by Huskyteer
“Not what is it,” Khaal cut in. “What can you tell me about it? Look at it.”
He lowered his head at the reprimand, and hid the instinctive response by crouching to peer under the front of the vehicle. The axle was quite plainly snapped. That couldn’t be what Khaal was asking about; it was too obvious. He stood and walked around the vehicle, trailing his fingers against the paneling and breakproof windows. Rovers were painted a pale yellow-orange to conceal them against the sand. This one’s armor had huge, tear-shaped rents gouged into the sides and roof. The paneling bulged outward around the scars, as if something big had latched onto the rover and lifted it. Rakin slipped his fingers into one of the holes. He could nearly fit his whole paw into it. He moved around to the back, ducking to look beneath. The rear axle was fine, but the left tire had a huge gash torn out of it, and there were deep scratches on the undercarriage. When he rounded the far side of the rover, he drew his breath in sharply. Dried blood caked the panels from the roof to the undercarriage, and had congealed in the door, which was buckled in so deep, he doubted it would ever open. The reek of the stain was sharp and unpleasant. He withdrew his paw, avoiding the stain as he followed it around to the front of the rover. The front left fender had been crushed inward by a terrific blow, so powerful that the rover’s frame appeared to be bent, and the hood was missing. Rakin leaned forward to check the engine, which proved to be black with greasy soot, both inside and outside the clear sand shield. Something glinted inside the shield, something small and shiny, a curved barb, shaped like an eagle talon.
He stood, moving away from the engine, wrinkling his nose at the stink. “The engine seized. Probably burned itself out. Something grabbed the rover and tried to carry it. And bit its tire. And it crashed, I guess, probably when its tire blew, and maybe hit a rock?”
Khaal shook his head. “Don’t ask me. Tell me. Look closer. Look at the story the damage tells. Think about what’s wrong with it. Tell me what happened first. If you don’t know what happened to a rover, it’s much harder to repair it.”
Frowning, Rakin stared at the rover again, his mind racing. The engine couldn’t have seized first, because then it could never have been going fast enough to hit its fender with such force. He stared at the fender again, looking at the way the metal was bent inward. It hadn’t been hit from the front, but from the side. And the rover had been moving at the time. “The dent to the fender happened first,” he said, feeling confident. “I thought the rover had hit something, but I was wrong. Something hit it. Maybe a charging modo.”
He saw the light of approval in Khaal’s eyes. “Then what?”
Feeling encouraged, he continued. “When the fender buckled, it popped the hood. It probably came off entirely then. Something else punctured the sand shield. I don’t know what it is. Something sharp and silvery.”
“Those are shrike barbs. Shot from the tails. Your average shrike can hit a rover moving at top speed with pinpoint accuracy.”
Rakin shivered at the thought, and nodded. “When the sand shield was popped, the engine seized. The Snakecrusher’s real vulnerable without its shield. Plus it was probably going at full speed when its shield was punctured. It would have ground to a stop pretty quick. The modo probably bit the tire then, but I can’t really tell when that happened.”
Khaal came closer, nodding. “And the axle? How did that break?”
Rakin considered. “Once the rover was stopped, it’d be real easy for the shrike to catch it. I’m guessing it tried to fly off with it. It must have been a really big one to lift twelve hundred kilo, though. Plus passenger. I’m thinking it didn’t get far before the ranger opened up on it with the JR9 and blew it off the roof. That’s why all the blood. When it dropped the rover, it banged up the undercarriage pretty bad and the front axle probably hit a rock. That’s how it broke.” He looked over at Khaal.
The older jackal was beaming. “Almost exactly how it happened,” he said. “Of course if our ranger friend had headed back as soon as he lost his hood like he was supposed to, he never would have wrecked the whole damned rover. But he just went around, driving all over the fool desert with his engine laid bare until a shrike took a pot shot at him. He’s lucky he’s alive. Rangers are brave, and fast, sure, but they don’t always have the most sense.” He clapped a still-greasy paw on Rakin’s shoulder, making him stumble against the rover. “That’s why you belong here in the garage, m’boy. You’ve got a brain in there, sure enough. It’s way too valuable to risk to shrike barbs or a bailwif’s maw. You look close, you can see the real stories of what happens out there, not the boastful nonsense those rangers spout in the dining halls every night.”
