Chapter 68 - Don’t Get Caught
We only had to walk for another hour or so before we came out of our exit. However, the smugglers’ tunnels in this area were dirtier, overgrown with moss and algae. Dark, mud stained streaks marked well trod paths on the floor, and the bricks were discolored from moisture and years of use. Faded drag marks and boot prints told of a long and continuing history of keeping the smugglers’ tunnels’ name relevant.
Eventually, we came to a curtain of green and gray, a barrier of plant life draped over the entrance to our tunnel, and our guides had us all get low and quiet before they slipped into the green and out of sight.
Corporal Bole and his subordinate, Private Beedy, seemed to ghost between the leaves and vanish. I’d almost forgotten that the two of them were slated to get us out of the city, they’d been so unobtrusive so far. Beedy was quiet by nature. I’d never heard him utter more than one or two words at a time ever since we met in the Undercity. However, Bole was uncharacteristically quiet, at least for the portions of the journey for which I was conscious. Not even when I’d had my magic induced panic attack did he try to trade barbs with anyone.
We all sat there for a while, listening to the insects, feeling the cold, wet breeze on our faces as it blew into the tunnels from the outside. While we waited, I summoned my new compass and took a look.
It was a simple thing, round, metal, sealed through magic and Automated much like my turrets were. The power requirement for what it did was minimal, just a rotating joint programmed to point in the direction of the nearest ‘living’ scourge touched while a separate Automated mechanism raised and lowered a little mallet to tap the back of the compass lightly to indicate how close the contact was. Faster meant closer. Slower meant farther.
Right now, the compass was pointing back down the tunnel and tapping a slow click, click, click in my palm like a tiny heartbeat. That meant there was scourge somewhere within the range of my aura, but that wasn’t saying much. My aura was massive at 106 Spirit.
Bole and Beedy came back inside more brazenly than they’d left, brushing aside the hanging vines and moss clumps to hang them on rudimentary hooks installed in the sides of the entrance. Blood covered the tip of Bole’s sword, and Beedy was sporting a new shallow scratch on his face.
“Everyone’s gone,” Bole said as he cleaned the blade of his shortsword on the moss and vines. “Gone long enough for a couple raptils to move in. Killed ‘em in case they were infected. Should be fine to come out now.”
Our exit seemed to be far, far outside the city. In fact, we’d passed out of the city and beyond the glade. Now we were back under the familiar, smothering blanket of the mendau trees. It was midday maybe, but you wouldn’t know it based on the heavy leaf cover overhead.
The swamp was just as I remembered it, a long time ago before I’d entered Eclipse and couldn’t get back out. The ground was spongy and dark green with a smattering of black puddles of unpredictable depth that could turn your ankle or swallow you whole. The mendau trees here were twisted, gray things with hanging moss growing in furry patches up and down their bark, while the leafy canopy overhead felt thick and oppressive, too close to the ground to be proper trees, but not quite short enough to be brush. Geddon had to duck under maybe half of them.
To our left, it was a foggy shadow land of thin, twisting tree trunks and thick patches of mist, a visible reminder of the humidity that I didn’t need. I could feel the chill of the moisture on my skin acutely, though it only reached skin deep. A sheen of moisture was already accumulating on my prosthetic, dripping from the fingertips. To our right there was some kind of waterway that ran past a rotting, wooden shack sporting a suspiciously well repaired dock.
“Bet the real guards would pay good money to know where this place is,” Geddon opined.
“I’ll ignore that slight upon my character, but I’ll still thank you to not go spreading this location around at the tavern,” Bole replied as he looked appraisingly at the little boat house connected to the dock. “Looks like they all fucked off with the boats, so we’ll be going on foot.”
“What this about ‘we?’” Sissa, having taken the lead after we’d exited the tunnels, turned around like she’d been struck. “Thank you for getting us this far, but we’re taking it from here.”
Bole casually sheathed his sword and slapped Beedy’s chest with the back of his hand. “See that, Beedy? Told you we wouldn’t be welcome.”
Beedy simply frowned and gave everyone an apologetic look.
“That’s because you’re not,” Geddon said, cracking his knuckles one at a time. They sounded like gunshots even through the metal gauntlets.
