Gathering of the Titans: The Tol Chronicles Book 2 (39 page)

Tol and Gilmat ran out of the smoky crater onto the narrow surrounding lip in time to see Jexx inscribe a wide arc above them, laughing. “Better luck next time, gentles!” he yelled and turned toward the distant shoreline. Gilmat took a couple of shots at the glider, but if he hit his target there was no observable effect. Tol rolled his eyes. “What I wouldn’t give for...” he stopped in mid- sentence as he heard a familiar drone. “That!” he finished, pointing to Dagyo approaching them in the
Sir Tol
. Gilmat, who had been on the comm calling for backup from a fast patrol boat stationed just out of sight on the ocean-facing side of the island, stared in amazement at the flying sausage.

Tol motioned for Dagyo to winch down the prisoner cage. He pointed to the rapidly shrinking glider and yelled up, “I need to catch that thing!” Dagyo nodded and released the winch cable. Tol climbed aboard the cage and turned to Gilmat.

“You go after him on the water, I’ll take the air.”

Gilmat just nodded with wide eyes as the cage with Tol in it lifted off. Dagyo pulled up until he was sure they were free of obstacles and then pushed both throttles full open. The Zifjagga accelerated as though eager for the chase, trailing its suspended goblin cargo behind at an acute angle. Tol tried not to think about how easy it would be to fall out of the unlocked cage and plunge to a watery demise and instead concentrated on the target ahead.

The glider was swift, but it was entirely dependent on air currents for both speed and altitude. Jexx found a thermal above a small coral archipelago and rode it as high as it would take him before popping out of the spiral with renewed height and velocity. Meanwhile Dagyo and Tol had been steadily gaining on him from below. Jexx decided to go on the offense while he still had the advantage of altitude.

Whirling suddenly, Jexx aimed his glider directly at the zifjagga and pulled out a disruptor. He aimed at Tol and then at Dagyo in the command car, but Dagyo took evasive action and both shots went wide of the mark. Switching tactics, he removed a projectile weapon from its bracket in the cockpit and started punching holes in the envelope surrounding the gas bag. The zifjagga lost altitude almost immediately and seemed to be doomed to crash into the water as the gas leaked away. Jexx laughed evilly and resumed his course toward Yiks Island.

Dagyo dumped most of his emergency ballast and the plunge toward the sea was arrested. Tol looked up at one of the exit holes from Jexx’s projectiles and saw the ragged edges that had been flapping as gas escaped through the opening cease to flap.
Self- sealing
, Tol thought,
Good idea
. Dagyo ignited a small heating element that ran along the keel of the ship. This gave the remaining gas more lift; they were soon at cruising altitude again. Tol couldn’t guess how long the battery powering that heater would work, but he figured it would be enough to get them back to land looming about three kilometers ahead.

They gained on Jexx again. Tol motioned to Dagyo to get as much altitude as possible. They came in on top of the fugitive while matching his speed. Tol pointed at the cage, and then down. Dagyo nodded in comprehension and lowered the metal enclosure until it was right on top of Jexx, who had not heard them coming because of the rush of wind in his ears in the open cockpit of the glider.

Something suddenly tipped him off and he made a hard right turn in evasion just as Tol dropped down onto the fabric-covered fuselage behind Jexx. Tol scrambled wildly trying to hold on, and finally grabbed a spar from which control cables ran to the surfaces on each wing that controlled the turns of the glider. Straining mightily, he reached up and grabbed the left-hand wire, pulling it back as far as he could. The corresponding wing surface folded up, levelling the plane out contrary to Jexx’s control inputs.

Tol realized he now had effective mastery over the roll axis of the craft. He could counteract any attempt to upset the glider and knock him off it. Jexx scowled in anger and pulled back on the wheel, which brought the nose up until the wings no longer had any effective lift, at which point the glider stalled and dropped out of the air.

Tol hung on for dear life. When Jexx realized Tol was still there, he pushed the nose forward until the craft was once again flying. After a moment he began to twiggle the vertical control surface on the tail back and forth. This slewed the tail of the glider from side to side, making it difficult for Tol to hold on. He realized that Jexx would eventually succeed in dislodging him if he stayed put, so he started pulling himself centimeter by centimeter along the top of the glider’s fuselage, inexorably creeping toward the cockpit and Jexx himself.

