Rebel Skyforce (Mad Tinker Chronicles) (35 page)

If there was another question, it was swallowed in a hail of rotorifle fire. Madlin spun to see a world-hole open in far corner of the workshop, well clear of most of the wreckage. She’d heard of steam tanks, but never seen one with her own eyes. It was a crawling brick of steel and glass, dragging itself through the world hole on studded steel belts. If certain fascinating details of its construction escaped her, it was because Madlin’s attention was drawn to the muzzle flashes of a rotogun spinning too fast for her to even take count of the barrels.

Rynn’s instincts took over—no, Chipmunk’s. The rebel army could call her what they liked, but it was Chipmunk who had been shot at. Madlin ducked behind the bulk of the control console and saw the cleaning crew torn to pieces. She squeezed her eyes shut to keep any more of the image from burning itself into her mind. There was a distinctive screeching rumble as the steam tank dragged itself into Tellurak, and she guessed that the second such sound wasn’t an echo following behind it.

No shot had been fired in her direction.
They want the machine intact.
Well, intact might have been asking too much, but they didn’t want to damage it any further. Madlin wasn’t about to let that advantage pass without availing herself. There was a small cluster of offices at the side of the workshop, through a door and down a hallway, from when the world-ripper’s workshop had been used as a warehouse. A workshop required little in the way of clerical support, but a warehouse needed shippers, accountants, freightmasters, and crew supervisors. Those functionaries had lost their offices in the conversion, but the rooms were still there.

Madlin ducked at the waist and ran, tool belt and holster flapping at her thighs. If she’d been armed with a coil gun, she might have stayed and slugged it out with a single steam tank, hoping to ventilate the crew before they got a bead on her with the rotoguns. With two, the odds of her getting turned into ground meat where she stood was nearly one hundred
percent, even if she had a weapon to fight back with. She reached the door handle in seconds, but flinched at every burst of rotogun fire, expecting each to be capped off with a searing pain that never came. On the far side of the door, the hall was dark. She was willing to take the darkness over the invitation of an open door, but when she moved to close it, she saw that two of her mechanics had followed her.

“Come on. Move!” Madlin waved them through the door. No fools, they—the mechanics monkeyed after Madlin’s bent-over run and slipped through the door behind her. With both through, she slammed the hall door behind her.

“Alder? Bakersfield?”

“They got got.” It was as succinct an answer as she was likely to get. No detail, for which she was thankful.

The hallway ran parallel to the workshop wall. They heard the rotogun fire and shouts from the bass voices of kuduks, all muffled through the stone-block walls, but still too loud for comfort. “Last office on the south side,” said Madlin, leading the way without waiting for confirmation. She hustled down the hall, dragging a hand along the left side wall, counting doors. The fourth door was the last; any farther and she would have hit the far wall.

The door opened with a faint click. There was no lock to worry over. A double-window, hung with lavender curtains, was the only thing inside. The desk, the files, the chair, all had been removed. She popped the catch and thrust the window open. She didn’t bother to check on the mechanics. They made enough noise that there was no question of whether they’d kept up.

Outside the gunfire sounded distant. Madlin heard it by the echoes from the other buildings, from the mountainsides. Answering fire came in a discordant chorus of single shot rifles. There was no telling how well they’d hold out. Errol Company made the best arms Tellurak had ever seen, but Korrish military hardware was still a cut above. Cadmus had plans drawn up for rotoguns, steam tanks—even the twenty-crew behemoths—but nothing that had made it past vellum. The coil guns were so simple to build by comparison that all production had been diverted to those.

The workshop! Workshops abounded in Tinker’s Island, but there was one that came to mind: the one where her coil guns were pieced together. Her first thought, and her first step, was to arm herself. But she stopped.
Father
. She couldn’t rush off to play the hero, not until she’d seen that he was safe, or at least on his way to safety. In his current state of mind, there was no telling how he’d respond to the attack. He might slip into despair, he might decide to play general-from-out-front with a rifle in his hand and go out fighting. Madlin was hoping for something along the lines of slipping away quietly into the mountains.

“You two are with me.”

The mechanics nodded and followed Madlin on her looping route to her house. There was a straight avenue from the Errol home to the world-ripper, but the population of airborne bullets in the area made it a bit too crowded for her tastes. She and her escorts slipped down side streets and alleys. The echoes of the gun battle caught her ears weirdly, coming from all directions, sounding at times like they were chasing the battle, at other times rightly that they were fleeing it.

The door to her house hadn’t arrived soon enough for her liking, but they got to it intact.

“I want the two of you to get down to the docks. The
Treforge
is in port, and her deck guns ought to be able to handle a steam tank, if you can hit one.”

“Miss Madlin, I ain’t never fired one of them guns.” His companion nodded agreement.

“Stop at Captain Tucker’s on the way. If you can grab him, do it. If you can’t, you smart fellas are going to do some quick learning.”

Madlin sped them on their way and went inside.

In the foyer of the house, Cadmus stood with a scattergun in hand, jamming cartridges into the breech. Thankfully the Mad Tinker had the presence of mind to dress himself before heading off for his assault. “Madlin!” He gave a single laugh. “I got it figured out. Ten minutes from now, I’ll have my foot on that daruu bastard’s corpse. He’s in the iron mines a little over a mile from here, except in Korr. Great minds, eh? Hah!” Cadmus snatched up a pile of papers covered in pencil scratches—equations, diagrams, coordinates.

“Father, what are you doing?” Madlin asked. “We’re under attack. Great minds, my arse! You got out-mathed. They found us first.”