“That wasn’t the plan, Bole,” Sissa hissed like a nearly boiling kettle. “We’re fine from here on out. Go back and inflict yourself on someone else.”
“No, I think I’m exactly where I need to be.” Bole countered with folded arms. “Besides, We’re wasted playing nursemaid with the civilians.”
Sissa’s sword was out in a flash, her eyes wide and full of barely contained wrath. “Where you need to be?” She quoted dangerously. “Need to be? Careful. You’re dangerously close to reminding me of the last time we ‘collaborated.’ I have tolerated your presence ever since we were thrown into this situation, but that does not mean everything is forgiven between us. I ask you again to go back.”
Bole didn’t react to the drawn steel. In fact, he made it a point to lean on Beedy like he was a man relaxing under a shade tree.
“I don’t need you to forgive me, Princess. I just need you to see the benefits to another two sword arms. You could use men like us in your little band.”
“Oh we could use the help, but you’ve shown time and again we can’t trust you,” Sissa replied flatly.
“You can trust me, actually,” Bole countered. “But you have your reasons not to. You’re letting our history get in the way of your mission.”
“You don’t even know what the mission is,” Sissa shot back.
Bole turned to me, looking me up and down with a contemptuous expression. “It’s about the monk. It’s been all about him since he showed up. It’s plain to see if you know how to look.”
Sissa’s mouth formed a tight line, but I could see her jaw clenched tightly. She didn’t want to give away more than she had to, but Bole had scored a hit too close to the truth.
“You’re the tactician. What would two more capable fighters do for you?” Bole asked before Sissa could come up with a good response.
The dragonkin’s grip tightened on her sword hilt, and her expression went from angry to volcanic, the quiet kind before entire civilizations vanished in the pyroclastic flow. “You’re not getting it, Brother. We can’t trust you. We can’t trust you not to cut and run when you feel slighted or dispirited or just plain bored. You will simply leave. You left your family when they passed you over for university, you left the church when you had a crisis of faith, you left civilized society when the law diverged with your personal desires, and you left me when I wouldn’t join you. I would love more help, Fidus” Sissa growled. “But definitely not from you.”
As Sissa spoke, even though he was trying to play it cool, Bole tensed with every word Sissa said, his muscles coiling and his breathing growing more shallow and rapid. By the time Sissa was done, I was almost entirely sure Bole would draw his sword as well and we would have to kill him.
Lanky, quiet Beedy broke the standoff by putting a comforting hand on Bole’s shoulder. The leather creaked under strong fingers, and whatever Bole was about to do, he seemed to have second thoughts. He reached up and ran a gloved hand down his face, closing his eyes and sighing.
“That is… fair from your perspective. I’ve wronged you, and that’s forever. I understand that. But you know me, Siss. If there’s anything you can trust, it’s that I don’t let a blow go unanswered. This-” he said, waving a hand in the air. “This feels like the start of something. Something big. The things back there struck the first blow, and I want to be there to answer just as my ancestors did.”
“I could hang him in a tree by his undergarments if you like,” Geddon rumbled from behind Bole and Beedy.
Tiba stood flintily next to the big guy with her spear poised for a fight, and her guards followed suit, adopting a similar pose. They had no idea what was going on, but they were certainly picking up on the vibes.
Meanwhile, Samila sidled up to her sister and took up position on her right, almost brushing up against her sword arm. Was Samila planning to step between the two or join in? My money was on restraint.
“And I’ll scream the whole time, big fucker,” Bole said. “I’ll make it more trouble than I’m worth and make a whole lot of trouble for you. It would just be easier if you let me come along, and I’ll be much more useful. Beedy here wants to come too, don’t ya Beedy?”
Beedy looked pale, like he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t, but as he looked back from Bole to Sissa, he slowly got the courage up to nod in assent.
“We have no need for a sneak thief in the wilds,” Sissa insisted. She’d lowered her sword, though.
“You’d be surprised what needs stealing even in the most rustic of settings” Bole grinned, his mask of roguish confidence back in place.
For a moment, Sissa was torn between her desire to be rid of the man and the desire to make it through the next couple weeks with her people alive and intact. Bole was not above just following us as we went about our mission, and, despite all her misgivings, I didn’t think Sissa was willing to murder the man for trying to do so.
