Chapter 98 - Vertical Thinking

Finding out we had to let the dartwing go dampened some spirits, but finding out we got to eat anyway lifted most of the goblins’ moods back up again. Still, I had a taste for competition and I wanted to get the Flock a placement that would see hunting rights secured for the tribe.

Since the Blood Gorgers had secured the latest totem beast, that meant they were the ones who decided when the Stampede would resume. And they weren’t in quite as great a hurry as the upstart Lura. Which suited me since it gave me a full 2 days to do some much-needed repairs and modifications using Sourtooth’s stockpile of supplies as we regrouped and planned. Chuck helped me out when he wasn’t busy with the dogs and the captured herd stock, and I couldn’t help noticing the resident canoneers eyeing us closely as we worked on engines together.

“With the dartwing out, what’s our next best option?” I asked Sourtooth. I hammered at an engine that had developed a warp, trying to get it back to spec—er, goblin spec, at any rate. Reinforcements from Village Apollo had brought more vehicles, including one small biplane with a crew of only three goblins. The orcs found flying goblins to be a novelty, rather than a threat, fortunately—and still attributed the artifice to the ifrit. The only ones who knew it was actually goblin tech were members of the Flock

“We find ourselves trapped twixt anvil and hammer, little brother,” said Sourtooth. He rested, crouched, on a flat rock in the middle of the forge yard. “What totems remain play cruel tricks upon us, either elusive or deadly.”

“And the dartwing wasn’t?”

Sourtooth ignored the jab and sucked at his namesake a moment as he thought. “The Dawn will seek the red trapper totem, having been denied the rasker by the Blood Gorgers. Lura gained insight fair on the location of one. Never beat her to it, we. A lesser drake perhaps, should one hunger enough to leave the mountains—alas, likely not this time of year. A long shot. A vine-grabber perhaps. How fare your artifice in swamps?”

“Not well,” I admitted. “But we’ve got boats and cliffords—er, the red badlands dogs.”

Sourtooth shook his head. “They would cower and flee before the thing.”

I pursed my furry lips. “What about trying to muscle out one of the smaller teams? You’ve seen what our guns and rockets can do. We defeated the javeline with them and only gotten stronger, since.”

The old orc huffed a laugh. “Brag at bagging bacon, you. Orcs are no rutter mob. Keen hunters, we, even of temper and steady of hand on spear and pommel. Prone to anger not, and not so easily goaded as a pork-brained buffoon. No, the weakest of the teams would not for you a victim be, but might, of you, a victim make. Skirmishes are good sport, but best not raise their ire.”

I put down my hammer and examined my handywork. With an arm in front of my face in case the ensemble exploded, I dropped a starter rockette into the chute and let the engine turn over. It rumbled to life, rattling, shaking, and generally raising an unholy ruckus. In other words, perfect working order for GTT tech.

I cocked my head. “What about… the whistler? Is that what you called it?”

Sourtooth stilled. This was a very touchy subject for him, I expected. I pressed on with caution.

“It had to be released, right? Since Lura beat you to a kill? That means it’s still out there, right?”

“You’d feed it my spare leg, little brother,” growled Sourtooth. “Your tribe’s not ready for a beast of that caliber.”

“But you know where it is?”

Sourfang held still a moment. “Aye. It’s gone to ground in the canyons to lick the wounds given by the Flock, grandfather spirits rest them.”

I cut the throttle on the engine and leaned against the crank case. “And no one else has it in their sights?”

Sourtooth straightened. “No other team is damn fool enough to follow it into a canyon tight where its charge can be evaded not.”

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“How tight’s the canyon?” asked Chuck.

<12 of your tribe members have assumed the zealot job>

Eileen and the canoneers must have converted another village. That was the third so far.

No new variants?

I tsked. Bad luck. I’d hoped each tribe would introduce a new needed skill or specialization into the tribe. So far we’d narrowly missed something called flatulators and gotten a duplicate variant.

I turned back to the problem at hand. “That’s a problem. We won’t have room to maneuver in the canyon. Maybe we could build a big missile and launch it into the canyon? We’ve got two-stage guided rockets. We just need one with a big enough warhead to send this horn-beast to the next simulation.”

