Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1 (26 page)

From his pocket came a voice dripping with sarcasm. “Ah, yes. It would be a serious error on my part to assume you were intellectually capable of posing a rhetorical question.” Tol screwed up his face in a scowl and started to reply, but postponed it when the pen switched to its data readout voice.

“Simplistically, a multimodal dweomer repeater/concentrator, colloquially known in the industry as an ‘emdrec,’ is an electronic device for intensifying and focusing magical activity. It operates on the Quantum Equivalence principle, essentially providing a duplex inductive gateway between magical and conventional electrogravitational energy fields.”

“More magineer stuff. What’s Pyfox up to? Bidding for a major CoME supply contract?”

“That would be highly out of character for him.”

Tol grunted in agreement and proceeded to break into all the crates he could find with the PCI logo on them. Not a single one contained anything like what was listed on their manifests. “You’d think at least one of these would have gotten inspected at the docks. I think maybe it’s time to pay a little visit to the Port Inspector General’s office. Make an inventory of each crate, the merchandise it contains, and the corresponding manifests, and we’ll throw that to the PIGs.”

“Already done.” If the pen had eyes, it would be rolling them.

Tol chuckled. “Eyejay, Eyejay: just when I think it’s time to trade up to a crayon, you turn out to be somewhat useful, after all.”

“A crayon? I wouldn’t think you were qualified to operate anything so sophisticated.”

Tol held the pen up and looked at it. “Yeah, you’ve got a point. I’d better just stick with the simple stuff.”

Eyejay seemed to be working this out while Tol went about cracking open one last PCI container he’d stumbled across, this one a barrel rather a crate. Inside was a single cylindrical unit apparently made of a solid metallic core with a large collection of pipes, conduits, wires, and less identifiable gadgets encrusting it. Tol was a pretty meaty goblin, but even he had difficulty lifting the thing out of its protective packing cocoon. “What in almighty Plegma
is
this contraption?” He turned it around, looking for a label. There was nothing but a small plaque with a serial number and the words
zZingler zZ-1
. He read it out loud for the pen’s benefit. “You got any buzz on this?”

“I’ve been upgraded to insect now, have I? I suppose that’s better than crayon.”

“Hey, I said crayon was a
goal
. Any results yet?”

Eyejay harrumphed—yet another sound Tol hadn’t been aware a pen could make—and after a few seconds began again.

“There’s nothing in the product registration database, but I did find one reference to a prototype bearing that designation on a military Requisition Ticket For Materiel issued a couple of years ago. It doesn’t seem to have been accepted by the government, though.”

“Hmm. Any descriptive language attached to that RTFM?”

“Just a general
Statement of Proposed Functionality
. It reads as follows:

A flux generator for dampening quantum fields within a given radius to modulate or eliminate magical activity.

Basically, a null-magic device.”

Tol furrowed his unibrow and paced. “Since when does Pyfox give a wet sloppy smek about magic or technology? He’s always been more the contraband/money laundering type, with a side order of protection racketeering.”

“First-order pattern analysis suggests some sort of infrastructure involving a magical interface along the approximate lines of a Duber, albeit presumably minus the Arnoc node.”

“Surely even Pyfox wouldn’t be presumptuous enough to try to build his own private interface. What’s in it for him? He can’t charge Magineers to use it—they can already access the government ones for free.
Gotta
be an angle here somewhere...”

Tol kept adding up the numbers in his head but he couldn’t make the balance sheet work. He frowned and started to move crates around.

“If I asked you what you were looking for, would I regret it?”

“I don’t know. I just have a gut feeling there’s another important piece of this puzzle lying around in here somewhere.”

“A gut feeling? Ah, I can see your point. The central nervous system hasn’t been performing at all well as a decision-making organ, so why not try the gastrointestinal? Especially when there’s so much of it.”

“You know, if you were any funnier I’d rent you out to emcee at funerals.”

“That would a violation of departmental pol-”

“Clam up, diode butt. I’m workin’ here.”

Tol was tossing crates around willy-nilly now, blindly following his cop’s instincts. There was something almost palpable just on the verge of coalescing into a concrete thought dancing around in his subconscious, and he wanted to give it as much opportunity to solidify as possible. Besides, as long as he was making this much noise he couldn’t hear Eyejay’s color commentary. He redistributed a new layer of wooden boxes and suddenly something caught his eye. It was a row of barrels identical to the one he’d just examined. He shoved a stack of crates aside and found even more barrels. As he continued clearing away boxes and crates, he ran across more and more of the barrels, each with the same
zZingler zZ-1
label. All in all, after over an hour’s hard work, Tol found at least a hundred of the zZ-1 units, most in a tightly-packed raft camouflaged by dozens of boxes and smaller crates.

A hundred magic-dampening units, emdrecs, field generators, transducers. Even a technically-challenged EE grunt like Tol could begin to see a pattern here. “Eyejay,” he said, biting his lower lip, “Correlate all the devices we’ve so far discovered and tell me what industrial or scientific enterprises they would be appropriate to. Discount, at least for the moment, the possibility that they might simply be warehouse inventory.”

“Stand by,” the pen replied, “My comm link is cutting out. I need to do a spectrum scan and lock onto an alternate primary biphasic carrier.”

“Knock yourself out. Just try not to take all day doing it.”

“I shall endeavor not to take up too much of your precious time. I would not want to be accused of impeding the march of idiocy.”

“Did I say, ‘knock yourself
out?’ How thoughtless of me. Please, allow me to do it
for
you.”

“That sounds considerably more in line with your personality and acumen, although I do worry that it might tax your intellect.” Eyejay noted the rise in Tol’s blood pressure and respiration rate, and continued hurriedly, “I suggest you postpone it, however, so that I may parse and deliver the new datastream.”

