MBGSP Chpt 58 thru 62

Big update for you guys this week! The end of Arc 1 wraps up midway through the update, transitioning smoothly into the start of Arc 2. MBGSP is still running full-steam and shows no signs of stopping. Patreon numbers have been going up, and a bit down, but mostly up. On Royal Road, we're still getting more readers hopping on the goblin train by the day, and we've maintained our spot in the top 50 stories on Royal Road - which is a result of you guys leaving good reviews, and I appreciate it!

I also wanted to set the next milestones for the Patreon. Right now we're at 8 advance chapters guaranteed (though I sometimes sneak a little ahead or fall a bit behind on posting schedule). If we get 75 paid members, I'll be upping advanced chapters from 8 to 10. If we get to 100 paid subscribers, I'll be upping the number of advance chapters again to 14.

I've also been approached this week by both a publisher and a literary agency about MBGSP and other work, so I may have even more news next week - possibly tentative info on an audio version of Arc I for those who like their goblins narrated.

Enjoy the rest of your week and weekend, goblin fans!

Chapter 58 - Oil and Ore

<Your tribe has decreased to 162 members>

The rest of the day wasn’t bloodless. Other crocs tried to make a meal of harvest teams, and not all of them failed before they were driven off. But by the end of the day, we’d managed to collect 31 chooms of iron ore, and I described the process of a bloom furnace to the ignis boss, Promo, over a dinner of roasted croc tail. It was, by far, the best thing I’d eaten since coming to Rava. Even if the igni couldn’t work fire or ceramics or swing a hammer, they were worth it for the cooking alone.

I spent the rest of the daylight helping the goblins make large jars to store and transport the oil the boglins had brought to trade that was currently held in several leaky skins that Ringo’s advisor insisted were not part of the deal.

They’d figured out a pottery wheel of sorts—albeit one where the clay remained stationary, and the goblins spun around it on a greased bearing. It was quite fascinating to watch, really, especially when they got two or three goblins on the same wheel with different ideas about what they were trying to make.

We were up to 12 chooms of bog oil. The consistency was close enough to kerosene that I hoped it would burn in an engine without additional processing. But first, I still had to make the engine. Tomorrow we’d be building our first furnace for smelting iron ore.

I sat back after dinner and watched the goblins. At some point, the little blue fuzz-balls had adopted graffiti based on the only reference imagery they had: engineering drawings. Flat surfaces within easy reach of a goblin were covered in iconographic schematics of the various technologies we’d unlocked so far. Parsing their art was like watching a chronological progression of our path through the Goblin Tech Tree. Strange way to start a culture movement, but the engineer in me approved.

At this rate, it wouldn’t be long before they developed a pictographic language. I didn’t want to interfere with that process because it’s very rare to see something like that manifest naturally in a primitive culture. Not that anything about the goblins was natural, or even sensical. Hell, I still had only working theories as to how the reproduction of goblins worked. My current working guess was that it had to do with the hot, damp, dark environment created within the sleeping mounds—though the fertilization and growth process was still a mystery. Goblins weren’t just animals, though I had my reservations about classifying them as complex carnivorous plants or myconids without more evidence.

A wave of cheers brought my attention around to several goblins trying to stand a pole upright that had been decorated with croc-knocker bones and capped with the top skull and jaw of one of the beasts. Looking at the stripped skull, it looked less like a crocodile and more like an iguana or chameleon, or something. But the moniker was already lodged in my brain.

<Goblin Totem Unlocked: Croc-Knocker Skull: Goblins who appreciate this totem temporarily 15% faster in wetland environments and can hold their breath 20% longer.>

The goblins present all took a collective breath and then, for the first time that day, none of them made any noise.

It was actually disconcerting. I looked out over a crowd of puffed out cheeks and bugged eyes as the goblins stared each other down, each daring the rest to be the first to release the breath. I worried they were going to start to pass out.

Eventually, one of them cracked and let out a gasp, which propagated through the crowd, followed by jeers at the half of the goblins that gave up sooner—which then led to a minor civil war as the goblins who couldn’t hold their breath as long began assaulting the rest. It all devolved into chaos within a few seconds as they forgot what they were fighting about and just started biting and punching anything that happened to be close by. Even Promo was wading through the crowd, laying into goblins with his hooked rod, and of course the hobbies were giving it their all even if they were overwhelmed by sheer numbers. In the end, the indivisible singular goblin was the great equalizer as their masses rolled over the variants.

