Tinker's Justice (8 page)

“This should have been a two-machine raid. We could have hit them from multiple angles, right off.” He knew Lieutenant Fedrin was listening, but he didn’t care. Fedrin was no fool, and must have been thinking the same thing. Most of the operators were clods, simple dial-turners who happened to be quick with their hands. Fedrin was an officer, a bit quiet and bookish, but he had a head for strategy. He kept the viewframe on the most critical areas, shifting angle and location to match the flow of the battle.

“Sir!” Fedrin shouted. “Reinforcements!”

“Those rat bastards,” Knorlen grumbled. “How many of you are there?” He closed his fingers around the grip of his coil gun. It was now or never. To Fedrin he shouted, “Open the hole. Grab your sidearm and help me hold them off.”

Fedrin, to his credit, did not hesitate. The young Lieutenant threw the switch and rushed to the dangerous side of the bullet-thick glass, weapon drawn. The human reinforcements screamed to one another and dove for cover, but Fedrin had left them a prime firing angle. Knorlen and Fedrin were both taking cover and reloading before the humans found anyplace safe from their withering fire.

“Don’t worry, lads. We’ve got your covered,” Knorlen leaned around to shout through the open world-hole.

That was when the first canister came through, plinking onto the stone floor of the world-ripper chamber. It bounced erratically, the oblong cylindrical shape hitting the ground with a mind of its own. After bouncing harmlessly off the bullet-thick glass, the canister came to rest between Fedrin and Knorlen.

“Gas!” Knorlen shouted. He sucked in a deep breath of clean air, then buried his nose and mouth in the crook of his elbow, letting the wool of his uniform act as makeshift breather cloth. He and his squad didn’t have gas masks on hand; humans just hadn’t shown a propensity for using gas canisters, by all reports. Dropping his coil gun, Knorlen dove for the canister, hoping to throw it back into the midst of the humans—who also wore no masks—before it went off.

Just before he scooped the canister from the floor, two more joined it, clanging along the ground in an ominous chorus. “Throw them back,” he ordered, his voice muffled by his own sleeve.

But Knorlen had been right in his initial assumption. The humans did not have gas canisters, nor was that what he held in his hand. Crackling spark stung his hand, coming from runes etched all around the canister. His introduction to the exploding rune dynamo was very, very brief.

The sun was nothing short of an open furnace door hanging in the sky. Draksgollow thought he had been prepared for it. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, and along with all his men he wore tinted goggles against the glare. But there was no escaping that blast-wave heat from above, not without retreating back to the consistent cool of the deep, not without losing face. Certainly, he was not letting his men off so easily. If half the human population of Korr could take the outdoor heat in the growing season, so could fifty kuduk soldiers for a few hours.

The ground was spongy beneath his boots, lacking the comforting solidity of rock. With every step, he half expected it would give way and let him sink in to the knee or worse. Nothing grew in rock though, and to find farmers he needed to go where the ground was arable soil, not stone or even clay. An unfamiliar stench wafted everywhere, coming from all directions. Asking around had gotten him no answers to its source, since none of the kuduks knew, and none of the humans seemed to have the first clue what he was saying—not that they were inclined to be helpful anyway.

His soldiers tromped through wheat fields and orchards, pastures and sties. They were on their eighth world-hole of the day, the Telluraki humans spread maddeningly over half the continent. They congregated in cities, but city humans weren’t the ones he was looking for. City humans of this world were spoiled, soft, and either scrawny or fat, with too little in the brawny middle ground that he wanted. Countryside humans, even the scrawny ones, were built for hard work, with muscle on their bones and muscle in their heads. A thinker was the last thing he needed in a human.

Kep stood at his side, a clipboard in hand, taking the tally. A squad of four approached, two holding either end of a line of chained humans, two others flanking with leather-wrapped clubs in hand. The humans had put up a fight, but his men had it beaten out of them. Bruises, bloodied faces, welts all over, the menfolk had been almost too much trouble to keep. But now all of them were trussed up, wrists chained up behind their backs, tethered to their collars so that they had to strain to keep from choking themselves. They stumbled along as best they could, no doubt imagining bloody vengeance enacted on his person.

Draksgollow chuckled at one thuggish farmhand who had the gall to glare at him on the way by. He took his own club from his belt and reoriented the farmhand’s eyes in the direction he was walking. “Yeah, you don’t know what I’m saying, but you’re going to learn some manners.” He turned to Kep and lowered his voice. “Muddy piss, we’ve got to get someone to translate to these savages.”

Kep snickered, holding up the clipboard. “Don’t look at me, I just count ‘em.”

“Speaking of, what’s the count?”

“This one, or the day’s?” Kep asked.

Draksgollow removed his hat and fanned his head. For once he envied the humans their innate cooling system, wet and stinking though it might be. “Both.”

“Well, here we got eighteen males, twelve females—nine breeding age and two of them already bred—and twenty two children. We culled six—five for age, one as a cripple,” Kep reported. Draksgollow clenched his mechanical fist. He knew that cripples were the last thing Korr needed in new human stock, but for some reason it still hurt deep down. “On the day, one hundred eleven working males, ninety females, one hundred fifty one children, with a couple of the older females close to breeding. Sixty-one culled in total.”

