Rebel Skyforce (Mad Tinker Chronicles) (33 page)

“So how’d you end up with ‘em, Buckets? I thought Tabby had you trussed up in church-day clothes, keeping clear of us ne’er-do-wells.”

“Kid’s got a sniffer on him, that’s how,” Pick said. “I taught him too good, and he tracked us down. Can you believe that?”

“How’d Tabby take it?”

“I left her a note,” Buckets replied. “Ain’t seen her since.”

“Think you could send that step-through circle over to get her?” Hayfield asked. “Might not be safe in Eversall, if folk get to puttin’ pieces together.”

“My father’s got a grid laid out, back and forth, up and down across the continent. We were already past Eversall when we picked you boys up. I can see about stealing some time tomorrow to go say ‘hi’ to her.”

“Do I have to be there?” Buckets asked, shrinking down and looking up at Rynn with baleful eyes.

Rynn twisted her mouth up sideways and frowned as she studied Bucket’s expression for hints of sincerity. “No. You should be there, but I won’t make you. I could use
you
there, though,” she said to Hayfield. “You always had a way with Tabby.”

Pick snickered. Rascal elbowed him in the ribs.

“What?” Rynn asked, looking from one to the other, then to Hayfield.

Hayfield grimaced and scratched at his head. “Yeah, she’s had her way with me, too.”

Realization dawned and Rynn’s eyes opened wide as her spectacles. “But—but I never—”

Rascal chuckled. “Yeah, you were always a bit dense about that sorta thing, and you were too young for her to talk to you about woman stuff.” The rest joined in, leaving Rynn the butt of the joke this time.

“I’ve missed you guys,” Rynn admitted as the laughter at her expense died down.

“Yeah, I saw the way freemen is lookin’ at you,” said Pick. “You ain’t got no one ‘round here who knows you for real.”

Rynn opened her mouth to object, but nothing came out.
I have Sosha
. Who was as similar to Rynn as a lap cat is to a mouser.
Father. No, not him either.
Rynn and her father were alike—too alike for the comfort of either, yet with enough differences in all the wrong places to make it grate when they argued. The other twinborn were her father’s friends, colleagues, underlings. They saw her as General Rynn or Miss Madlin, depending on the time of day and which world they were awake in.

A freeman rebel dropped by with their next round of drinks. On impulse, Rynn hoisted hers toward the ceiling and made a toast. “To having a bunch of low-born tunnel rats around, willing to tell me to piss off when I need it!”

“Piss off!” came the reply in chorus. They raised their mugs and clanged them over the middle of the table, sloshing sudsy ale over the sides.

The engine of the thunderail as seen through the world-ripper had been turned into a ragged mesh, more hole than whole. Kuduks watching from the station platform screamed in horror and fled in all directions as boiler water leaked onto the tracks, tinged with blood. The thunderail wouldn’t be leaving while the Errol Company soldiers went to work.

“Search the cars, find the slaves, and get them out here,” Erefan ordered. “No human casualties, and that includes you lads. Understood?”

“Yes, sir!”

The Errol soldiers piled through the hole, each carrying a coil pistol at the ready. A team of twenty was overkill, a concept which Erefan appreciated when he was on the proper end of it. Erefan watched them storm into the thunderail, car by car, chasing out kuduk passengers and heaving corpses out doors and windows from the ones that had gotten too involved in the proceedings. Human passengers ducked to keep clear of the gunfire as ball bearings whizzed about at speeds rifle-launched bullets couldn’t come close to. They scurried along the tracks and followed the freeborn rebel voices coming from the
Jennai’s
side of the world-hole.

Reluctant rebels could be returned later. The priority lay in getting humans aboard the airship before kuduk forces arrived to make things interesting.

Erefan could have spent a bit of time figuring out which was the slave car. He had a good idea just by looking at the outsides, but he could have panned down the length of the thunderail to make certain. But it wasn’t about saving one car of slaves, nor was it about the one particular slave that had taken him on this detour from his grid pattern. If they were going to free humans from kuduk rule, there was to be no nibbling the meat from the stew—they would take everyone they could.

After a time, the soldiers found the right car, and a line of unwashed, ragged slaves slogged down the tracks and into the cargo hold with the machine. Among them, Powlo.

“About bleeding time,” said Powlo as he separated himself from the herd and stopped by Erefan’s chair. “Could you maybe have spared me half a day’s ride in that thing?”

“I got the schedule. I knew when you’d be stopped. I wasn’t about to attack a moving target when I could take one at rest. Simple physics.”

“Bugger your physics. I want a bath.”

Erefan nodded. “Next stop is Tinker’s Island for you. I want you cleaned up, changed, and ready to help loot Kezudkan’s workshop in an hour.”

That changed Powlo’s demeanor. A tight grin twisted the corners of his mouth, and his eyes hardened. He nodded. “You can count on that.”

Erefan took a tinker’s eye to Powlo’s collar. “Nothing fancy, that. Should come off like a greased fitting. Stop and get one of the machinists to pop it off before you report to Orris. He’ll be running the machine from that side.”

Everyone had returned through the world-ripper. Erefan opened the switch and turned it back into an observation window. Powlo stood at the ready, waiting. And waiting.

