Rebel Skyforce (Mad Tinker Chronicles)

by J. S. Morin

  “How long will the runes take?” Bosley asked. The question was as good as taking her side, as far as Chipmunk was concerned.

  “I’ll round up some likely candidates and teach a class on carving them. Sosha will take a sample rune around on a piece of sheet steel and we’ll see if we can find anyone else aether-capable among the troops. The levitation rune’s simple enough, there are just going to be so many around it’ll look like a typesetter went mad. I’m hoping in two to three days we can take the Sulfurous in tow.”

  “You called yourself Rynn, you know,” Sosha said. She sat in a chair at one end the cabin. At the other end, Chipmunk sat on the floor working on a book-sized piece of steel with a screwdriver and a hammer, making tiny, elongated dents that would eventually form Sosha’s test rune.

  “Slip of the tongue,” Chipmunk replied, not looking up from her work. With a sharp rap and a clatter, she dented the metal again. It jumped with each strike, and every time she had to re-orient it before she hit it again. “They knew what I meant.”

  “Have you ever seen a live chipmunk?” Sosha asked.

  “Not for real, just a diagram in a wildlife book. It’s too cold for them up in Tinker’s Island,” she replied. It went without saying that Eversall Deep had no woodland creatures dwelling in its depths. She looked up. “Don’t you have patients to look after?” The firefight with the Ruttanian Air Corps had left five dead, thirteen injured.

  “We used to have them around the sanctuary,” Sosha said. “They’re cute, inoffensive little creatures, adorable little puffs of reddish-brown fluff with black streaks in their fur. I used to try to catch them when I was little. If you held still enough, they might forget you were there and come close, but the second you flinched, they’d bolt. None of the children were quick enough to catch one, but it was great fun trying.”

  Chipmunk hit the steel again, and the rune grew incrementally. “Is there a point to this? Some joke about me being an easy chipmunk to catch, now that I’m hobbled.”

  “No, nothing like that,” Sosha assured her. “It’s just ... how old were you when you got that name?”

  Chipmunk set the steel aside and pursed her lips. “Twelve, maybe?” she ventured after a moment’s consideration. “Why?”

  “It’s just, well, it’s just a cute nickname is all,” Sosha said. “I’m sure it had something to do with your hair, but it’s also just a scared, fuzzy little creature that lives in a hole in the ground.”

  “Well, maybe when I was twelve, that was a pretty good description of me—minus the ‘fuzzy’ that is. I’m not a scared little girl anymore though, and I live wherever I want.”

  “Maybe when you were twelve, it was a good name for you,” Sosha said. “It doesn’t suit you now.”

  Chipmunk snorted. “What, I need a new nickname? What do you think I should go by?”

  “Just Rynn,” Sosha replied. “Maybe with something tacked on as a surname.”

  “Rynn’s a kuduk name. I don’t—”

  “Your mother gave you that name,” Sosha said. “Your father said as much.”

  “Kuduk-approved then,” Chipmunk replied. “There’s probably a Rynn in every city in Korr.”

  “But only one in Eversall?”

  Chipmunk shrugged. “Far as I know.”

  “Then you can be Rynn of Eversall. Maybe we can start a trend, giving humans surnames, like full citizens.”

  Rynn set her screwdriver down and leaned back against the bed. “You’re serious about this one, aren’t you?”

  “This rebellion’s going to grow, and if newcomers don’t take you seriously, they’re going to look to someone else to lead them.”

  “You’re saying no one will take General Chipmunk seriously? I’d lose the army over my bloody name?”

  “They’re tiny, harmless little rodents that make squirrels look like shining knights by comparison.”

  Chipmunk tried to picture herself meeting someone named Squirrel, taking orders from a woman called Mouse, following Kitten into a battle. She’d been Rynn before, mostly when miserable, sweat-soaked, and working under a kuduk boss. It was a cloak she could wear when she needed an authentic disguise. She answered to it readily from long habit. Maybe instead of burying her birth name, she could reclaim it instead.

  “Fine. You and my father win this one,” Rynn said.

