MBGSP Chpt 130-132

Hey goblin fans! Here's this week's three chapters, hope you enjoy!

Chapter 130 - Sky Kings

I was a little surprised when Taquoho elected to take the radio back to Bluff Apollo, considering how disorienting his first trip had been. But then, trying to keep an Ifrit from possessing a piece of technology that had caught their interest was nigh-impossible. And in all honesty, I wanted them to continue exploring the possibilities of transmission by radio frequency. I had long worried about the prospect of taking Ifrit up into space. Goblins could survive falls from any distance, and if something killed them on the ground it was, as awful as it sounds to say it, not a dire issue. The loss of an Ifrit was something entirely different. But if they could escape emergencies by using a radio like a parachute? Well, there wasn’t much to limit them.

By the time those of us limited by corporeal bodies landed back at the bluff along with the returning searchers still scouring the forest for the remaining elf, nightfall was approaching and our maiden airship, Gertrude, was also pulling into port. Pretty much the whole bluff turned out to welcome our intrepid Eileen back, whereby goblins with a plethora of new stripes and fur patterns jumped down to greet their new tribemates from the main branch.

The canoneers stumbled off the ship with armloads of new comics that they immediately began distributing before I could attempt to stop the spread of their propaganda, but that concern was only secondary.

“Boss!” Shouted Eileen, waving down at me. She’d acquired a flight cap with crystal lenses at some point in her journey, rounding out her classic aviator look. Everywhere they’d gone, they’d taken the tech tree of Tribe Apollo, and now we had a network of bluffs making iron, glass, radios, copper wire, and more. Gerty’s hold was full of goodies.

“Welcome home!” I shouted over the cheering. “How does it feel to be a hero?”

“Amazing! We’ve got so many new friends and stories and stuff! Is this how it feels to be you all the time?”

I tried to avoid wincing. If only she knew.

Eileen vaulted down, summersaulting gracefully and then landing flat on her head, whereby she rolled to her feet. Several of her fellow air corps goblins mobbed her and lifted her on their shoulders. She was grinning so wide I thought the top of her head might flop back. “Boss, I can’t believe you sent me on this pig and then made those chopper things to fly without me! I want to try one right now!”

I laughed. “I’ve got something even better for you. Come see what we’re working on.”

She dropped down from her underlings and scrambled over, climbing up Armstrong like a ladder to straddle his shoulders.

“Onward!” she declared.

I led Eileen and several of her aviators up to the factory level of Bluff Apollo and into the hangar where we’d stored the first prototypes of the turbine test planes. Her eyes bugged so wide I thought they might break the lenses on her goggles from the inside. She stared at the first-generation models, jaw slack and hands on her cheeks.

“I haven’t seen these in the tech tree! Boss, you shouldn’t have!”

“We haven’t officially unlocked them, yet,” I said. I moved over and ran my hands on the sleek, metal fuselage made from whistler hide alloy. “But we’ve got them sized for goblins, hobgoblins, and orcs. Armstrong has been champing at the bit to fly one, but…”

Eileen grinned. “You can say it, boss, everyone already knows.”

I shrugged. “Your mechanical aptitude skill is higher.”

Armstrong moved alongside the primitive jet aircraft and Eileen hopped over to the top of the wing. She got into the cockpit and started fiddling with different controls, actuating the sticks and watching as the control surfaces warped at the tips of her wings and tail.

“Of all the stuff to come from your brain, boss, this is the best yet.”

I climbed up onto the wing myself and swung into the back seat in the cockpit, pointing out various controls and their functions along with the primitive instrumentation. Eileen listened raptly.”

“How fast will they go?”

“About 7 times as fast as the prop-driven bi-gliders,” I said.

“7 times!? How is that possible?”

“Turbine engines,” I said. “A compressor rotor draws in air, squeezes it tight, mixes it with fuel, blows it up, and then shoots it out the back.”

Eileen cocked her head. “In’t that how the combust’em engines work?”

I nodded. “Yep. Except a combustion engine works in cycles. In a turbine, it’s happening constantly, all at once, in one linear cycle.”

Eileen grinned and worked the flight stick back and forth. “Sounds proper goblin, this. When do I get to try it out?”

“We’re putting the finishing touches on the airstrip at the base of the bluff. These need a bit of run to takeoff and land so we can’t just drop them off the second ring like they’ve started doing with the gliders. Rest and relax for a day or two, yeah? Then you and Chuck can fly formation in the first prototypes.”

