Another helping.
I told them Chief Rapp probably had a shot that would make it better. That didn’t make them happy. Rangers felt that every time someone had to get a shot it was probably pretty bad. I could see the look in their eyes. It verged on superstitious paranoia. I added that maybe just a drip would straighten Sims out, and they seemed to grab onto that like it was a piece of drifting debris in the river of fear they were currently in.
For me, the details bore more significance than what was just on the surface. First off… Spanish. A witch, human-like and mixed in and supporting the attacks of these orc monsters as assault infantry, was using Spanish. And Spanish from Spain, not Latin or South America. She didn’t use bastardo, which was far more common.
She’d used gilipollas.
The Spanish from Spain version of the word bastard.
Combine this with the HVT sorcerer speaking some kind of Hui dialect, and things were starting to get interesting for my particular military occupational specialty. Languages. The Chinese characters on the recovered documents and tattoos on his severed head also stood out.
Yeah, I get it, we were all about to get our throats cut here at Ranger Alamo, but still, the language thing was fascinating. To me at least. Probably not to Captain Knife Hand or the command sergeant major. Or the rest of the Rangers.
But me… I was practically riveted. Pins and needles.
Maybe PFC Kennedy would appreciate the nuances…
Stepping back now to view the larger picture as I was doing, making my way once more toward Sergeant Kurtz and the heavy weapons squad, the really exciting part about all this was there might be something more for me to do here ten thousand years later than we’d intended. A way for me to be of use in this waking nightmare of a fantasy world that was out to kill us as fast as it could. Until this moment I’d wondered if maybe we’d gone some other place not our own. If the languages here were so different that all my available ones were made useless. No problem, I could learn a new one. It’s all just code and there are tricks. And that was exciting in its own way. But…
“Talker,” Sergeant Kurtz barked. Like my acquired tag was a slur reserved for the unclean who were not Ranger or even Airborne. To be used on the great unwashed of Leg Infantry.
“Yes, Sergeant!” I replied as fast as I could jerk myself out of my reverie about how I might possibly spend the rest of my life here in the future. I have to admit, I was pretty excited about being useful.
“He’s down there in the gully!” shouted the sergeant before turning back to his work at the firing pit. They were dragging trees and deadfall across their position to improve it in the time that remained to them. “Tell Tanner to stay with you and don’t get too close,” he barked over his shoulder. And finally, “Thing’s got a set o’ teeth that’d probably take a chunk out of someone. I’m telling you…” He turned back to face me and pointed his own version of the knife hand at me. I guess he was practicing at one day being as matchless a killer as the captain. “He’s dangerous, Talker. Watch out. You been warned.”
That sobered me a bit.
I went off toward the gully behind the squad’s machine-gun pit. It was nothing more than a dry portion of the riverbed that had been cut off from the river at some point in the past. It was filled with loose sand and rock, and a giant hunk of dead wood lay in the middle of the open space. Tied to that hunk of tree, with paracord and then zip ties and some chain… was a goblin.
Just like the ones we’d seen the night before.
Smaller than the orcs. Green-gray skin. Large ears. Eyes like half-moons. Claws opening and closing and scrabbling about as I approached. Worrying one another. This one didn’t have the loincloth and spear the others had. This one wore a sort of crude armor. A leather cuirass. A tattered kilt. Over-large boots. He eyed me fearfully as I came down into his space.
Tanner, who’d been leaning against the embankment a little farther down the gully, weapon ready, moved on an intercept course to cut me off before I got too close.
“He’s…” began the Ranger private.
I held up a hand. “I know… dangerous. Kurtz shouted at me.”
Tanner stood back and watched the little thing try to hop and move about defensively as we gathered near it. It couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. If.
I said hi. In Spanish at that.
The thing cocked its head and looked at me quizzically. But it was clear it didn’t understand even though I repeated this five or six times.