Tol smashed a huge fist into his palm, took a deep breath, and answered with a curt, “Go.”

“While there are multiple feasible scenarios in which this particular collection of instrumentation might be appropriate, the most likely explanation is that Pyfox is planning some sort of large-scale disruption of access to magical space.”

All at once a large chunk of the puzzle assembled itself in one corner of Tol’s mind and plopped down in front of him. Thoughts of pen-directed hostility were tossed aside as he considered this new information.

“Disruption of magical spa....wait a smekkin’ minute! That guy with the face fur and smooth skin in the pub. He said somethin’ about a plan to whack The Slice. Maybe Pyfox is mixed up in that somehow. But what’s in it for him? Doin’ away with magic would screw up everything. We’d either have to figure out how to get along without it, which would be a disaster, or find some way to get it...back...” He tailed off as the full significance of this scenario hit him. Tol trudged the rest of the way up the ramps in silence, chewing on this.

“I wonder,” Tol mused several minutes later as he stepped once more into the light of day, “If that horker could actually pull it off?” As though in answer to this question (which it was), Eyejay chirped from his pocket. “By my best estimation he could, given judicious deployment of personnel and equipment. The key would be effectively neutralizing the existing Dubers while maintaining the security of the null magic generators. I have calculated only a 0.023% chance of that being a successful tactic over the long term, however.”

“Not very good odds,” Tol reflected, “but...what if The Slice were somehow rendered inaccessible except through one heavily fortified portal controlled by Pyfox?”

“Feasible. Collapsing the quantum gateway in all but a narrowly-specified position would take both enormous energy and an intimate understanding of the transdimensional architecture involved, however. There are few, if indeed any, living creatures with that sort of knowledge at their command.”

“Yeah, Pyfox couldn’t cast a spell even if it was printed in large block letters on the back of a racing form. So, who gave him the guts of this scheme and why?”

“Logic would suggest it was someone who stood to profit from the outcome. Or perhaps, given the nature of the individual in question, some degree of coercion was involved.”

“I’d say that’s a pretty sure bet. Pyfox rarely employs the art of gentle persuasion when brute force will do. But who would know enough about this stuff to help him, coerced or not?”

“There are a few possible candidates in my database, but they are all very remote. The one who seems most likely under the current circumstances is Clostridius Perspice.”

Tol rolled his eyes. “Right. I don’t think Pyfox has that kind of clout.”

“Perhaps not, but Gramidius Contentius quite possibly does, and Pyfox is known to have strong ties to the Belladonna organization.”

“What could even Grami do to convince someone with Perspice’s power and influence to participate in a caper like this? I know Archmages are traditionally amoral, but jacking around with access to magic is not something he’d be likely to do.”

“Certainly such an action would not seem to be consistent with his self-interests or prior behavior patterns. However, organic creatures have a marked tendency to grow increasingly irrational with age and Archmage Perspice is well over two hundred years old now. There is ample evidence that, at least in the past, Gramidius considered the archmage to be a close personal friend; it is not illogical to presume that this friendship persists and may even have strengthened. Gramidius himself is, according to public records, 247 years of age.”

Tol made no reply because just then a shadow passed over them and he found himself staring up at a huge, heavily-muscled, oddly familiar beast. It did not seem particularly pleased to see him.

“I’ve had it up to the dorsal hump with that thing. What the smek does it want from me now?” Tol yelled as he dove behind a traffic signal box. “It is a Guardian,” Eyejay explained calmly, “it was created to protect something or someone. I would speculate that it considers you a threat to...whatever it has been put under geas to guard.”

“What, by just walking down the street minding my own smekkin’ business? What the smek is it guarding?”

“Good taste, perhaps?”

“Har de har har. The electric tweezers made a joke. Laugh this off, fun-o-matic: that thing weighs as much as a good-sized pram, and if it stomps me
you’re
going to end up looking like the blade of a palette knife, no matter what kind of fancy-schmancy alloy you’re made of.”

“That possibility has occurred to me, in abeyance of which I therefore suggest you move approximately one meter to your right as soon as is practicable.”

Tol leapt aside, looking over his shoulder as he did to watch a huge paw come crashing down and leave a gaping, crumbled hole in the sidewalk where he’d been standing a moment before.

“I wish to smek you’d learn that complete sentences are not always optimum for communication in tight spots like that. I...
we
...could have been flattened.”

“Next time I will be more succinct. Duck!”

Tol mouthed Eyejay’s last word with a puzzled look on his face until peripheral vision afforded him a glimpse of the stone-gray oblivion swinging towards his head. The meaning of the reply became crystal clear in the split second while he dropped to his stomach and rolled, getting clipped in the noggin in the process. “I guess I asked for that,” he muttered, rubbing the throbbing grutch egg blossoming in the fertile ground just below his inferior occipital ridge.

“I suggest you either run away with considerable alacrity or go on the offensive, because the energy aura surrounding this Guardian is intensifying rapidly.”

Tol whipped out his weapon and snapped off the safety. “I’ve never been very good at retreating. Something to do with being clumsy running backwards.” He dove to avoid a vicious claw slash, tripping in the process and ending up in a crumpled heap.

“Yes, I can see that would be an issue, given your level of grace in forward movement.”“Who the smek programmed you to be sarcastic? What kind of desirable trait is that in a personal digital assistant?” He fired point blank into the gaping maw of the beast as it narrowly missed taking off his head with a single awe-inspiring chomp.

“I was not
programmed
for sarcasm, as such. I was programmed to be adaptive to the social milieu in which I operate. Sarcasm is simply a logical adaptation to being constantly in your vicinity.”