Chapter 60 - Welcome Home

I hardly recognized the bluff. It had changed so much in the time I’d been gone setting up operations in the bog. It seemed like Buzz hadn’t spent a single minute idle, as wooden structures reached up above what few trees remained, with bridges and lattices crisscrossing disparate floors and intersecting structures at strange angles. They hadn’t only built up, but also out and down making the bluff itself look like it wore a lop-sided hat at an angle that was less jaunty and more precarious. The sides of the bluff now played host to a plethora of cliff-side dwellings and structures sprouting from the face of the cliff itself and anchored by thick cords. Freight traffic moved both up and down the bluff through a half-dozen elevators manned by dozens of goblins. The strange counterweight cranes stacked wood beams even higher, making odd, lopsided buildings that swayed in the wind.

Over 100 goblins called Village Apollo home, and it was about to get even bigger once the goblins of Canaveral withdrew. The airspace over the bluff was thick with smoke and crowded with the slow circling of personal gliders. We were spotted long before we reached the bluff, and a procession of goblins dropped out of the sky to join us, mimicking various noises of inventions I’d introduced. It was quite a bit of fanfare for having only been gone a couple weeks. All of them wanted to see the hammer, or at least that’s how I interpreted the hoisting of various wooden and stone mallets.

Promo handed over the first finished steel hammer and I hoisted it up so that it could catch the rays of the setting sun on its silvery surface. The goblins all cheered and raised their own tools in response.

Every goblin in the tribe was going to want steel tools. It was only natural. But most of them would have to settle for flint or make do with ceramic. All of the iron we had was earmarked for the igni to turn into hammers and engine parts. Well, most of the iron, I thought, looking down at my worn sloth-claw prosthetics. But engines were the ticket to jumping the developmental rail yet again. And in the next few days, I was going to work closely with Sally and Promo to get that technology unlocked. We had all the elements of internal combustion. Now, I just had to put everything together. Tribe Apollo was going pre-industrial.

The route from the west took us through the paddocks that Chuck used for the cliffords and the livestock rounded up from the savannah. I spotted the stone sloth cub running among the meager herd, now at least twice the size of a goblin. Two wranglers in the pens directed it with whistles and shouts to corral the livestock into a new paddock.

“They’re good,” I said. “That cub is a regular sheepdog.”

Chuck nodded, beaming like a proud papa. “Could use a dozen more like him.”

“A few dozen more herd animals wouldn’t hurt, either,” I said, looking at all the empty space in the paddocks. “We could fit a lot of those ‘lopes in here.”

“Aye, but they’re fast. The cliffords get tired easy. It’s tough to drive a big group, so we settle for hooking a couple at a time.” Chuck nodded to the cub. “Once he’s trained up, we’ll have a better shot. Maybe even at some big game.”

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Bringing down a big herbivore would be a huge boon for our food stocks. I watched the stone sloth circle up the few animals in the paddock and then barrel through them, despite the shouts of the handlers. Well, they still needed work.

We reached the base of the bluff just as a freight platform with a dozen goblins clinging to it hit the base, and all of them jumped off and ran around hooting and cheering. I practically had to start swinging in order to keep them from mobbing me.

“What is going on?” I shouted to Chuck over the racket of the tribe’s manic clamor.

“They’re glad to have their king safe and sound,” said Chuck, laughing. “A king should be with his people. There’s no other place you ought to be than surrounded.”

“Fair enough,” I said. I tilted my head upward at Raphina’s waking eye. “I could think of one other place.”

Chuck followed my gaze and grinned a mouth of sharp teeth at me. “We’ll get there, boss,” he said, reaching out and slapping my back. “You’ll lead us. We all know it.”

My wrangler boss handed our cliffords off to some of his assigned goblins and we scrambled onto the freight elevator, along with at least half the goblins who had joined us. There wasn’t even room for most of them, they just clung to the sides and ropes, and the whole structure creaked worryingly as the platform slowly started to ascend under the load. As we gained altitude, I could really see the extent the western forest had been cleared.

Even as I watched, a small explosion rocked the base of a tree and the whole thing toppled over.

Goblins darted in to begin stripping the branches and bark with axes in a swarm of activity.

“So that’s where all the bomb fruits are going,” I mentioned.

“Getting drained for poppers and mixed with the icky-putty, too,” said Chuck. “Grove of them popped up closer to the bluff where we’d stored ‘em in holes, but goblins keep eating them before they get volatile enough to harvest.”

“They’re eating bomb fruits?” I asked.

Chuck nodded. “Not bad if you get ‘em early. The igni squeeze ‘em onto the meat for an extra kick.”

Huh. I guess the explosive transition must happen during fermentation. It’s an effective way to spread seeds, when you think about it, simply exploding and blasting them every which way. Still, that might make harvesting the juices safer if we collected them from stable fruit and stored them in vented containers to ferment.

One detour I had to make was visiting Sally and her engineers. I had hoped she hadn’t spent the whole time I was gone building rocket boosters for the search effort. I needn’t have been worried, as her engineers were banging out stacks of parts and shoving more clay into kilns.

Sally exploded with the most energy I’d ever seen out of her by standing in front of me and reaching out to poke my chest before turning and running away. I figured she’d just expended her social battery with such a sensory overload, but she came back with six other goblins hauling a platform between them.

“Is that what I think it is?” I asked.

Sally chittered and shifted her weight from foot to foot. Before I’d left, I’d been sketching out drawings for a rotary engine case. My chief engineer, it seemed, had found them.

I looked at the two halves of the case, rendered in ceramic. They were… lacking, to put it lightly. Misshapen and different sizes, such that they could never actually be assembled. One of the reasons metal was ideal for this was that it was malleable, whereas ceramic couldn’t be shaped once it was fired. But we had more clay than iron, and she’d still taken the first step.

“Well done,” I said. “We’ll make some molds and iterate when we can. We’ll try both metal and ceramic. Still, I want to make sure we have a supply for munitions. Poppers are our best defense against the javeline so I want to get more RPP rounds rolling.”

“We’ve got the shockers and metal, now,” said Chuck. “Won’t be long until we’re tougher than the porkbellies.” he looked south toward the savannah. “Just wish we were faster than them, too.”

I grinned. “Give it time, my friend. I’ve got more surprises in store for you, yet.