Then I tried Chinese several times. I was working with the languages we’d encountered so far. I figured that was a good starting point.
Tanner looked at me like I was a lunatic, and frankly, for a moment, I felt like one standing there and trying to talk to…
Just embrace it, I told myself.
… to a… goblin.
It was either that or hairless little malevolent monkey.
I attempted a few other languages, but it wasn’t until I tried some phrases in Turkic that I got a recognition response from the thing.
The positive response came when I asked it, “What’s your name?” I said it fast because I was just trying out a bunch of stuff and the thing wasn’t responding to anything. But when I asked it that, when I asked it what its name was, in Turkic—Isminiz ne?—it answered without guile and seemed just as surprised as I was.
Apparently, its name was Jabba. And using some German, some Turkic, some Arabic, and a language I just was beginning to discover as… well, Jabba’s description for it was Orc War Talk… we were able to have us a big old conversation.
Chapter Thirteen
Roughly translated, here’s what was said between the little goblin and me. At first it was slow going, but things picked up fast once he understood I could understand him and what was being said, and once I let him try one of the precious Cokes I’d smuggled on the flight. I had a case of thirty-two minis in the bottom of my duffel. After speaking with the sergeant major, I’d picked up three to bring to the interrogation.
John whose real name wasn’t John had told me this simple technique often worked better than expected and should be used before the rubber hoses and sleep deprivation fun got started.
Do goblins even sleep?
“What’s your name?” I ask it. Him.
Strange look but dawning realization. The thing croaks more than it speaks, like it’s part frog somehow.
“Me Jabba. Me Jabba. Me Jabba. You know Jabba. Me Jabba,” he replies. Repeatedly.
I’m writing this down verbatim. Because of the record, and it’s kind of funny.
“Your name is Jabba,” I say.
“Me Jabba. Me Jabba. Me Jabba. You know Jabba. Me Jabba. Jabba is me.”
It was at this point I was really hoping it knew something more than Me Jabba and permutations thereof. I paused. The sergeant major said interrogate and find out what it knows. I received a short course in interrogating at a cruddy motel in East Vegas ten thousand years ago… so I’m totally qualified for this. Monster interrogation.
Not monsters.
Embrace the fantasy, I had to remind myself. Embrace it or you’re all gonna die at Ranger Alamo, and apparently there’re things you can do here in this forgotten ruin of a future so start doing them. Start being useful. Languages. You do languages, and languages are nothing more than the coded exchange of information. So do that. Get some useful information from this thing. Start talking, Talker. Start helping.
“Why you…” I began. I stumbled here when I discovered he didn’t entirely understand the language we’d started off in. Through trial and error, I fell into some German and Arabic to complete the communication. “Attack me. Us.”
“Why you attack us, Jabba?” ended up being a mix of three languages.
The goblin looked genuinely hurt when we finally got a clear translation. Or maybe like he want
ed me to think he was genuinely hurt by what I’d just asked. I had no grounding in goblin body language to operate from. But I had the feeling he was playing me a little.
As best he could, he pawed at the ground with his claws and mewled like a sick cat. Humbling himself by getting his head lower than his butt. I assumed it was humbling. I’d seen something similar in a nature documentary once.
“Why you attack island, Jabba?” I asked.
Jabba nodded energetically all of a sudden.
“Attacka…”
Okay. His word usage wasn’t academically perfect. Far from it. And for purposes of the translation I’m adding the pidgin patois to approximate how he spoke in other languages. C’mon, people, these things are important. Or at least they’re important to me.
And yeah, I know: who am I to criticize how this goblin spoke its own language? I was the foreigner here—that doesn’t even begin to describe it—patching together bits and pieces of dead languages, using ten-thousand-year-old pronunciations. My academically perfect was Jabba’s pigeon patois and vice versa. But this is how he sounded to me, and I’m sure it’s how I sounded to him.
