Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1 (7 page)

Goblins are not delicate creatures. They have heavy bone structure, dense musculature, and very thick hide. They can take abuse that would pulverize most bipeds and come back for more with what passes in goblin facial morphology for a smile. After just two hits by his mysterious assailant, however, Tol wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t even smirking. He was hurting. This thing had all the subtlety of a speeding dray, but sported far better maneuverability and the apparent ability to climb buildings or fly. Besides a bruised and battered goblin, it left behind a very strange magical aura that Tol was beginning to find distantly familiar.

He still couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was something about the
modus operandi
of his opponent that tugged at the shirttails of his mind. (This would be a lot more effective metaphor if goblins habitually wore shirts, of course.) The scent began to get stronger again and Tol decided he couldn’t take another round of that punishment. He broke into a hobbled run for the alley. It didn’t make much difference that he’d be cornered there—he knew he couldn’t outrun the thing. At least he’d be covered on three sides. He found a small piece of ornamental stone cornicework that jutted out from beneath a window and ducked under it as a partial defilade.

Tol’s entrenched position forced a frontal attack, which was a bit of a gamble. The previous two assaults had been little more than glancing blows. If the thing hit him full in the chest, who knows if he’d even survive. But at least this way he might have a chance to get off a point blank disruptor shot. He pulled out the weapon and set it to emergency overcharge. This would give him two or three pulses at above maximum power before the weapon fried itself. He figured the battle would be over by then anyway, one way or the other.

The scent of the beast was once again growing intense. Tol dropped into his best EE academy-approved defensive stance with both hands bracing the disruptor, and waited. The air was very still, and the night strangely silent. He could hear his own heart beating—it sounded like someone with a jackhammer trying to remove his eardrums from the inside.

Suddenly a massive quadruped appeared, as though out of thin air, less than a meter from his face. His reflexes were on overdrive, and without thinking he squeezed off a shot. The disruptor belched out a hideous blaze of brilliant blue that drove the gun into his solar plexus. The energy bolt hit the monster full in the neck, just below the chin. It had roughly the same effect as trying to stop a moving carriage with a torch beam. Tol knew then and there without any shred of doubt that he was finished. The beast advanced on him, slavering jaws agape, and he fired his last shot right down its throat. The beast hesitated for a second, although he didn’t know if it had anything to do with his feeble attempt at defense. He threw the now useless disruptor into the hideous maw and waited for the end.

The little voice that had been nagging him now told him to reach into his overjack pocket. He didn’t have much else to do, in these last few seconds of life, so he decided to humor it. In that pocket was a hard, irregular lump that surprised him. He fingered it, and suddenly realized what it was. With a supernatural effort he launched himself sideways, squirming past the creature’s reactive paw swipe, and bolted for a garbage collection bin about five meters away. As he ran, he tossed the object over his shoulder in the general direction of the beast. It inscribed a graceful arc, halting abruptly at the apex, where it began to glow with a golden radiance. The beast slammed the brakes on its pursuit of Tol and stood perfectly still. The now brilliantly glowing object moved slowly and purposefully through the air, heading for a dark, ugly chasm rimmed with bluish residue in the beast’s left shoulder. It fit with fine precision into the gap, and as it made contact the golden glow spread until the entire beast was similarly illuminated. Tol could now see it for what it was. Not just an animate gargoyle.
A Guardian
.

The Guardian shook itself and stared straight into Tol’s fascinated eyes for a moment. Then it rose majestically into the air like some great dirigible and dematerialized, leaving behind a faint golden mist that gradually dispersed into what Tol now came to realize was the rather fetid atmosphere of the alleyway. He slumped against the garbage bin and exhaled slowly. It was nights like this he wished he’d taken his mother’s advice and gone into rock ranching.

Chapter Seven:
Change of State

A
spet had been a studious, focused young goblin for the first several years of his education. He had discovered computers somewhere along the way and grew more and more obsessed with them. He wasn’t very athletic, but nevertheless possessed the usual intense competitive spirit of his race. He found that engaging in ever more complex computer challenges allowed him to express his competitive instinct and achieve victory much more successfully than any physical activity would have permitted.

At first he’d been primarily interested in gaming. Online gaming was a huge enterprise in Tragacanth. Besides hundreds of local and regional hobbyist groups, there were two competitive professional leagues for games ranging from single-player-against-all-comers deathmatches to massively multiplayer pro-am games where amateurs competed for the right to join teams led by a professional gamer. It was very big business for the hosts, and very absorbing for the participants.

Aspet was a competent gamer, but gradually the thrill of simply fragging opponents, farming resources, and solving online puzzles began to pale for him. He hit upon modifying the factory configurations for the game console to optimize his experience. He spent his allowance on programming books and courses, and started hanging out in hacker areas on the net. He downloaded code and compiled it himself, then toyed with it to learn exactly how it worked. After a while he began to write his own utilities—simple at first, but becoming more and more complex as his knowledge base grew. He became adept at several of the most popular programming languages, but his very favorite was DOORS.

Before he was really aware of what was happening, Aspet had become a veritable expert at the ins and outs of programming in DOORS. He even created a small footprint subset of the operating system he named KNOBS (KineticNoodle’s Object Brokering System, after his online handle), for use in portable devices. This was a wildly popular move, and made Aspet one of the better-known hackers. Of course, everyone knew him as kineticnoodle, not Aspet, but that was by design because his parents would have been highly disturbed if they knew their little goblin cupcake was a, gulp,
hacker
. Not everything he’d learned had gone into creating free tools for legitimate use.

