MBGSP Chpt 107-109

Welcome to the next update!

Chapter 108 can be considered something of a soft ending for book 2, though it's likely that the actual book 2 will end somewhere closer to chapter 116 for consistency of length with the first book.

I hope ya'll enjoy!

Chapter 107 - Birds of a Feather

<Your tribe has increased to 922 members>

So, what do you do when you successfully hunt a whistler near the end of the Stampede? You party. For the five days it took to process and pack the bulk of the whistler, the orcs drank and celebrated and cheered both the Flock’s kill and their withdrawal from the Stampede. Sourtooth strutted on his new prosthetic blade, wearing a necklace of whistler teeth across his bare chest. His skin was marked with the grey and white bands of his hunting team. I thought he would be eager to put both my tribe and the Stampede behind him, given the state I’d found him in. But learned this was not the case.  

Now that Tribe Apollo was officially part of the Flock, the reverse was apparently also true. The temporary partnership between Sourtooth and myself seemed to become permanent.

“Or does this road of kinship but one way travel?” he asked, eyebrow raised.

“Of course not!” I said, waving my hands ahead of me. “I’m just surprised. I’m ecstatic that you want to see the village and help me with Lura’s task.”

“For the Flock, was the task,” Sourtooth reminded me. “The Flock could complete it not, were we not of a mind. Besides, I wish to see more of your artifice.”

“And I’ll be glad to have your smiths working with my igni. Orc metalworking and composite materials are going to be invaluable in our next generation of tech. Two days by over-land travel will see us back at the village. I have tests to run and lots of new materials to work with. It’ll take weeks to haul everything the Whistler had to offer back to the bluff.”

Plus, if there was one way to get back in the good graces of the King of the Ifrit, it was to uncork their city by helping Lura take down the magic devourer. I wondered if the desert would turn back into a verdant area once it was gone. In the meantime, we would send a batch of ceramics as a peace offering, along with an explanation. But Taquoho said the method for arbitrating conflicting information within The City was long, arduous, and resulted in the splitting and reforming of various unions along political lines—a process that often created more problems than it solved. Haughty-Von-Haughty had really done us dirty by lying about what he found at the village.

Between the orcs and the Ifrit, we were building a monstrous menagerie of our own. The irony wasn’t lost on me that if this were Earth, we’d clearly be the heels of the villainous faction. But then, Sauron was never interested in space flight. So, we at least had that going for us.

The morning of the fifth day, the Stampede resumed. The various teams went their separate ways, and Lura with them. She still had a tournament to win before she went after the biggest trophy of them all. Tribe Apollo, the ifrit outcasts, and the remnants of the Flock headed west toward the lake-side waystation—which was already started to become a fuel depot and rest stop for goblins hunting plains creatures and harvesting edible plant-life that grew in the grasslands.

The taskmasters of Tribe Apollo were proving deft hands at keeping the logistics lines moving. An innate understanding of the technology itself apparently came with a keen sense of where raw materials needed to go to be processed, and where refined materials and devices needed to go to be utilized. I had shored up a few of those processes myself, but largely the logistics engine was self-sustaining.

A perimeter fence of wood backed by mud bricks was going up to protect the central tower that anchored the site. I spotted a platform jutting out the side of the tower that was definitely an airship dock, though it was currently empty. Just outside the fence, a stretch of relatively flat land had been cleared of brush and small debris to serve as an airstrip, and two small biplanes were fastened down with weighted lines.

Sourtooth looked up at the structure as we stopped for water and shade in the daily eclipse. “Underestimate the size of your tribe, we. Believed it numbered some 200 or more, did Lura. And perhaps that is true—here on the open steppe. But such a number you could feed in the jungle, if just. Pray, what is the true counting?”

“After 5 consecutive days of no catastrophes and full bellies, we’ve replenished what we lost in the Stampede and then some. We may break 1,000 goblins soon, if we don’t suffer any huge losses,” I said. I pulled up my population window and looked at the various assigned goblins and their tasking. “I can use the System to track them and manage everything from spawn rates to productivity.”

