.
“You just won’t like them,” she added under her breath.
The crew quarters aboard the Jennai had come a long way in the time Dan had been aboard. Every day, more and more rooms were constructed inside the giant, hollow steel bulbs that used to keep the airship aloft, and not all of them were mere bunk-rooms. Stuff so many men into one area, and no matter how dedicated they might be to a cause, you had to keep them occupied. The workers had built in kitchens, pubs, rec halls, wrestling rings, and a firing range. Dan preferred the casino.
It was an informal title, but one of the pubs had taken to catering to the dicers and card players among the rebels. Dan found his games among the Tellurakis and the twinborn. He would be gutted before he bothered learning daruu just to talk to people he intended to be rid of at his earliest opportunity.
“Aren’t you young for whiskey?” they had asked, his first night there.
“Where I’m from, they say a soldier earns himself a free drink for every man he kills in battle. I think if I’m old enough to earn ‘em, I’m old enough to drink ‘em.” No one could argue his point, so they let him drink. It didn’t matter that the story was complete manure, straight from the horse’s arse. Dan was from Veydrus as far as they knew, and none of them could tell Veydrus from a fairy story.
The rebels drank well. When the world-ripper crews pillaged, they pillaged top of the line. Dan held his cards in one hand and a wooden cup of Takalish whiskey in the other. It was Tenik Faii, and nearly as old as Dan, and some of the Takalish that worked for Errol had enough class to know that wood brings out the flavor. The cards were worthless, the dwindling pile of coins in front of him were a testament to how poorly the game was running for him. Dan hadn’t been cheating, mostly because he had been enjoying his drink and the bawdy humor of the soldiers.
When the jokes quieted, and the soldiers choked back laughs unfinished, Dan knew something was coming their way. He heard the thumps and tiny hisses and creaks approach from behind him, watching his fellow players’ eyes.
“Can I help you, General?” Dan asked. He took a sip of his whiskey and leaned way back in his chair, hooking a foot under the table to keep from toppling over. Rynn appeared upside down in his field of vision, and he gave her a sloppy grin. Go away. Let me drink in peace.
“I need to talk to you about something.”
“Pull up a chair. I’m sure we can make room.” The table was packed, but there was no way that the men around it were going to quibble over making a space for their general.
Rynn smirked. “Last time I played Crackle with you, you killed everyone but me and the barmaids.”
Dan didn’t take his eyes from Rynn, but he heard the scrapes of chairs, the muttered excuses, the departing footsteps. He watched Rynn watch his fellow players slink off to other parts of the pub or remember pressing duties that needed attention.
Dan let his chair thump back onto all four legs. “You are, without a doubt, the most boring person I have ever met. Do you do anything but work? What have I done that warrants this latest interruption of my attempts not to die of boredom on this flying barge?”
Rynn leaned close, bending awkwardly without moving her legs. “I need to see you in private.”
“Should have thought of that before you installed the rat trap,” said Dan, nodding toward Rynn’s tinker’s legs. “Wouldn’t have you, now. Gotta think of my safety.”
“Would you quit fooling around for once?”
“Your father made it quite clear what not joking with you would get me. World-ripper. Black-powder. Sleeping warlock. Torch. Boom!” Dan opened a fist into a spread of fingers to punctuate his comment.
“This is serious. I need your help with something.”
“Anyone bleeding to death?”
“No.”
“About to?”
“No.”
“Pretty sure I’d have noticed if we were under attack.”
“Probably.”
“This sounds like it can wait until dinnertime.”
“I’m General of the Rebellion. I can’t bend my schedule around your mood.”
“Maybe not, but I’m drunk,” said Dan, lifting his cup and downing the last of its contents. “I’ll be a bit more use once I’ve dried out a little.”
Rynn crossed her arms, and Dan could see the tendons stand out as her fingers dug into her arms. “Fine. After dinner then. No more booze for you until then.” She snatched the bottle of Tenik Faii off the table.
“Dinner in your quarters. Have that chef of yours cook us up something better than the slop-line chow.”
“That ‘slop’ is better than most of these fighters ever ate in their lives.”