After Aspet finished school, he was looking around for his first real job when he came across an advertisement for The Seminar. He’d heard about The Seminar all his life, of course, but never paid much attention to it because it seemed too far from the reality of his personal world. The full name was
The Preparatory Seminar for Aspirants to Royal Office
, which of course is why it was popularly known as simply ‘The Seminar.’ This was far more than simply another Continuing Professional Education course, though—it served as the initial screening mechanism for future monarchs of Tragacanth. The final day of the event was a laboratory session where students pitted themselves against a team of crack Arnoc NetSec techs. Those who managed to achieve a set number of strategic objectives in this contest were certified as potential Royal Candidates and allowed to petition the Crown for the Right of Challenge, subject to approval by CoME.

Tragacanth had not always been a monarchial technocracy, of course. Until the advent of the digital age a hundred years ago it had been a conventional monarchy, ruled by a member of one of the three principal noble families, who juggled the throne among them. It had been a fairly stable system, but suffered from the utter lack of accountability to which hereditary absolute monarchies are inevitably subject.

The Royal government took little notice when computers began to dominate the command and control landscape in Tragacanth. Computers were just electronic filing machines to the King and his staff—as such they lay in the realm of clerks and other menials, well below the Royal purview. That indifference ended abruptly one night in the midst of a crucial negotiation with neighboring Galanga over a border dispute. The Tragacanthan King at the time, Rexingrasha II, was in usual goblin style attempting to intimidate the Galangan monarch by rattling sabers all along the disputed territory. The Galangan Potentate, a cerebral gnome named Clorvos, wasn’t having any. He ordered his highly-trained Silicommandos into action.

By noon the next day, Tragacanth was virtually without power, data mining, communications, financial transactions capability, or entertainment (other than the spontaneous massive public demonstrations protesting the Royal
faux pas
). Rexingrasha was furious, but he had little recourse but to back down, as his kingdom was in a crisis of chaos. Clorvos, to his credit, was fairly magnanimous about the whole thing. He wasn’t the aggressive, posturing sort, unlike the goblin—once Tragacanth backed off he instructed the Silicommandos to undo whatever damage they were able. The damage to Rexingrasha’s reputation, and to the noble status quo of Tragacanth, however, was irreversible.

For the first time, the citizens of Tragacanth realized that their leader, not to mention their information infrastructure, was vulnerable. Of course, they all knew deep down that kings were just people, with the same frailties and insecurities as everyone else, but up until now those shortcomings had been well-hidden by a combination of stellar public relations and the inherent goblin need to believe in the unassailable nature of their government. Suddenly their king, and by association their nation, had been violated by a foreign power—critically embarrassed on the world stage, as it were.

Goblin society does not tolerate weakness and failure very well. It wasn’t long before Rexingrasha found himself the object of derision, rather than the adulation to which he and his forebears were accustomed as monarchs. The Royal Protective Corps began to pick up signs, in fact, that a popular rebellion might be gaining momentum. This enraged the king, who felt that absolute obedience and unquestioned loyalty were his due as the head of state. He ordered the RPC to round up anyone whom they saw leading, advocating, or even—at the end—
looking
as though they
might
support a demonstration against the regime. This sort of strong-arm tactic just led to more resentment; violence and even civil war seemed inevitable.

The tinderbox was on the verge of ignition when an extraordinary event took place. For the first time since the founding of the Magineers, the Loca Magineer, an ancient named Preotimast, made a public appearance and appealed to the angry mobs for peace. He made a simple proposal: if the people did not want to be outgunned in the computer arena, why not ensure that their ruler was not only cognizant of computer technology, but among the best hackers around? Let the king prove himself worthy of leading the people, or step aside in favor of someone more capable. Preotimast had never been particularly impressed with Rexingrasha as a leader, anyway.

Such a radical proposal would have been met with scorn at best, exile at worst, if made by anyone else in the kingdom. The Loca Magineer, however, was in many ways the spiritual leader of Tragacanth; he commanded as much if not more respect than the king himself (especially under the current circumstances). Rexingrasha was predictably shocked by what he saw as Preotimast’s treachery. He ordered the Magineer’s arrest on charges of high treason, but the RPC seemed strangely reluctant to follow his command. They’d never had to arrest a Magineer before; they weren’t even sure such a thing was possible, given the defensive capabilities of the Loca Duber.

This reticence from his own household troops was the final straw for Rexingrasha’s mental health. He left the palace with his personal guard hurrying to keep up, rode to Royal Proclamation Square in the heart of Goblinopolis, and in a shrill and almost hysterical oration declared Preotimast a traitor to the Crown. The crowd that had gathered turned instantly hostile, and the king’s bodyguards were on the verge of being overwhelmed by the angry mob when the ‘traitor’ himself appeared again. The antagonists faced each other in silence in the center of the square for several minutes. Finally Preotimast spoke.

“It would seem, my Lord King, that you have reached an impasse. While I wish you no ill will, I cannot allow you to subvert the office of Magineer of Ferroc Loca. Nor, it appears, will the people of Tragacanth.”

Rexingrasha was vain, petty, officious, and occasionally callous, but he was not altogether dim. He added up the odds using all thirteen of his primary digits, realized that they weren’t even in the approximate neighborhood of good, and started looking around for a way to back out without losing what little face he had left. Not that a goblin face, even a king’s, would be any great loss.

By this time the Tragacanthan Army had rolled up to join the party, but they were disinclined to act once they saw how the wind was blowing. Backing the right horse has always been the goblin prime directive. The situation had degenerated into a whole lot of goblins (and a smattering of other races) standing around watching the king look for a hole to crawl into. This is actually the sort of thing that passes for popular public entertainment in Goblinopolis. A few enterprising bookies were giving odds and taking bets along the periphery.