Tinker's Justice

by J. S. Morin

  Standing and flexing her arms, Rynn checked her physical dexterity with a few calisthenics. No one was watching, so she twisted and couched, swung her arms overhead, and bounced lightly on her tinker’s legs. Everything seemed slower than she was used to, but nothing impeded her motion. With an imagined foe popping out from behind one of the workshop’s machines, Rynn quick-drew her coil gun, fumbling briefly as the bulk of her tinker’s arm made the grab awkward. She aimed at one phantom kuduk, then another behind a crate of ball bearings, then a third who had snuck behind her. With how muddy her motions were, she was going to have to trust in the runes scrawled across the plates of her new armor for her defense.

  There were a number of innovations she had implemented, but none felt as satisfying as scavenging Kadrin runes from the wall at the city of Raynesdark. A chunk of that wall still sat on her desk, displaying an intact series of runes which she had copied in miniature several hundred times over the surface of both arms. It had been the most time-consuming part of the work, but when she had emptied a hopper of ball bearings from her coil gun into the runes, they had splashed ringlets of aether but held firm.

  The table at the side of the room wobbled and had several chunks that had been gouged out by inexpert woodworking. Rather than pitch it through the world-ripper or off the side of the ship as the crew did with most of their rubbish, Rynn requisitioned it as a test subject. She lifted her left hand above the table, palm up. Here goes …

  She dropped her hand to the table, the plate on the back of her glove hitting the surface first. Inside, between plate and glove, a spring compressed, and a smaller plate bearing part of a rune was pressed into position, completing an arrangement of runes similar to the ones that reduced the recoil on the coil guns to almost nil. Instantly, the mass of the plate jumped a thousand-fold (Rynn had calculated it to an equivalent weight of nearly five hundred pounds), and the table shattered. All Rynn felt was the pressure of the spring plate on the back of her hand. As soon as the resistance from the table was gone, the spring separated the rune and her hand returned to its proper weight.

  Turning the battering ram of a gauntlet over, Rynn checked for damage. The reinforcement of the runes had prevented even a scuff from marring the surface.

  Grinning, Rynn worked to put on the rest of the armor she had fashioned. The other pieces were nothing extraordinary by comparison. A breastplate and back plate clasped into place with fittings that matched the tinker’s arms where the joining piece crossed Rynn’s collarbone. Filtration tanks attached to the back plate had hoses leading to a helmet custom fit to Rynn’s head, with a gasketed fit based on the military gas filtration masks the kuduks invading Tinker’s Island had worn. Though they hadn’t run into it yet, they were bound to blunder into forces armed with poison cloud canisters sooner or later.

  Rynn took off her spectacles and donned the helmet. Goggles built into the face mask carried the same refractory correction she was used to, though the mask itself blocked much of her peripheral vision. She twisted her neck to either side, feeling the tug of the hoses’ weight, but otherwise unimpeded. Her breath echoed back to her, making the helm feel claustrophobic, and there was a rubbery odor inside, but nothing intolerable. She made a mental note to wash out the hoses with peppermint or lilac perfume, or perhaps lime juice.

  There was a spring in the step of her tinker’s legs as Rynn made her way to the world-rippers.

  Jamile put her arms around Cadmus as he sat gazing lazily through a viewframe overlooking a factory town in western Ruttania. He leaned his head back against her shoulder and sighed. There was a whiff of shaving liniment on his face, which felt smooth against her cheek. If nothing else, her attentions had gotten him to start taking better care of himself again.

  “What news from Madlin?” Cadmus asked.

  Jamile pushed herself away, leaving her hands on his shoulders. “That’s your third foul of the day. No dessert tonight, and don’t you think Greuder’s not with me on this.”

  The Mad Tinker twisted his head around and smiled at her, but it faded quickly. “She’s fine, and I got a drafting square thrown at me last time I asked, so you’re not getting any more detail than that.”

  Cadmus leaned forward to the control console, his hands stretching out for the dials. “I’ve got to check.”

  Jamile pulled him against the backrest of his seat. It had been a revelatory experience when she realized that, for all the strength in the tinker’s arms, she had enough leverage to manhandle him on occasion. She was a full three inches taller than the tinker, and probably out-hefted him as well. “You’ll do no such thing. We know the beastie can see our viewframe, and Rynn says Madlin’s being held so close she can feel his breath rumble the floor. You’d open a view just in time to see her get eaten.”

  “I’m no good at doing nothing,” Cadmus grumbled.

