MBGSP Chpt 145 thru 147

Hey everyone! Here are the next 3 advance chapters for MBGSP

Chapter 145 - Festivities

Watching orcs and goblins hammering side-by-side at the forges for hours in the sweltering desert heat was certainly not on my list of things I wanted to do. But damn if it wasn’t an impressive sight. Lura’s smiths had access to good quality iron and steel on top of a wide array of materials the nomadic people collected in the course of their journey. The eclipse came and went,  and by the time the sun started to drop, the fighters I’d designed for the orcs looked more like the kind of aircraft an age-of-sail pirate might design.

Like with Ringo’s Boglins, I’d blocked off access to firearms to Lura’s hunters. The last thing I wanted was orcs making their own guns. All the guns on the aircraft, likewise, were going to be loaded and maintained by my goblins—even if the orc hunters were lending their superior aim. Precautions to keep the orcs from racing to the top of the food chain in Rava seemed prudent to me, given their propensity for raiding and looting. But that didn’t stop them from working with the canoneers to describe new and novel ammunitions for the recoilless rifles, which the canoneers would then transcribe to the igni. Already they were testing large, hooked harpoons that could be loaded into the existing recoilless rifles.

“How big is this null-devil?” I asked Lura, watching as a large harpoon head was hammered into shape.

“I’ve not seen it—so tell you, by virtue of lungs that yet draw breath,” said Lura. She considered. “Tis not so long as the whistler. Worry not, for the knowing of it will not change a thing.”

I imagined few things outside of highways and railroads were as long as the whistler. The creature had been so long its thoughts probably didn’t even reach its rear end, which mostly just tried to keep up with the front. I’m also sure Lura was purposefully being unhelpful. But this wasn’t just a pleasure hunt for me. This could help me bridge the divide between the Ifrit exiles of Tribe Apollo who refused to return home, and the Ifrit King in the City of Brass who believed I’d stolen them.

“We just have a lot to get done, and I want to make sure we cover every angle.”

“Angles will yet remain when the sun is fresh, little brother king. Talk only of labor makes for a poor guest. Go, enjoy the pleasures this gathering offers.”

I sputtered. “A poor guest!?”

Lura shrugged and offered a toothy grin. I waved her off, but… when in Rome, I suppose. I’d been in the forges for hours, and the sun was starting to droop toward the horizon.

I wandered past to the cook tents where the orcs were searing and seasoning meat directly on hot coals. The crackling of wood and the pop of sizzling fat made my mouth water. I’m not sure how the cooks managed their tasks with all the goblins running around with their mouths open hoping something would drop into them, but they did, and they had a lot of orcs and goblins to feed. One of them recognized my crown and held a hand up in greeting, along with a small pita sandwich, which I took before moving on. The snack-sized bite had a spicy cream on it that reminded me of a chipotle tahin kebab sauce, and the portion wasn’t enough to put me in a stupor. This was a pleasure food, and I savored every bite as I wandered.

The Dawn’s Light camp was huge, but it wasn’t only Lura’s hunters who had come. Apparently this attempt at the null-devil had turned into something of a spectacle once the other orc factions learned she was going to be using goblin artifice in the attempt. I kept walking through hundreds of orcs that accepted my presence without a second thought. Goblins ran about like wayward children, sometimes even through the various competitive sports the orcs apparently played in their down-time.

I spotted a game that looked like horseshoes, several wresting pits with shirtless, sweating orcs caked in dust and salt. My favorite was the orc sport that was a bit like soccer, in that they used their feet to move the ball, but I think that was only tertiary because both hands were occupied with sticks they used to whip whoever had possession. I saw javelin throwing, lassoing, trick oryx riding, and tests of marksmanship. Orc children even smaller than goblins rode small deer or tamed boars with their tusks ground down, led on a rope by older orcs long in the tooth.

It reminded me of nothing so much as a county fair. Strange to think these slate-skinned savages were making me more homesick than my own kind had when I flew through the human city of Habberport. My competitive side missed all these games. I’d been so busy since coming to Rava that my own entertainment had taken a backseat to all other tasks. A psychology major I dated in college had explained a concept to me once, a hierarchy of human needs. Basically it meant that your higher-order needs like entertainment and self-actualization couldn’t be addressed until you’d taken care of your baser needs like safety, shelter, and hunger.

