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21: WHIZBANGS AND WHATNOTS


Baum Boulevard and Centre Avenue bracketed a big five-story, redbrick building that had been a Ford plant and showroom in the early 1900s. The University of Pittsburgh had bought the site prior to the first Startup, planning to turn it into research labs. The plan was delayed for decades as the university adapted to life on Elfhome. Construction had started just that spring, gutting the interior and decorating the outside with warning signs. One proclaimed EVERYONE GOES HOME SAFE AT THE END OF THE DAY!

Tinker truly hoped that the slogan boded well for the battle.

The busway ran under the parallel bridges in what used to be a deep river channel. The far side of the ravine had a sheer fifty-foot-tall retaining wall. At the bottom, there were two sets of railroad tracks and two lanes of limited-access highway, both closed in by tall fences, creating an obstacle course that the oni probably would avoid at all costs.

Centre Avenue was the shorter bridge but the one closer to the enclaves. While both bridges had been barricaded and strung with concertina wire, the human militia seemed to be concentrated at the end of Centre Avenue.

What do you know—Pittsburgh has a militia, Tinker thought. They were a sorry-looking, ragtag lot but it was a militia. At least half of their number wore garbage bags as rain ponchos. The rest were in hunting gear. Some had cooking pots on their heads as helmets, but most wore blue bucket hats like the ones that Roach had wanted to order for Team Tinker.

Jane Kryskill seemed to be the one in charge. It was at once surprising and yet not. The Kryskills had a military air around everything that they did. Roach and his family were leaders by nature and happiest in a crowd. Roach managed Team Tinker. His older brother Sean was the one of most popular deejays in Pittsburgh. His father Bill was the president of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Rotary club. The Roach men could gather and organize large crowds with ease. The Kryskills were more reclusive than their cousins. They marched to the beat of a different drummer, often alone, and perfectly happy that way.

There was nothing ragtag about Jane Kryskill as she stalked toward Tinker, snapping orders over a radio. All her equipment was military-grade, from her rain gear to her boots. Chesty, her big black elfhound, followed on her heel, eyeing up the newcomers with suspicion.

“This is Storm Six.” Jane issued commands over her headset as she handed off her rifle to her cameraman. Judging by her glance toward Pony and the other sekasha, Jane didn’t want to look like a threat to the elves. “Homestead. Hot Metal. Shift to target two.”

“Long time, no see,” Tinker wasn’t sure what to say. Jane wasn’t like other authority figures that Tinker had plowed through in the past—she was practically family. Certainly every time that they had crossed paths before, Jane had operated as everyone’s older sister. She punished everyone who ran with her younger brothers and cousins when she caught them doing something that they shouldn’t be doing. She also would protect the entire pack of younger children if someone picked a fight with one of them.

“Is Oilcan okay?” Jane said. Because of Geoffrey, Jane knew that metal and magic didn’t mix. She shrugged off her chest armor before closing on Tinker, handing it off to another one of her film crew members who looked weirdly like Nigel Reid. Jane obviously wanted a private conversation, not a shouted discussion at twenty paces. “I hated leaving him but we needed to reinforce these bridges.”

“He’s good.” Tinker dropped her shield and then recast it to include Jane. “Thanks for holding the oni until I could get here.”

“We only managed to hold here because of the barricades our people set up earlier,” Jane reported. “That and the tengu reinforcements at the last minute. I don’t know if it’s because Oilcan was at the other bridge, or the added guns, but they didn’t try to wade through the concertina wire like before. They hit our barricades and pulled back. They’re dug in on the other side—building something.”

Between the darkness and the rain smearing down her shield, Tinker couldn’t see anything beyond dark shadows moving about.

Jane continued her report. “The tengu say that they think that it’s bonfires but they’re not sure. The scouts report that the oni are muscling cages with horrors down Centre Avenue. The tengu couldn’t get close enough to tell what type of horror; the cages are covered up. They think the covering is to keep the horrors somewhat docile until the oni can get them into position and use the enlarging spell on them.”

The EIA arrived in trucks. Tinker waved Captain Josephson over to her, dropping and raising her shield so he could join the discussion.

“This is Jane Kryskill,” Tinker handled the introductions. Most locals didn’t like the EIA, as they were off-worlders who created huge legal difficulties for Pittsburghers while they dealt with life isolated on Elfhome. What they could import. What they could export. What they could gather from the forest around them. It created a lot of hostilities that could boil over on the battlefield if the EIA assumed that it was in command. “I’ve known her for years. I trust her completely. She’s in charge of the militia. You’re to work with her. Understand?”