Eileen groaned and draped herself dramatically over the edge of the cockpit. “That’s forever, boss! I’m ready to fly now!”

A woman after my own heart, truly. And if my secretive service would have entertained the idea, I’d already be up in the air in the first prototype. But historically, bad things tend to happen when I went into the air alone and so I needed goblins like Eileen and Chuck.

“You’ll get your chance,” I said. “We’re going to need these. If Lura wants to take on the sky-devil oppressing the Ifrit, jet fighters are going to be the key to beating it. It’s not just about helping her with her hunt and getting Taquoho home, either. These get us one step closer to high atmospheric flight and then space flight. I’m asking a lot of you, Eileen.”

“That’s cause you know I can do it,” she said. She dropped down into the nose turret and oggled at the guns. “Wow, what are these?”

“Well,” I said, “Can’t take to the skies in jet engines with lever-action rifles, can we?”

Eileen made gunshot noises as she angled the turret guns around. She slapped at the glass. “Armstrong!” she shouted. “Are you going to run these for me?”

Armstrong looked up at me, eyes starry as he pressed his index fingers together.

“Can I, boss?”

I sighed and shook my head. “Who am I to refuse?”

I slid out of the cockpit as my two taskmasters celebrated their impending adventure. I ran a hand along the underside of the fat-bodied jet. In other parts of the hangar, goblins scrambled, working on putting together more of the jet prototypes. Right now we had two ready and waiting for pilots. By the time the runway was ready, we’d have another. Every day, we were advancing. I had expected technology development to slow once we hit the industrial age and things became infinitely more complex. But, if anything, it was accelerating.

Ifrit, orcs, and goblins seemed to be the perfect storm for lightning-quick iteration and design. Now, with Midnighters in the mix, if all went well it wouldn’t be long until space was within reach. Today, jet engines. A month from now? High altitude rockets. Satellites, maybe. I already had almost a thousand goblins turning food into fuel in anticipation of our need for high-volume boosters. At the same time, their labor turned raw resources into refined products. And the workforce just kept growing. It wouldn’t be long before we truly ruled the skies of Rava. Maybe they’d need a new word to describe us, once the sky was filled with goblins.

We were long past being pests or vermin. In fact, Tribe Apollo was beginning to feel unstoppable.

Chapter 131 - Stoppable

<Your tribe has decreased to 1492 members>

<Your tribe has increased to 1565 members>

North of us, a great column of smoke rose from what, just yesterday, had been one of our newly assimilated bluffs. Granted, smoke now rose from almost all the bluffs as they built fires and forges and kilns. But this was the dark smoke of an unchecked fire burning things that weren’t supposed to burn. And it didn’t seem like there was anyone left to put it out. Goblins that had joined under my leadership were now as toast as their home. I watched from atop the guard tower on the north edge of City Apollo with Armstrong, still wiping the sleep from my eyes.

The reality of the situation was that as the tribe grew, so too would the losses. Technically, we were still at replacement levels even with the loss of over 60 goblins in one day. But it’s hard having those numbers shoved in your face first thing in the morning. Goblins I’d never seen, never met, but who were part of my tribe all the same. Taskmasters, scrappers, igni, wranglers, sparkers, and maybe even a canoneer.

“Armstrong,” I said.

“Already onnit, boss,” he said. “Choppers are fuelin’ up.”

“Good,” I said. “I’m going.”

My scrapper chief mulled something over in his head and nodded. “Reckon that’s proper. We’ll have the lads wiv us.”

“Do you… think anyone survived?” I asked.

He hesitated. “Been nuffin’ on the radio. But the lads are sneaky. There’ll be someone gone to ground.”

I hoped so. I went down to the rotary pads, where over a dozen aircraft were being rolled out under the totem-ized skull of the whistler that gave speed and durability to vehicles. Some part of me had expected the helicopter designs to become more standardized as we iterated, to start converging on a homogenized design that took inspiration from the best parts of previous models. If anything, the opposite was true.

The 100% goblin-built helicopters were a mishmash of design philosophies that intersected at obtuse angles. Some aircraft had coaxial blades, like the ifrit vessels. Some had as many as 3 or 4 rotors of various sizes and mounting angles. A few sported larger cabins or cargo slings, which armed and armored goblins were piling into in anticipation of going to check out the commotion. Dozens of riflemen or goblins with popper slingers would be my escort, and Armstrong jogged off to make sure my secretive service was kitted out with the best of the gear.

