Chapter 54 - Icky Slicky

It was actually somewhat marvelous, the way the boglins used their tesla wasp rods to zap the croc-knockers that came too close. A few of them still got potshots from range that killed 2 of our escorts and 1 of the throne-bearers, causing King Ringo to almost fly out of his chair in a most unkinglike way. But the king of the bog was clearly more willing to expend his tribemates than I wanted to be.

My scrapper laughed his head off the whole way, being carried between three of the much-smaller boglins. The boglin tribe didn’t have any hobgoblins (hob-boglins?) so far as I could tell. It made sense, since I hadn’t unlocked my second variant goblin until, what was it, 50 or so goblins? And the boglin king seemed to have a count somewhere in the mid 30’s or 40 max. I also learned that he’d been king longer than I had, about a year. But he didn’t have the benefit of an Earth engineer’s understanding to jump-start his tribe’s technology the way I did. It didn’t help that the swamp simply had resources he would have no idea how to harness, while lacking the basic resources he needed to build up to making those advanced resources useful to him.

Rava had dealt him a poor hand, for a king. It was a miracle Ringo had even kept his tribe alive in such a hostile environment. Javelines and humans hadn’t found him simply because no one wanted to go in the bog. He may have been paranoid, vain, and self-important, but he was also modestly successful in the face of an incredible challenge. I really did want to help these guys, if I could. King Ringo’s goblins, with King Ringo in or out of the picture, deserved a fair shot at securing their future in Lanclova.

Much like the boglin king’s fish crown, I smelled it before I saw it: The sweet-sour tang of petroleum fumes bubbling up through the swamp water. It wasn’t crude oil, either. The slick rainbow sheen of film that spread out over the surface of the water was thinner and more pale than unrefined crude oil. This was something else—closer to kerosene, maybe. But unmistakably a hydrocarbon (or this world’s equivalent). My heart began to race. I had kept the food bag from the night before, and I skimmed it across the surface with trembling fingers, careful not to get it on me.

“For my fur,” I said to the boglins guarding me. This seemed to placate them as I re-tied the skin to my belt.

Ringo leaned down from his chair. “I’ve brought you to the spring. Now, tell me how it can used for fire!”

“Do you see how the bubbles rise, o’ king?” I asked, pointing to the gasses filtering up from the underwater well. Methane or natural gas would be my best bet—what would normally be burned off as a matter of course in the process of extracting oil. “They contain a strange, invisible miasma that burns like a tree touched by lightning, if you can set them to spark. It’s actually what we’re smelling, right now. But it rises in the air once the bubble bursts, so we have to trap it with this device.” I held up the glider.

The scrapper looked at me, confused. He knew well what the glider actually was. This part was risky. As I continued speaking, I held up two fingers, and then tilted my head subtly toward the oil-slick. “If we collect the miasma from above the spring, we can take it back to the village and use it to make fire. With fire, we can make clay and ceramic—like the knife.” I made a fist, as though I was gripping the knife. Then flicked my eyes back toward the scrapper and opened it, in the forest-goblin hand-sign for an explosion. The scrapper looked confused for a moment, but then he put things together. His expression grew serious, and he offered the slightest of nods. Even trying to be subtle, the advisor noticed the exchange that passed between us, and the tiny boglin’s eyes narrowed. George was a sharp one. I just hoped my scrapper picked up on the instructions, as well.

King Ringo was getting excited. He rubbed his hands together. “It was here, under our noses, the whole time. Oh, yes, King Apollo. You’re doing me a great service.”

The advisor climbed up the goblin throne-bearers, and then the throne itself to whisper in Ringo’s ear. The king’s eyes narrowed, and he regained his composure enough to remember that he was supposed to be suspicious of me.

“And I suppose you’d like to collect it yourself, hmm?”

“Oh, no, o’ King Ringo,” I said. I raised the folded glider above my head. “The fumes must be gathered from as high as possible for the best potency. It should be your majesty himself, atop his tall chair, that does the gathering.”

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“As if I’d be foolish enough to fall for that!” snarled Ringo. “Invisible miasma? Fire boiling up from the bottom of the bog? He pointed at two of his goblins. “This is clearly dangerous work. You and you, carry King Apollo over the spring. Make sure he collects as much as possible.”

