Chapter 27 - Battlestart Gobsplatica

“What is noise?” yelled Mitri.

“Oy! Told ye shut it!” Rotte shouted from his tent.

Armstrong hooked two of the goblins in the crooks of his elbows and melted back into the brush. The third started to run, then grabbed the flat rock they’d used to mix the putty and made scarce. I sat stock still, donning my best look of innocence.

The three rutters emerged from their hide tents, and boy, let me tell you, they’re even uglier with their helmets off. All three had thick, hairy jaws with oddly protruding tusks that I’d assumed were fixed to their helmets and not their faces. Above that, they looked about like uglier versions of the dwarves you’d see in a movie. Least of all because I’d interrupted their beauty-sleep. But if any of these things were to get enough of that to look pretty, they’d be a shoo-in for a fairy tale of their own.

Rotti and Muthus grabbed the spears from beside their tents before they trotted up. Mitri just cracked his hairy knuckles.

“I warn talking goblin!” said Rotte. He lifted his spear and thrust it. I squawked and dove out of the way, wrenching my arms on the chain, but narrowly avoiding being impaled. This just made Rotte mad, though the others chuckled. He thrust again, and once more, and I managed to barely get out of the way. By now, the other Rutters were laughing openly.

“Mitri!” Rotte Snarled.

Mitri trotted forward and grabbed the chain just above my wrists. He yanked it up, easily lifting me off my feet, and sank a heavy fist into my gut.

Really? That’s all it took? Granted, it hurt like a devil! But were goblins really that paper-thin?

No. Something else was happening. Something back home that I wasn’t there for. Night haunts? The wranglers should have been protecting the village against them. But I had more pressing concerns. Mitri wound up and slugged me again. I gasped for air, kicking my feet helplessly.

“Something odd,” said Muthus.

The others ignored him. Rotte lifted his spear again. “Hold it still, Mitri. This one no miss.”

Mitri moved to the side to be out of the path of Rotte’s spear. Beyond the spear, I saw several shadowy forms creeping in from the other side of the camp. Coal light glinted off rough iron in their hands. Armstrong and the others getting into position.

“Rotte!” insisted Muthus. Rotte started to turn back, but if he did that…

“Wait!” I gasped. “You were facing me this whole time? I thought I was talking to your backside!”

Rotte snapped his attention back to me, face reddening. Foam started to trickle at the corners of his mouth.

“You were prettier with the helmet on.”

“I make goblin sorry,” seethed Rotte. He gripped the haft of his spear so tightly the wood began to creak under his fingers. Behind him, I saw my improvised riflemen plant the butts of their poles in the glowing coals and angle the muzzles toward the trio of rutters.

I hadn’t wanted to do this. I hadn’t wanted to introduce firearms to this world along with all the horrors that came with them. I certainly hadn’t wanted every goblin in my tribe to be running around separated from a boomstick by a few bowel movements and a bath. I would have liked to skip every conceivable variation on a gun that I reasonably could on the way to securing my tribe’s path to the moon. But now I was looking at my first formation of goblin riflemen. And I hated myself just a little bit for its necessity.

“Did goblin have one leg, before?” asked Muthus.

“He has no legs, idiot!” barked Mitri. He looked down. And stopped. I looked down as well.

Oh hell. Armstrong and his pals had tracked us here from the glider wreck, and they’d brought my other leg. The rutters had brought me here with only one.

“How he get…”

Rotte spun around, raising his spear and hurling it at the fire pit. One of the goblins squawked and dropped his pipe, diving to the ground to get out of the path of the spear. But Armstrong and the other two held steady.

Mitri dropped me to the ground and charged along-side Muthus. I didn’t know how long it would take the fire to heat up the putty in the tubes, but I had to—

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We must have tamped the stones in the tubes down too hard, because they didn’t explode out the front end like scattershot. It was the back ends that blew, the ones in the fire. They exploded in a shower of sparks and a shrill, mounting whistle. And it didn’t launch the detritus in the business end. It launched the whole kit and caboodle—goblins included.

The first one to go was the one that had been dropped in the fire. It fizzed, ignited, and careened skyward where it popped in a burst of yellowy sparks.

Everyone in the clearing stopped and stared. Especially the goblin that had dropped the pipe, now clinging gratefully to the ground. The two goblins that had held on to their pipes rocketed forward on plumes of sparks, screaming and holding on for dear life. They impacted Mitri and Muthus before the pair had time to register what was going on.

A cloud of blue fur, thankfully shielded from view by the unfortunate javalines, erupted at the same time about a half-meter of iron pipe sprouted from the dwarven backs.

I hadn’t invented guns. I’d invented missiles. Goblin-guided missiles.