“Yeah, so what? I’ve had better and I know the difference. Vaulk and Greuder make the only real food I’ve seen on this wreck. I’m not one of your rebels, and I don’t take orders, so if you want my help you’re going to need to wipe that look off your face and try asking me for help over dinner instead of expecting me to come begging at your door after you dine like a princess.”
Rynn gritted her teeth. “Fine. Dinner’ll be at six.”
“Six-thirty would suit me better,” said Dan. Rynn scowled immediately, but Dan continued before she could object. “But I am happy to bend my schedule around to accommodate you.”
Once Rynn had stormed off in a jangling cacophony of mechanical apparatus, Dan leaned across the table and grabbed one of the bottles left behind by his departed opponents. The label claimed it was a cheap Acardian ale, popular among the north-blooded Tellurakis, who preferred brewed to distilled.
“Mostein Hills, huh?” He eyed the bottle dubiously but lifted it to his lips anyway. Too bitter. Still, it was on the table and little else left looked any better. Downing a swig, he decided he could stomach it. Dan shook his head. “If she were a man, I’d have gutted her like a fish by now.”
Madlin sat basking in the borrowed sunlight from Tellurak’s Savage Lands, her chair pulled over next to the viewing frame of one of the working world-rippers. The other world-ripper she had tuned stood idle but was ready at any time if she needed it. The last, Cadmus appeared nearly done with. It lay at the far end of a semi-circular canal that ran the length of the chamber, with a viewing frame set into the floor at either end. The view was lush, filled with greenery and shimmering water from the river whose waterline was just below the top edge of the canal. The cross section of the water gave Madlin a view of the river fish as they swam unaware of the bizarre sight they were about to witness. The scene would have been worthy of a painting if not for the mesh protective screen erected across where the world hole would form, giving the frame the appearance of a fan housing.
“I didn’t brew enough tea for this if you’re going to be much longer,” Madlin called across the room. Cadmus ignored her and continued his adjustments.
Madlin turned her attention to the wildlife, watching some movements in the underbrush and wondering whether she could catch a glimpse of what creature was concealed within. She had never paid much attention to the out of doors, and Tinker’s Island had few native species. Rats, cats, horses, dogs, and birds, all other creatures were meals or stories. Madlin had eaten her share of fish but had never given them much thought as a source of amusement. The colorful creatures in the muddy shallows of the Telluraki stream were like something from a fairy story, too alien to be real. Someone must have drawn them with ink and brought them to life with magic. I wonder if that isn’t just what Eziel did.
Madlin’s philosophical musings were interrupted by a clatter from across the room. Cadmus had dropped a wrench as he pulled himself from beneath the control console. “Things going amiss over there?”
Cadmus said nothing, but pulled a switch and the first bulb around the world-ripper’s frame lit. “Hah!” his voice echoed across the room. He pulled the others in succession and when the final bulb lit, his world-ripper sprang to life, showing a view out over the sea. “What are the coordinates over there?”
With the controls operating on relative location, the settings for the two would be nearly identical for what they had planned. Madlin read off the numbers from her machine, and Cadmus turned the settings on his to match. The view was from the same remote valley in the Savage Lands as far from Madlin’s view as his machine was from hers. Cadmus adjusted his side until the two views were back to back.
“You ready over there?” he asked.
“Nothing left but to try it.”
Madlin threw the switch, and her machine opened a hole to Tellurak. Water from the stream gushed through as if a dam had burst. In a strange sense, one had. The canal carried the water across the room, under a metal bridge that connected one half of the room to the other, covering the ends of pipes that jutted into the canal to pump fresh water out and wastewater in. It sped toward Cadmus’s side where he awaited its arrival with a hand ready on the switch for the other machine.
The water level in Cadmus’s view had drastically lowered. Madlin’s machine was starving the stream just an inch upriver from where his looked. When the water was about to crash into the frame of his world-ripper, Cadmus activated it, opening a world-hole for the water to exit through. The water poured back into the stream bed on Cadmus’s end.
Madlin let out a whoop, and Cadmus cackled and clapped his hands together. “Smell that fresh air,” said Madlin.
“We need to install some rocks, to make it babble like a proper stream,” said Cadmus with a critical eye on the flow.