The two boglins looked at each other and reluctantly handed their spears off and one climbed onto the other’s shoulders.

“King Ringo,” I said. “At least let me use my scrapper for this. He’s quite strong, and taller than a boglin.”

Ringo’s advisor hissed. “Absolutely not. In fact, keep him back. Spears!”

The other boglins leveled their spears at the scrapper, who stayed at the edge of the sheen with his hands up in placation. But he winked at me.

“Very well,” I said. I clambered onto the shoulders of the boglin, which teetered precariously. “Alright, take us in.”

The bottom boglin started forward, slow and steady, causing us to lumber toward the gas bubbles.

System, do the boglins also have blast resistance?

The three-man tower teetered and almost toppled. I couldn’t help thinking that all we needed was a trench coat to get into an R-rated movie, and had to fight back a laugh, lest the king’s advisor find it suspicious. Ugh. Keep it together, Chris. If I took a dunk in the oil, this plan would go a decidedly different direction.

We managed to make it directly over the spring. I unfurled the glider and held it overhead, angling it, and trying not to let the breeze catch it and torque us over.

“It’s working! Is it working? It’s working!” said King Ringo, leaning so far forward that the goblins on the back legs of his throne were lifted completely out of the bog, swinging their legs in the air.

I nodded to the scrapper. He gave a series of indecipherable, but very conspicuous hand-signals, which the boglin next to him noticed. The boglin turned and squawked in alarm to the King’s advisor, but as soon as he did, the scrapper punched him in the side of the head.

Scrapper surprise attacks were incredibly effective. The boglin skipped across the surface of the water, leaving his spear spinning mid-air. The scrapper grabbed it, held it up, and threw it directly at the bottom boglin in our tower.

I barely had time to widen my eyes in surprise as the spear took him in the chest, and the shock traveled both down, and up the three of us. Every muscle in my body tensed with pain—but it wasn’t as bad as when I’d been hit directly.

“Betrayal!” Bellowed Ringo. “Kill them! Kill them!”

I had meant for him to tap the oil slick with the prongs of the wasp to ignite the surface. I don’t know what mad goblin logic made him want to throw a spear at a goblin I was literally riding on. But then, if they were predictable, they wouldn’t be goblins. Of course the tower collapsed. And of course I started falling toward the oil. My plan was about to go up in flames.

Then the arcing electricity from the tesla wasp skipped across the surface of the oil slick. And the water beneath me turned into a roiling ball of fire. My plan really did go up in flames, because my plan was to go up in flames.

The two boglins that had carried me were instantly incinerated. I felt a little bad about that. The rest of them recoiled from the spreading fire. But the gout of resulting hot air hit the underside of my deployed personal glider, and I managed to hold on despite the weakness from getting tasered by bug-sticks and despite getting the fur singed off the lower half of my body.

The blast had still been enough to kill me. At least, it felt like it. I was scorched, and the heat was akin to dancing in the mouth of the forced air kiln. It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced, and I’d been to a test firing of NuEarth’s 32-nozzle rocket motor that liquefied the concrete pad.

The glider bucked and jerked from the turbulent, rising air. I was climbing so fast I thought my arms might pop out of their sockets from the acceleration. My blades kicked helplessly in the air.

I looked back down at the spreading field of fire and the retreating boglins. I’d killed at least 8 of them. A quarter of Ringo’s tribe swept away like chaff, but they were now closing in on the scrapper.

As they reached him, he looked up and gave me one last salute before he was driven down by spears—ones tipped not with wasps, but with sharp ceramic points stolen from our own wagons.

I hated that it was necessary. Hated how effective it was, and how easily justified, and how willing the goblins were to throw their lives away for creatures like me or Ringo. They would take me to the moon, yes. But I would give them a reason to live for me—not just a biological imperative. I looked away, searching for King Ringo. I found him splashing in the water, his throne-bearers having ditched the chair in an effort to distance themselves from the fire. I locked eyes with him and shouted down over the roar of the fire.

“I’ve kept my side of the bargain, Ringo! That’s how you make fire in the swamp! And this is how you flyyyyyyy!”

“Beeeeeetttrraaaaayyyaaaaalll!”