Armstrong was a heavier payload. When his ignited, he looked more like a witch riding a flaming broom as he screamed and flew toward Rotte. The blood and fur-covered javeline rutter stared, and then tried to dive out of the way at the last second. The pipe missed him, but Armstrong hit him. The hobgoblin was made of sterner stuff than the average goblin. He bowled the heavier rutter over and the two went rolling. And if that didn’t count as a surprise attack for the scrapper bonus, then I don’t know what would. The other eastern bluff survivor, the one fortunate enough to be carried off by his own gun, yowled in rage and chased after them.

With them fighting, I worked at my chains, no longer caring about the noise. In fact, my little goblin ears were ringing anyway. I managed to get the loops off, just as I saw the camp tender emerge from his hiding spot. He took one look at the tableau and ran for Mitri’s spear.

“Armstrong!” I shouted. I cast the last loops of chain off and dashed over to the tousling trio. The hobgoblin had a pair of cleavers tucked behind his belt. I pulled one out and started to hack at the flank of the javeline, for all the good it did. I just wasn’t strong enough to get through his thick hide.

The thunder of hooves sounded, and a spear took me in the back.

The force drove me into the ground, and the pain took my breath away. I dragged through the dirt and the foliage as the camp keeper kept his charge up. Every meter became a fresh hell.

He was killing me over and over. My arms were useless by my sides, and both of my prosthetics came off.

Some snarling creature brought the javeline rutter to a screeching halt. He dug in all four hooves, barely arresting his speed. My own momentum kept me going, sliding off the end of the spear and tumbling through the dirt and brush at high speed. Though my spinning vision, I caught a glimpse of big red shapes charging toward me, and of the backside of the camp keeper as he threw the spear away and retreated.

A pair of feet thumped to the ground near me, and hands wrapped my shoulders to pull me upright.

“S’alright chief, we got yer back.”

The spinning had made me sick, and I heaved what little was in my guts—which wasn’t much, since the javelines hadn’t fed me. Good thing, too. If they had, I’d have likely been too lethargic to mount an escape.

I finally managed to look up at the hobgoblin with the mandible mask. “Chuck?” I asked. “What are you doing here?”

“Rangin’. We knew there ‘bout where you went down. But not where they took you. ‘Least til we saw yer signal,” he said. He pointed to the sky. The first pipe gun had gone off like a bottle rocket and detonated in the sky. You could still see the yellowish smoke. But that was still miles from Apollo.

My vision cleared enough to see the other wranglers, and my jaw dropped. They were riding cliffords, the red canines from the savannah that had tried to eat me on my first day in Lanclova. Each one had a tight grip on their clifford’s mane in one hand and a spear in the other, while a second goblin balanced on the back haunches with a rock slinger. Even now, the goblin riding behind Chuck struggled to control the beast, but they didn’t have the animal handling skills of the wranglers.

Chuck tried to help me to my feet, and then realized my lower legs were missing. Instead, he picked me up, punched his wayward mount on the nose to remind it who was boss, and then slung me over the back of its haunches like a sack of potatoes.

I figured we’d be getting out of dodge, but instead he spurred the clifford on toward the one javeline still fighting. We bounced and jostled our way back into the clearing. I struggled to get my arms between me and the clifford so that I could tilt my head up far enough to see what was happening.

Armstrong was up and clear of the melee. He was bruised and bloody, but hobgoblins are built tougher than us standard goblins. The rutter leader, Rotte, was sprinting off into the woods, looking a bit like a pin-cushion with all the wrangler spears sticking out of him. But it’s not easy to kill a wild pig. I had no doubt he’d make it back to the rest of his kind.

Chuck dismounted again, and clasped wrists with Armstrong.

“Good lookin’ out fer the boss,” said Chuck.

Armstrong put a hand behind his head, looking almost embarrassed at the praise. “Weren’t nuffink,” he said.

The other goblin on our clifford helped me to sit up.

I looked at the other two rutters impaled on the poles. “Sorry about your friends, Armstrong. I wanted to save you all, but you ended up saving me instead.”

The hobgoblin waved me off. “Big group o’ rutters done for the ol’ village. I fink me mates’d be proud wot to have done-in a few back.” He grinned. “You see ‘em? Were all shwoooosh—Splat! Proper scrap, that!”

The scrapper laughed, and it seemed his mirth was contagious as the rest of the goblins started making shwoosh-splat noises and howling with laughter.

I looked to the woods in the other side of the camp, where the other wranglers were returning after having run off the other javeline. “Rotte is going to report this. If there’s more rutters in the woods, you can bet they’ll have their sights set on a goblin king before long. We need to show them that we’re tougher quarry than some impotent elf’s wallet is worth.”

“Aye, boss,” said Chuck. He patted the side of his clifford. “Ain’t no helpless hands they’ll be finding. Tribe Apollo claws back.”

“That we do.”