Chapter 100 - Canyon Model
The number of goblins we’d amassed in the convoy of gear-headed speed freaks had grown noticeably. Even though we’d added new vehicles, the fact that the convoy was self-sustaining in terms of food meant that the spawning penalties had been rescinded—at least for the time being. One extra benefit I found from the spawning submenu was that I could restrict new goblin births if I so needed, to maintain the tribe at a certain level with only enough growth to account for daily attrition—which had been markedly higher after inventing multi-stage missiles and internal combustion engines.
Our fleet was now over 20 strong, with each new replacement vehicle hauling bladders of fuel pumped from the swamps of Huntsville and framed from the steel refined from its iron. Damaged vehicles were sent back with captured herd animals, scrap parts, and cast-off materials from the orcs. And that figure was after accounting for the bi-plane that was attacked by a four-winged bird and the bike that was taken by a dire trapdoor spider creature while we were setting up camp for the night—taking 6 goblins with it.
But having split the fleet into a mix of ground vehicles and choppers made it slow going as the buggies struggled to haul their heavy loads across the badlands. Our rival teams kept pace easily and kept a safe distance whenever we camped for the night. Spirits in the tribe were high, but Sourtooth kept mostly to himself the closer we got to the beast’s lair. The terrain grew rockier and more mountainous, turning into sharp stone and pink gravel that crunched underfoot.
At a maintenance stop, a glint caught my eye, and I reached down and picked up a piece of the gravel, turning it in the sun. It shined with a greyish luster in a couple spots, and I held it up to my eye. I could see metallic flecks in it. Some sort of surface ore. Worth collecting, maybe. Studying it would have to wait. For now, we were on a time crunch to make sure we hit that whistler before Lura tracked down her own quarry. I returned to the convoy, where the igni were overseeing the unloading and reassembly of the new aircraft.
When I say aircraft, I mean it in the barest sense of the word. Helicopters are aerodynamic freaks of nature, flying primarily by rattling and shaking so hard that the ground rejects them. In fact, I wouldn’t even have to dumb them down or make them more dangerous for them to fit in the Goblin Tech Tree. If a Blackhawk had followed me to Rava, it would have immediately triggered a GTT unlock prompt.
Still, it was another step toward the terminus of orbital space travel and landing a spacecraft on the surface of Raphina, whose watchful eye hung fat and heavy in the sky above. It must have been getting close to summer on this continent as well, because the days were getting hot and I was grateful for the shade that offered brief reprieve from the rays baking the dusty hardpack. I’d been to the salt flats Utah a few summers to watch races and a rocket test fire, but I hadn’t been blue and furry at the time. It wasn’t quite to the point where I considered the limited coverage favored by the Shafts and Motors club. But it wasn’t far off, either.
Clutching the gravel in my tiny fist, I stashed it in a pack I kept on the back of the buggy and then helped Promo get one of the choppers sorted. None of them had a standardized layout—having been cobbled from disparate parts meant they had unusual setups in terms of number or rotor blades, tail configurations, and payloads. Each one would fly completely differently from the next, so the canoneers had their work cut out for them trying to canonize them. Hell, it’d be a miracle if the pilots didn’t crash them on takeoff, even with the Ifrit smoothing out controls and flight. So far, we’d only tested them with tethers, and never multiple together. It was time to change that.
“Fuel ‘em up!” I called. “We’re going on a dry run.” The tribe cheered and ran to the back of the new and improved Big Hoss Rig for bladders of kerosene to power the choppers. The wranglers, meanwhile, were fighting with the goblins possessing abnormally high mechanical aptitude for who would get to be at the controls, and it somehow managed to work out that every wrangler pilot seemed to be squeezed into a craft built for a nonvariant, while each of Eileen’s air deliverymen were stuck between reaching the foot pedals and the flight stick (called a ‘cyclic’ on helicopters).
As for me, I had my vehicle already marked out, and Armstrong was already in the gunner’s station waiting for me.
“Ready, boss!” he said, offering a salute. His skull mask had been painted with ash-grey streaks—matching the grey and white of the Flock’s colors. I climbed into the pilot’s station above and behind Armstrong while a half-dozen other goblins clambered onto the various stations, or just kind of held onto the bare-bones frame. Even with them aboard, the heaviest weight by far was the engine and fuel bladders. But around the engine, I could see Girmaks’ pale, blue shimmer. I dropped a charge in the engine compartment and started it up.
The engine roared to life, and I cranked the clutch belt to engage the main rotor as it warmed up. Overhead, the coaxial blades started to turn, but I kept the pitch flat while the rest of the fleet got their vehicles up and running. In total, we had eight choppers of various sizes. Three of them didn’t have controls at all, being controlled entirely via Ifrit while the goblins aboard were simply along for the ride—a fact that dissuaded them not at all.
The thing about helicopters is that they’re loud. You not only have the engine noise, but the noise of the main rotors and tail rotors cutting through the air essentially gives you sound at three different frequencies that drowns out nearly everything. Voice communication is nearly impossible over the racket, and goblin helicopter blades had none of the modern aerodynamic creature comforts that reduced the sound profile of Earth helicopters from deafening all the way to nearly deafening. Necessity being the mother of invention, and being a fantastic engineer with 2,500 hours in the cockpit, I had foreseen this—and built the tribe’s first electrical device: a simple sound-powered intercom.