All this over a skull on a stick. But, then, I’d never really understood art. I leaned back by the fire, watching the chaos unfold. Sometimes, it was good to be the king.

                          *

<Your tribe has increased to 179 members>

“More heat!” I called.

The goblins worked the impellers on the furnace by the light of the rising sun. Promo stood with the other ignis that had been born at the bog camp (now Village Huntsville) the previous night and dumped baskets of charcoal into the bloom furnace. Smoke billowed out the top, along with an acidic tang that I surmised was the bacteria in the iron nodules within the furnace.

Making iron in a bloom furnace wasn’t all that dissimilar to firing ceramics. You needed a chamber hotter than the hottest boil on Satan’s big, red behind, and you needed lots of air and heat.

It took hours for the furnace to melt down all the iron, and I couldn’t even check the progress of it. But we were following the book almost exactly—with a few modifications to account for differences in goblin methodology. But we had to be getting close. I could feel the anticipating building.

<Goblin Technology Unlocked: Boom furnace>

Don’t you mean ‘bloom’ furnace?

I felt a rumble start to mount beneath my feet. That wasn’t anticipation shaking the dirt.

<I said what I said.>

My eyes went wide, and I whistled for everyone’s attention. “Get down!” I shouted. “Now!”

Most of the goblins had learned pretty quickly that when I gave an order with urgency that it was in their best interest to comply, so most of them dropped what they were doing and dove for the floor, pressing their hands over their heads to stop any imminent debris. The goblins working the impellers weren’t fast enough, and when the furnace exploded, it took both of them with it, and knocked me to the ground.

<You tribe has decreased to 177 members.>

Clay chips ricocheted off the brick tower, the trees, and rained from the sky for several seconds. When I looked up, the whole front face of the furnace had erupted outward, carving a path right through the cranking station while—amazingly—leaving the impeller assemblies completely intact.

While I felt bad for the goblins, impellers were a few orders of magnitude more rare. I picked myself up and dusted off my fur. The furnace was a mess, but I could see something glowing under the collapse. I grabbed a wooden pole and moved up, ready to call the whole thing a disaster. But then I saw it: the red-hot glowing billet at the bottom of the furnace.

I wedged the wooden pole underneath and dislodged it. The iron rolled down the base of the furnace, shooting off sparks.

“Promo!”

“On it, boss!” shouted the ignis, grabbing a set of wooden tongs and examining the rough mix of iron and slag. He tipped it over, examined it from all sides. “To the stump!” he declared.

The goblins in the village cheered. They ran to the makeshift forge we’d been able to scrape together. A stump sat in the middle of the area with narrow wooden log sitting above. The goblins who had followed us from the furnace area raced to be the firsts to grab a series of ropes that fed into pulleys that were, themselves attached to the pole. The goblins leapt up and hauled down, and the pole lifted from the stump.

Promo was quick to lever the iron underneath the pole before the thing came crashing back down, compressing the iron and knocking off some of the impurities. The goblins on the lines were pulled off their feet, but they yanked back down and began a see-saw between their weight and the pole hammer. I watched as Prometheus got the billet turned every which way as they hammered it.

Shouldn’t I get an unlock for the forge hammer?

<Still technically a sticky-hammer.> the System informed me.

I feel like there might have at least been some difference. But what do I know? I was only bringing my tribe into the iron age.

Chapter 59 - Dawn of Iron

It’s a common misnomer among people who play too many videogames that technological progression always goes copper-bronze-iron, and then some sort of made-up stuff like mithril. In reality, bronze is actually pretty tough to get a hold of. On Earth, early sources of tin came from only a few places in Europe and Asia, and when those trade routes broke down, some societies actually fell back out of the bronze age for a while. For many applications, bronze was similar or sometimes even favorable. But one thing it wasn’t, was a stepping stone into the iron age.

My tribe had its first iron bar. As I held the metal in place with wooden tongs, I watched the two igni cut and stack, and continue to hammer it into a proper billet. We worked until mid-day, adding more heat from a charcoal fire when necessary, at which point the hobbies woke up and another iron-gathering expedition set out into the bog.