“You think it’s nonsense?” Rakin suddenly felt uncomfortable. Maybe Khaal was a dissident after all, one of those crazy jackals who stood on the street corners and shouted about how the City was a prison. He’d seen one, once, trying to tell everyone that the rangers were their jailers and the Walls were there to keep them in. It was foolish talk. You only had to take a walk atop one of the walls on the wrong day to feel them shudder from the impact of a modo battering them, or see the glistening black fury of a shrike bearing down on you. One of the police had quietly escorted the dissident away. If Khaal were one of them, maybe the police would visit him, too.
“Well, it’s not like they don’t bring down the monsters,” Khaal said. “But those stories are all exaggerated. A true engineer can see the truth. He doesn’t get dazzled by the fiction. You’ll see it too, one day. They all lie.”
“Okay, maybe some of the rangers,” Rakin allowed, “but not all of them. Not Kamil.” Kamil was the greatest of the rangers, hands down. Everyone knew him, everyone loved him. It was after Kamil had given a racing marksmanship demonstration for Rakin’s school that he and his friends had sworn they would all be rangers together. He had bagged twice as many trophies as any of the other rangers out there. That was proof. If not for Kamil, the shrike would probably be raiding the town right now.
Khaal just snorted. “Kamil, pah. He’s one of the worst of them. Exactly how long do you think Kamil would survive out there without his rover? How long do you think he’d last on the dunes? An hour? Two?” He shook his head, and fixed Rakin with a serious gaze. “It’s us in here, you and me, who make what they do possible. We keep their machines running peak. We build their armor. We give them their speed. We make sure their guns don’t shake their rovers apart, or melt off from their own heat, or spin out of control and pelt their own rover. Anyone can go out there in a rover and fell a few shrikes. But a ranger is nothing without his ride. You and me, we have the most important job in the whole City. So don’t go thinking you’re less than some puffed-up hunter with blood in his fur. You understand?”
Rakin furrowed his brow. “Yes, sir.” He actually felt a little bad for Khaal now. Sure, fixing up rides was important, but it was mostly grunt work. Anyone could do it. Maybe working the pit made you bitter after a while, seeing the City’s heroes come in and drop off their rides and go off to feasts and glory, leaving you behind to hammer the dents out of their panels, replace their brakes, scrub the blood out of the seats, or clean sand out of the manifold. And that was going to be his life now. Cleaning up after rangers like a servant. Still. No point in making the old mechanic feel bad about it. He forced a grin and a tail wag.
Khaal studied his expression for a moment, then nodded. “Good.”
He set Rakin to work straight away. Rakin expected to be assigned to menial tasks for his first day, but Khaal led him to an engine that looked as if it had been repeatedly dropped into a canyon while on fire, and told him to rebuild it. “Better to learn on the first day what you can and can’t do,” he said. “That way we don’t waste you.”
A battered old tool-cart had been assigned to Rakin, with his name written on a strip of cloth fixed to it. These were to be his tools, he learned, and he was responsible for their care. They were heavily worn, but functional, and he wasted little time in disassembling the engine
and cleaning it. He’d never done this sort of work on his own before, although he and his father had worked on smaller engines together, hunching over their workshop table into the cool hours of the night until his mother would come out and blearily mumble that they both ought to have been in bed hours ago. The principles were the same, and he felt comfortable with the work. From time to time, Khaal would come by to inspect his progress, give a grunt of approval, and walk away again.
After what seemed a short period, Khaal came up behind him and put his hand on his shoulder. “I’m off for the night, Rakin. You’ve done fine work here. Keep at it, but if you have questions about anything, leave it for tomorrow. We don’t want some ranger stalling out there on the dunes because you weren’t sure about something.”
Feeling a bit stung, Rakin turned. “I know what I’m doing, trust me.”
Khaal’s expression went serious. “It’s plain to me you’re capable. But there’s knowing, and there’s thinking you know. And it takes lots and lots of experience before you can tell the difference. Until then you’re going to make mistakes. All right?”
Rakin nodded. “All right.”