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A crucial first-step on the way to radios, I slipped a pair of leather ear-cups over my head and pulled a hand-set closer to my mouth.
“Check, check,”
Inside the handset, my voice caused a diaphragm to vibrate, inducing a charge across a pair of lodestones connected to a wire in what amounted to the world’s dirtiest transducer, and the Goblin Tech Tree did the rest of the heavy lifting. In my ear cups, the process reversed, and the faint electrical signal repeated my own voice, sounding hollow and tinny—but understandable.
“HEY BOSS IT WORKS!” shouted Armstrong. I pulled one of the ear cups away from my head as he shouted, wincing. The scrapper tossed me a grin and a thumbs up over his shoulder.
“NOT SO LOUD!” I yelled back. He flinched in his seat.
Tribe Apollo had the means to build one of these ever since Rufus’ second visit to the bluff, but they hadn’t ever been a priority, what with the tribe suffering crisis after crisis. Electrical devices had simply fallen to the wayside in favor of weapons and vehicles to hunt with. But now we were starting to unite the tribes of the region, work out a way to keep them fed, and we were going to need communication more reliable than glider messengers to get it. Sound-powered phones were a step on the road to radio—and the jump wasn’t as big as you might think. A power source, a modulator, an amplifier, an antenna, and a receiver to demodulate and reverse the process. Hell, there were radios even simpler than that that just worked on induced AC current across a coil. But that would still take time and focus to develop the electrical components, so right now comms were limited to per-aircraft, while red-tinted smoke swirled from two flares at the back of our craft to let the other pilots know to follow our lead.
I twisted the throttle and checked the response on the anti-torque pedals before lifting the collective pitch control lever. The chopper started getting light on its wheels, and I tilted the cyclic control forward.
Our engines still weren’t amazing. Don’t get me wrong, it was amazing that they worked, at all. But they were heavy, being made primarily from cast iron, steel, or ceramic, which meant a strength-to-weight ratio less than ideal for heavier-than-air flight. Combined with the inbuilt inefficiencies in the aerodynamics of helicopters, and we had a fleet of whales that struggled to get off the ground with a full belly. Luckily, helicopters become more efficient at around 15-20 knots. It’s where you stop getting recycled air killing your performance as vortexes form at the edges of your rotor disk. I pressed forward, letting our ground speed climb, and I felt the aircraft shudder as we passed through that boundary into clean, efficient air. I hauled back on the cyclic, and we lifted into the air to cheers and the loss of one goblin who got so excited she forgot she still had to hang on.
I craned my neck to see most of the rest of the fleet had gotten off the ground, with the exception of one aircraft that tilted too far back, sheering off its own tail in the process. I winced as the crew bailed out before the still-spinning main rotor could turn them into furry, blue clouds.
Flying the choppers was strange, being used to fixed wing aircraft as I was—and yet again, I felt the tell-tale pressure of System’s increased attention on me, as I often did when I was flying. I focused on maintaining the controls and checking the simple gauges I’d built to monitor the remaining fuel weight and rotor RPMs. It all seemed to be working as I climbed. The whole aircraft vibrated, but the feeling of peace that flying always gave me still settled into my core. Every problem I’ve ever had was on the ground—and lifting off left them all behind. I was part of the sky while I was in the cockpit.
I banked to the right, towards a formation of stone pillars that created a small channel. With the whistler licking its wounds in a canyon, rocky, tight terrain was going to be our battlefield. Dumping collective, I brought us low and then flared back. I lined up on a spindle formation down the center of the lane. Geological forces had conspired to give the formation an hourglass shape, heavy on top and bottom with a narrow bit in the middle.
“Armstrong, hit the skinny part.”
My scrapper lined up the two recoilless rifles built into the nose of the chopper and let ‘em rip. Acrid, smoky back-blast blew through the open cockpit, stinging my eyes. But through the haze, two small explosions burst against the pillar, near the narrow section. Around us, a half-dozen other sets of rifles fired, and contrails raced ahead. Some of them missed, but most of them hit. A handful of cheers came over the sound-powered headset from the goblins on board. I tilted us to the right and traversed us while endeavoring to keep the nose pointed at the spindle. It wasn’t easy. I wasn’t used to flying sideways. But several goblins took the opportunity to fire rifles and pistols at it.
I straightened us back out and circled behind our target pillar, weaving through the forest of stone formations. The engine and the main rotor thumped, stressed by the hard maneuvers. I pulled the stick back and raised the collective to bring the chopper up and slow us before banking around for another pass.
I grabbed the sound-powered handset. “Tally ho!”
One of the goblins squawked and climbed down to the compartment underneath the cockpit. Once we were lined up, I cranked hard on a plunger built into the front dash, and I felt a mechanical clunk from underneath. The chopper got significantly lighter as our primary payload dropped away. I banked us and looked below, where a rocket had detached with a single goblin holding on. The rocket motor kicked on, and I swear I could hear the EEEEeeeee as it sped towards the spindle on a plume of dirty smoke. To my left and right, two other teams released their payloads as well, goblin guidance systems steering the rockets to the pillar.
Just before impact, three gliders unfurled and the goblins detached from their rockets, turning velocity into altitude as they caught the air and soared high above the choppers. They’d find their way back to the convoy, having completed their task. Below them, a trio of explosions kicked up a cloud of dust and smoke against the spindle. A thunderous CRACK echoed throughout the confines of the canyon.
Uh oh.