  The cargo hold of the original Jennai was cleared out to make room for eleven students to work. The loading ramp was lowered to allow fresh air and light in from the valley, and the grassy lowlands just beyond the craft were piled with the former contents of the hold. Coils of rope rested on barrels of salted meats and fresh water. There were piles of scrap metal from the thunderail harvest mixed with bundles of cloth and casks of ale and wine. Anything not of immediate need had been dragged out and left until they were ready to depart.

  “This isn’t going to be too hard,” Rynn said, raising her voice above the sounds of the construction going on just a few dozen paces away. “It’s just like making your letters, except there’s no using quick-script and no sloppy lines. Other than that, they’re the same characters you read in the newspapers, just bigger and lined up touching in particular ways.

  Each of her students had a crate for a workbench and one of the chairs from the dining halls. They were armed with various improvised chisels ranging from screwdrivers, to awls, to butter knives, and a few proper hammers mixed in with hard heavy objects that could at least be counted on not to break when striking a make-do chisel.

  “This is what you’re trying to make,” Rynn continued. She held up a painting from the formal dining hall, depicting a dignified elderly kuduk in the uniform of an Air Corps general. Flipping the painting around backward, Rynn showed a painted copy of the levitation rune structure large enough to be seen from anywhere in the hold. “Your first ones we’ll call practice, but any that work will get welded to the ship, so try your best.”

  Each student had a stack of thin steel plates beside their crate, rough and spattered around the edges where the welding torches had cut them from the vacuum tank of the Sulfurous. Each plate was roughly the side of a ledger page, and thin as shirt cloth. The students took a plate each and in moments they were playing the amateur blacksmith concerto. Rynn gritted her teeth to keep from wincing as her pupils tormented their steel work pieces.

  She wandered among the rows of crates as unobtrusively as she could. The general din of the hammer-work drowned out the rhythmic thumps of her crutches against the floor. She glanced from sheet to steel sheet, watching the runes take shape in various states of deformity. The worst of them looked as if a woodpecker with the strength of a hydraulic piston had taken its anger out on the steel. Only two looked as if they might hold aether when they were completed.

  A discordant clatter startled Rynn, and she spun to see what had happened. The hammering slowed as many of the student rune-carvers turned and did likewise.

  “Flog this!” a stubble-headed young man said. He had no sheet left on his crate; he had been the one to throw his across the hold. “Sorry General, but this ain’t gonna work.” He held up a letter opener and the pipe wrench he’d been hammering with. “Yank someone else’s dangles.” He let the wrench and letter opener tumble from his hands to crash on the floor, then turned to walk away.

  “Wrong way,” Rynn said. The man stopped and turned to look at her over his shoulder. He was a few years older than Rynn was, a one-worlder whose name she couldn’t recall. All she remembered about him was that he was swept up with a group of quarry slaves and knew his letters. “That’s back into the ship.”

  “Yeah, and?”

  Rynn tucked a crutch against her side and hooked a thumb toward the open ramp. “Deserter’s exit that way.”

  “I ain’t never said I was deserting!”

  “You just stood up and walked out on your commanding officer without leave. You refused an assignment. You just quit on your comrades,” Rynn said. All the hammering had stopped. All eyes in the hold w
ere on General Rynn.

  The would-be deserter’s breath quickened. He looked to both sides for signs of anyone coming to his defense. Rynn had clearly shown that she was in charge, or so she thought. But a fundamental quality of mankind escaped her: some humans are irrational, especially when they feel cornered. The deserter snarled. “Who do you think you are, anyway? Just some cripple with a slave collar.” He rushed her.

  Rynn’s eyes went wide at the unexpected turn of events. She had grown so accustomed to being obeyed and deferred to that certain laws of the natural world had gone overlooked. The most prominent of these was that of mass and velocity combining to create momentum. The deserter was a head taller than her and muscular from working all his life in a quarry. Rynn fumbled with her crutches to draw her coil gun, but there was too little time and too many objects to manipulate. He hit her midsection with his shoulder and Rynn was lifted off her foot, the breath driven from her lungs. A second later, the two of them crashed to the unforgiving steel of the hold floor. She tried to keep her head up, but the impact snapped it back and everything went black.