Draksgollow nodded to let the squad know they were counted and cleared to take the new slaves through. There was only one squad left out in the fields. They would be back in the cool deeps before long.

“Not a bad haul,” Kep commented.

“A gesture, more than anything,” Draksgollow replied. “A proof of concept. We’ll need a huge operation to replenish Korr’s stock.”

“You don’t mind me sayin’, but these here seemed like more trouble than the ones we’re getting’ rid of.”

“Oh, they’ve got fight in them for now,” Draksgollow replied. “But that kind of anger fades quick enough once reality sets in. They’ve got closer ties to their kin, and won’t want to see them get hurt. They’re not used to getting beat if they don’t work, not used to getting a half ration if they don’t work themselves to collapse. Korr can break these. What they lack is organization, and that’s the real trouble with the rebels. A few troublemakers here and there, you can snuff them out like candles. You can’t snuff out a grease spill, once it catches fire. You gotta bury it good.”

Kep pointed down the rows of wheat. “Here come the last ones.”

“About rusted time,” Draksgollow grumbled. “Let’s count them up and get out of here.”

Back in the cool of his own office, in a desolate stretch of tunnels that Kezudkan had never seen, Draksgollow let the heat of the foreign world bleed out of him like pus from an infected wound. His desk was piled with reports, and his generals and officers stopped by to get advice, check in with him, or see what he might need. Despite all that, he kept his muddied boots off, letting the stone leech heat through the sole of his one good foot. He should have changed into fresh clothing, he knew. His guests were the delicate sort, with sensibilities belonging in the deeps, not the open skies, and especially not skies from another world. Draksgollow still smelled of farm, which, after conferring with his troops, was a mixture of dung, animal sweat, human sweat, and fertilizer—which was also dung.

Report after report, all glowing victories; it was enough to cool his sun-soured mood. They were biting into the neck of the growing human rebellion and shaking it. The details were just details; let the generals worry over those sorts of things. Draksgollow could spend an hour poring over a schematic with a hundred interlocking parts, and find the one number that was in error, but that was his stock in trade. For all the military airs he had put on of late, he knew he was still just a tinker, albeit one rich enough to buy armies. He enjoyed the big picture, and to a lesser extent, planning the raids. Then the generals got involved, turned the plans into something they could accomplish with the men they had, and generally mucked things up. It was good to see that for once they had skipped the mucking up part.

“Kep, where’s the report from General Knorlen?” Draksgollow shouted out his office door. “Those Kupak Deep rebels were the worst of today’s bunch. I want to know how it went.”

Kep poked his head in the door. “Ain’t got one from him.” The head disappeared.

“Get your arse back in here!” Draksgollow shouted. Kep reemerged with his head low, not meeting Draksgollow’s eye. “What do you mean? Get Knorlen and get his sorry beard in here, and I mean yesterday.” Kep was gone before Draksgollow finished his sentence.

Draksgollow sighed, checking the gibberish label on the bottle of booze he had taken with him from one of the farms. There was a picture of a waterwheel and a patch of grass riverbank, but the rest was human script. It looked like someone had shattered a pile of runes and sprinkled the pieces into rows of simpler symbols. He popped the cork and sniffed the contents. The overwhelming scent of alcohol stung his nostrils, but he guessed that the subtler smell beneath it was grape. The humans hadn’t known they would be the target of a world-ripper assault, so there was no reason to think they would have poisoned it. He took an experimental swig. Once the initial sting wore off, it was sweet. Not good, but palatable. He leaned back in his chair, throwing his good foot up on the desk as he drank the rest and waited for Knorlen to report in person.

Half an hour later the bottle was empty, and a light fuzz settled into Draksgollow’s head. Kep returned alone. “He ain’t coming back.”

“Aww, piss,” Draksgollow said, though he couldn’t muster enough anger to shout about it. “What’d that brickwit do?”

“Can’t be too sure, but I had the boys peek in on his world-ripper with ours, and the place is wrecked.”

“Underestimated ‘em,” Draksgollow said, nodding. “Shovel it, get a team in there. Get survivors out, and anything we can salvage. Plant charges and collapse the place when you’re done.”

“You got it, boss,” Kep said. Once in a while, it was nice to be treated like a businessman, instead of a soldier.

“Hey, before you go kicking the dogs, send in that lady councilor, the one in charge,” said Draksgollow. He worked his tongue around his mouth, trying to get rid of the clumsy, filmy feeling that made talking more work than it ought to have been.

“Her name’s—”

“Yeah, I know. Gerkie Steelsmith. Just tell her it’s time we had a talk.”

Kep departed with a vigorous nod.

Draksgollow had never been to sea, so he was only guessing that the swaying motion of the room was the same. He knew it was the waterwheel grape booze having its effect on him, which told him that his thoughts were clear enough to be meeting with councilors. Despite an unsteady view, his brain was still in there, tinkering away.

“This is him, councilor,” Kep’s voice preceded him into the office. Right behind him was a woman of late middle years, wearing a pair of spectacles with a freshly ground lens in one side. She was a sharp one—knew her optical refraction off the top of her head. One of Draksgollow’s glassworkers had taken care of it inside an hour. That was what a good man called “politeness,” and what a politician called an act of goodwill.