The fuel trucks pulled out of the yard, and I climbed into the cockpit of one of the choppers. Eileen scrambled up beside me and pulled a headset on over her goggles.

I narrowed my eyes. “Am I going to have to fight you for the sticks?”

“You’d lose,” she said.

“I’m your king, I could just order you to let me fly.”

“You’d still lose,” she said, sticking out her tongue. “I’m your pilot, sire, ain’t none better the whole tribe round.”

I crossed my arms. “Except for me.”

She grinned, dropping a rockette into the starter. “Remains to be seen, don’t it?”

The helicopter shuddered, not only from the rotor coming to life, but also from the dozen scrappers wrestling their way onto the back or just clinging on to the sides. Armstrong squeezed past us to his customary seat in the nose gun.

Around us, several other aircraft were already lifting off, so Eileen hauled up on her collective pitch and we got light on the skids. The engine began to rumble under the increased load, and then the ground dropped away. I pulled on my own headset and listened to the sparker relaying what passed for air traffic control. Considering the sheer volume of traffic around the bluff, it was a chaotic spiral of stepped-on calls and angry, chittering controllers arguing with disagreeable pilots with their own ideas. So, not too unlike traffic control back home.

On the ground, several air delivery goblins with smoldering flares signaled us directing us out west over the livestock paddocks. Eileen followed their signaling until we were over the cleared grazing land and then banked us toward the north. We climbed up over the forest as we transited. I looked down, marveling at the size of the area we’d cleared to the west and north. Roads of flat stones curved out from the bluff, often looping back on themselves or crossing each other nonsensically. Watchtowers dotted the flatland, and I spotted a group of wranglers on dirtbikes herding a flock of the kangaroo-like horned lopers.

“Won’t be long til we’ve cleared all the way to the stream,” I commented. The livestock in the paddocks looked up at us, incurious as we passed. They were used to the flying machines by now. The wranglers cheered, raising their zap-rods and lever guns.

Cleared land gave way to treetops, and then we crossed the sparkling river and headed back into the northern jungle. I realized I hadn’t spent much time on this side of the river. Bluff Apollo was on the southeastern edge of the jungle, close to the badlands where I’d been reborn. But the forest was a deep, vast thing that covered a good portion of northern Lanclova.

Bluffs poked out of the canopy, here and there. We even passed close by one on our trek north. Word went out on the radio that we were coming, and it seemed like every converted goblin in the village turned out to see their new king—at least 100 of them, wearing leather clothes and standing on fortified perimeter walls. The bluff had several multi-story wooden structures, with more going up with the help of windmill-powered cranes. My tech tree unlocks were helping these goblins thrive.

So what had happened at the bluff to our north? It wasn’t the furthest north bluff, so I doubted it was the inevitable incursion from Habberport. What made this one special? Something made this area feel familiar, though I hadn’t ever visited this bluff before.

It was another half hour of flight, as we moved at the speed of our slowest aircraft. But we finally approached the bluff that had been attacked during the night, a pinnacle set into the rocky foothills of the mountains to the northeast.

“Circle us around. Armstrong, guns ready.”

My scrapper chief racked the priming lever for his two nose guns and tilted them down at the bluff, as though ready for something to leap up at us. Eileen eased us into a bank. She was a natural at handling the bulky helicopter.

“This is one of the places you converted, yeah?” I asked.

“Early on,” she said. “They make that copper wire you’re so in-love with. We called it Red-Rock Rise.”

Hmm. If this was one of the few sources of copper ore that I had, this had to be marked as a critical bluff and restaffed as soon as possible. Copper was one of the most important resources to advancing electronics and power generation. But it wouldn’t do to just have another group of goblins slaughtered. We needed to figure out why it had happened.

A few structures still burned down below but the majority had been snuffed out by the nightly rain. We circled, looking for activity. But the smoke seemed to be the only thing moving.

“Alright, let’s set her down,” I said.

Eileen dropped the collective and brought us in on a low approach to the bluff, nearly scraping the top of what remained of the perimeter wall and bringing us into the main square. The back ramp dropped, and we disgorged our cargo of angry, war-crying scrappers, who rushed out only to find no enemy to face.

I dropped out of the cockpit myself, and felt a crunch underfoot. I looked down and lifted my foot, picking bits of red insect carapace off my soles.

Elves. Or rather, elf, singular. The missing member of the diminutive dude-bro druid commandos. We’d been looking for the one that had fallen in the forest. Our searches had been concentrated around the area he’d fallen, and to the west. I’d expected him to either make a beeline back to the coast, or to make his way toward Bluff Apollo to cause more trouble. But it seemed he’d made his way north instead. Curious.