I’d been caught in a workaholic whirlwind since I’d gotten to Rava. But now the tribe was self-sustaining, self-propagating, self-innovating, and had largely grown beyond my need to babysit the day-to-day logistics. Maybe now there was some room for living. I wandered over to where a small handball from some game or other had been discarded, along with a an orc’s one-handed wooden club that I could just heft with two hands. I took an experimental swing with it. Not perfect, but not bad.

I whistled to get the attention of one of my secretive service members, and sent him to bring me a canoneer. He dashed off, and a few minutes later returned with Luther in tow.

“Yes, my emperor?” asked Luther, struggling to keep his armful of loose papers from spilling out of his grip.

“Get a fresh sheet ready,” I said. “I’m going to canonize the rules of a game called Baseball.”

Several goblins within earshot had already begun to gather, as well as one or two orcs wondering what the excitement was about. I gave Luther a quick and dirty rundown of the sport, and then sent goblins to find material to uses as bases. They returned with a half-empty sack, an old orc boot, a wooden platter, and someone’s pillow. Good enough.

I divided the goblins into two equal teams, making sure to keep the scrappers and wranglers even on both sides. I joined Armstrong’s team. The tribe seemed quite confused, at first. Once Luther finished his comic-style instructions, the canon started to take hold, and even the forest goblins started to get it.

<Goblin Technology Unlocked: Sticky Sports>

I’m not going to bore you with the nine-inning play by play of a game that only vaguely resembled its Earth counterpart—none of which was sane or sensical. Even codified in the canon, the goblins’ loose understanding of the rules resulted in batters that ran to bases at random (or in circles), the pitcher using a rock slinger to launch the ball, fielders rugby-tackling runners, and an abrupt end when the shortstop literally ate the ball. With the scores a complete mystery, both sides claimed victory, which erupted into a total bench brawl.

But it was sport, it was fun, and it was something had had been sorely lacking in the tribe. I sat back with my dinner, watching orcs give the incomprehensible version of the game a go. Exhausted goblins dozed next to me, and more of them wandered around, flopping onto the pile as they got too tired to continue terrorizing the camp. Other sleeping mounds began to form on top of orcs who had passed out from too much drinking and revelry. I soon found my own eyes drooping, and wriggled my way into a press of bodies where I promptly fell asleep.

Chapter 146 - Tally One Devil

<Your tribe has increased to 1936 members>

The morning brought with it a shadow in the form of Gemini-II, repaired and refit after the battle at the night haunt nest. It carried fuel and supplies, and a few-dozen more stowaways. Lura watched it with a pensive attitude. I’m pretty sure she was starting to suspect that the tribe was much larger than she had expected—even with our advanced artifice. If we weren’t a match for the Dawn’s Light now, we soon would be, and her threats would be meaningless.

But I’m a goblin of my word, and for that reason alone I’d have kept my side of the bargain. Lura’s sense of mischief was the reason my tribe had enough food in their bellies to keep growing. I wouldn’t soon forget that. I watched one of the fast-moves do orbits over the camp, the orc pilot learning to fly the ramshackle jet. When I had gotten my pilot certification, it was 40 hours for my private pilot license, 200 before I was a certified flight instructor, and only then did I step into a turbo-prop plane. I was somewhat jealous of the orcs ability to borrow from the Goblin Tech Tree to learn to fly the advanced aircraft with proficiency in just a few hours time—and in fact, with their higher level and improved coordination and handling skills, they were better pilots than any of the goblins save for Chuck and myself.

My human pilot side itched with the need for structured learning to pass on the knowledge and skills necessary for Earth pilots, but Lura nixxed that idea.

“I tire of watching these iron hawks draw circles in the clouds,” she grumbled. “What was the word you used to describe a hunting party on the wing?”

“A sortie,” I said.

“Yes, a sortie. One team to strike east, another south. By 3 and 3, we shall lay eye upon our quarry and return. Come, little brother king. You and your guardian, desire I, to man my armaments.”

I looked south. “Is that wise?” I asked. “You said this thing is pretty dangerous. What if it’s not keen to let us report back? If the sky-devil fights us, three fighters aren’t going to be enough.”

“Then lead it on merry chase, we shall. ‘Til it tires or sickens of the sight of our arses.” She clapped a hand on my shoulder. “What worry have you? A thousand lives you have, worn as armor. Tis I who ought be yet worried. Do you witness me fret?”