As in any case of development, the first thing we needed to manufacture was tools to make more tools. In this case: a proper blacksmithing hammer. The over-sized mallets the igni were swinging looked more like the hammers you’d use at a carnival game. Luckily, shaping and fixture of a hammer was pretty simple, as far as tools were concerned, and we had one by mid-morning and Proto took a lunch break while he waited for his new toy to temper in the kiln.

<Goblin Technology Unlocked: Clangy tools - all previously discovered tools may now be made with metal variants.>

“Boss, I gotta say, it’s an honor what to receive our first iron tool,” said Promo, spinning the hammer around while another hunk of pig-iron iron heated in a boom furnace (with appropriate shielding for the impeller team, this time).

“It’s fine. I’m sure you’ll do the tribe proud with it,” I said, guzzling water from a skin. Helping the igni in close proximity to the fires, the fumes, and the red-hot metal was thirsty work, and my fur was matted with sweat. It almost didn’t bother me that it was straight bog-water in the skin. The goblin ability to filter out almost all toxins through our digestive tract made brackish water fine to drink. I wiped my mouth of with the back of my arm. “You’ll have your work cut out for you when it’s time to hand-hammer an engine together.”

“Enn-jinn…” Proto said, slowly, sounding out the word. “Sounds fun. What’s it do?”

I thought for a moment, trying to describe it on fundamental terms for the primordial goblin. “It swallows fuel, makes heat in its belly, and creates internal pressure that translates to external force,” I finally said.

“I get like that sometimes, too,” said Proto, patting his rump.

I chuckled, shook my head, and pointed to the large jars of maybe-kerosene. “That stuff. An engine will let us use that to turn a wheel, spin a propeller, run a lathe, or charge a battery.”

“You can use fire for that, too, though, right?” asked Proto. “The balloons work off hot air, can’t you use hot air to move things?”

“Sort of,” I said. I set the water aside. “But not for the reason you’re thinking. A hot air balloon rises because the hot air inside is less dense than the cool air outside. But, expansion of gasses, or transition of liquids into gasses, is a huge source of kinetic energy and a fundamental concept of almost all forms of power generation where I’m from. What you’re talking about is called steam power. And yes, we’re going to make use of it. But we don’t have large scale energy problems right now. Almost all of our problems stem from a lack of materials.”

“Like food,” said Proto.

“Like food.” I considered. “Did you just stop paying attention because I’d lost you and you got hungry?”

Proto started to giggle. “Sorry boss, you lost me ‘round about expansion of gasses.”

The other igni started to giggle, too, and held his hands up to his mouth to make a farting noise. I rolled my eyes as the goblins nearby started to do it, too. And then of course it propagated through the base. Not all of the goblins realized the others were using their mouths, either. I set the rest of my food aside, disgusted.

When I’d said material constraints, I’d been thinking more along the lines of manufacturing materials. Not just iron, either. We needed to start thinking about cloth, paper, properly cut lumber, more metal, more fuel, and a dozen other things. But I’d also been watching the food stores tick down from a safe margin to a few dozen chooms as the tribe continued to grow. Even assigning more hunters and fishers had done limited good. We needed a larger source of calories if we were to continue growing. If I was to support a population in the hundreds or thousands, we needed kilochooms of food. And we needed working engines to secure it. That had to be the next priority.

It didn’t help that Neil’s hunters were competing against the javeline for small game in the forest. Whatever else they were, the half-pigs were very effective hunters. But they also weren’t in the forest exclusively to collect goblin trophies. If we buttoned up, they didn’t risk losing too many of their own. But they were an ever-present threat.

I pushed to my feet, ready to get back to work. “I will say this: you and your noblin pals are going to have a lot of work coming your way. Are you up to it?”

“Trust, boss!”

We managed to get one more hammer ready by the time the harvesters returned with several more baskets full of raw iron, and not long after that, we heard the baying of hounds that announced Chuck and his wranglers making their daily visit. They reached us a few minutes later and the wrangler swung down from his saddle with a grim expression.

I stood up. “What’s going on?” I asked.

Chuck went to his saddlebags. “Javeline look like they’re gearing up for a move on Canaveral,” he said. “Eileen spotted a warband of them east of the springs.”

I considered. “Canaveral is well-defended, but if they attack during the eclipse, the goblins might be spread too thin to defend it.” I looked to Armstrong. “Should we reinforce their numbers with an air drop?”