But even as I spoke it, I knew it wasn’t feasible, yet. Guided rockets with enough payload to function as long-range artillery were going to take time and trials to develop. We’d gotten lucky with the net missiles working as planned, but precision short-range ballistic missiles were another beast all together. We weren’t exactly working with HIMARS, here.

Still. We had manpower, we had materials. That meant this was an engineering problem. A canyon might not have enough space to maneuver on the ground, but they had plenty of verticality. Maybe we needed to attack this problem from a different direction. Literally.

“Let’s go talk to Promo. I have an idea.”

I choked out the engine and wandered over to the forge-yard. Several of the Blood Gorgers were still sleeping off hangovers, dozing in the heat given off by the forges. The ringing of hammers on anvils seemed to bother them not at all, and I had to step over one of them in order to reach the head of my smiths.

“How long would it take to dismount the engines from, let’s say, half the buggies?” I asked.

Promo cocked his head at me. “Rest o’ the day, reckon. What you gettin’ at, boss?”

I nodded to the Ifrit floating around the camp in their coaxial vessels. One of them floated by a pair of orcs, who offered the two-fingers-to-the-nose gesture I had learned was a sign of respect/warding to/from ancestors.

“We can’t get at this next monster from the ground. The next option is the air. Do you understand the principles enough to make a version big enough to carry a crew?”

Promo scratched at his jowls and a glaze passed over his eyes, typical of a Ravan looking at System menus. A grin spread across his face. “Reckon I can at that, boss. Why only half the buggies?”

I huffed. “Because the abomination unto aerodynamics that are helicopters are very fuel inefficient. We’re going to drive them to the canyon and launch them from there to maximize flight time.”

Sourtooth grunted. “I’ve seen your skyborne artifice, little brother. If you hold notion that I’ll ride the winds on a wreck in the making, absolve yourself of it. For my lads that goes, as well. We tolerated your wheeled contraptions, but good faith and daring takes an orc only so far. An oryx twixt our legs is the only sure thing in terrain like that.”

I shrugged. “You’d be too heavy anyway. We need to minimize weight. Besides, someone’s going to have to be the bait.”

“The what?” asked Sourtooth, having very clearly heard me. “I know the rate at which goblins breed, but an orc life is not easily cast before the charge.”

“Figured you’d want to be as close as possible when you get your revenge. The canyons might not have the terrain for buggies to maneuver, but what if I could make you a shield capable of taking a hit from the whistler?”

Sourtooth closed his eyes and muttered something under his breath. I caught Lura, blight, and womb and a few other terms best not repeated in polite company. And of course it wasn’t Lura he was upset with. It was me.

“Alright, little brother mine,” said Sourtooth. “But once we commit, there will be no turning back. The whistler will not keen be to grant us a third audience. It is like a meteor made flesh, and it will finish what I started.”

“The whistler, then.”

Sourtooth absently rubbed the remnant of the leg he’d lost to the beast. “The whistler. More than those peashooters, we’ll need. What more artifice have you a will to unlock in your tech tree?”

I thought about the advancements we’d made so far. I hadn’t followed the linear path of human technological development. I’d skipped around, cut corners, jumped entire fields of research by already knowing the terminus those innovative-yet-obsolete stepping stones had led. We had internal combustion engines and I hadn’t even gotten around to making a telegraph, a radio, a light bulb, or a transistor, yet. In some regards, we were up to the early 1900’s. Hell, we were getting ready to make helicopters. But in many other regards, we were still in the BC era. We didn’t have running water or sewage, our government was a pure monarchy—or rather some sort of gestalt colony with a king at its heart. We didn’t even have agriculture, despite my best efforts. On the other hand, we had heavier-than-air flight, we had rifles with internal magazines, and we had multi-stage rockets. Military technology was certainly progressing. But, then, a large amount of innovation and development had been spurred on by conflict on Earth. Well, if we were doing it by hunting wild animals instead of killing humans, I certainly didn’t have a problem with it. Bonus points if it kept my tribe sufficiently fed.

But they also needed to be protected. Sourtooth didn’t think the buggies would cut it, and I had a feeling the oryx weren’t going to get the job done, either. The majority of our military technology was about at a pre-WWI level. Well, the first world war introduced more than just biplanes and trenches. There was one area of technology that we were still behind on.

“Promo. Bring the rocket rig around. We’ve got work to do.”