“You sleep on the opposite side of the fire from me,” Sissa hissed finally, sheathing her sword and stomping toward the abandoned shack.
Bole held up both of his hands in surrender, tossing a victorious grin at his partner in crime. “Whatever you say, Princess. We’re under your command, aren’t we, Beedy?”
—--------------------------------
I sat on the edge of the smugglers’ dock fifty or so feet from the shore. My compass was tapping me only occasionally as the arrow jiggled generally east and southeast. It had been doing that for the past hour without fail, so consistent that I was almost willing to put it down for a while and obsess over something else for a bit.
The creaking dock bobbed below me as I stared down into the glassy black surface of the river. Bayou was probably the proper term for it. It was a hidden branch of the main river, dug with great time and effort by those on the wrong side of the law. As Bole told it, this place served as a sort of stop over, where the shallow draft boats the smugglers tended to use could put in and offload their real cargo before they floated into Eclipse and went through customs with slightly lighter holds.
Midday sun only partially filtered through the grayish canopy of leaves that stretched over the dock, bright enough to see by but not enough to penetrate the muddy water. Anything deeper than a couple inches probably hadn’t seen true light for centuries. There was plenty of life out there, though. Once in a while, a little cloud of muddy debris, kicked up by motion below, floated to the surface and swirled lazily there until the current took it back down.
Detect Iron showed me flashes of wriggling schools of tiny fingerlings as they flitted underneath the pontoons that held the dock afloat. None of them were scourge if my compass was to be believed, just the Ralqir equivalent of fish.
Fishing has never been my thing, mostly because there weren’t a lot of fish to be had back home, and those that you could get tended to be mostly bone or eyeless nightmares from the deep. People did still fish, though. It was a sport humanity had brought with us from our homeworld and had somehow survived even on a planet whose oceans were mostly underground. Even though I didn’t really go for that sort of thing, I felt I’d be pretty good at it with Detect, but the ability would probably also ruin a lot of the mystique.
There were probably no scourge in the immediate area, but my mask was on anyway, just in case. The tracking methods my creations used weren’t foolproof, as I’d seen with a couple different stealth type monsters that my turrets didn’t recognize until they revealed themselves. Apparently, if you could fool me, you could fool my aura. If you could fool my aura, you could fool my compass, since the aura was doing the heavy lifting.
That meant the mask stayed on… for now. The time would come soon to show my face, and then I would be in the fight of my life.
I looked up for what must have been the hundredth time checking to see if the light was finally beginning to fade. Of course, just like last time, I couldn’t tell thanks to the mendau.
Trix insisted on traveling at night to not gather the wrong kind of attention, and everyone else seemed to just agree despite my insistence that I could not see in the damned dark.
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A whole planet of people that never really saw the sun. Of course, they saw better in the dark than I did. That didn’t stop it from being annoying. When I’d voiced my concern that I’d be stumbling around blind out there, I just got apologetic shrugs and a snigger of Bole.
Well, just waiting passively wasn’t my thing.
Finally setting my compass down, I summoned a handful of the new prototype smart rounds, a full rifle magazine, and the hopper piece to my magazine loader construct, pretty much an oblong tin tub with a narrow hole at the bottom just large enough for one bullet to fit through at once. The piston loader arm and the magazine holder weren’t needed for this, so I left them in my spatial storage.
I took a smart round between two of my fingers and examined it for flaws. It was brand new, so it shouldn’t have any, but I wanted to make sure. They were slightly larger than my original smart rounds, the ones that would crawl back to me once I’d fired them. They were slightly longer than my pinky nail, cylindrical at the back, conical in the front as most bullets tended to be, but the surface had ringed grooves that went all the way around meant to protect the ‘legs’ the bullets would deploy after being fired. While my other rounds grew appendages when they were activated, I’d discovered it was cheaper to have them already formed and tucked away than to re-form them every time they were meant to do their thing.
Carefully, I set the hopper down on the dock, positioning the base of its edge up against one of the spaces between the dock boards. This was meant to be a test of the pathing. Obstacles and problem solving were good.
Taking a moment to aim, I flicked my smart round out sending the bullet careening down the dock and toward the shore, bouncing it over the wood before it finally came to rest somewhere in the mud and grass. Then I did the same with three more rounds. Two, I kept in my pocket and the last I let fall into the water. The full magazine I let lie on the dock.