He nodded. Hopefully he understood that he wasn’t to go around stepping on Jane’s toes. Tinker wasn’t totally sure Jane wouldn’t shoot him if he did. Kryskills were usually the type to punch first, ask questions later.

“Jane, this is Captain Josephson. He’s in command of a special operations unit. They backed me up at the whelping pens earlier this summer. They’re good but they’re new to Elfhome, so they don’t know the area well and they’re not totally familiar with some of the more dangerous things like black willows.”

Jane nodded. The two shook hands.

“It looks like the oni are focusing on Centre Avenue. You two cover Baum Boulevard,” Tinker told them. “If they send more horrors this direction, I’ll hold them off.”

Captain Josephson nodded again.

“Don’t throw yourself into a no-win fight,” Jane said. “If you have to retreat, pull back. We’ll hightail it and regroup someplace else. Remember: he who runs away, lives to fight another day.”

This sounded like a speech Jane gave proto-Team Tinker when Tinker was twelve. She and Oilcan had gone to a street fair with a horde of Roach’s cousins and friends. Some older kids picked a fight with them for reasons that Tinker could no longer remember. What she did remember was that Jane—after breaking up the fight and chewing out her family and their friends—promptly ignored her own advice when the tallest of the idiots who started the fight threw a punch at Jane. It was an impressive and quick beatdown.

“We will retreat if we have to,” Tinker promised. “We” because she suspected that none of the sekasha would leave her, no matter what she told them. The knowledge made her a little queasy in the stomach. What were the oni going to throw at her?

Jane suddenly turned and pointed an angry finger at a short man who had been creeping toward them. “Hal! Behind the building!”

Hal Rogers was shorter in person than Tinker imagined him to be. Why did she think he was taller? He wavered in place, apparently well aware that Jane could and would hurt him if he disobeyed her without reason. “I should interview Tinker domi for the listeners!”

“Oh, dear gods, no!” Tinker said. The last thing she wanted Pittsburghers to hear was how she didn’t have a clue what she was doing.

“Go.” Jane put a hand to her ear, listening intently while looking toward the darkness that held the oni. “They’re moving. Brace yourself. Hal! Back! I mean it!”

“I’m moving! I’m moving!” Hal scurried back to his hiding place behind the nearest building.

The smell of gasoline flooded through the night. The oni must have poured out hundreds of gallons of the stuff for it to smell so strongly.

“What are they doing?” Tinker asked.

Flames shot up from stacks of gasoline-soaked piles of wood. The fire brightly illuminated the far side of the bridge. The oni were retreating back up Centre Avenue, leaving behind a wagon carrying something square, covered with a black tarp. It must be one of the cages that Jane mentioned.

Dark Scythe growled softly as he realized what the oni were doing. “This was a common tactic for phoenix scorpions.”

“A what?” Tinker said.

The roaring fire suddenly snuffed out. The creature within the cage started to glow brightly. There was a flare of magic as a powerful spell went off. The monster suddenly expanded in size, shattering the cage until it was the stuff of nightmares. Giant pincers. Big glistening mandibles. Stinger tail the size of a backhoe curled over its back. Translucent wings that unfurled.

“Shit!” Tinker whispered. “It can fly?”

“Yes, it can fly,” Dark Scythe said, talking quickly. “Fire attacks will only make it stronger. A nulling shield will cancel its sound attack but you cannot cast it and hold a Stone Clan shield at the same time.”

Tinker dropped the shield she’d been holding with her left hand. She set up a link to the Wind Clan Spell Stones and cast a shield with her right. “Nulling? Grandpa erased that spell out of the codex. How do you do—”

The scorpion started to make a noise like a Godzilla-sized cicada. The sound felt like a nail being driven straight into her skull. Everyone around her cringed, bowing before the sound.

There was a quick exchange of blade talk between Pony and Dark Scythe. Pony stepped aside. Dark Scythe caught hold of Tinker’s left hand, molded her fingers into the correct position, pressed them to his lips, and spoke the key word to link her to the Stone Clan Spell Stones. He changed her fingers and spoke a second key word.

The silence was blessed.