“Boss!” shouted one of the scrappers. “Come look ‘ere!”

I followed the voice around the corner of a caved-in building, where I started at the gaping jaws of a night haunt—dead, but still snarling. A few of the red insects still crawled around its mouth, and it had the red badges of a dozen gunshot wounds in its side.

Armstrong whistled. “At least they put up a proper fight. Big job, this.”

“You’re right, it is big. But not big enough to take out the entire village.”

A goblin squawked in alarm from further in. The scrappers charged their rifles and dashed after the cry. I followed at a safer distance, wary. But all we found were more carcasses. At least a half-dozen of the flying predators had been taken out around the bluff by various means—mostly lever-action rifles and spears. It reminded me of the early nights before we were able to repulse the attacks, when goblins would be taken and we were powerless to stop it. Well, these goblins hadn’t been powerless, but they still hadn’t stopped it.

“Hard to believe they did all this,” said Armstrong.

“It wasn’t just them,” I said. “These are just the ones they managed to kill.”

Chapter 132 - Queries

I went over to yet another carcass and crouched down, lifting its jaw. It was definitely bigger than the one that had tried to skewer me, and the downy hair of its shoulders had gone silver. Like the others, it had traces of the red insects around its mouth. “The elf found the nest. He might have every night haunt in the foothills bewitched by now.”

Even Armstrong looked concerned at that. The normally unflappable hobgoblin shifted his eyes back and forth, as though one of the nocturnal predators might leap out of the shadows. Something in the goblin brain was especially wired to be frightened of the flying creatures. Maybe they had been the primary goblin predator in Lanclova even before whatever strange force here twisted the beasts into true monsters. “Boss. Croc-knockers and big-jaws is one thing. But night haunts workin’ together?”

“I don’t like it either,” I said. I snapped my claws to call a sparker over. “See if their radio is still intact. Warn every bluff to have sparky weapons and be ready for concerted attacks by multiple night haunts. Check with Sourtooth and see if he knows how many of these things an individual elf can conceivably control at once.”

The sparker saluted and dashed off.

I straightened and dusted my hands off, considering.

“Boss, ain’t you worried?” asked Armstrong.

“Of course I’m worried,” I said. “But the elf may have played itself.”

“How’s that?”

Eileen perked up. “Ooh! Ooh! We know where the nest is!” she said.

I pointed a claw at her. “Got it in one. He has no way of knowing we already found the night haunt roost in the cliffside. And unless I miss my mark, this is the closest bluff to it.”

“It is,” added Eileen. She pointed out to the east. “Out that way.”

Armstrong whooped. “Then what’re we waiting for? Let’s go get the big guns and take out that nest while it’s still daylight. We can make it there and back, yeah?”

“Easily,” said Eileen.

“Not likely,” I said. I dusted off my hands. “The normal rules for night haunts probably don’t apply when there’s an elf at the wheel. Daytime, night-time, I doubt it makes a difference.”

Armstrong’s expression fell. “Well, then, we need to at least get you out of here. Back to the choppers.”

I shook my head. “Have your boys start pulling together shelter and figuring out which buildings can withstand a second attack.”

“Boss?”

“This attack did exactly what it was probably intended to do.”

“It drew you here…” Armstrong finished, then started kicking dirt. “Dirty elf’s probably waitin’ fer us to take back off again to send the haunts at us! They can out-fly the choppers no problem, we seen ‘em do it.” He whistled and made a circle in the air with his claws. “Dig in, lads! We’re having night haunt for dinner guests. Best make ready.”

“Salvage wire, get the exterior hulls of the choppers electrified and take the guns off the ones we can’t rig up,” I said.

One of the goblins came back, chittering. Armstrong listened for a moment and then relayed. “Radio room is functional,” he reported. “They’ve raised Bluff Apollo.”

“Good, take me there.”

I did a quick mental head count on the goblins scrambling to scrape together some cover while we walked. We had maybe 20 scrappers, 10 wranglers, and 100-120 other forest goblins with us—all armed and armored. It was a sizable force and heavy on variants. We had rifles, pistols, spears, and poppers—plus a few heavier guns we could dismount from the chopper noses. I estimated it would take at least 10-12 night haunts to have any chance at winning. How many were packed into that cliffside cave?

Dozens, at least.

<Is that a conservative guess?>

I grit my teeth. You already know the answer to that, System. And how many night haunts there are, down to the youngest cub. You could tell me.