Armstrong considered. “Could be a porkbelly trap, king. We send boys to Canaveral, and then the main force hits Apollo.” he smashed a fist into his meaty palm. “That’s what I’d do if I was them. But they ain’t clever like me. Maybe it’s just what it looks like.”

I growled in frustration. Armstrong was probably right. There were aft of 80 or 90 javeline in the forest that we knew of, though they’d taken to hiding their numbers from our overhead scouts. It was frustrating, because Canaveral had become an important source of food for the tribe thanks to the eclipse lizards having more meat than brains.

As much as I didn’t want to abandon Canaveral, even temporarily, I’d planned for this. There were gliders ready and waiting at Canaveral, enough to carry every goblin back to Apollo. But it would be a huge expenditure of sulfur to send them back. “Evacuation protocol,” I told Chuck. “Have everyone ready to pull back from Canaveral if the javeline attack during an eclipse. Let’s head to Apollo and shore it up for an attack.”

Promo stepped up, hefting his mallet. “Great, boss. Been missin’ the old homestead. Ready to smoke some more javeline ribs.”

“What about Huntsville?” asked Chuck.

The javeline hadn’t shown any interest in the bog before, and any time Neil’s hunters encountered them with overwhelming numbers, they simply withdrew—so I had to believe they acknowledged the threat Apollo goblins represented. Plus, Huntsville produced and consumed charcoal locally, and produced and consumed iron ore locally. The combination of the two was critical to smelting the iron, which was then hammered and purified into steel. All processes that benefit from close proximity to each other. It was simply too much of a logistical burden to transport the raw iron and the charcoal to fire it to Village Apollo. The main village already had heating fuel sources, and I didn’t want to strain that infrastructure, either. “We’ll leave the collection crews. Iron bar stock and oil will get sent to Village Apollo, like we always planned.” I looked around. “This camp is going to be instrumental in defeating the javeline and securing the future of Tribe Apollo.”

But until then, we might have to cinch up our belts and get cozy at Village Apollo.

End of Arc I

Arc II

Chapter 60 - Welcome Home

I hardly recognized the bluff. It had changed so much in the time I’d been gone setting up operations in the bog. It seemed like Buzz hadn’t spent a single minute idle, as wooden structures reached up above what few trees remained, with bridges and lattices crisscrossing disparate floors and intersecting structures at strange angles. They hadn’t only built up, either, but out and down. The sides of the bluff now played host to a plethora of cliff-side dwellings and structures sprouting from the face of the cliff itself and anchored by thick cords. Freight traffic moved both up and down the bluff through a half-dozen elevators manned by dozens of goblins. The strange counterweight cranes stacked wood beams even higher, making odd, lopsided buildings that swayed in the wind.

Over 100 goblins called Village Apollo home, and it was about to get even bigger once the goblins of Canaveral withdrew. The airspace over the bluff was thick with smoke and crowded with the slow circling of personal gliders. We were spotted long before we reached the bluff, and a procession of goblins dropped out of the sky to join us, mimicking various noises of inventions I’d introduced. It was quite a bit of fanfare for having only been gone a couple weeks. All of them wanted to see the hammer, or at least that’s how I interpreted the hoisting of various wooden and stone mallets.

Promo handed over the first finished steel hammer and I hoisted it up so that it could catch the rays of the setting sun on its silvery surface. The goblins all cheered and raised their own tools in response.

Every goblin in the tribe was going to want steel tools. It was only natural. But most of them would have to settle for flint or make do with ceramic. All of the iron we had was earmarked for the igni to turn into hammers and engine parts. Well, most of the iron, I thought, looking down at my worn sloth-claw prosthetics. But engines were the ticket to jumping the developmental rail yet again. And in the next few days, I was going to work closely with Sally and Promo to get that technology unlocked. We had all the elements of internal combustion. Now, I just had to put everything together. Tribe Apollo was going pre-industrial.

The route from the west took us through the paddocks that Chuck used for the cliffords and the livestock rounded up from the savannah. I spotted the stone sloth cub running among the meager herd, now at least twice the size of a goblin. Two wranglers in the pens directed it with whistles and shouts to corral the livestock into a new paddock.

“They’re good,” I said. “That cub is a regular sheepdog.”

Chuck nodded, beaming like a proud papa. “Could use a dozen more like him.”