“That sound you heard,” Hal Rogers said quietly in the background, “is a monster that the oni have unleashed on Oakland. It’s massive—nearly the size of a wyvern. It looks like a scorpion forged in the heart of the sun! If we had any questions about what the oni plan for the humans, I think we just got our answers. Tinker domi will kill this beast but she needs us to mop up the rest.”

Yeah. Sure she will, Tinker thought. The problem was she only had two hands and she was already holding two spells active. Worse, there were more cages farther up the hill, probably holding more phoenix scorpions. At least the militia was making it hard for the oni to release the other monsters.

“The beast will locate you via your shield,” Dark Scythe warned as he let go of her hand and stepped away. “You will feel it. It will attack you once it has located you.”

Bullets from the militia and the EIA troops pinged off the glowing chitin, not doing any damage. The sekasha fired spell arrows, hoping to luck into hitting the hidden creature within. Judging by the lack of response, they missed.

She’d used an electromagnet on the foo dogs that attacked Windwolf in her salvage yard. Metal also disrupted the spell. The area was scattered with possibilities but she had both hands engaged.

“How do I hurt it?” Tinker said nervously.

“That falls to us,” Pony said.

Magic pulsed from the scorpion. It washed over Tinker like white static.

“It’s targeted me,” Tinker said. “Here it comes!”

It lifted off and flew toward her. Seemingly large in the distance, it became impossibly huge as it rushed toward them. It filled her vision, blotting out the night, with a glow so bright that she found herself squinting against the light. It slammed into her shield and rebounded, then hung for a moment, its translucent wings blurring as they beat the air. Its huge alien-looking head worked its mandibles only yards from her face. It had eight legs like a spider, each ending with sharp hooks that were bigger than her torso. Its chitin was golden yellow, glowing as if it was made of molten metal. The only black on it were two dark spots on its head that she assumed were its eyes, staring at her intently. Spikes covered its body like massive individual strands of hair. She could only guess that they were to sense vibrations. It was too alien for her to understand what hovered before her.

“Goddamn son of a bitch,” she whispered as she held her shields tight. Stone Clan with her left hand. Wind Clan with right hand. Everything about the giant monster was sending fear shivering down her back and that made her angry. This thing didn’t really exist. There was some little creature inside, running the monster like a puppeteer. The creature within shouldn’t even exist—wouldn’t exist except for the Skin Clan being assholes with god complexes.

The scorpion landed at the edge of her shield. Rain hazed as it turned to steam on contact with the glowing shell. The nulling shield was keeping out its magical sound attack but she could feel the vibration from it under her feet.

Her shields kept the monster on the bridge but she couldn’t do any damage nor could her people. If it decided to attack someone else, she couldn’t stop it. Behind it, on the hill leading up Centre Avenue, four more bonfires flared into being. The oni were making more horrors!

Tinker frantically looked around, squinting against the brilliance of the fiery scorpion. There was nothing useful to her right, just the bare asphalt of a parking lot. To her left was the construction site. There might be something they could use among the building materials. She spotted a pile of galvanized steel fence posts.

Stormsong had told Tinker once that she needed to trust her Hand to do their jobs. Tinker knew what needed to be done. She hated it even as she shouted, “Pony, to my left, those poles!”

“Yes, domi!” Pony dashed to the pile and picked up one of the poles. Holding the length of galvanized steel like a spear, he rushed at the scorpion. Dark Scythe and his people moved forward to join Pony, activating their personal shields as they left the protection of Tinker’s shields.

“Ready arrows,” Stormsong ordered, taking charge of Tinker’s remaining sekasha.

It took all Tinker’s will power to simply hold her shields and trust her people to do their job.

The horror grabbed at Pony with both its pincers as he closed. Dark Scythe and his Second sprang forward and parried the massive claws with their ejae. The force of the strike pushed them back even as they strained to control the massive limbs. The huge barbed tail slashed forward. The others of Forge’s First Hand stacked themselves in front of it, stepping aside as their shields failed before the blow.

Pony rammed the post into the gleaming chitin with his full weight behind the blow. The illusion flickered, going transparent to reveal a dog-sized glowing insect inside. In that moment, Stormsong, Cloudwalker, and Rainlily released their spell arrows.

The giant scorpion crumbled to the bridge’s deck. The illusion continued even though the creature inside was dead. The horror took up much of the bridge, motionless as a puppet with its strings cut. The fiery glow, though, slowly waned.