No answer. No surprise, either. Whoever, whatever the System was, it was clear that one of its governing rules was that it couldn’t play favorites. Even though I’d managed to crack its shell a little, even though it was obvious there was some sort of sentient intelligence behind the seemingly cold, rules-driven mask, be it an alien sys-admin or AI or whatever, it wouldn’t lift a finger to help me over, say, an elf.

<I have urged caution in the past.>

Huh. System actually sounded a little hurt at that. Not this time, though. Not when we were walking into a trap.

<You’ve always ignored my warnings of caution anyway.>

I paused, causing Eileen to bump into me with a startled squawk. System had a point there. Hell, I would go so far as to say it had been one of my defining qualities throughout my life. Where others saw signs warning of danger or limits not to be exceeded, I saw opportunities to challenge myself. Heck, it was part of how I ended up here. The accident that ferried me to Rava was part of the biggest challenge there was. The only bigger challenge was surviving once I got here.

<And reaching the moon.>

And that, yes. Bootstrapping the Apollo program from the stone age. But what did System care about my goals? What did anyone care?

<Perhaps you should ask them.>

Who?

<The ones that brought you here.>

This time I didn’t just pause. I stopped dead in my tracks. My fur became damp with sweat. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Who brought me here?”

“Boss?” said Eileen, unsure. “Uh, I did. On the chopper.”

I shook my head. “Not you, System! Someone picked me specifically? Why me? Why not Sanders or Davis?”

No answer.

“Hell, they brought Ringo, too! Why Ringo? Why bring a kid from Florida?”

Nothing.

I growled. “Nothing to say, now? Figures. You should’a been a government database with all the queries you fail to return.”

“Boss!” I looked over at one of the scrappers shouting from the eastern side of the bluff. He ran up, gasping for breath. “I think they figured out we don’t plan on takin’ back off. There’s a bunch of haunts, headed right for us.”

This isn’t over, System. I looked at Eileen. “Let’s get to the radio room. And, I’m sorry,”

“For what?” she asked, confused.

“We need reinforcements. Looks like Chuck is going to get first dibs after all.”

Eileen swallowed, pointing east where a handful of black dots had appeared in the eastern sky. “Well the faster he gets here, the better.”

We ducked into the radio room, which had been partially collapsed—but miraculously, the low-frequency antenna was in-tact and the sparkers had managed to finagle a channel with Bluff Apollo. I took the handset and barked instructions through until I heard Sourtooth’s voice on the other end.

“Little brother! A mad scramble, you’ve got here. Pray, what troubles found you ‘ere northern village?”

“Our missing elf. He’s found the night haunt nest. I know you think night haunts are pests, but they’re dangerous enough to exposed goblins.”

“Night haunts by 1’s and 2’s, are pests. A nest inflamed by the bough of an elven infiltrator is a pestilence. You must retreat.”

“We can’t retreat,” I said. “We can already see them coming.”

“Then luck favor you, little brother king, for fortune has not.”

Weren’t those just the same things? A commotion outside drew me away from the radio, where several goblins I didn’t recognize were coming up over the bluff’s edge. They had longer, lankier arms than the goblins from my bluff—an adaptation to the higher cliff faces, I assumed. There were concentric circles on their fur, and their little skull masks were mostly of birds and fowl.

“Locals?” I asked. They chittered and nodded. Another dozen goblins that had managed to survive. “You escaped the attack?”

Nods.

“How many night haunts?” I asked.

The group looked between each other. 2 of them held up both hands and all their fingers, and another held up only his left hand. I flinched. Two-dozen night haunts heading our way. And reinforcements from Bluff Apollo were at least an hour away. We needed some edge. “Come with me.”

I brought the survivors to one of the slain night haunts with the silver fur. They immediately began shouting as they punched and kicked it, and I had to shout to get them under control.

“Hey, HEY! Stop that. Bring tools and a beam. We’ve got to get this thing mounted up, yeah?” The mountain goblins seemed to understand what I was telling them to do, and several rushed off and started pulling rope or intact bits of wood from the flattened structures.

In the main clearing of the bluff, several of the helicopters started to spin up again, what ones the sparkers had managed to rig-up with improvised anti-elven defenses. Engaging the night haunts in close-air support would be incredibly dangerous. But, then, so was engaging them on the ground. Nothing about the situation was ideal.

Nothing new for us, really. I just had to keep reminded them, like everyone else, that Tribe Apollo were not goblins to be underestimated.