by Wen Spencer
Scaling it down presented a host of problems. With the large surface to play with, her father hadn't bothered to economize his design, and the Chinese apparently hadn't dared to deviate from the stolen plans. She'd have to use every trick she knew to compact the circuits. "Where is the ceramic coming from? You said we have surplus of everything."
"We've been stockpiling ceramic tiles for nearly fifteen years. They decided early on, though, that the shield material wasn't needed."
"Yeah, that's just to protect the gate from micrometeor impacts and solar wind." Tinker finished up her measurements by taking the ceiling readings at every grid point that she had chalked on the floor. "Sparks, render that for me."
"Okay, Boss."
While she waited she considered the scale ratio. The easiest might be a simple one to a hundred ratio: 2640 feet shrinking to 26.4.
"Done, Boss." The AI projected it onto the screen.
She snapped out a circle to represent the scaled down gate and moved it around the workshop. Gods, manufacturing the damn framework was going to be a bitch. The nonconductive material used in space wouldn't stand up to gravity. While steel could take the stress load, the amount of metal needed to make the gate would play havoc with the system.
A good fit on the model drew her attention back to it. She locked the circle down. "Let's see if this works."
As Sparks read off the gird coordinates, she found the matching points on the workshop floor and circled them in chalk.
"Is that it?" Riki asked with quiet awe.
She snorted in disgust. "That's the easy part. Of course if I make a mistake now, we might not know until the last moment. Let me think on this for a while. Get me a list of supplies that we have, and see if you can find some more comfortable chairs."
* * *
She'd shifted the locations three times including rotating the gate half a turn as she considered factors from height clearance, use of the overhead crane during construction, the ease of getting large materials into place, and finally the local ley lines, faint as they might be. Riki reappeared with the materials list and a surprising array of office chairs just as she was spray-painting the final location onto the workshop floor. He also had a lunch of steamed fish, brown rice, and more pickles.
She took the list and studied it as she ate. Again, she found the oni depressingly efficient, though noncreative; they had slavishly gathered what had been used to build the orbital gate and nothing else. "We need something for the superstructure of the gate, something inert and nonmetallic. If we were on Elfhome, I'd use ironwood. I don't suppose you have something similar?"
"Ironwood?"
"Yeah."
"You want to use ironwood?"
She flicked her pickles at him. "Hello! That's what I said. I know you understand English, Mr. Born-and-raised in Berkeley."
"It's just using wood is so low tech."
"To quote you—doh! From little minds come no solutions. Ironwood is stunningly strong, renewable, non-toxic, recyclable, and easy to work with. Do the oni have anything like it or not?"
"We can get ironwood."
She waited for explanations but they weren't forthcoming.
"I'm talking massive timbers." She held out her hands to show the beam size.
Riki nodded. "Just tell me how much, and I'll get it."
"Okay. We're in business then."
* * *
Time blurred for the rest of the day, as she designed the wood framework. Riki came and went, searching out samples of the ceramic tiles and other materials stockpiled elsewhere. Each item fired new ideas, and she branched out to how to affix the tiles, a ramp over the threshold to protect the gate, and a preliminary sketch of the power supply grid.
Night fell, and shadows in the warehouse grew deeper. Chiyo brought dinner and almost instantly the female and Riki started bickering in Oni. Tinker sighed, leaning back in her chair to look up through the skylight. She expected the stars to be strange and unfamiliar, like the sky of Earth. First Wolf, though, was right overhead, his shoulder star the brightest thing in the sky as always. It was comforting to see it, so very familiar. Then it struck her—it was too familiar. She leaned from side to side to see more through the overhead rectangle of Plexiglas, studying the constellations. The moon spinners. The dark-eyed widow.
It was the sky of Elfhome overhead.
And suddenly it was all clear to her.
You have a prisoner, extremely intelligent, to whom you need to give great freedom and entrust with a great deal of material that could easily be twisted into weapons. Wouldn't the simplest method of holding said prisoner be simply to convince her that she is in another dimension? Even if she fled the building, the whole world would act as a prison. Escape would seem impossible.