Up the hill, the bonfires snuffed out. The cages holding the proto-horrors shattered as the creatures within them enlarged into giant fiery forms. It was like the sun had suddenly risen in the heart of Oakland. In the sudden brilliance, Tinker could see that all the oni were retreating at a full run, fleeing in terror of their own creations. There was nothing orderly about the withdrawal; it looked like sheer hysteria.

Tinker cursed. “I count four more incoming.” She dropped her shield so Pony and the others could rejoin her. She recast it when they were safe beside her.

“We will not be able to repeat that maneuver with four at the same time,” Pony said.

Dark Scythe nodded in agreement.

The woman who might be Chloe’s sister thought that these horrors would roll right over Tinker. The possibility was real. Chloe, though, hadn’t been able to see the trap that Tinker created with the mix of science and magic. Tinker had proven that given time to prepare, she could outfox her aunt’s ability to see the future. It was only a question of time: did she have enough of it?

Bong! A loud oddly musical sound rang out and a thick shaft of light flashed overhead. It pierced through the lead horror, instantly killing it.

“Yes!” Tinker cried.

Geoffrey had gotten the coherent light pipe up and running!

When Tinker was little, she had plans to create a tank that could fire spell arrows. She no longer remembered why. Back then such projects often didn’t need a “why” beyond “because I want to!” The proto-cannons were her first experiments toward a tank. She inscribed spells on the inside of PVC pipes that would accelerate an inert material—golf balls worked best—while converting them into a powerful beam attack. The tubes were wildly successful in terms of damage output but were far too long. She later drastically changed the design, printing the spell onto the ammo instead allowed for a shorter barrel.

Bong! Bong! The light strobed the night, again and again. Geoffrey’s team was doing a great job of reloading the pipe. Aiming could be improved; the cannon was punching holes to the right and left of the three remaining horrors. This section of Oakland was going to look like Swiss cheese by the end of the fight.

Unlike the trial run of the pipes, years ago, she could feel the magic within the pipes activating as the mallets provided the sound that the spells were keyed to. It was an odd thrumming sensation, like someone plucking a guitar string while she pressed her arm against it.

There was a second, different ping against her senses. Short and piercing, more like a needle stab than a vibrating string.

“What was that?” Tinker said even though she knew no one else probably sensed it.

One of the remaining scorpions turned and headed away from the fight.

“Where’s it going?” Tinker said.

“They are not trained beasts like elfhounds,” Dark Scythe ventured after a long silence around her. “They act purely on instinct encoded into their genetics. They will kill anything before them, even their own creators. That is why the oni pulled back their troops when they released the horrors.”

The white static of the scorpions’ targeting magic washed over Tinker again and again.

“The other two just targeted me!” Tinker warned. “Here they come!”

The nearest horror took wing, heading toward her. Tinker braced for the attack. A beam of light punched through the monster, missing the main puppeteer body hidden inside but taking out its right wing. It veered drunkenly in a half circle.

The second gleaming scorpion came in a scuttling run, burning through the concertina wire on the bridge like it was cobwebs.

Ba-Boong! The second pipe sounded off. It had a weird deepening reverb, meaning it was probably the gravity pipe. It had been a bitch to aim when they were kids, hence the loss of the prized room-sized lilac bush in the Roaches’ backyard. In the flashing brilliance of the coherent light attack, one dark orb arched high up in the sky to fall down toward the bridge. Seconds before the shot hit the deck, everything around it was sucked inward. The oncoming horror vanished as if it had been turned to dust and vacuumed up. Chunks of asphalt ripped free, flying upward before vaporizing. The structural beams cracked loudly, never meant to take an upward pressure. The dead horror at the edge of the bridge was dragged backward and then it too vanished into nothing.

There was loud cheering from the militia from their position within the research building.

The wounded horror gave up trying to fly. It charged forward across the bridge.

There was a loud cracking noise and the bridge collapsed in giant slabs of concrete. The giant gleaming insect skittered on the falling deck, its one remaining wing beat as it tried to fly to safety.

Ba-Boong! The gravity pipe sounded from behind Tinker. The dark orb followed the same trajectory, landing square on the horror that was scrabbling to free itself from the collapsing bridge.

The horror and parts of the bridge vanished, compacted down as gravity in their immediate area momentarily increased a hundredfold.

“Wood sprites and their dangerous toys,” Dark Scythe murmured, shaking his head.



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