Lura definitely shared a little too much of my cavalier attitude. I wasn’t used to being the voice of reason in misadventures. Not one to be left in the dust, I whistled for Armstrong.

“Have Air Delivery get 5 more orc fighters prepped. We’re going up.”

“Onnit, boss!” he said, excited. I watched the hobgoblin dash off to the flight line. Lura and I took our time in getting there, to be greeted with a frenzy of activity as fuel was pumped into bladders on the heavy, twin-engine fighters. Lura took the lead aircraft, which had been painted by the sparkers with the visage of a whistler smashing through a stone pillar. Oddly appropriate.

Eileen ran up to me as well, puffing from the sprint. “Boss, we oughta be ready to take the big jet up, too. Keep up comms, yeah?”

“I know you just want an excuse to fly. But, it’s a good idea,” I said. “Make it happen.”

I scrambled up the ladder behind Lura, tumbling into the comparatively roomy cockpit, and then down the hatch into the nose turret. The orc fighters had a pair of twin self-cycling guns at the pilot’s control, and the nose turret had a pair of recoilless rifles that could be aimed independently of the nose. Out either side of the nose turret, I could see three rockets hanging from each wing. Six more goblin crewmembers stumbled aboard, including a sparker, an igni to work on the engines, and my boglin technician who was now looking a bit shriveled in the dry heat of the salt flats.

I donned the heavy gloves for loading the recoilless rifles as Armstrong slid into the aiming seat. The turrets on the orc fighters were like old bomber turrets, spinning on motorized tracks that were supplied with mechanical power from their own small engine below the fuselage. Pipes ran from the backs of the recoilless rifles, venting the exhaust gasses out of the aircraft. I stepped on a switch, and a panel above me slid open to reveal the magazine full of recoilless rifle rounds. Letting off the pressure slid the spring-loaded door closed again.

Lura ducked her head down into the turret.

“All is ready?” she asked.

I gave her my best salute. “All yours, ma’am. Don’t crash us.”

“I promise naught but excitement, little brother. Keep engine stoked and eyes toward the horizon. We’ve a devil to catch, and we’ll make for its hunting grounds near the City of Brass.”

Lura disappeared. I looked over at Armstrong, who was pulling on his flight goggles and grinning.

“Proper lark, this’ll be,” he said, and checked that the shims keeping the turret stationary for launch were in place.

“Shouldn’t you be more concerned with my safety?” I asked.

Armstrong shrugged. “You’ll be right between my irons, boss. Easy enough to keep an eye on. Ain’t like the nest where you was up fighting in the sky while I was stuffed in a cave with the noblins, issit?”

“I suppose not,” I said.

To either side, the turbine engines rumbled to life. When they didn’t explode right away, I figured we were in good shape. One of Eileen’s traffic controllers waved flags at us on the ground, but I doubt Lura understood them any better than I did as each controller seemed to have their own code they were incapable of explaining. It got out of the way fast enough when Lura let off the brakes and we started to roll forward. I settled back against Armstrong’s shins as we rumbled across the salt flats. The engines rose in pitch, and we hit that subtle backwards tilt of the nose lifting from the ground. Then we were up and climbing.

Lura kept the nose straight and steady until we built up speed and altitude. Then she turned us into a high-G bank and I was pushed against the floor of the turret. The bank turned into a barrel roll, which stopped at exactly a wings-level attitude. Lura was a natural, of course. She was leading the Dawn’s Light because of her skills and cunning. Piloting simple added another layer to her mount handling.

I spotted our wingmen pulling into a tight formation to the sides. The other scouting squad was further out, maintaining altitude and drawing greasy black contrails in the sky a kilometer or so away. I pulled on my headset so I could listen in on the chatter. The orc fighters had actual radio receivers, not just sparkers catching stray signals.

“How vast this desert falls ‘neath our wings. All we see ‘afore us is…”

I pulled the headset off again. Orc poetry. Maybe there was wisdom in using the keepers to communicate.

We turned south. The hard flat salt plain of China Lake turned to mounting dunes, rising and sinking like cresting waves. I hadn’t set seen the deep desert yet, but if Rufus was to be believed, it harbored some of the most dangerous wildlife on Lanclova. But it was also a place of unbelievable beauty.