Sourtooth looked at the goblins scrambling about the fuel depot at their various tasks. “1,000 goblins,” he said. “That is a tribe of troubling size, yet still easily quelled. Err caution, little brother. Goblin kings are feared even upon Kelembog. Even one such as you that seeks peace, others will yet see as a pestilence.”

I took a drink of water. “Are goblin kings typically war-like?” I asked. I didn’t want to mention that I only knew of one other. My knowledge of Ravan history was still murky, at best—and neither ifrit nor orcs kept written records that I could reference. Ironically, my canoneers were making the closest thing to a history book on Lanclova, as far as I knew.

Sourtooth rubbed his chin. “A goblin uprising swept across the Duchy of Habbe—though of when, the songs are not clear. Before my grandfather’s time. Some 30,000 ravenous maws descended like locusts, having devoured everything in the mountains that could possibly sustain them. Not each their own dangerous, you see. But in aggregate… and starving… it left a devastated duchy for some time.”

I sighed. “I at least have plans for that. Hunting secures us in the short-term. Gives us enough time to maybe start seeding crops and planting orchards for when the tribe grows as big as I need it to be to reach my goal. But the tribe hasn’t taken to agriculture. It’s like it doesn’t even exist in the tree.”

Sourtooth laughed. “Pray, little brother, from where will you gather seed to plant? The humans will not trade it to you. Ifrit have no such thing. Even the Lanclovan soil taints and twists whatever is planted in it. You’ve seen burst-fruit, I assume?”

I took a pause in my drink and raised an eyebrow at the orc. “Those aren’t typical elsewhere?”

The old orc shook his head. “Not meant to grow in the shade of the moon, were the beasts and birds and trees of Kelembog. ‘Tis an evil eye that warps all it watches. Look no further than the creatures of the steppe.”

“I see,” I said, frowning. Maybe my goblins weren’t to blame for the failures of our early farming attempts after all.

We continued on, hoping to reach the village before nightfall. I saw it before we even entered the jungle—or rather, the several globular balloons lofted above the village and the various wooden structures suspended between their lines. Buzz and Javier had been busy at work. Rufus must have arrived with the canvas for my taskmasters to make so many of them, and I spotted glider launch rails, flex-a-pults, windmills, houses, and countless other goblin devices in the towering complex that Buzz had begun to erect. It looked like little more than the floors of a skyscraper under construction without the benefit of the supporting structure. What’s more is that a cloud of orbiting shapes I’d originally taken for birds were in fact goblins on personal gliders transitioning from level to level or dispatching to tasks in the forest below.

“By foul elders,” muttered Sourtooth. “Such a sight, a body never beheld.”

It was a village no longer. That much was for sure.

“Welcome to City Apollo,” I said, a bit stunned myself.

We continued through the widened roads, passing traffic the other way who stopped to mob the king and see if the new orcs were A) edible or B) good anchors for sleeping mounds. Other goblins took advantage of the opportunity to ditch the buggies and run into the woods to look for grubs or streams to fish in. By the time we got to the base of the bluff, fully half the goblins who had been riding with us had cycled out for entirely new goblins. But such was their way.

The freight elevators had been upgraded. Rather than suspended by cordage and counterweights, they’d been adapted to the wind-powered screws. While the platforms struggled and creaked against the weight of the buggies and their added cargo, the wind-powered lifts began to climb with slow, cyclical noises. Overhead, two biplanes flew between discrete levels of construction, before passing east on their way to (presumably) Camp Canaveral.

I’d worried that the village would stagnate in my absence. But under my taskmasters, it had flourished. That was perfect, because we had work to do. 30,000 goblins like the ravenous blue plague that had swept Habbe? I didn’t know that I would need that many. 10,000? Perhaps 10,000 could do the job.