“Attacka eye-land cuza big orc from Guzzin Hazadi say so,” babbled the little goblin. “He says… Jabba, all Jabba kind… sneaky sneak on eye-land. Cuttah throats and make fire to burn you. So no attacka… you. See… attacka eye-land,” finished the little fiend all wide-eyed and innocent.
They hadn’t attacked me personally was what he was saying. They had attacked “eye-land.”
Apparently this was a serious point of distinction for him. We went round and round about this and I got kind of angry because he made no sense. If the orders from “big orc” from Guzzim Hazadi, which seemed to be some kind of uber-orc tribe, had told them to slit throats, then how did you slit an “eye-land’s” throat?
Jabba shrugged his bony shoulders at this logic and just played dumb for a while. And that made me even angrier.
Then all of a sudden I remembered I was arguing with a goblin who even by his own accounting seemed to be some kind of low-grade idiot in the hierarchy of monsters of this world. That’s when I pulled out my Cokes and showed them to Jabba. I gave one to Tanner and kept one for myself, and we each opened a can and drank right in front of him. Of course Tanner didn’t spit out his dip first because he was a Ranger and that’s what they do. I hadn’t acquired that habit. Yet. And I wasn’t looking forward to it. But if that was what it took to go to Ranger School, and yeah I wanted that tab, then I was going learn to dip.
I like to collect achievements and skills.
That should be obvious by now.
Jabba watched our every movement. I got the impression that he thought what we were doing—opening a soft drink can and drinking from it—was the most amazing thing anyone had ever done. He tried to jump up and down, but he was still tied to the giant piece of driftwood that must’ve weighed a couple thousand pounds.
“Do it again,” he croaked in low German.
I took another sip.
And then he barked and laughed, and that was a hideous sight to behold.
I opened the third can and placed it in front of him. As I got close, he shied away.
“Be careful, man,” Tanner warned.
“I am.” I placed the Coke on the ground and backed away.
Jabba eyed the can suspiciously and tried to circle it as much as his restraints would allow. Every time he sniffed at it, we took a long slow drink to make sure he knew it was safe. Finally he got down on all fours. His armor, for all its ragged condition, didn’t make a sound. I was pretty sure he was some kind of infiltrator. Or his kind were. There was no way they were going to do what the bigger, more ferocious orcs were doing out there. Charging wave after wave into the solid walls of gunfire and mortar barrages. But somehow his little crew had slipped in during the chaos and had gotten close enough to the pits for him to get captured.
I needed to ask about his weapons and how he was captured. But now was not the time.
Jabba sniffed the can and then, quick as a snake, he swiped it up with one claw and downed all of it in a go. His thin neck worked and a massive Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, gulping the soda quickly. Then a slithery long tongue appeared and swept up the bits that had managed to splash across his face.
His expression was caution for a moment. He was looking upward but not really looking at anything. More… waiting for something to happen. Then Jabba belched… and that’s an understatement.
It wasn’t so much a belch as it was the roar of a small and ferocious predator from the Pleistocene era.
The goblin croak-laughed and again tried to jump up and down, straining at the cords he had been secured with. He laughed manically and tried to bust the zip ties, like the soda had given him some incredible surge of strength and good vibes.
“Is it possible?” I asked Tanner as we watched the thing struggle. “To break the ties?”
“Nah,” said the Ranger, watching the little thing jump and shake. I noted that he flipped the selector on his MK18 off of safe.
Then Jabba busted the tie around his wrists and waved both knobby arms wildly about, claws flexing, opening and closing on nothing in some sort of weird goblin triumph.
Jabba was screaming about being the Moon God. In Arabic.
Tanner had his MK18 pointed at the creature now that it was getting erratic and dangerous. When Jabba came to his senses a few minutes later and saw the weapon, he threw up his hands as if to plead sudden surrender.
He indicated, through several languages spoken a mile a minute, that he’d never felt so alive. And could he now please have more of… what was the wizard’s potion called? Jabba’s word for wizard was sahir. From Arabic.
