Chapter 33 - Deeper Waters

<2 Hobgoblin scrappers have been added to your tribe>

<1 Hobgoblin wrangler has been added to your tribe>

<1 Goblin taskmaster has been added to your tribe>

I could still smell the smoke when I woke up. The survivors of the night before had tucked in immediately to the night haunt the wranglers had brought down in order to not miss out on enough sleep to put us in a stupor the following day. I couldn’t afford to waste the day.

Luckily, I seemed to have gotten a good roll on the new goblin births overnight. 13 new goblins off of 5 sleeping mounds was, as far as I could tell, near the max possible. That was good. We needed a real win after the previous night’s quite literal pyrrhic victory. I also decided to stop considering the question of goblin reproduction as a scientific one, and start thinking of it like an engineering one. That is to say, it doesn’t matter that I didn’t know how it functioned as long as it continued to do so.

Buzz was up early, as was his usual habit. His crew was clearing away the remains of the cage and hauling the second dead night haunt over to the tannery to be processed. He waved me down, and I headed over. His entire crew were now wearing gloves, which they’d stitched from left-over small hides the hunters had brought back.

“Didn’t go quite as planned, eh, boss?”

I looked at the ash trails. “Not quite. But your trap worked great. Think you can rig up another?”

Buzz pulled a scrap of bark from his trouser with a nub of wrapped charcoal in it. “Have one done by nightfall with six o’ the lads bangin’ it out.”

“Good, I’m going to get a few more under your team. I want that other project started today, as well. Like I showed you in the book.”

Buzz nodded excitedly. “The lads are on it, boss. Trust. Be up to your specs. Other priorities?”

We were interrupted by a loud whoosh accompanied by a scream. I looked over at the spiraling smoke trail and the goblin who almost managed to hold on to his booster.

“Houston, successful stage-1 separation,” I said as the goblin lost his grip and fell somewhere in the forest to the west. “That one wasted no time. I need to invent locks so we can lock up the sulfur.”

“Sounds like a Sally job. Wot about my boys?”

“Fuel,” I said.

Buzz’ eyes slid over to the scat mound.

“Fire fuel. I want to run up the kiln again soon. We’re going to need a few things to start getting iron out of that bog.”

“Chuck wants more space on the west side for his cliffies. We’ll pull timber from there.”

I slapped Buzz on his shoulder. He dashed off to relay the news to his crew. While he did that, I pulled up the system menu and assigned half the fresh goblins to his team, and half to Neil’s hunters. Sally’s team suffered the fewest casualties, since they rarely left the bluff, so I kept her with the same roster. Though, they did have a tendency for projects to explode in their faces. I gave her 1 extra.

The new taskmaster found me while I was sifting through the new arrivals to see which of the new arrivals were best suited for which teams. She dashed up, skidded to a halt, and stood stock rigid like a soldier.

“Sir! Ready and able to tackle any and all challenges!”

I’d already looked at her skills in the System, so I knew what she was good at. I dismissed the window and looked at my newest taskmaster.

“Eileen. You ready to fly a test flight?”

Eileen practically vibrated with anticipation. She had high stats for agility, perception, and mechanical operation—which was a trait I hadn’t yet seen. It must have been a side benefit of starting to unlock various simple machines on the Goblin Tech Tree. So, any goblins I put under her should get a bonus to operating machines as well. “Always, sir!”

I pushed off my chair and folded my hands behind the small of my back, strutting like a general. “I’m putting you in charge of the tribe’s air delivery wing. Assemble your crew and report to the east launcher at mid-day. Until then, help Sally with her preparations. She’ll brief you on the plan.” I stopped pacing and considered what I’d just said. I wondered whether Sally was more talkative around the other taskmasters. If not, the brief would be very brief.

Eileen saluted and dashed off.

I’d have loved to stay and help with that project, but I had boats to build. Neil had all his hunters staged on the north side of the bluff with sets of tools, bones, in addition to their usual assortment of slingers, spears, and cleavers. Two of his group also hoisted one of the ceramic impellers that we used to force air through the furnace.

Everyone threw themselves down the slope except for the ones lugging ceramics, which I made sure took the lift down. It wouldn’t do to have the whole ensemble shatter before we even got it to the river. I still wasn’t keen on the vertical approach to travel. I took two of Sally’s engineers and two of Buzz’ builders over and loaded into the flex-a-pult with a handful of the rare mini-gliders to start getting everything we needed prepped.

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Neil’s hunters split off to look for game, but he accompanied me to the river with the fishers. The goblins buzz-cut their trail, criss-crossing previous trails until we hit the bank of the river. It still mesmerized me how a collective group of goblins almost moved more like a swarm of insects than a pack of intelligent creatures. The area northeast of the bluff toward the old stone-sloth den and clay deposit had been criss-cut so many times it looked a bit like a checkerboard. It was, by far, our most trafficked area outside of the bluff itself.

We came to a slow bend in the river where a few of Buzz’ goblins were already cutting logs to size and Sally’s engineers were weaving cordage from vines. Some of the fishers went to trawl the banks for small fries while I set the rest to task shaping structural poles into a platform and lashed them together. We started to make a shallow-draft boat according to my sketches, with a pair of pontoons that would hopefully keep it stable enough that excitable goblins wouldn’t capsize the whole thing at the earliest opportunity. The space between the wood was packed with pitch and chewed bark on the outside, while the inside got another layer of sap and then the canvas from one of the javeline tents. I had another pole mounted on bearings, to which I added the impeller and crank assembly near the back. And on the forward end of the boat, I added a second column, with a long crossbeam and ceramic winch assembly to pull a flexible pole under load and secured it with the crossbeam.