  What could only have been a few seconds later, she pushed herself up to her elbows, watching dizzily as four of her students subdued the deserter. He hadn’t been the only one in the class who had been a laborer, and stout bodies with thick arms were in plentiful supply. Other helpful hands kept Rynn from rising, murmuring assuring words and clucking over her like nurses. She had just banged her head, she wasn’t bleeding out.

  “Haul him down to the valley,” Rynn ordered. Drawing breath to speak hurt her ribs, both front and back.

  The deserter thrashed in the arms of his captors and spat vile threats. He had lost what semblance of civility he had earlier. One of her “nurses” shook his head. “Some just can’t have a taste of freedom. They get themselves drunk on the stuff; can’t tell ‘em nothing.”

  “Help me up,” Rynn muttered.

  “General, you shouldn’t be—”

  “Just help me stand.” Though she didn’t raise her voice, there was an edge to her command, the weight of an order. Someone pushed crutches into her hands and someone else grabbed her beneath the arms and lifted her like a child, letting her dangle until she got both her foot and crutches settled under her. She bit her lip to keep from crying out at the pain that shot through her ribs. “Thanks.”

  At the bottom of the ramp, the four students holding the deserter hauled him into the grass. “That’s far enough,” Rynn shouted, trying to keep her rib muscles taut to ease the pain of raising her voice. “Hold him right there.”

  Rynn took a few steadying breaths with her self-appointed nursemaids to either side, ready to catch her if she stumbled or collapsed. She hobbled to the top edge of the ramp. “I’d have let a deserter go. This is a volunteer army; there are no slaves here. But humans don’t fight among themselves. By attacking me, you sided with our enemies.” Rynn drew her coil gun from the holster at her hip. The deserter’s eyes widened and he renewed his struggles to break free, but to no avail. “I can’t just let that go.”

  Click.

  There was a hiss of displaced air, followed by wet thump a fraction of a second later. The deserter collapsed with a half-inch hole in the middle of his chest, and the four who held him let him crumple to the ground.

  “Thank you all for your help. Let’s get back to work. All the clocks in Korr won’t stop for us.”

  Chapter 12

  “The only thing better than enough, is more.” - Neiron the Kingthief

  Cadmus stood by the edge of the water as it rushed over Wheel Falls. His hat was wool-lined canvas and his long coat was oiled with linseed against the freezing spray. Thanks to hot springs and curious mineralogy, the Iceless River flowed year-round despite the frigid temperatures. Errol Company was the river’s constant tormentor, chaining it against its will to power their machinery. Four waterwheels harassed its plummet over Wheel Falls, forcing it to supply torque to a series of shafts and gears that distributed that rotational energy to the factories—and now to the new dynamo.

  “What if we dam the thing?” Cadmus shouted over the crash of water and the creaking of the great wheels. “We can build a sluice and let the water out in force when we power up.”

  “How long would that last us?” Enderburt asked in reply. “A minute’s reserve would still take a blasted big dam. By the time we get done thinking it out on vellum, I bet ya we’ll find it simpler just to make a proper dam of the whole falls and be done with it. Tear out the wheels and go full spark.” Enderburt knew his spark as well as anyone on the island except Cadmus and perhaps Madlin. He worked as a maintenance assistant in the hydrospark factory in Kupak Deep. They produced spark wholesale, enough to ship it out of the city on heavy wires.

  “Give me a solution I can have in a week,” Cadmus replied. “We’ll work on a solution that’ll eat three months when I’ve got three spare months to feed into a spark dynamo. That isn’t today, Mr. Enderburt.”

  Enderburt took off his own rain hat and scratched at a greasy crop of grey hair. “Not sure this end’s gonna cough out any more spark than we’re getting already, unless we take it to scraps and build new.” He walked over to the edge of the falls and peered down. Cadmus gave him a moment to think. Enderburt was one of the few worth consulting on design matters, even if his thoughts took time to coalesce. “All your talk about dams and sluices ... what you’re looking for is a spark condenser, really.”