“A few dozen more herd animals wouldn’t hurt, either,” I said, looking at all the empty space in the paddocks. “We could fit a lot of them in here.”

“Aye, but they’re fast. The cliffords get tired easy. It’s tough to drive a big group, so we settle for hooking a couple at a time.” Chuck nodded to the cub. “Once he’s trained up, we’ll have a better shot. Maybe even at some big game.”

Bringing down a big herbivore would be a huge boon for our food stocks. I watched the stone sloth circle up the few animals in the paddock and then barrel through them, despite the shouts of the handlers. Well, they still needed work.

<Your tribe has decreased to 174 members>

We reached the base of the bluff just as a freight platform with a dozen goblins clinging to it hit the base, and all of them jumped off and ran around hooting and cheering. I practically had to start swinging in order to keep them from mobbing me.

“What is going on?” I shouted to Chuck over the racket of the tribe’s manic clamor.

“They’re glad to have their king safe and sound,” said Chuck, laughing. “A king should be with his people. There’s no other place you ought to be.”

“Fair enough,” I said. I tilted my head upward at Raphina’s waking eye. “I could think of one other place.”

Chuck followed my gaze and grinned a mouth of sharp teeth at me. “We’ll get there, boss,” he said, reaching out and slapping my back. “You’ll lead us. I know it.”

My wrangler boss handed our cliffords off to some of his assigned goblins and we scrambled onto the freight elevator, along with at least half the goblins who had joined us. There wasn’t even room for most of them, they just clung to the sides and ropes, and the whole structure creaked worryingly as the platform slowly started to ascend under the load. As we gained altitude, I could really see the extent the western forest had been cleared.

Even as I watched, a small explosion rocked the base of a tree and the whole thing toppled over.

Goblins darted in to begin stripping the branches and bark with axes in a swarm of activity.

“So that’s where all the bomb fruits are going,” I mentioned.

“Getting drained for poppers and mixed with the icky-putty, too,” said Chuck. “Grove of them popped up closer to the bluff where we’d stored ‘em in holes, but goblins keep eating them before they get volatile enough to harvest.”

“They’re eating bomb fruits?” I asked.

Chuck nodded. “Not bad if you get ‘em early. The igni squeeze ‘em onto the meat for an extra kick.”

Huh. I guess the explosive transition must happen during fermentation. It’s an effective way to spread seeds, when you think about it, simply exploding and blasting them every which way. Still, that might make harvesting the juices safer if we collected them from stable fruit and stored them in stable containers to ferment.

One detour I had to make was visiting Sally and her engineers. I had hoped she hadn’t spent the whole time I was gone building rocket boosters for the search effort. I needn’t have been worried, as her engineers were banging out so many parts and shoving clay into kilns.

Sally exploded with the most energy I’d ever seen out of her by standing in front of me and reaching out to poke my chest before turning and running away. I figured she’d just expended her social battery with such a sensory overload, but she came back with six other goblins hauling a platform between them.

“Is that what I think it is?” I asked.

Sally chittered and shifted her weight from foot to foot. Before I’d left, I’d been sketching out drawings for a rotary engine case. My chief engineer, it seemed, had found them.

I looked at the two halves of the case, rendered in ceramic. They were… lacking, to put it lightly. Misshapen and different sizes, such that they could never actually be assembled. One of the reasons metal was ideal for this was that it was malleable, whereas ceramic couldn’t be shaped once it was fired. But she’d still taken the first step.

“Well done,” I said. “We’ll make some molds and iterate when we can. We’ll try both metal and ceramic. Still, I want to make sure we have a supply for munitions. Poppers are our best defense against the javeline so I want to get more RPP rounds rolling.”

“We’ve got the shockers and metal, now,” said Chuck. “Won’t be long until we’re tougher than the porkbellies.” he looked south toward the savannah. “Just wish we were faster than them, too.”

I grinned. “Give it time, my friend. I’ve got more surprises in store for you, yet.

Chapter 61 – Back to the Drawing Board

<Your tribe has increased to 192 members>

<Your tribe is consuming more food than it produces.>

Village Apollo rang with the dulcet tone of metal on metal. Oh, that sweet sound of progress.