Finally, with the glider yawing wildly and the fabric beginning to bulge and rip as a result, Tol laid one beefy hand over the edge of the partial nacelle surrounding the cockpit proper. He pulled himself into the opening while Jexx rained blows on him with his right fist. Tol shrugged them off and punched Jexx hard in the right ear. Stunned, he slumped forward on the wheel and the glider went into a steep dive. Tol tried to pull the unconscious half-ogre away from the control wheel, but the only other space in the tiny cockpit was currently occupied by Tol himself; there was no place to put Jexx.

Tol rolled his eyes. “Smek me: why isn’t anything ever easy?” He clambered back out along the spine of the craft toward the control surface cable spars. With his feet anchored under the lip of the cockpit, he reached back and grabbed both of the wires leading aft to the horizontal surfaces on the tail, pulling back as hard as he could. The glider abruptly stopped losing altitude and leveled out.

Tol realized that with the half-ogre’s body mass still resting on the control wheel, as soon as he released the cables the glider would resume its dive. Seeing as how they were only a hundred meters or so above the water now, that didn’t seem like a good idea. Trouble was, he was already growing fatigued from the intensely strenuous effort. Tol let out his breath and rested his head against the fabric. As he did he heard a whistling noise just above him and looked up to see that Dagyo had brought the cage to within reach. He took a deep breath, tensed, then in one motion released the cables while pushing off from the cockpit frame and grabbing the front edge of the suspended cage.

The glider pushed forward and resumed its dive, crashing into the water below at high speed and fracturing into a thousand fragments. Tol pulled himself up into the cage with his final remaining strength and slumped, breathing heavily as Dagyo winched him up to decrease drag. They puttered along for a few minutes until at last the gnome hovered over solid ground and lowered the cage to a meter above the beach. Tol dropped into the warm sand and briefly considered hugging it. He looked up at the crowd gathering and quite suddenly found himself in Selpla’s arms. They had come ashore at the Sellestra Placidum beach, not ten meters from where Selpla was sunning herself in a nice wooden chaise with down cushions.

“Tol! What on N’plork were you doing?”

“Landing,” Tol replied, closing his eyes and smiling blissfully.

Pieces of glider and half-ogre washed up on Yiks Island beaches for the next couple of weeks. Once most of Jexx’s head was discovered wrapped in seaweed, the case was officially closed. Tol and Selpla spent a few days actually resting and recreating—with emphasis on the recreating—before heading back to Tragacanth. Tol bought Dagyo a very nice dinner at the resort in appreciation for his services and promised once again to extol the virtues of the zifjagga to those responsible for EE acquisitions back in Goblinopolis.

in which a number of loose ends are secured, more or less

When Tol returned to Justice Hall, there was a diplomatic communiqué waiting for him from the office of Odinial Tartag in Hellehoell. It was requesting information on the whereabouts of a titan named Korq. The Hellehoell authorities had reason to believe that Sir Tol-u-ol was in possession of knowledge regarding his current location and respectfully asked for a meeting concerning said personage.

Tol laid down the parchment and leaned back in his padded executive swivel chair. He stared at a detailed map of Tragacanth on the far wall without seeing it and thought about how best to reply. He weighed the current excellent relations with the fledgling titan nation against the specter of slavery and racial elitism. Something about Korq’s story didn’t sit just right with him—never had. The titans had not betrayed any trace of that repugnant behavior in front of him, even under stress. Either they were first-rate actors as a race, or there was more to this than what Korq had given him.

Tol knew he couldn’t just ignore something that arrived in a diplomatic pouch. Not like the old days, anyway, when things just ‘fell behind his desk.’ Heads of State had a nasty habit of knocking on the door until someone answered. He sighed and poured a cup of stankabru. He knew what the right thing to do was, of course: confront the titans about the practice of enslaving half-breeds. For most of his life he would have plunged into that crusade without a second’s hesitation. He was strangely reluctant this time, and that reticence itself puzzled him.