  “Enderburt, I’m having all I can tolerate just getting copper wire made in this backwards world,” Cadmus replied. “You expect me to fashion condensers in a week?”

  Enderburt shrugged. “Ain’t never been surprised by you yet, Cadmus. I just figure you want something built, it gets built.”

  Cadmus walked up and stood beside Enderburt at the falls’ edge. Tinker’s Island spread out below them to the south, little snow-crested buildings. Smoke rose from more structures than not, whether from hearth fires bellowing wood smoke from their chimneys or factory smokestacks belching black coal soot into the sky. The whole city ran on steam and clockwork. Converting them to spark on the quick was proving daunting; there was just too much basic infrastructure that needed to be built.

  “Well, thanks for the confidence. I’m no miracle worker though, much as I’d like to be. I’m just taking the best of Korr and making it ours. They’ve got an eighty year head start on us on spark though, and it’s still in its infancy. There’s new spark inventions every day—or at least there were a dozen years ago, when I got to see them. Steam and gears, nothing’s changed about those in a hundred years. Anything new’s just paint over something older. Someone’s always thinking up a new dynamo or a condenser. Last time anyone tried to store physical energy, they still just came back to springs and flywheels. It’s not as if—” Cadmus looked up blankly in Enderburt’s direction and blinked. “It can’t be that simple. Can it?”

  “Sorry, what’s that?” Enderburt asked. “You got to rambling and I went back to thinking how I can dam this whole falls off for you in a week—steam cranes, and lots of ‘em. Best I got so far.”

  “A flywheel. Falls spins up the flywheel, flywheel turns the dynamo shaft.”

  Enderburt nodded along, though his mouth twisted beneath a skeptical frown. “Crude. Might work, but a bodge of a job it’d be.”

  “Look, Madlin’s going to be back in a week, and if I don’t have that dynamo powering the world-ripper, I’m going to have to let her use those daruu arts to get it working. Do you want that?” Cadmus asked.

  “Naw,” Enderburt replied. “Sweet girl like that oughtta lay off that rubbish.”

  “Speaking of that ‘sweet girl,’ how’s the welding going on that kuduk airship?”

  “Back’s twisted up like a candy swirl, to be honest. Feels good puttin’ to work for a human boss though, so I don’t complain,” Enderburt said. He scrunched his face briefly. “This ain’t complaining, so you know. I only mentioned the back cuz you asked. I mostly just feel for t
he poor saps making the rune plates. Feels like we oughtta just have a kick press and a die and just stamp ‘em all out in an hour like they were griddlecakes.”

  “Well, if I can get the machine working, we might just arrange that,” Cadmus replied.

  World-Machine Theater, they called it. Twinborn and one-worlder alike came with meals from the mess hall with tankards of their preferred ales to sit and watch scenes from another world flash across the aperture of the giant frameworks of copper and steel. With the lights turned out, the only illumination in the room came from distant parts of Tellurak, aside from a few lights near the controls so Cadmus could see dials, gauges, and his notes.

  Cadmus was weary to the bone, and feeling his age more than usual. He’d spent the afternoon getting efforts underway to build a giant flywheel for the dynamo, efforts that had ultimately involved him dirtying his hands in the foundry. Those hands ached and chafed from the shovel he’d used for hours as he helped dig a trench that would become the mold for the flywheel. Working with the hobbled machine in search mode was relaxing by comparison.

  He had never intended for the world-ripping machine to become a form of entertainment, but once his employees began concocting excuses to be in the presence of the machine while it was on, he gave in to popular demand. And it was entertaining, he had to admit. Though his time with Kezudkan had dulled him to the sheer wonder of looking across vast distances in space, and even between worlds, it was still a marvel, and more so to those who were seeing it for the first time. While Cadmus browsed remote corners of Tellurak for news, the audience treated the images like a play, or a circus, gawking slack-eyed for hours, if he let them.