She had to still be on Elfhome. Why else would they paint the warehouse windows to keep her from seeing outside? How else could Riki be on Elfhome prior to Shutdown and after Startup and yet have a copy of her computer system up and running? How he had access to office chairs and ironwood? How he got her to the "castle?" If Riki could pop back and forth freely between Elfhome and Onihida, carrying kidnapped girls, ergonomic workstations, and large trees, the oni had no need of a gate.
And yet, she couldn't completely explain away the city outside the windows. How had they tricked her so completely?
"Kitsune are the fox spirits," Lain had told her. "They usually appear to be beautiful women, but they really are just foxes that can throw illusions into their victim's mind."
Was the spider she felt every morning Chiyo stepping into her mind, reading it and planting illusions? When she considered it, she could find a dozen times Chiyo had reacted to her thoughts.
Chiyo could read her mind.
Tinker glanced over at Chiyo, who was still arguing with Riki. Her greatest weapon was her enemies' ignorance. As long as they didn't realize she had discovered the truth, they would continue to allow her the freedom of the workshop. And with the workshop, she could build tools to escape. But Chiyo mustn't discover that she knew . . .
The fight finished up when an oni guard came into the warehouse to fetch Riki away, leaving behind Chiyo to guard Tinker. To distract herself, Tinker started to factor out large numbers, looking for primes.
Chiyo winced at her. "What are you doing?"
"Factoring numbers," Tinker said truthfully.
Chiyo rubbed her forehead. "You're a hideously ugly little creation."
Tinker gathered together all the cordless screwdrivers and started to remove the battery packs. The joy of being a genius was that you could do complex math in your head while assembling simple but effective weapons almost thoughtlessly.
Trying not to grin, Tinker switched to determining escape velocities, which reduced Chiyo to quiet whimpers of pain.
* * *
Tinker would have liked to create more of a plan, but she didn't dare plan anything with Chiyo prying into her mind. She finished the simple stun baton and tested it by pressing it against Chiyo. The kitsune collapsed into a satisfying heap of silk. Tinker bound and gagged her quickly, surprised to discover Chiyo had very sharp canine teeth, small furry dog-ears, and a foxtail hidden under the kimono.
Tinker swapped fresh batteries into the stun baton, glancing around. The warehouse had changed little, but that would almost be expected. The low windows had been painted black so Chiyo wouldn't have to disguise anything outside.
She bypassed the alarm on the outside door, cut off the padlock with a welding torch, and opened the door.
* * *
She expected to be on Mount Washington—it was the view out her bedroom window, only from the Onihida perspective. Looking at the moonlit hills rising all around her, she realized that the view had been a complete sham. They were in a river valley someplace far from downtown. As she scurried down the alley, she decided that it was logical. The oni would want to be as far out of the public eye as possible. Mount Washington, being far above the floodplain and yet close to downtown and
the Rim, was still heavily populated.
She paused at the mouth of the alley, trying to get her bearings. She was in an industrial park of some sort, the long tall warehouses standing dark all around her. Nothing looked like a stone castle, so her bedroom and the rest of the living spaces were probably in one of the warehouses, hidden from prying eyes.
Fake, all of it.
She peered around the corner. Surely there would be guards—unless they were afraid of advertising their presence. She dashed across the street to the cover of the next alley. It took her to the water's edge.
Only twenty feet across with high cement retaining walls for banks, the waterway was too narrow to be a river. Most streams in the area, though, flowed into the Ohio River eventually. A silvery leaf tossed down to the dark water pointed out which direction the creek flowed. Following the creek would take longer than striking off across country, but heading in a random direction might only take her deep into Elfhome wilderness. Hopefully Riki wouldn't be back soon.