“Any time, tinker.”

“Soon as we see that workshop.”

Powlo seethed an impatient breath through his nostrils, but relented. He directed Erefan to a workshop in Cavinstraw Deep, and in moments they were staring at a twin of the world-ripper they were using.

“Your word that I get to be there soon as you go.”

“Agreed,” said Erefan.

The settings for Tinker’s Island were so ingrained that Erefan had no cause to look in his notes for the coordinates. They had been nailed to the sky long enough that he’d opened the same hole countless times. Erefan saw Powlo through to Tinker’s Island, then slumped back in his chair a moment. When that moment had run its course, he went to see about some dinner. He’d been so long at his work that he hadn’t eaten since morning.

Kezudkan reclined with his feet propped on a stool and an elbow leaning on the table. His eyes had a dusty film on them from not having blinked for the past several hours as he stared. The viewing frame in the world-ripper, buried in his abandoned mine lair, showed the same image of Draksgollow’s workshop. Without so much as turning his head, he reached for one of the charred pork-on-a-stick delicacies he’d had the cooks prepare. It came on a little wooden spear, just to prove how expensive it was. He dipped it absently in a bowl of tar and crunched down, biting through wood and all.

Patience. Men with patience are rewarded. Men with too much patience ossify in their chairs and need a chisel to rise again. Kezudkan squirmed in his seat, just enough to crack his joints loose before settling in again.

Thus it was with Kezudkan, and when he had waited long enough, a hole from another world-ripper irised open in the middle of the workshop floor. Kezudkan sucked the tar from his fingers and fumbled for his cane. Every joint in his body wanted to make a statue of him, but he lurched to his feet and stood in front of the viewer.

Erefan, you sly rat, you. I’ve got you now.
The slave tinker wore no collar, and might have added a bit of meat to his bones. He was first through the hole, followed by a crew of humans, crawling over the workshop like bipedal insects. When a second hole opened by the side of the first, Kezudkan found himself only mildly surprised. After all, he owned three himself, with a fourth under construction.

The first human through the other hole was Chapun. That wily slave had gotten his collar off as well. These humans were enterprising and organized.
I should have put Erefan in charge of the estate years ago. We could have been a model of efficiency.
Kezudkan was in a generous mood. Why shouldn’t he be? He was right once again, and Draksgollow was wrong.

Erefan and Chapun engaged in a brief conversation, then Chapun left the field of vision available in the view frame. Kezudkan could have moved it, of course, but he had set it up so very cleverly and precisely. His view was the reverse angle of the inert viewer in the now human-infested workshop. Patience.

“Camera,” said Kezudkan over his shoulder. One of the silent kuduk workers pulled himself from where he was leaning (or napping, perhaps) against the wall and picked up a camera and tripod. “Set up right there, and get me shots that can see into those other two holes there.”

Kezudkan’s vision was poor by objective standards, though for his age he felt his eyes were better than they had any right to be. He could see the two world-rippers through the holes they created. It was a setup nearly identical to the one they had arranged in Eversall for the prototype. Erefan was nothing if not a creature of habit. It worked, so he kept it.

“Get the guns ready,” he ordered.

Two more kuduks stepped out of the chamber’s shadows with rotorifles and took up positions flanking the view frame. “Steady with those now. They’re the contingency, not the plan.”

Erefan was gaping around at the workshop as his minions swarmed around, busy at whatever tasks they’d been given. Kezudkan gave less than a muddy sock about the minions. Erefan was talking to himself, looking up toward the ceiling. He grew more animated by the second, shook his fist at the workshop roof. It was a marvelous show, made all the more special when the flame lit in Kezudkan’s mind and he realized Erefan was cursing him from afar. Oh, how delicious! It could only have been more perfect had Kezudkan been able to lip read.

He must think this is his victory speech. I’ve half a mind to open the hole so he can deliver it in person.
Of course, there were good reasons not to do so. For one, he was just as happy not taking the risk that one of those wicked rune-powered guns ended up aimed his way. More importantly, he had worked everything out so perfectly otherwise. It would be a shame to spoil it; a momentary amusement at the cost of a greater pleasure later.

Erefan calmed himself and got down to the business of a more pointed inspection. The idiot Chapun should hopefully have told Erefan that there was only the one machine. He and Draksgollow had talked in front of the human about the progress of the ‘second’ machine when discussing the fourth one. Erefan had no expectation that he could be watched at that very moment, that there was another machine right there, waiting.

“Yes, that’s good. Get curious. You can’t help yourself.”

Erefan walked to the viewing frame, and despite knowing that Erefan’s side was turned off and his own was just a view, Kezudkan felt a rumbling little thrill. A human hand brushed against the webwork of copper in the frame, out of
sight just behind the view. It appeared from Kezudkan’s view that Erefan’s hand pressed against the surface of the hole, a black spot where no light came through.

“Go on. You’re curious. Have a seat and find out where I pointed it.”

After his inspection of the view frame, Erefan sat at the controls. He ought to have known them, Kezudkan’s machine was based on notes and sketches from the original. The book had been vague on details of the controls, so Erefan had filled them in to his liking and Kezudkan copied them wholesale.