Either way, we still had a long road to the stars.

Chapter 108 - Building Up

“We have some larger scale structures that we built for the Ifrit paladins. Your people should be comfortable there,” I told Sourtooth, pointing out the area. The old orc looked around the base of the bluff at the tangle of squat, misshapen buildings lining the southeast corner of the bluff. Large anchors tethered the floating platforms above, which themselves were suspended by balloons crafted from canvas—which meant that Rufus had returned in the interim. I wanted to find him. “Make yourselves at home,” I said.

“Hope the smell of the humans has left with them south,” he said. He shouldered his gear. “Come on, lads. Working doors we’ll need, lest any of you should want to wake at the bottom of a goblin breeding mound.” he shuddered. Hmph. At least the paladins had let goblins snuggle them.

The orcs hurried after him, and I headed to the central square. It was hard to believe how much and how quickly the bluff had changed. Village Apollo was turning into a proper town. And my goblins were everywhere. They worked at hammering together wooden structures, linking up gear assemblages to wind power, working gas-powered lathes to turn raw materials into usable parts, and assembled buggies, bikes, choppers, and gliders in the motorpool powered by gas engines. So much smoke rose from the foundries and furnaces on the north end of the bluff that I thought something must be burning. But the blaze was in the hearts of all the goblins working to make Tribe Apollo great.

Buzz greeted me with a wave, pulling up in a small flat-bed buggy with loose construction equipment in the back that threatened to become a projectile hazard as he screeched to a stop.

“Welcome back, boss!” he shouted over the roar of the engine. He slapped the side of the vehicle. “Hop in!”

“Good to see you, Buzz!” I said. I waved to Armstrong and Chuck. Armstrong jumped into the back, threatening to crush the primitive suspension, but Chuck waved me off.

“Gonna check on the animals,” he said. “See how the paddocks are shaped up.”

“Suit yourself,” I said. I slapped him on the shoulder and watched him jog off to the west end of the bluff before I slid into the buggy beside Buzz.

“You’ve been busy,” I said.

“Been crowded. Only way to go was up, so we went up! Wotcha think?”

I looked overhead at the concentric ringed platforms staged haphazardly on canvas balloons. Such a feat of engineering would have given architects ulcers and physicists strokes. But it looked perfectly goblin-sane.

“Is Eileen back yet?” I asked.

“Still up north,” said Buzz. He had to shout because his foot seemed weighted down with lead on the throttle pedal. “We had some converts come in. Once they’re in the tribe they make gliders and some head ‘ere. Most stay put, start buildin’ up their own bluffs with the new tech they learn. I send builders out to help. It don’t take long to get ‘em flyin’ but most of ‘em don’t have a source of metal to make engines. We got more sulfur, rubber, clay, whatever anyone needs. Takes time to send word back and forth of who needs what where, though.”

“So I’ve seen,” I said. I’d been using the System menus to keep track of resources in and out, monitoring trends and shortfalls. Being able to draw resources to central hubs like the bluffs from multiple areas meant a smoother curve of extraction from the forests. One of Eileen’s bluffs near the mountains had even come with a source of copper, which was as least as valuable as a new variant.

“Radios are on my to-do list,” I said. “Now we’ve got strong magnets and copper wire, generators will be straight-forward. From there we’ll some extra equipment to send and receive signals.”

“If you say so,” said Buzz. More content to wait until I got the tech unlocked than try to work through it in his head, my lead builder put his focus into navigating the bluff at a breakneck pace. He stopped short near one of the lines leading up to the next platform, swerving into a halt that threatened to tip us straight over.

“I sent along the second airship with rotors and other hard-to-make parts, help some of the new lads find their feet and get engines going. Got one of the noblins onboard to spread the canon. Should be back in a day or so.”

“Good thinking.”