“More potion. Jabba wanna more potion. Potion! Potion! Potion! Jabba moon god now!”
“I don’t think givin’ him a soda was such a hot idea, Talker,” remarked Tanner, following the dancing goblin through his MK18’s sight.
I had no doubt that if the wild Jabba managed to break one more zip tie, Tanner was going to splatter his little goblin brains all over the river rocks.
“Maybe,” I said to Tanner, keeping my eyes on Jabba. “Or maybe… Jabba. Jabba! Jabba! Jabba want more potion?”
What happened next was not seemly. Basically, Jabba wheedled and pleaded and begged like a dog for what he called “more moon god potion!”
I indicated he could have more moon god potion if he’d settle down and tell me what I wanted to know.
He agreed and started telling me before I even asked any of the important questions. Like How many of you are there? Who are your leaders? And When will you attack next?
How many?
“Bigga-more than all the stars!”
Who were the leaders?
“Skorum leader of gob people. Azar leader of orcs. Many other and pooooooor thirsty Jabba not know the witch people or the Trollen and all the others of Crow who come-uh now to take and kill Potion Giver. More potion now, please. Jabba moon god want! Jabba moon god need!”
When would they attack next?
“Night blanket comes then we come for you again. Killah all. Killah ye. Jabba sorry. Moon god want more potion before you die.” Then it caterwauled and collapsed into a dispirited lump that was just pathetic.
I thought about this and swirled the last of my can of soda. Jabba watched this with one open eye like any junkie watches the last of the dope being passed out, cooked or cut, made ready to take and disappear. His open eye was large and hungry.
Sergeant Kurtz had come over the hill and stared down into the gully to see what was going on a few minutes earlier when Jabba had been in the full throes of his first encounter with a corporate soft drink. I wondered if the Forge, which we had been told could make anything, could gin up more Coca-Cola for interrogation purposes.
It was afternoon now a
nd the dim sunlight was heading west through thin and skeletal trees. A mournful bird called out and I could hear the river on both sides of the island.
Night blanket comes then we come for you again. Killah all. Killah ye.
How long could the Rangers hold out? Jabba said they were as many as the stars and who knew what that meant. Was that an accurate count, or just tribal hyperbole? Bronze Age propaganda.
And what were we holding out for? Who was going to come rescue us? There were no other known detachments to assist. No air cav for support. No artillery to call in. No rear to pull back to. We were five days into this and two days into a battle that didn’t show any signs of being over soon. Ammunition requirements were soon going to outpace what the Forge and our reserves could keep up with. What then? Sharpen our entrenching tools and keep your tomahawk ready.
The Rangers lived for that.
But did they really?
I was actually afraid we were going to find out soon if that was indeed the case if we didn’t find some way out of this relentless attack from all sides.
“How long, Jabba? How long do they attack? What goblin and orc and witch and troll come for?” I asked.
And how long can Ranger Alamo hold out? Which I didn’t ask but couldn’t stop thinking about.
Jabba just smiled slyly and croak-whispered the answer.
“Triton say never never never never never stop. Triton say. So… is,” whispered Jabba.
Chapter Fourteen
I hustled back from the interrogation through the deepening gloom of late afternoon. The air on the island surrounded by the river was tense and quiet. Not many Rangers were moving around as the day finished up and we headed into what would probably be a long, violent night.
I was bothered.
Something the little goblin called Jabba had said was bothering me like an itch that couldn’t quite be scratched, and believe me, I was the first to admit that what was bothering me sounded stupid. Real stupid.
But let’s just say evidence and reason were insisting that I needed to start playing by PFC Kennedy’s game’s rules and fully embrace the fantasy. And try to scratch the itch. There were goblins and orcs, a giant, magic. If those were the rules… then it was time to learn more about them.
Forgotten Ruin: An Epic Military Fantasy Thriller Page 12