<Chris.>

I stopped. System?

<Take caution>

In all my time on Rava, System had only addressed me by my real name on one other occasion: when I was being repeatedly killed by the Javeline hunting party. The enigmatic hand behind the voice showed itself only rarely, and seemingly only in times of great danger. I looked over at Armstrong, who had his own headset on and was tapping his leg in time to the cadence of the orc poetry without a care in the world. This message was only for me.

Are you warning me about the null devil?

<Unable to answer INVALID QUERY>

Are we in danger?

<This region is classified maximum threat due to ERRANT NULL RESPONSE>

System?

<I cannot ERRANT REQUEST explain without breaking NULL DATA>

<NULL RESPONSE>

<Chris, you must—ERRANT INSTRUCTION—keep advancing>

<NULL—MISSING SET>

System?!

<NULL RESPONSE>

<NULL>

<NULL>

<NU…

I’d never seen the System struggle this much. It was like something was interfering with whatever field it used to impose its own brand of logic on the universe.

Armstrong was sitting up in his seat now, with a hand cupped to his ear piece. I took my own headset and slipped it on.

“Be lively and true of aim, lads! Spotted a dragon, have we! It lays siege to the City of Brass.”

I shaded my hand against the glare of the sun on the dunes. Sure enough, a faint, bronze beacon glowed in the distance. And above it, a black dot that seemed to darken the sky around it.

Chapter 147 - The City of Brass

You must keep advancing

With the System’s strange, incoherent spell fresh in my mind, I hauled open the magazine and slammed a round home in each of the recoilless rifles. I looked once more out through the glass of the nose turret, and then scurried up the ladder to the main deck.

“Lura!” I shouted.

She glanced over her shoulder with a grin. “Fret not, little brother. Tis a scout only. We will leave the devil to its devices.”

“We have to kill it!”

The orc huntress laughed. “Worried after the spirits of smokeless flame? Long have the grandfather spirits endured. Long after you and I are dust shall they remain.”

I shook my head. “No! Well, yes, but that’s not it! Try to query the System, will you?”

<NULL entry>

<OBSTRUCTED>

Lura paused a moment, staring at nothing, then scowled. “The aura of the beast disrupts magic. It is known, and is why your artifice have I enlisted.”

“But the System isn’t magic,” I said. I waved my hand. “If anything, it’s the opposite, right? It’s absolute order, not whimsy or chaos. It forces a framework around things that ought be governed by the natural laws of the universe.”

“Ought they?”

“Yes!  And before it went crazy, it told me to keep advancing. I think it wants us to kill the null devil.”

Lura was silent for a moment. “A queer notion, for Grandfather to want. Or to speak in such a way. Perhaps in the space between its demesne and that of the beast, its own bonds were loosened.”

Its own bonds. It never occurred to me that the enigmatic System might be under restrictions of its own. I had always sensed it had its own motivations, and certainly things it refused to talk about. But I’d never considered that it was under constraints. Who could constrain such an entity other than itself? And if that was the case, why would such an omnipotent being purposefully curtail its own freedom to act?

“Lo, perhaps I spoke in haste, King Apollo,” said Lura. She leaned forward in her seat. “The City’s defenses seem of little deterrence to the beast.”

“What?”

Despite her indignant huff, I scrambled over her lap and pressed my face to the glass of the canopy. I had no real baseline for the city’s defenses, but it made a certain amount of sense that the orcs would be intimately familiar with them. As it was, several jets of what looked like red lightning cracked up from the city at the creature, but they were ineffectual.

“The city is in a state of political upheaval,” I realized. “It must be impacting their ability to mount a defense. We’ve got to help them!”

I felt a hand on my scruff as Lura pulled me out of her cockpit and dropped me to the deck. “Tis the business of Ifrit to protect themselves, as it is all on Kellembog. No coward am I, know you, but three scouts will unfurl not a banner of victory but a funeral shroud. We must plan our attack.”

“I don’t think it’s going to be that simple,” I warned her.

Lura pulled the flight stick to put us in a bank back toward the salt flats. Or, at least, she tried to. The stick stuck fast, and the groan of metal translated through the hull.

“What jammed contraption is this?” she said. The stick bucked in her hand, and the nose swung back to point at the City of Brass. The throttle stick slid forward, seemingly of its own accord.