Buzz hopped down and went over to what looked like a knotted rope loop strung between a small windmill on the second platform and a bearing on the ground. At the top, I could see several aircraft staged and ready to launch. Buzz grabbed the rope and let it pull him up. I jumped on behind him, with Armstrong and a few other bodyguards close in tow.

At the top, I spotted a goblin that was slightly bigger than the others—a taskmaster I didn’t recognize, in charge of the air hangars. His jaw dropped when he saw me, and he dashed over.

“Sir, sir! It’s an honor!” he squeaked.

I grinned and looked at the air fleet, which had a mix of powered and unpowered gliders staged in lopsided rows. “You in charge with Eileen gone?”

“Yessir!”

“Suppose you’ll need a name,” I said, racking my brain for an astronaut or pilot name.”

“They call me Footsmash, my king!”

Or… he could be called Footsmash. I looked down at one of his feet, which looked to have been mangled at some point in the three weeks or so since he’d been born. “Footsmash it is,” I said. I suppose now Taskmasters were going to be popping up all around as the tribe grew, and I wasn’t going to be there to name every single one of them. Tribe Apollo was becoming bigger than Apollo. Which it needed to do if this logistics engine was going to grow big enough to support the thousands of goblins I’d need to start processing, refining, and manufacturing complex aerospace components.

“Got a bi-glider ready?” asked Buzz.

Footsmash led us to one of the larger models with a big, cast-iron engine block. I rubbed my hands together. While helicopters might be cool (they’re not), airplanes were my jam. And I’d wanted to get my hands on the sticks ever since Eileen flew the first one over the Stampede camp. I climbed up into the cockpit and familiarized myself with the controls—which had been upgraded from the days of the first heavy gliders having individual goblins work control surfaces. These ones used push-pull rods to manipulate actual three-axis controls built into the wings and the tail so that one pilot could steer.

“Strap in, boss!” said Buzz, indicating a harness. I pulled the straps tight and cinched them down, marveling at the fact goblins had actually integrated a safety feature into a vehicle. Armstrong stuck a rockette into the starter, and the engine rumbled to life. We started to roll, even at idle power, and I realized the aircraft wasn’t secured or chocked in any way.

“Where’s the runway?” I asked, looking around for a place to turn.

“More like a drop-way,” said Buzz, tugging his own belt tight.

My stomach sank. Oh. That was the reason they’d installed the belts. I swallowed, looked at the quickly-approaching edge of the platform, and jammed the throttle wide open. The noise mounted behind me, and I pulled on the pair of ear-cups in the cockpit. Black smoke belched out the back of the bi-plane, and we built up what speed we could before we shot straight off the edge of the platform.

I grit my teeth and shoved the stick forward, angling the nose down toward the ground. We weren’t going fast enough for takeoff, so trying to stay level would just stall us out. We needed airspeed, and this was the only way to get it. We fell past the edge of the platform, then quickly passed the top of the bluff. The cliff face blurred past us, and the ground rushed up. System’s little altitude and airspeed window popped up, one climbing while the other rapidly depleted.

“Uh… boss!?” shouted Armstrong.

The wings started to shake, and I hauled back on the controls, pulling us out of the dive as the engine screamed. I thought the plane might come apart from the sheer forces, and then I thought it might come apart from smashing into the tops of the trees south of the bluff. But it managed to claw back into a climb, and we cleared the tallest branches by a few meters.

I felt Armstrong relax behind me, and I eased my white-knuckle grip on the controls and banked us to the left.

“That’s a proper takeoff, boss!” said Buzz. “Welcome home.”

Chapter 109 - Just a Swamp Thing

I circled the bluff, joining the pattern of gliders already filling the airspace. We’d been gone a few weeks, and I wanted to see the extent of the changes.

As we climbed, I got a look at the upper suspended platforms where goblins worked at workshops, turned lathes, tuned engines, slept, or crafted. The top-most layer had stockpiles of raw materials and workshops for clothing and armor. The balloons keeping the whole thing suspended were thick canvas, and looked like they had once been a ship’s sails. Braziers of scat fed them with hot air. I suppose several-hundred goblins created more than enough fuel to keep them lofted but I wasn’t sure what we’d ever do if they needed to come down.