He seethed to himself after Khaal left. Talking to him like he was a pup, like he didn’t know the basic principles of maintenance and repair. He worked through the night, and by the time his shift ended, he had the engine halfway rebuilt.
By the end of the week, he was working on his third major job, reconstructing the chassis for the Snakecrusher Khaal had tested him with the first day. He still hadn’t been allowed to work on weapons; that required joint cooperation with the armory, and they wouldn’t admit any engineer who hadn’t given at least five years of service with the Garage. Rakin was determined to change their minds. He’d changed Khaal’s, after all: the old jackal had been so impressed with his rebuilt engine that he’d gushed to Rakin’s father about it in the dining hall the next day, and was talking about having Rakin moved to modifications.
All the same, the work, while engrossing, was already wearing him down. The other engineers worked the day shifts, since the rangers mostly patrolled in the cool hours of the evening. Even the best-insulated rover would turn into an oven in the desert sun, which burned too fiercely for any living things but the sandwisps. So the rovers were out all night, and there during the day. But someone had to work the night shift, and that was the new kid. Each evening when his shift started there would be leftover rovers pulled into in the Garage, the ones that the other engineers hadn’t had time to get to. They would be riddled with the evidence of adventure: tears in the roof, weapons sheared off at the base, blood pooled in the seat wells. Twice, rovers had been parked with trophies still crammed into the cargo bed. One, a modo’s head, was so heavy it had taken an engine hoist to heft it out of the bed, its massive skull studded with bony knobs and covered with thick, rough bluish-grey skin, resting half as high as Rakin’s.
The other was the severed head of a shrike, which Rakin had found snarling into his face when he opened the cargo bed, startling him so badly he nearly cried aloud in terror. He had seen the heads of shrikes before, mounted up in the guard towers, and in the King’s Hall, but those were old, dried, and glassy-eyed. This one had been wet and bloody and fresh; life still glinted in its black-eyed glare. Its reptilian jaws were crammed full of wicked teeth, and Rakin had kept well clear of them. A shrike’s bite was said to be mortally venomous even after death. He had grabbed the head by its antenna, tugged, and dragged it out of the back of the rover. It fell to the floor with a nasty, wet sound, and blood and saliva spattered from its mouth.
There was an area of the Garage designated for trophies and other such materials, and Rakin had dragged the head over and left it, but even now he shuddered to think of it there with its gaping jaws, its dead eyes still full of menace and hatred. He wondered which of the rangers had brought it down.
Tonight, though, his shift was not even half ended when he was startled by the shriek of the alarms, the alarms that meant that the Garage gate was opening. The gate was one of the only breaks in the Wall, and so the alarm sounded to warn everyone that there was a breach, that something might burst in from the desert. There were two gates, one inner and one outer, so the chances were rare, but it had happened; Rakin had heard of a bailwif that rode in clinging to a rover’s undercarriage once, and had killed two engineers before the ranger could shoot it. And once, years before that, a shrike had flown in without the ranger knowing. That one had taken out half the garage before it went down. The pictures of the slain engineers hung on one of the walls. Rakin crouched low, perking his ears. His ratchet slipped from his paw and fell into an oil pan with a thunk. The gate rolled upward, the metal slats squeaking above the rumble of the motors. Rakin poked his head over the hood of the wreck in time to see a rover rolling into the drop-off point.
Rakin recognized it immediately, but so would any jackal in the City. It was the Sandray, a lean and sleek custom job driven only by Kamil himself, faster than any other rover ever built, mounted with twin swivel cannons, hull saws in the roof and fenders, razor nets, and a load of sand mines that could probably take a bite out of a mountain. With a decompression hiss, the door slid open.
Although Rakin had imagined this moment since he was a pup, had told himself over and over that Kamil probably was sick of being pestered by fans and wouldn’t like to be bothered, when he saw the ranger push the trac goggles up from his eyes and climb out of the rover, he couldn’t stop himself from hurrying over. It was Kamil, after all! “Hello, Mr….Kamil…Sir,” he said lamely. He tried to force himself to look calm and professional, but his tail wagged in frenetic betrayal.
The jackal stood—tall, broad-shouldered, clad in combat gear—and grinned a cool, easy grin. “Hey there, kiddo. Haven’t seen you before. You must be new to the Gary.”