“If I had to venture a guess,” I said, “I don’t think our engineers are keen on leaving their city to a superpredator.”

Pale, pink flames licked out of the control console where the Ifrit slid through the circuitry and spread out along the inside of the cockpit. I couldn’t understand the Ifrit equivalent of speech, but I was starting to pick up on some of their body language. And I know the low, rapid flicker that meant one of the fire spirits was pissed.

“Better radio the rest of the fighters at China Lake,” I said. “We’re going to need backup.”

I looked out the front of the aircraft again at the growing smudge of bad juju on the Lanclovan skyline. “A lot of backup.”

“It seems as we have little choice. Well, tis a proper day for a war in the sky, little brother mine,” said Lura. She laughed in her sing-song way, and pulled her headset down. “All hunters of the Dawn’s Light, let sun shine upon spear. By the glow of the cresting sun, shall this greatest totem fall or see us felled in its stead. I swear to you, glory! Give wind these iron hawks to the City of Brass, lest this feat of legend pass you by,”

Lura grinned back at me. “Let it not be said that I am one to turn away from challenge given, oh little brother mine. I hope only that your chariots are better for more than cutting circles in the cloud.”

I pointed at the red switch on the forward console. “That one arms your guns. I’ll be on the comm, chief!”

I gave Lura a salute and scurried back toward the tail of the plane to check the tail gunners. On my way, I glanced up at the hull above. System, if you’re listening, I’m doing what I can.

No answer.

My menus still appeared upon impulse, though they flickered in a way that was somewhat disconcerting. But System’s voice was now completely silent, presumably suppressed by the creature the Ifrit called the null devil. I had thought moniker was due to its  I now wondered if that name was due to its effect on the voice that whispered in the ear of every creature on Rava. A voice that came with a subtle presence, a sense of being watched—sometimes with attention so focused it felt as though I was its sole interest, like the first time I flew on a glider. A presence that was now all too conspicuous by its total absence. I was beyond the System’s gaze, now. Or, rather, shaded from it by a creature that devoured life and magic. A creature that had turned a fertile valley into a desert of dust and bone.

After making sure the scrapper in the tail turret was squared away, I made my way back to Armstrong.

“So much for a scoutin’ mission, eh king?” asked Armstrong.

“You nervous?” I asked.

Armstrong bared his toothy grin. “Naw, I like all that stuff what Lura said. Glory, iron hawks, and all that. Besides, what good’s carryin’ a rocket if you don’t get to point it at a big monster?”

I tugged the shims free from the turret actuators and stowed them under the hobgoblin’s seat. “Armstrong, I like the way you think.”

Armstrong flexed his biceps. “That’s why I’m your number 2! Err, after Chuck, that is.”

“Hopefully he’ll be along shortly,” I said. I was starting to get a better sense of the scale of that null devil. And if it was really as big as I thought it was, we were going to need every fighter in the fleet. And maybe that even wouldn’t be enough. but I’d learned from the dartwing. I’d learned from the whistler, and I’d learned from the silvermanes and even the elves. We’d iterated, adapted, and improved. If there was any force on Lanclova, or probably even Rava, that could challenge the null devil on its own terms, it was the air wing of Tribe Apollo.

“Ugly brute,” commented Armstrong.

I had to agree. Lura had referred to it as a dragon. So had the bestiary Rufus had given me. But it looked more like a cross between a serpent and a black scorpion, sinuous and slithering through the air with two large claws and a line of dozens of chitinous legs tapping away at nothing down its length. The back end hung down below the beast, dangling a barb that it used to strike the city as it passed, before coming around for an attempt to pry open the brass canopy with its building-sized claws. Thus far, it hadn’t managed to get in, yet. The dark smudge I’d seen around it was like a visible aura that seemed to warp the air like a mirage shimmer, only it robbed the light passing near it like the event horizon of a black hole.

If the null devil noticed our approach, it gave no indication. Either it didn’t think we were a threat, or didn’t think we were food. In either case, not worth its attention. A red bulb flashed in turret. It meant to secure the magazine, in case any errant sparks found their way into the ball turret.

We were definitely going to be a threat now. Lura had just armed all six missiles.

You may have lost your voice, System. But I hope you’re at least watching. Because this is going to be one hell of a fireworks show.