Maybe he was just getting old. No, if he ever reached the age where he no longer felt compelled to act on known or suspected injustice, he would bloody well retire. He still enjoyed putting down the bad guys as much as ever. Slavery was abhorrent in N’plork societies, no matter what race you were, so it was definitely a hot- button issue and well worthy of his attention. So, what was holding him back?

Tol was still pondering as he walked into the central case file library for Tragacanthan EE. He sat down in one of the cubicles and started pulling records. Every cubicle had a copy of the master index list; investigators ticked the files they wanted to see and the automatic retrieval system dropped them down a chute. He selected records with the words ‘slave’ and ‘titan’ combined. Nothing popped up except the report he’d filed himself after returning from the
Grollnash
adventure.

He dropped the ‘titan’ keyword. A dozen files relating to people who claimed they’d been enslaved by one person or institution or the other came back; most of them were just rather loose definitions of ‘slave.’ So, he tried just ‘titan.’ Only a few files there, all of which were reports of people being terrorized by something they claimed was a ‘rock titan,’ but which proved to be the disgruntled next door neighbor or some wild critter that came down from the mountains looking for food.

He sighed again and headed over to the Royal Library to study up on titan society. The shelves weren’t entirely bare, but titans in the past were rather secretive—so much so that most of the other residents of N’plork thought they were either entirely mythical or extinct, at least until they suddenly began streaming into Hellehoell answering a summons no one else heard. There were a few slim tomes on archaeological finds with their attendant thinly-grounded speculations on function and social customs, but nothing concerning the titans’ views on enslavement or interracial breeding. Was that because there was nothing to report, or had it been expertly covered up by the titans themselves?

After a morning spent reading what little there was on titan social customs, Tol realized that he was just going to have to head back to Hellehoell and talk to the titans in person. He sighed one last time for good measure and filed the travel paperwork, then sent a message to Selpla that he would return in a couple of days.

Tol spent the carriage ride to Fenurian carefully devising the approach he was going to take. It had to be direct, at which he was quite adept, yet diplomatic, at which he was really not. He went back and forth among various planned strategies but in the end decided just to wing it, as always.

Because he was responding through official diplomatic channels, Tol was met at the station by the Tragacanthan Ambassador to Hellehoell, a career diplomatic service goblin named Liloth Tigli. She discussed the slavery issue with Tol and tried to convince him to gloss over it, which he flatly refused to do. He did promise her not to be accusatory or negative about it, however. Tol merely wanted, as he told the Ambassador, to ascertain the truth of the matter. If the titans wished to legitimize slavery within their society, they had the legal, if not moral, right to do so. Tol could not be compelled to countenance that practice, though.

Tol had steeled himself for what could prove to be a nasty confrontation, but the reality was quite different. He explained to Tartag that he was uncomfortable revealing the whereabouts of Korq before he investigated some disturbing claims the young titan had made concerning treatment of half-breeds. Tartag seemed genuinely perplexed at Korq’s report of being enslaved. He was the son of a prominent titan scholar whose life’s work had been research into improving crop yields to maximize the number of titans fed from a given plot of arable land. Because of his father’s inclusion amongst the heroes of titan society, Korq’s fate was of considerable importance to the people of Hellehoell; especially given that he simply, from their point of view, disappeared without a word.

“What sorts of experiments did his father do?”

Tartag consulted a document provided by the institute where Korq’s father was employed. “It says here he did selective cross- breeding, genetic manipulation, and something called ‘varietal magnification.’ He magnified certain nutritional attributes of food plants by very narrow and concentrated selective breeding.”

Tol considered this and had a thought. He didn’t know where the thought came from; it didn’t seem to be from his own brain.

“Is it possible that Korq himself did a little ‘experimentation’ with his father’s modified plants and ingested something that affected his thought processes? Specifically, generated a form of paranoia in him?”

Tartag blinked. “I...I suppose that is a possibility. I would have to consult with our experts. What made you think of that?”

Tol shook his head. “I’m not sure. I just felt when I was talking to Korq that something wasn’t quite clicking with his story. He told me that titans enslaved any who were not racially pure and that, as a half-breed, he had been essentially forced labor for pure-bred titans. His rhetoric reminded me of the drug-induced paranoids I ran into from time to time on the streets of Sebacea.”