Cadmus’s face went slack, eyes gaping. “No. We can’t be. He couldn’t have guessed. He saw through our world-holes. Must have seen our dials. BLOODY BASTARD! I’LL KILL HIM.”

“That’s a nice thought, but they brought steam tanks, and we’re getting pushed—”

“Is this a festival day?”

Madlin’s head snapped toward the hall, where a bed-haired Dan was yawning as he walked toward them.

“Winds, you people make a racket. I was up late studying those—”

“Dan!” Madlin’s trip to the workshop for half-assembled coil guns suddenly seemed a like a fool’s errand. “We’re under attack.”

Dan stopped mid-stretch. “You’d better not be dangling apples over my head.”

“We’re. Under. Attack. Full scale assault from a Korrish force coming through their own world-hole. We’re being overrun.”

She wasn’t sure what she expected. Dan had never shown cowardice, or shyness to fight. But the prospect seemed daunting. The rational part of her considered a soldier’s response, a grim acceptance of duty with a clenched jaw and a nod. The worrier in her thought he might toy with her, let the daruu’s force take the city and help them escape by the slimmest margin. His actual response sent a shiver through her.

His eyes widened and a little smile grew into a toothy grin. “Happy age-day to me.” Dan strode past Madlin and snapped his fingers. The nightshirt he wore transformed, turning into a costume of black silk and matching leather boots, with a long cloak, draped in lacquered chain at the shoulders. She felt the aether swirl around her, rushing in the direction of the departing boy. Though there was no physical force, she found herself leaning against the current of it.

The doors to the Errol mansion were thick timber, bound in brightsteel. Madlin had to lean whenever she pushed them open. Dan threw them from the hinges and stepped through the gaping passage that they left.

Madlin and Cadmus looked to one another in the wake of Dan’s departure. “You still want to run out there with a scattergun?”

With the doors burst open, the sounds of the battle carried clearly into the foyer. Cadmus looked down at the scattergun clenched in his hand. What thoughts ran through that mind of his—that twisted conglomeration of gears and levers, all powered on steam, not spark—Madlin was sure she couldn’t imagine. It went on too long for her liking.

“Go down to the docks. I sent a couple mechanics to see about using the guns on the
Treforge
. It’d be nice to know someone there knew the workings, if they can’t snag Tucker on their way.”

Cadmus nodded, blinked a few times, shook his head, and nodded again. “Right. Of course.” He set his pages of calculations down on a side table and jogged out the door.

Let him set his mind to a task—anything that kept him from realizing that Dan might be able to clear a path to the invading world-ripper and to Kezudkan beyond. In his current state, he was not fit for vengeance.

Madlin set off in the young warlock’s wake. With some hope of fighting back, it was time to act the part of a general.

The exchange with Cadmus had taken mere moments. If Madlin had known how far she had fallen behind, she would have run.

The streets of Tinker’s Island still cracked with gunfire. Rotoguns must have numbered in the dozens, and between bursts, the hum and scrape of the steam tanks could be heard plodding along, clearing out opposition. There was nothing shoddy about the construction of the local buildings. No wood or plaster walls stood readily shredded by bullets, but thick stone blocks, piled and mortared. The defenders took up positions in houses and shops, making miniature fortresses of them. They had been built against the harsh weather, but met their new challenge well.

Dan’s path through the battlefield was easy to follow. Kuduk ground troops had joined the fight, packed up inside suits of steel-plated leather, with glass-faced helms, each with a filter canister protruding to either side of the mouth. Madlin got a good, close look at them, inside as well as out. The bodies lay scorched and torn in the middle of the road, leaking blood over the cobbles. The suits looked well guarded against bullets, but no bullet had felled any of the kuduks Madlin saw. She could imagine a fairy-story dragon had descended and taken umbrage with the invading force, such were the great gashes and burns covering their bodies.

From a block away, judging by the sound, she heard the thunderous crash and metallic clatter that could only have been one of the steam tanks running into misfortune. A tinkling of falling parts followed, then another great crash like the first. Madlin rounded the back corner of Joskin’s Fine Jackets to see one of the steam tanks flipped like a turtle, studded belts drifting to a halt, with the driver’s cabin smashed flat. Miraculously, someone was stirring inside.

Dan strode toward the wreck, showing confidence but no sign of hurry. He leaned to peer in through the glassless frame of the side window. “What are you rutting monsters made of?” he asked offhandedly. He stuck a hand into the opening and unleashed a gout of flame. A riot of gunfire answered as the ammunition overheated and fired wherever it lay within. Madlin ducked back around the corner until the bullets stopped. When she dared peek, Dan was already moving, keeping to the sides of buildings but showing no other precaution.

Madlin muttered to herself as she set off in pursuit. “I’m crazy. He needs my help like—” She cut off abruptly, not that anyone was around to listen. Up in one of the upper floor windows of a multi-apartment worker barracks, she saw a glass-masked kuduk taking aim at Dan with a tri-barrel rotogun.

The call of warning died in her throat. Madlin couldn’t risk drawing the kuduk’s attention. She drew her revolver and took careful aim through the site, lining up the kuduk in the crosshairs much as the kuduk looked to be sizing Dan up for a barrage. She put a bullet through the center of the mask, shattering the glass. The rotogunner fell out of sight away from the window. She had no time to waste. Dan was continuing away from her, not fast, but not stopping, either.

The boy warlock kept his path erratic. He turned down side streets and doubled back after clusters of troops, but always kept a general course toward the world-ripper. It took all Madlin’s efforts to keep up with him without stumbling into an ambush. Twice more she fired on and struck kuduk soldiers too preoccupied with Dan to notice her in time.