Buzz pointed out various facilities and workshops as we passed. “There’s the paparium where the canoneers oversee their paper and charcoal production together—it’s burnt down twice already. Over there’s where we make clifford saddles and plate carriers. That hut there is where we keep jars of bomb-fruit juice. Next door is one of the rockette stores.”

Good to see things hadn’t changed. I pushed the stick forward and took us low. The forest had been pushed back even more, now at least half a kilometer from the edge of the bluff in most directions and even more to the west, where the paddocks held dozens of herd animals captured and brought in from the planes. A clutch of 20-30 captured hoppers bounded away from our low pass, and near them a dozen oryx drank from a trough. Small packs of cliffords ran freely across the grass, keeping the herds together. Wranglers rode alongside on dirt-bikes with prods and clubs.

There was one form I didn’t recognize right away, until it raised its head and I saw the large, pronged tusks jutting from the wide, flat face.

“You captured a thundercleave? Alive?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“They come on their own to the scratchy towers. Got a taste for the pulp-slurp. Wranglers say they ain’t so bad if you don’t startle ‘em. More beasts come back every day from the badlands, and we send the vehicles back out with more go-juice and ammo to stage at the lake camp.”

Having placed in the Stampede, we now had a right by the orcs to hunt game in the plains, and that meant being able to build up our herd animals. But that wasn’t the only food project. I angled us north, where we’d cleared all the way to the river for farm-land. Though, looking at what were supposed to be tilled fields, it looked more like the zen-garden of a dyslexic dog than the ordered rows of an industrial farm. Here and there, an odd plant poked through the surface and the occasional large hole pocked the area.

“The lads still don’t get the point of sticking food back in the ground,” said Buzz, “But we’ve been stuffing seeds, berries, rocks, eggs, anything we can find on the off-chance it grows like you said it would.”

I grimaced. “It’s looking more and more like agriculture might not be in the Goblin Tech Tree at all. But it still works, it’s just regular old science. We’ll figure it out,” I said.

As I flew over, a fountain of dirt shot into the sky, leaving a new smoking hole in the field. The BOOM reached us a moment later.

“I take it you’ve been planting bombfuits?” I asked. Buzz nodded. Our one successful agricultural venture thus far had been the bomb-fruit orchard created primarily by accident when trying to create safe storage for the volatile fruits during my first days on Rava. Whatever else they were, bomb-fruits were extremely efficient at scattering their seeds. Back then I’d only had a couple dozen goblins in the tribe, and the loss of even a single one was devastating. Now, System didn’t even alert me unless there was a significant drop in a short time.

I angled the plane north toward the river, where an extensive network of docks jutted out into the water. Small boats floated up and down, powered mostly by manual impellers and the rare gas outboard engine. The fishermen were using anything from small, 3-goblin canoes to the big 10+ goblin pontoon barges. Upstream, I could see several wooden towers dotting the banks, poking up above the tree-line.

I made a low pass by one of the towers. The goblins at the top had fish smoking on racks, and they jumped and chittered and waved as we flew past. I pulled up and around, angling us southwest. The road to Huntsville had been widened and further cobbled, but I stuck over top of the river, following its winding path until I started to see the towers and furnaces of Huntsville. The river spread, slowed, and then we reached the edge of the marshlands where I saw boats traversing the brackish water in between peat mounds and goblins wading in the water with prilling knives.

Low to the right, a splash and hiss indicated the emergence of a croc-knocker, who immediately struck a goblin with his tongue prill. A nearby boat swiveled its mounted weapon, and the whoosh-crack of a recoilless rifle accompanied a gout of black, oily smoke from the deck. The croc-knocker rolled belly-up, and several goblins jumped into the water to retrieve the carcass.