Under the supervision of Prometheus, the igni and their assigned assistants took to blacksmithing like a baby bird to the sky—eventually, and with much struggling. Even the heat-crafting specialists weren’t born experts. I can’t imagine how tough it would have been to get ordinary goblins up to a level of competence in smithing. Even with understanding of the process through the Goblin Tech Tree, the igni needed time and practice to perfect their skills. They weren’t quite at the point where they could bang out an engine block, so they were working up to it with knives, nails, gears, poles, and my newest set of prosthetics.

I was partial to the spring-steel blades on my legs, especially. They were still much heavier than the carbon fiber blades I’d used in races on Earth, but they were still a cut above the sloth claws. Buzz nearly fainted when the concept of iron nails was introduced to the GTT lexicon. Granted, no two came off the line in a similar shape or length, but it was a start. Poles would eventually be purposed for axles, propeller shafts, and rifle barrels. Though, I doubted we’d see anything like a unified bore caliber. The gears being similarly disjointed had been a problem ever since we’d been making them by chewing wood into shape. Standardization was a completely foreign concept to goblins, no matter how many examples and templates I tried to offer them. The only thing that sort of worked was making molds, and things somehow still came out of those wonky. Without the strange grease of the Goblin Tech Tree, I don’t know that any mechanical devices produced in the village would work.

Piecemeal parts and soft fits weren’t going to cut it for something with a pressure vessel and moving parts like an engine. Sure, we could hand-make each one under my direct supervision, and that’s how we were going to unlock the technology, but the industrial age meant industrialization. That meant factories and assembly lines and part tolerances. That meant guides and regs, and something to record and keep track of them.

Bark and charcoal could only get us so far. We needed paper—actual paper. The method to make it isn’t complicated and it had other industrial uses, as well. You take a finely woven screen and sift it through a pulp mass, then press and dry the result. Now, don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t so far gone as to think the average goblin had the attention span to read and write modern English. But the Egyptians had built the pyramids (and if you like conspiracies, the first battery, refrigerator, and UFO landing pad) with drawings of birds and cups. Or at least that’s what it looked like to me when my anthropology major then-girlfriend had tried to educate me about early human cultures.

Huh. Maybe I should have paid more attention to her explanations instead of daydreaming about rowing away from the conversation. Chances are anthropology was now much more relevant to me than it would ever be for her. Go figure.

Anyway, I already had most of what I needed to make it happen, including one of the rainwater collection vats Buzz had been building to satisfy the village’s drinking water needs. When the goblin-powered hammers weren’t pounding the impurities out of iron stock, I instead turned them to mashing wood pulp. Fires were always going at Village Apollo, now, so heating the pulp pool to break down the plant fibers was a matter of just heating rocks and dunking them into the vat. While that was working, I took two of Neil’s hunters with the highest skills in basket and net weaving and set them to making fine corded mesh screens.

Toward the late afternoon, I oversaw Javier’s clothiers dunking the first of the mesh screens and applying pressure by jumping on flat, heated rocks. Also, turns out, paper pulp is a bit like milkshakes to goblins. I had to install a bunghole (don’t laugh, it’s a real thing) on the side of the vat so goblins could uncork the tub for a sip and quit trying to stick their heads into the pulp slurry between log hammer strikes. When the System said goblins could process nutrients from almost any organic matter, this is not what I had pictured. We’d lost 3 thirsty goblins to the papermaking process and tinted half the first batch of sheets blue.

<Goblin Technology Unlocked: Pulpy scratch-bark>

The eyes of most of the goblins in the village glazed over for about a half-second before they resumed what they were doing—except for Sally’s engineers, who redoubled their effort. Yeah, paper isn’t exactly the stuff of rock stardom. But the tribe would see soon enough what else they could use it for. At least the engineers seemed excited about it. Which, yeah, laugh all you want. I wasn’t just an engineer, dammit, I was an astronaut. And I would be again.

I spent the afternoon relaxing as the hammers rang and the scent of wood pulp wafted through the village. I had to admit, I found it much more appealing as a goblin than paper mills had ever smelled as a human. But not quite enough to take my turn at the bung. Still, if we could use wood pulp as a nutritional supplement, it might take some of the load off the hunters and fishers.

                          *

<Your tribe has decreased to 182 members.>

I had dozed off but was awakened by a loud shriek in the distance. A large number of goblins were streaming to the east side of the village, tasks dropped. I joined them and pushed my way to the edge of the bluff, hand sheltering my eyes from the sun. “What happened?” I asked. Of course, the goblins just chittered and squawked.