After five minutes of walking with the warehouse to her right, she realized how large the oni complex was. The long building was easily a quarter mile or more long. There was a wide break, and then another long warehouse running alongside the creek. At the end of the second warehouse, a thick column of white limestone lit by moonlight drew her eyes upwards. A massive bridge spanned the valley in several graceful arches, totaling sixteen hundred feet long with a deck two hundred feet above the creek. Even in the city of bridges, it was quite singular, and she recognized it.
The bridge was the Westinghouse Bridge, which meant the oni base was the old Westinghouse Electric Airbrake plant. By blind luck she had gone in the right direction, because the Rim cut through just feet north of the plant. The erratic path of the Monongahela River and the Rim effectively isolated this small slice of Pittsburgh. The elfin forest deeply encroached on the area, slowly whittling it down. Last she'd heard, something had killed and eaten the last human inhabitants; now she wondered how much the oni had had to do with that.
No matter; now she knew where she was, she knew where to go for help. She sold scrap to the converted USX steel mill just downriver. The mini mill operated twenty-four hours a day, melting down old steel to reforge it to slabs which were sent upriver via barge to the rolling mill at Dravosburg. It was less than three miles. Unfortunately, most of the steelworkers now lived across the river, where miles of transplanted Pittsburgh buffered them from Elfhome wilderness, but there were plenty of bars.
Sticking to the water's edge would be slow, and considering the black willows and jumpfishes, far from safe. She decided to take a risk and follow the street.
* * *
She heard the car engine and saw the headlights running on the power lines overhead moments before the car swept into view. She had ducked back into the shadows, and then recognized the car. It was one of Windwolf's Rolls-Royces.
"Hey!" she cried, stepping into the light. "Stop!"
The car squealed to a stop and the driver's door flung open. Surprisingly, it was Sparrow who got out. The female was in mourning black, with her pale hair simply braided. It was the most unadorned that Tinker had ever seen her. "Tinker? What are you doing here?"
"Escaping!" Tinker laughed, crossing to touch the marvelous, beautiful car. "Is Windwolf with you? Pony?"
"It's in the middle of night," Sparrow said. "They were searching the river for the last two days. I believe they're sleeping now. How did you get away?"
"With this!" Tinker proudly held out her homemade stun baton.
"That tiny thing?" Sparrow held out her hand. "What is it?"
Without thinking, Tinker handed the weapon to Sparrow. "It's a stun baton. You just press against someone, hit the trigger and the person is stunned."
"Like this?" Sparrow pointed the baton toward her, thumb on the trigger.
"Careful." Tinker reached to take it back.
Sparrow pressed the tip into Tinker's outreached hand.
The pain was instant and intense, and she started to fall as all her muscles spasmed.
Sparrow caught her. "Ah, yes, how clever of you. I must tell Tomtom to keep a closer eye on you."
* * *
By the time she recovered, Sparrow had her bound and inside the car.
"Are you mad? Why are you working with them?"
"Sometimes the best tool is a very big stick."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"I'm using the oni to fix what is wrong," Sparrow said. "I'm going to take things back to the way they should be."
"How should they be?"
"If you repeat a lie long enough it doesn't become a truth, but everyone will act like it has. I'm sure you've been told how evil the Skin Clan was and how the domana nobly dispatched them. The truth is that the Skin Clan took our race from one step above apes and made them one step below gods. As we were when the Skin Clan toppled, we still are. Under the domana we're stagnating. It's time to go back to the old ways."
"How could you do this to your honor?"
Sparrow gave a slight laugh. "Honor is nothing but convenient ropes that the domana use to bind the lower castes helpless. They are slave lords with invisible chains."
"How can you say that? They made you one of them."
"They've made a mockery of the dau. I should have undergone the same transformation as you, to be wholly domana, but that would have weakened their power base. So they call me domana, and expect the lower castes to bow to me, but everyone knows the truth. I'm no more domana than I was at birth."
"You're going to destroy your people because the lower castes never groveled to you? The domana are evil because they wouldn't make you one of them?"