Their elation was short lived. Once the water filled the canal, it kept rising. In the span of seconds, it was spilling over into the banks of the canal and heading for spark equipment. Prudence had made them keep the wiring off the floor when trying to harness a tiny river for themselves, but a flood was an alarming prospect when trapped in a small space with enough spark to turn them both to cinders.
“What in Eziel’s name...?” Madlin shouted.
Cadmus was already back at the controls for his machine. “It’s the gravity. Water pressure is higher on both sides than it is in here. We need to raise the world-holes.”
Madlin rushed to her own controls as Telluraki water washed over the soles of her boots. “Blast it, you’re right. I worked out the setup without taking the gravity change into account. Who knew the moon would be like this?”
“Cap it,” Cadmus said. “Worry about it after we stop this flood.” Cadmus brought his side completely out of the water, turning his end into a drain pipe. The water level in the canal began to drop.
When Madlin was able to adjust the controls on her end, she brought the hole halfway out of the water, and the flow into the canal lessened and stabilized.
“Sorry.”
Cadmus looked down into the canal. None of the pipes were underwater, meaning no pumped water until something was done about the civic engineering of their new headquarters. “Well, you’re the one who’s going to mop it up.”
Madlin looked out her end of the setup, then across to the hole on Cadmus’s side of the room. “I can only imagine what this must look like to the animals out there.”
“I imagine they see two idiot humans, trying to flood the moon of another world with their stream water.”
“Yeah, I’ll get working on a solution to the gravity problem.”
Rynn felt foolish. She fidgeted in her seat, trying to find a comfortable position. Her tinker’s legs were the best thing she’d built since her injury; they’d changed her life. But there were still deficiencies to the design and sitting was one of them. For reasons she could not quite explain to herself, she had washed and changed in preparation for dinner. Nothing she wore was fancy or even particularly ladylike—she owned nothing but coveralls and loose-fitting, comfortable garments—but she was scrubbed clean to the freckles and her clothes smelled of laundry soap.
For Dan? The question nagged at her. She tried to justify it to herself as a visit of state. Dan was as good as an ambassador to Veydrus. He was influential, powerful, and she was planning to ask for his help. He’s all that ... but ... DAN? He was also spoiled, vicious, and violent. Her boys liked the idea of putting holes in a few kuduks here and there, but there was never the glee in their eyes that she had seen in his at the prospect of a force invading Tinker’s Island. There was never the wanton bloodletting as Dan had shown at the card room in Buou.
There was a knock at the door. In a panic, Rynn mussed her hair—which she had just finished brushing—lest Dan get the wrong idea. “Come in.”
“Thought I’d come half an hour late,” Dan said as he poked his head in, “but I figured I’d kicked enough dirt on your boots for one day.” He slipped inside and closed the door behind him. They were alone.
“Thanks,” said Rynn. “You’re one of the few left around here who ever does. You’re better at it than the gang I ran with.”
“Well, there’s always a line you can’t go over,” Dan said as he sauntered to the table. “Back someone into a corner, even the scrawniest cat will fight back. Me? I just don’t worry about that line.”
“But you just said—”
“I said you’d had enough, not that I was worried about pushing you too far. Nice spread, I must say. Your bandits pop off to a royal cupboard for all this sparkling finery?”
“This?” Rynn asked, waving a hand over the table set for two. The plates were polished obsidian, chased with gold. Forks, knives, and spoons all shone in immaculate brightsteel—which did look a little like silver at a casual glance, now that Rynn thought about it. “These vacu-dirges were classy rides before we filled them with sweaty human soldiers. This junk all came from first class. Kitchen staff went a little off the tracks when I told them I needed a table set for two in ... my ... quarters.” Rynn swallowed. She had gone off the tracks a bit herself.
Dan smirked and slid into the chair across from her. “You don’t say. Well, you’re looking a lot better. Wouldn’t hardly know you broke your nose a week ago.”
Rynn fumbled her hands under the table and gave a nervous laugh. “Well, I can’t grow fingers back, but I’m not exactly made of glass.”
Dan flexed the fingers of his left hand. “Yeah, the skin color took a while to get right, but you’d think I grew up with these. Perks of being a mighty sorcerer, am I right?”
“Wouldn’t know. You keep refusing to teach me.”