I needn’t have bothered asking. A few minutes later, the eastern horizon filled with a dozen winged shapes. They were escape gliders from Canaveral. John had pulled the ripcord. The air controllers in the tower started making a fuss, clearing the landing area of the goblins napping or working in the open space.

One by one, the gliders laden with goblins came in for landings, often spilling their payloads as goblins bailed out before even reaching the bluff. The gliders came in, performing the goblin equivalent of a smooth landing (that is, a crash that wasn’t completely catastrophic). The pilots barely had time to leap from their craft before the next in line would plow into the back of the one before it, resulting in a pileup of gliders that clogged half the landing strip. One of them didn’t even make it onto the bluff, and instead crashed into the side.

<Your tribe has decreased to 180 members>

At least most of the goblins had bailed out ahead of the crash.

The final glider came in, rough and ragged with several tears in the wings. I wasn’t sure it would make the transition, but the pilot flared off and just got it over the edge of the bluff before dumping his altitude and crashing down.

I ran over to the landing strip and saw John, the martial taskmaster in charge of Canaveral, climbing out of the cockpit with his two hobgoblin lieutenants. He had a hide bandana tied around his forehead that was stained with blood, and his lieutenants were similarly festooned. All three saluted upon spotting me, and John stepped up to report.

“Sir, the porkbellies hit us at the same time as the lizards. A group of maulers, at least 30 of ‘em, led by that big side of bacon you warned us about.”

“Hrott?” I asked. Rotte’s brother had threatened me at the river. I knew he’d be back eventually.

John nodded. “I commanded a withdrawal from Canaveral. I’m sorry, boss. We couldn’t hold it.”

“Damn!” I said, kicking a patch of dirt with my blade. Not only had it cost us goblins, but the most reliable source of food, as well. I sighed and turned around, thinking. Bringing in more herd animals depended on engines. But we weren’t going to get engines if the tribe starved before then. We needed Canaveral. And I knew what I had to do to take it back.

“Follow me,” I said.

I marched, John in tow, to the blacksmithing area where the igni hammers still rang.

Promo greeted me, holding up a finished pinion gear and a rack with teeth that actually married up. “Success, King!”

“That’s great,” I said. “But we need to shift gears.”

Promo looked at the gears in his hands.

“No, we need to adjust our priorities. Get the straightest, cleanest poles from the piles that you can find—as thick as your thumb. We’re going to use them to make hollow tubes from iron.”

“What are we doing with those tubes, boss?” asked Promo, scratching his belly.

I hated that internal combustion would have to wait. I hated that the javeline had pushed me to this point. But I suppose it was inevitable. Rava was a dangerous place. I’d only been here a few weeks, and in that time I’d been bitten, slashed, stabbed, and shocked. The planet was so dangerous that goblins were practically stamped with expiration dates. I needed something more than sharp sticks to level the playing field. “Making rifle barrels. We’re going to war for Canaveral.”

Chapter 62 – Gunblins

<Your tribe has decreased to 179 members>

<The majority of your tribe is not well-fed; a spawning bonus has been rescinded.>

<Your tribe has increased to 192 members>

I’d never shot a gun on Earth. I didn’t even like violent movies. I’d certainly never designed one—even as an engineering thought experiment. But, in principle, they were simple devices. And making a cowboy-style lever-powered gun receiver from ceramic and springs used mostly intuitive engineering principles. Move lever: clear chamber, compress spring, set trigger, and load round: pull trigger: release spring tension, strike primer, ignite propellant, bang. Repeat. That’s why they called it a repeater rifle. Or so I had to assume.

We were skipping a few steps in firearms development. The earliest Chinese guns were more like the hand-cannons I’d originally tried to make when I was captured by the javeline. Early muskets were a function of shortfalls in material, chemical, and mechanical understanding. I could make up for one with a surplus of the other two, combined with the rapid iteration capability provided by ceramics and the Goblin Tech Tree.

I gave the initial plans to Sally, Neil, and Promo in the morning, and by afternoon, the igni assigned were pulling the first prototype receivers out of the kiln. Promo’s smiths had provided us with spring-wire and smaller gears and jigs, and other parts needed to create an internal magazine and receivers before they moved on to creating prototype ammunition.