We were losing daylight, but Neil informed me that the best fishing was during the daily eclipse anyway. The javeline rations (and the javeline themselves) were a nice one-time windfall, but I had to make sure I could keep the tribe fed when the night haunt haunches ran out—which they would. I had them smoking over the coals with some salt, but they’d last the tribe two, three days at max. And my hope was that having killed two of them, the rest would be more reluctant to attack the village.

Just as the sun slipped behind Raphina, we carried the boat to the water and pushed it down the muddy bank into the river bend.

It sank immediately.

“Well, that’s disappointing,” I said, watching the bubbles rise to the surface. With all the time I’ve spent on the water, I thought I’d be better at building a decent boat. At least the technology had been unlocked. I sent two goblins wading into the shallows to retrieve the ceramic parts we couldn’t easily replace.

It took us a couple extra hours to rig up a second one, and this time Sally’s engineers made multiple adjustments. This time, when we pushed the assembled craft into the water, it wobbled, but didn’t sink.

Neil’s fishers looked at each other excitedly and redoubled their pushing. I had to take a running jump in order to make sure I actually got on board. And let me tell you, stone-sloth claws are not meant for walking on the uneven surface of a wooden boat. The fact this thing was water-tight at all was nothing short of a miracle of Goblin Tech Tree engineering.

Several of the goblins helped me to my feet, including Neil. Others had already set trawling lines or were rigging bait to poles. Two more clambered onto the impeller cranks that I’d set up like bikes using the javeline chains that had once bound my wrists. They started pumping away with their little legs and the water at the back of the boat churned. I had to stumble over and grab the steering ring to get them spun around to the right direction before they could ground us on the bank.

Rather than forcing air through the impeller, they were forcing water. It was much less practical than a direct-drive propeller, but it was smoother and caused less chop in the water, which I figured would be better for a fishing vessel and less likely to tangle in the river weeds. As soon as we got to the deepest part of the river bend, I had the goblins hop off the impeller cranks and help me kick a bundle of rocks over the side to serve as our anchor. We drifted a bit with the current, but the line drew taut and I secured it to the gunwale.

Two of the fishing teams got quick bites and pulled in their fish. Both of them needed extra help wrangling the bigger catches from the deeper part of the river onto the boat. I nodded to myself as I watched. By any measure, it wasn’t an impressive vessel. It would have struggled to keep three or four humans afloat. But it easily held more than a dozen goblins. And it was just the first (sorry, second) prototype. I had no doubt the fishers would iterate and improve the design, as well as work on things that hadn’t even occurred to me. This was overdue. If everything hadn’t been such an emergency since I’d been reborn, this would have been much earlier on my to-do list. But it would become an emergency soon enough if I put it off any longer.

“Boss,” said Neil, from the aft end of the boat. I walked over and joined him. He pointed to the water about thirty meters back from where we trawled. It was about as long as three goblins laid head to feet, and several fish were leaping out of the water ahead of it.

River monster.

The bestiary had sketches of multiple aquatic predators. The one specific to rivers and moving waterways that preyed on humanoids was an amphibious predator that looked like a cross between a salamander and a barracuda, long and lithe with powerful jaws, a long, finned tail, and a set of stubby limbs. It veered away from the boat, for the time being, and Neil relaxed.

I walked up to the forecastle of the boat and kicked off a special bundle that included chunks of javeline offal that even the goblins hadn’t wanted to eat. Then, I sat back to cast my pole along with the rest of the fishers for an hour or two of just casting and pulling while I listened to the river and the bugs and the birds, and for some reason the occasional explosion. Being back on the water was almost as good as being back in the air. And really, this is what reincarnation should have been about: sailing and soaring and working on engineering projects. Not getting stabbed by pig-men and fighting for my life against beaked bat monsters to protect a tribe of creatures that spent the time they weren’t actively getting murdered finding creative ways to get themselves killed.

One of Neil’s fishers hooted and yanked in his pole, aided by his partner. A sizable fish flipped out of the water and smacked another fisher in the face. The three of them fell in a tangle of punches and bites and ended up tying themselves in a knot with the fishing line.

And yet, if I couldn’t protect these guys, I’d never walk on the moon. So, even if I hadn’t grown attached, they were worth every squawk, squabble, and scrap.

The sound of cliffords barking drew my attention to the riverbank. Chuck and a few of his wranglers bounded through the trees, pulling up just shy of the water. He stood up in the saddle and shaded his eyes. “Boss-man, you over there?”

I put my foot on the gunwale and cupped my hands. “Yeah, I’m here!”

“Sally says she’s almost ready. Wanted me to come bring you back.”

I whistled and pointed to the impeller cranks. Two of the goblins not currently casting bounded over and clambered up on the assembly and began pumping. A few others helped me reel in the anchor. We started to move, and I twisted the ring to get the impeller pushing us toward the bank.

“Boss, this one’s stuck,” said Neil, from over by the bow.

I looked over as he tugged on the line. “Careful with that one, it’s loaded to the…”

The line thrashed in the water, nearly pulling Neil overboard. Two goblins dove over and grabbed his feet, keeping him from dropping into the drink as the boat dipped toward the bow.

The thick cord drew a perfect line to a dark shadow writhing beneath the surface.

The river monster had returned.