Flying further in, we passed a screw-pump that looked remarkably like an Earth-style oil derrick—if miniaturized and swarming with little blue goblins. It was also on fire, but that didn’t seem to be hurting productivity as goblins cycled in with bladders to collect the fuel being pumped up out of the ground. I spotted a larger taskmaster overseeing the process and offering encouragement in the form of shouting and kicks to goblins who weren’t moving as fast as she thought they ought be.

How many taskmasters are we up to? I asked System.

<You currently have 33 taskmasters.>

Huh. I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me. That meant I was on a first-name basis with less than half of them. I’d have to fix that. My first variant was my rarest, but also my most critical to the massive logistics engine this tribe was already starting to become.

Still think I should have gone with the Hobgoblin Sentinels?

<I have no direct input or assessment on the variant choices of a goblin king.>

System was a damn liar. I chuckled. Off to the northwest, I spotted another smoke trail, and shaded my eyes. “Buzz, that’s an awfully big fire. What do we have in that direction?”

Buzz followed my gaze. “Nothin’ boss. That’s King Ringo’s island. We don’t go there on your orders.”

I frowned, looking at it. Had the wayward king of Daytona managed to burn down his own castle? Somehow, I doubted it. I dipped the wings and angled the glider towards the swamp king’s domain.

As we got closer, I could see that there was definite damage to the outer walls and huts of the island. A shredded, untethered hide balloon draped across the tree-tops, and several primitive boats were smashed on the shore. The keep’s perimeter wall was damaged and smoldering in several places—absolutely not by accident. Someone had attacked Ringo. Of the boglins, there was no sign.

“I don’ like this, boss,” said Armstrong, leaning so far out of the plane he threatened to throw off our CG.

“Me either,” I said. I circled around for a lower pass and spotted a group of croc-knockers watching us as we flew by. Which struck me as odd, for some reason. As I passed over, they opened their mouths—despite the fact we were clearly out of range of their prills. Rather than iron, a cloud of red mist streamed up from their nostrils and mouths, taking the form of a narrow lance that shot up towards us.

“Oh hell!” I shouted.

I jammed the throttle wide open as Armstrong scrambled for the rifle under his seat. He fired several shots back at the thing, which seemed to have no effect. But we built speed, and the thing apparently reached the end of whatever tethered it to the crocks, because it doubled back and shot towards the pack of reptiles once more. My stomach just about lurched into my throat, and my heart thumped in my chest. That was the same type of creature or spirit or something I’d seen take over the cliffords we brought to Huntsville and wreck up our first camp. We hadn’t had any problems with them since, but clearly something had changed.

I angled us back toward Huntsville. “Buzz, can you fly this thing home?”

“Sure, boss!”

“Good. Tell Sally to get to work on the electric generator project. Tell her to strap bits of the whistler tail to an engine and spin them around wrapped copper wire until a goblin tech unlocks.”

“Sure thing, boss!

I didn’t want to delay electric motors and generators any longer, but this situation couldn’t be ignored. Ringo was my canary in the coal mine, and he had clearly stopped singing. I wanted to know what he saw, which meant I had to find him.

“Armstrong?”

I needn’t have asked. The burly scrapper was already uncinching his safety harness and slinging the rifle over his shoulder. He shot me a quick salute, and I nodded. Buzz and I awkwardly switched places with my lead builder assuming the controls. He wasn’t a great pilot—in fact he was kind of terrible and terrifying—which was why he was in charge of building things instead of running the air wing. But he got us relatively over-top Huntsville. I grabbed an emergency glider from the cockpit and scrambled out onto the wing. When I was sure I was clear of the prop, I leapt off the wing and opened the glider, catching the air and starting to circle over the bustling village Huntsville had become in my absence. A few seconds later, several blue, furry forms plummeted past me.

Armstrong and his secretive service hadn’t bothered with the gliders.