Rakin stared at him stupidly. “The Gary?” He winced. The Garage. That must be what all the other rangers called the Garage. God, that was cool. “Right, the Garage. Just signed here a few weeks ago, sir.”
“Yeah, I try to know all the fixers, but I haven’t met you yet.” Kamil flashed his grin again. “I’m Kamil.”
“I know who you are, sir. Everyone knows who you are. I…we all wanted to be rangers because of you.”
“Yeah yeah, kid.” Kamil leaned back against the Sandray and stripped his helmet off, tossing it into the vehicle. “Listen, I had to park in early tonight. Got a fine piece of—” He gave Rakin an appraising look. “Got a date.” He settled back into his easy smile. “You think you can have my baby here all shiny and full of bullets and butane by tomorrow night? Don’t worry about being new and all. My regular guy looked at it a few hours ago, so it should be fine. Nothing too complicated.”
Sorry, Rakin said in his mind. I can fuel it up, but you’ll have to wait for the armory to restock your ammo. Out loud, he said, “I can handle it. No problem.” Then he grinned back at Kamil while his mind shouted in fury at him.
“Knew you could handle it.” Kamil flicked his paw in the air and the keys arced toward Rakin, who, somehow, reached up and snatched them in the air instead of fumbling and dropping them like he normally would. It looked pretty cool. “Good to meet you, kid.”
“Rakin.”
“Rakin, right.” Kamil turned and headed toward the Garage exit with an easy swagger. Halfway to the exit he turned, and Rakin’s cheeks burned. He’d been caught staring after him like some dumb pup. “Hey kid,” Kamil called back, “don’t feel too bad about not getting selected as ranger. It’s only the best of the best that get chosen. What you do is real important too. Don’t let anybody tell you different. You guys keep the heroes of the City alive. That’s a big job.” He flashed a white-fanged grin. “You’re, like, second best. You and the gunners. I mean it.”
Rakin’s face burned beneath his fur. “Thanks.”
He clenched the keys in his paw as Kamil left. Second best. That was how the rangers would see him. That’s how they saw all engineers. Fixers. Grease-st
ained wrench jockeys. And that was all he’d ever be for his whole life. He’d work here in the Garage until the day he was too old to hold a hammer. Why had he let Haytham shame him out of applying to be a ranger? That was his dream, wasn’t it? It was his dream, and he’d let it go because of a little teasing. Not the flash of shrike’s teeth or burning lights of sandwisps, but just a couple boastful remarks. How could he call himself courageous? And now Haytham was going to lord it over him his whole life. He deserved it.
He looked down at the keys in his paw. Maybe it wasn’t too late. His fur stood on end. The shift board was empty for the night; no one would be back in until early dawn, and that was a good six hours away. It was forbidden for anyone but a noble or a ranger to take a rover outside the Wall, but what if he came back with his own trophy? Suppose he went out and took down a shrike or a bailwif, and brought back its head? They’d have to acknowledge they were wrong. They’d have to make him a ranger.
He reached into the Sandray and pulled out Kamil’s helmet. It didn’t smell very good at all: a mixture of sweat and fur gel and something like old feet, but he pulled it on over his head anyway. He had a little trouble threading his ears through the holes, and the helmet was decidedly too large for him, but it would do. Kamil had taken the trac goggles with him, but that was all right. It was a full moon, and Rakin had good night vision anyway. He should be fine without them.
He climbed into the Sandray and sat down. He had to slide the seat up so his toes would reach the pedals. He ran his fingers lightly over the wheel, the shifter, the cannon brace. It was beautiful. Surprisingly dirty, but beautiful. He turned the key in the ignition and felt the rover growl to life below him, watched the gauges spin up. Still plenty of fuel, plenty of ammo. He closed the door and looked up to the roof where he knew the button to open the Garage door would be. Click.
Inside the Sandray, he could barely hear the alarm warning that the door was opening. Then he pulled around and drove out under the open sky. For the first time in his life, he was outside the Wall. He’d seen the endless sands before, when his father took him up to the battlements to stare out over a vast, unending ripple of dunes that folded around toothy brown mountains in the distance, but being outside was something different. There was no protection here, no limitation. He’d walked the whole City up and down a hundred times, but now he was outside.