“Okay. Let’s see if you guys have gotten any better at this,” I whispered as I sent a little jolt of power into the hopper’s Trigger. The Automated smart card inside of it activated, just a simple thing where it fed power into the machine’s internals, generally to the loading arm, the stirring mechanism, and the clamps that held loading magazines in place. It also told my other machines that the loader was in business and was ready to do what it did.
I felt more than heard the signal go out from the hopper, a little tremble in my aura, a declaration of intent. I kept a wary eye on the magazine near my feet, but nothing catastrophic was happening with it as of yet. The new pacifying instructions I’d put into the rounds’ programming was working there at least.
Essentially, the rounds sensed they were in a valid magazine and didn’t activate until they were fired and were ‘free’ to go about their programming. It meant I had to Automate a narrow strip of iron in the back of every magazine that touched each round to keep it pacified, but if I could avoid the stupid bullets growing legs inside of an already cramped magazine then attempting to claw their way out, I’d take the added mana expense. I’d ruined three whole magazines before I figured out what was happening in the workshop.
The bullets in my pocket were another matter. They crawled out of my shirt like cockroaches on amphetamines, the hooked insectile legs they produced easily able to grab onto the fabric and skitter out to obey the automatic loader’s call to be filled. They clawed their way down my pant leg as a pair and to the dock where they met their first obstacle, a gap between the boards.
Without hesitation, the lead round lept the gap. Well, it wasn’t so much a leap as a sort of forward fall with its forelegs outstretched to catch the other side, leaving it dangling there momentarily between boards. The smart round’s partner, suddenly seeing a valid path across the gap, used the lead bullet as a bridge, crawling over and getting across. The poor guy in the crack almost lost its grip and went into the water down below, but it valiantly held on if only just.
They had to cross three separate gaps with varying success before they could load themselves into the hopper by crawling up the grooves on the side and into the tub. Neither of them went into the drink, though. Once they were safely where they were supposed to be, they retracted their legs and went dormant, rolling noisily around in the bottom of the tub, waiting for the hopper to load them into a magazine.
Soon, the four rounds I’d thrown to the shore came trundling up and, one-by-one, threw themselves into the hopper as well.
Again, I eyed the magazine, watching for shaking or jiggling. I really didn’t want to make another one of them. I especially didn’t want to re-tool my Automated programming again. It was already complicated enough, and holding that entire concept in my head long enough to get it to stick was painful. I would send a prayer of fervent thanks to Constance once I had it down and was able to foist the mental labor off on a casting bowl for mass production. Thankfully, the magazine sat there next to me inert, joyously unbroken. That was one problem fixed at least.
The two rounds that got in each other’s ways when trying to get into the hopper concerned me slightly. Unlike living things, they had no concern for one another or their respective objectives. Once they saw a way to complete their programming, they took it, even if it meant climbing over the broken forms of their brethren. I could see some breakage happening if I recalled a whole magazine of these things or several magazines at once. Not to mention, it was more than a little creepy to watch. A large enough number of smart rounds would resemble a swarm of robotic bullet ants without the warm and fuzzy dispositions of ants.
The round that went into the water never came back. Soon, I received some notifications in my combat log that shed some light on that mystery, though.
River Pairfish takes 1 damage. (slashing)
River Pairfish takes 1 damage. (slashing)
River Pairfish takes 1 damage. (slashing)
River Pairfish is bleeding.
River Pairfish takes 2 damage. (slashing)
River Pairfish takes 1 damage. (slashing)
River Pairfish takes 2 damage. (slashing)
River Pairfish is bleeding.
It went on and on, little drops of damage that compounded on one another until…
River Pairfish defeated.
You have been awarded 0 experience points. (1 base, -1 level)
Well, that’s what I got for making ammunition that crawled like bugs. Now the thing was stuck inside a fish down at the bottom of the river trying to claw its way out. I did feel a little guilty for killing the fish, though, thinking back to the ancient wretchwyrm I’d slain in a similar fashion. That was a rough way to go, and the least I could do was eat what I killed.
Note to self, add a cleaning function to the next iteration of magazine loader station. There’s gonna be blood.