Ammunition was another matter that I worried about. Until I remembered that we essentially had it unlocked already, and I didn’t have to do everything myself. I brought Sally over and explained.

“I want tiny rockets that ignite when you hit the back of them. I held my forefinger and thumb up. “This wide, and about twice as long.”

Sally held up her fingers and looked critically at the size. Then she nodded and started whistling for her engineers. They began hammering away, making molds and packing clay while others started stoking the kilns. I watched batches of clay prototypes go in, and by the end of the eclipse, they came out as little ceramic cylinders, pointed on one end and hollow.

Of course, no two were precisely the same size or shape. And it was going to impact their performance and reliability. But as long as they didn’t destroy the ceramic receivers when they ignited, and that was a big ‘as long as’, then they should somewhat function, and they should be somewhat stable.

Who was I kidding? Half of them were going to explode on first firing. The others weren’t going to fire at all. I handed them off to Neil.

He had some scat put on the top of the kiln to dry it, and then had goblins grind it into a more powdery form of the putty before mixing it with the charcoal and sulfur.

<Goblin Technology unlocked: Icky-sicky powder>

Once the bullets were cooled, some of Neil’s hunters with his bonus to bomb handling carefully packed the compound into the back third and capped it with a small blob of bomb juice-infused icky putty and a small dab of almost-dry clay.

<Goblin Technology unlocked: Single-stage rockettes>

<Goblin Technology unlocked: Miniature goblin blastics>

“Looks good, boss,” he reported.

That was a good sign. When the System unlocked technology before it was even tested, it generally meant I was on the right track. I held one of the new micro-rocket bullets and inspected it.

“Nice work, Sally,” I said. She beamed at me.

But now, it did still need testing. The easiest way was actually a modified slinger with a small pin at the front of the sled. It wasn’t a rifle, of course, but I just needed to see how the ammo functioned.

I set up the slinger between two rocks, with a cord tied around the release catch, got to a safe distance, and pulled the cord.

There was a shower of sparks, a fizz, and then nothing else happened. I frowned. I whistled to one of the other goblins and had him run up and reset the sled with a new round. Once he was out of the path, I pulled the cord again. This time, there was a pop, and the round whistled off, leaving a meandering trail of sparks as it flew through the air, twisted, bounced off an adobe wall, and tumbled over the edge of the bluff.

The goblins close to its flight path ducked, squawking in fear, and then rose, cheering. The dichotomy of goblins.

The third round exploded, destroying the entire slinger.

Armstrong laughed. “1 outta 3 ain’t bad, issit?”

“It’s pretty bad,” I said. “When we’re going to be relying on volume of fire. They’re not going to be accurate enough.”

We tested the rest of the first batch and had 6 more successful ignitions and 9 more misfires. I called Sally over.

“Besides the reliability, accuracy is the biggest issue. Rifling the barrels won’t do much if the ammo isn’t standard”

We needed a goblin solution to a goblin technological quandary. I watched a handful of goblins working at a pottery wheel—where they’d designed the clay to remain stationary while the goblins spun around it. Hmm. We couldn’t spin the rifles around the bullets. But we could take the rifle barreling out of the equation.

“Alright. We’re going to put spirals on the shafts in the clay before we fire them in the kiln. Can you take care of that?” Sally nodded.

I went to Neil next. “We need better than 1 in 3,” I said. We sat down to examine some of the dud rounds and figure out what went wrong. After some testing with expired rounds and very careful testing with some of the the duds.

“Clay is too thick at the back,” I said. “It needs a hole in the middle so the firing pin can actually strike the primer, yeah?”

“Onnit.”

A commotion at the landing strip drew my attention, and I left Neil to his work as I went to see what was going on. One of Eileen’s recon gliders had returned, limping home from Canaveral. I could see a few of the porcine crossbow bolts sticking out of the bottom of the frame, and part of the starboard wing was damaged. I waited as the pilot circled to bleed off altitude and airspeed before coming in and flaring off. Admirable piloting. I was unsurprised to see a hobgoblin wrangler pop out. With their heightened senses at high speeds, they were natural aviators. He chittered back and forth with Eileen, and she came to make her report.

“Piggies smashed up Canaveral, but only half of ‘em stuck around. Smoke from a camp further north. Betting they want to keep us off their backs while they hit more villages.”

“Well, they’re in for a rude awakening,” I said. “Get some supper. We’ve got an early morning."