Sparrow stopped the car to look down at her. "I can kill you. Doing this now is convenient, but if it proves too annoying, I can easily wait another hundred years for my chance. And so can the oni."
Tinker shrank away from the cold, impartial stare, barely able to breathe.
"Good." Sparrow started the car. "You really must start thinking like an elf. Look at the long-term future."
Like she had one.
Tinker found no comfort that Sparrow, after several minutes of silence, felt the need to justify her actions with, "My case only illustrated the hypocrisy of the domana; even when they lift up one of the lower castes, they still suppress us."
15: Whipping Boy
The back door of the Rolls opened and an oni warrior, face painted for war, gazed down at her—bound hand and foot—as Sparrow murmured something in the Oni tongue. The warrior grunted, took out a whistle, and blew a single long note that jumped from shrill to inaudible. Somewhere close by, small dogs broke into excited barking.
Sparrow said something about Tomawaritomo, and the warrior pointed off into the darkness. She walked away without looking back.
The warrior reached into the Rolls with huge gnarled hands and lifted Tinker out, passing her like a hissing kitten to another guard. Oni warriors were emerging out of the night, faces painted and heavily armed. Apparently her escape had been noticed, and the oni had been on the hunt, now called back by the silent whistle.
Without the kitsune's deception, the airbrake plant was a collection of massive, old buildings, heavy with the sense of otherworldliness where men did the works of gods and sneered at the concept of magic. Yet rising up in the moonlight beyond the great buildings was the wild primal forest of Elfhome, and all around Tinker, smelling like wet dogs, were the brutish oni warriors.
Tinker was carried into one of the mile-long buildings. The first section was a garage, holding a host of hoverbikes and cars; Riki's motorcycle sat to one side, as singular as the tengu. The second section was a kennel, filled with steel cages. Many of the cages held yapping little pug dogs. In one cage was a muzzled warg, its glowing eyes lighting its corner with icy rage, its bulk filling the cage.
Beyond was empty warehouse. A shallow, narrow channel cut down the center of the vast room; oily water flowed in the cement drain. On one
side was the bare skeleton of a freight elevator. There was something disturbingly familiar about the space. They passed a dark stain of old blood on the floor, and there, in the dust on the floor, were her bootprints and Riki's footprints, where he had held her still and made her watch the deboning that first morning. This was the true appearance of the courtyard garden with the gazebo.
At the far end, they caught up with Sparrow. The elf female was coming to a stop beside an oni male. Riki knelt on the ground in front of the male, head bowed until his forehead nearly touched the dusty floor. To one side, the wizened-dwarf torturer sharpened his boning knives.
"I caught her before she could do harm," Sparrow was saying to the oni. The guard dropped Tinker onto the ground, knocking the breath out of her. "Really, Lord Tomawaritomo, I had hoped you could contain her more than three days."
"The kitsune let her slip away." The oni male reached down to catch Tinker by a handful of shirt and bra and lifted her up to dangle in mid-air as he inspected her.
So this was Lord Tomawaritomo. Tall and lean, he towered over Tinker; even the long thin sword strapped to his side was taller than her. He was striking in appearance, but not beautiful; his cheekbones and chin were too sharp, and his nose too flat. The gold of his pupil filled his eyes, with an iris a dark vertical slit. He had a mane of white that spilled down over his back. His ears were more than just pointed: they were white-furred, and cupped forward, like a cat's. He wore a kimono of vivid purples and greens, and a fur of pristine white that matched his snow-white hair. The pelt was wrapped over one shoulder and pinned in place by his shoulder guard of ridged bone. The fur looked to be white wolf or warg, though larger than either species. The origin of the bone, however, Tinker couldn't guess, except that the body part involved was the jawbone, hinged midpoint at the oni's chest.
After inspecting Tinker closely, Tomtom grunted. "Such trouble in a little package."
"It seems to be a universal constant that keys to doorways are usually small." Sparrow smiled at her own wit.
Tomtom grunted again. "Perhaps I should put this one on a chain to keep it from being lost."