—------------------------
When nighttime finally came, I was well and truly done with experimenting with crawling ammo, and I had the scars to show for it… metaphorically. The actual cuts healed quickly after I finally let the offending bullet go. Apparently, I had not programmed them to recognize their daddy, and trying to hold them back from their objective with a closed fist was not advised.
Never doing that again. Those little legs are sharp.
I flexed my palm and worked my fingers, remembering the itchy, burning sensation of a tiny robot trying to slice into my tender flesh.
The next iteration was definitely going to have a friend or foe ID system.
With so many conditions I was putting into these things, the power and time investment was getting more and more ridiculous. My batteries would need to charge overtime if I wanted to mass produce these little suckers. As a consequence, if I created a bigger battery with faster collectors I’d need to watch said battery like a hawk to shut it down before it could overcharge and have an explosive meltdown.
If I, say, let a casting bowl work overnight producing my new smart ammo with a new, beefed up, battery array and didn’t feed it enough metal to keep it working until morning, I could come back to a bomb… a bomb sitting right next to a lot of hard, metal projectiles that were practically built to be shrapnel.
Breaking the Volatility/Collect cycle turned out to be harder than I would have liked. I had to connect the Volatile cube to the whole thing with Shape to get it to work, and I couldn’t Shape it out of the thing once it was saturated with enough Volatility. My spatial storage tended to treat the Volatile center of the battery and the collector arms as one singular object after they all had the same energy flowing through them too.
What I needed was a way to detect how charged a battery was. Once I could do that, I could just Automate a cutoff on the Volatility refresher plate. I could probably do the same thing with a counting system, giving a maximum number of times to refresh the spell, but what if I was in an extended battle? The battery would last longer this way but not indefinitely.
A hand slapped my chest, halting me before I could take another step. I froze mid stride reflexively. Judging by the silhouette of the person attached to the hand, it was Samila, petite but intimidating in her armor and helm. She gestured down at the open mouth of the water into which I was about to plunge. My boots were already soaked from having already done this a few times in the night, but one never knew how deep these little holes were.
I gave Samila a little nod of appreciation and stepped around.
Though extremely dark, nighttime in the swamp wasn’t quite as bad as I thought it would be. While I had the worst night vision out of anyone in our little group, there were ways of seeing where the water was. The cold kept most insects dormant at night, but tiny swarms of glowing gnats swept over the surfaces of a lot of the open water, bright enough to cast a reflection upon the glassy charcoal mirror surface. In my experience, they only seemed to come together over water, clustering up and shining bright as they danced around one another.
So, if you could remember where the little fairy lights had been dancing, it was easy enough to avoid the deeper water. I had a breathing tank in my spatial storage filled to bursting just in case, however. I was a heavy guy, and if I stumbled into a deep hole, no one was pulling me out but me, more than likely.
Trix, Tiba, and her guards were the most adept at navigating the squishy and maze-like terrain. Their eyes were better than everyone else’s, and they weighed less than the rest of us, making them able to use floating deadwood and some of the more robust lily pads as springboards to get across otherwise inaccessible swamp. Since I couldn’t see anything, Trix, as he led the group, carried my compass affixed to his wrist with a little leather watch band Geddon had rustled up for him from somewhere. It let him consult the compass while still being able to use his rifle. It was also something I probably should have thought of before. I came from a planet with watches! Why did it take a giant lion man to think of the concept for me?
The construct had already paid dividends warning us of clusters of scourge before we could bumble into them in the dark. More than once, we’d had to go the long way around something Trix had detected out there.
I made sure to tell him the thing wasn’t infallible, however.
Lucky that I did too.
I’d just sank my foot into a particularly rank bank of mud when a hiss from in front of me drew my attention. As we all did when a halt was called, I sank down low, lying on my belly, listening and doing my best to keep from breathing.
When nothing immediately registered as dangerous, I felt safe to slither up the embankment, past Samila and Geddon, to follow the dry-ish strips of the land to where Trix had sent the signal. He, Tiba, Bole, Beedy, and Sissa were all there, crouched low amongst several bushy clusters of dead moss that had fallen from a nearby tree.
“What’s up?” I whispered, knowing the little Volpa’s sharp ears would hear me even when I could barely hear myself.
Slowly, deliberately, Trix sank down on all fours and crept until he was looking me in the face. His eyes were especially dark and fox-like in this dim light. He put his nose right up against my ear.
“It’s the road,” Trix whispered. “Your compass says the nearest infected are a good distance away to the east, but I don’t like it.”
“You think the road is being watched?”
“It is the most solid ground you will find out here, and though only sapients use the road itself, many things use the raised ground for travel. Very open, long sight lines. There is a good chance we will be spotted if there is something waiting for us.”
There was a shuffling sound from up ahead, and then Tiba was there, not that I would have seen her unless she was right on top of me. Sometime during the night, she’d slathered herself in mud, streaks of it running down in slanted lines across her green skin, even her face and hair. The only dry things on her were her spear and her medicine pouch which she wore across her shoulder.
The goblin queen grabbed Trix’s hand and brought him down to the ground where she drew in the mud with the tip of her finger. It was too dark for me to see, but I thought I spotted a long, curved line that was the road and a few round shapes that could have been trees.
Trix seemed to understand though, drawing bits of his own, interplaying his drawings with hers while Tiba added to and crossed out others. By the time the two had exchanged their pictographic messages, Tiba gave the little Volpa a wink and was gone like a shadow in the night.
Trix’s gaze lingered on her as she left, an odd look on his face as he absently ran his fingers over his rifle’s bolt carrier. He stopped when he saw me watching him.
“What?” Trix asked innocently.
“Nothing,” I lied.
“What?” He asked again.
I smiled mischievously. “You two have gotten cozy.”
Trix shook his head and did the Volpa full body shudder thing. “Not ‘cozy.’ Her Highness has been very helpful, especially with the maps,” he whispered, increasingly defensive with every word. “Once you get a sense of goblin pictograms, you can get a surprising amount of information. Queen Tiba has proved to be intelligent, brave, and fierce in a way I have never-.”
“Woah there, tiger,” Sissa murmured. “Maybe tell us what she said, and we’ll talk about how dreamy Queen Tiba is later.”
Trix blinked, flustered, his mouth working open and shut several times. “Dreamy- I- She’s- Mmmf-” he sputtered loudly until Sissa reached out and closed his muzzle for him. Trix did not reach up to free himself, instead choosing to give the dragonkin a very hard stare. If looks could kill, Sissa would be dead twice.
“Sorry. Go on, please,” Sissa whispered, letting go of Trix’s muzzle.
“Please don’t do that. It is hard to breathe,” Trix pleaded, the request bordering on command. “You were right to do so, however. I forgot myself and our need for stealth. As I was saying, the queen has spotted several clusters of birds not native to these lands in the trees lining the road. I had seen them but had written them off as normal before she said something.”
“Scourge?” I asked.
“The compass says no, but you said it is not reliable for all,” he replied.
I nodded, uselessly squinting into the darkness to try and see what Tiba had seen. “You can see the best, Trix. What’s the play?”
“If we are where Queen Tiba says we are, our pass is perhaps two miles south of here.”
“Two miles of swamp is a long way,” Sissa interjected.
Trix nodded in agreement, nervously playing his claws across his rifle again. “It would be best if we did not give ourselves away at this time.”
So they had creatures on the road as lookouts. More of that strategic thinking I was beginning to fear. It was getting far too prevalent in my dealings with the scourge. Was it getting smarter over time, or was it always that smart while I didn’t have a clear enough picture of what it was doing?
“You want to wait for them to move, or do we do something more drastic?” Sissa asked.
“I do not believe they will move,” Trix said. “They aren’t even breathing.”
A thought surfaced in my mind.
“Not breathing means not alive. They’re like drones. Without a biological imperative, they could sit in those trees for days. So, you’re saying, and correct me if I’m wrong… You’re saying we need a distraction,” I postulated. “Something… eye catching.”
Trix’s ears drooped down until they practically disappeared in his fur. “Oh no.”
“Devious. Dramatic,” I continued.
“No, please.” Trix replied, violently shaking his head.
“And explosive.”
Trix blinked rapidly like I’d just struck him. “I’m sorry. What? I thought you were asking me to glamor these creatures.”
I steepled my fingers and waggled my eyebrows at him, trusting that he could see me do it.
“I’m thinking more of a collaboration.”