  “You’re not doing nothing, you’re doing the right thing. It’s called waiting, and it’s one of the harder things to do, I think,” Jamile said. “Especially for you and your daughter. Daughters?” She planted a kiss on the bald spot on his head. “I saw your sketches for the medical station on the Jennai. It’s a big improvement over the closet we’re in now. Why don’t you work on that for me?”

  Cadmus furrowed his brow. “I tossed those in the bin. They were rubbish.”

  “Well, I found them there and I liked them. Un-rubbish them, if you’re as good a tinker as everyone says.” She reached over his head and flipped a switch to shut the viewframe off.

  Cadmus grumbled beneath his breath. Jamile wasn’t even sure they were words, just noises meant to convey his annoyance.

  “What was … oh poo!”

  “Hmm?”

  “It’s Rynn,” Jamile said. “Madlin may be pillowy safe in Veydrus, but Rynn’s just signed up for a raid. She’s … well, she’s made herself into a tinker knight … or something.”

  A standard raiding squad had twelve soldiers, a commander, and a medic. Twenty or so crewmen waited to haul supplies and wounded through the world-hole once the shooting was done, and all available medical staff were on hand, including their chief medical officer, Doctor Sosha. When Rynn walked into the staging room, clad in her tinker’s armor, minus the helm she carried under her arm, the personnel on hand shifted from stoic readiness to gawking gossip.

  “Rynn!” Sosha exclaimed. “What are you …?”

  Rynn smirked. Wearing? Thinking? Doing here? “It’s time to field test this new gear.”

  Sergeant Hemock stepped forward. “General, is this the time?”

  Rynn shrugged with a clank of metal. “Your lucky day. It was going to be one raid or another, and this one was next up when I was ready to put this stuff through its paces.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Hemock replied with a salute. Eziel, I love soldiers. One question, one answer, and that’s that. Soldiers might not have been the thinkers in the rebellion, but there were times where all Rynn wanted was to act, not spend days or weeks debating options. Soldiers were all about taking a plan and performing an action. She snorted, amused at a thought she had no intention of ever sharing. They’re a little like the goblins, actually. Except instead of building me factories and parts, they go kill kuduks for me. Happy little gears in this big old machine.

  There was a viewframe in the staging room, but none of the incidental equipment that went along with a world-ripper. These were the latest design, a two-room system where all the controls and spark systems were housed on the other side of a wall from where Rynn stood with her troops. A periscope and a series of mirrors relayed the viewframe’s image to the operator at the control console. In the event of anyone counterattacking or looking back through the world-hole, there was nothing sensitive for them to see or damage. Well, aside from personnel, of course.

  Sosha separated herself from her medical team and rushed over before Rynn could join her troops. “What do you think you’re doing?” she whispered. “This is no place for a general. You belong on the Jennai, where you’r
e safe.”

  “If I don’t test things myself, how can I expect my troops to trust me?” Rynn asked, loudly enough for Sergeant Hemock to hear. “A month from now, all the squad leaders will be armored, and in six months, I can see all the troops that go through that viewframe to be outfitted like this. How would you like to get bored waiting for troops to patch up? I want standing here waiting for casualties to become a waste of your time.” Rynn laid a hand on Sosha’s shoulder—not the gloved hand, just in case—and smiled. “And I always build the prototypes to my own measurements.”

  There were no further objections. Sosha fumed behind pursed lips, but Rynn knew she had thrown a grenade into any arguments a doctor could make. She was doing this for them, for the troops she kept sending into harm’s way, and for the ones who had gone but never came back.

  “Come on, boys … and girls,” Rynn said, noting that two of the squad were women. There was nothing that prevented women from toting rifles around, but the reduced weight of the coil guns seemed to have convinced more of them that they could soldier right along with the miners and freight handlers.

  Rynn pulled on her helm and took up a position at the front of the formation.

  “You familiar with the op spec?” Hemock asked. Soldiers’ jargon. I wonder if my tinkering sounds as strange to them.

  “I wrote the mission plan,” Rynn replied. She didn’t care for the sound of her voice in the echoic confines of the helm. There was no getting around that for now though. She made a mental note to think of ways to fix the echo. “We match speeds with the thunderail, take over the engine, and work our way front to back. Full clear. I want no human casualties, civilian or otherwise. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the squad shouted in unison.

  “These supplies are going to shore up spots we’ve already hit, and they’re going to be used against our brothers and sisters in retribution. Every bullet we dump in the Sea of Kerum, every crate of bandages that patches up one of ours instead of one of theirs, every box of coal ash crackers we take out of those kuduks’ mouths is one step closer to beating them.”

  Piss off, Kupe. I’m what you pretend to be. Rynn felt a pang of guilt even thinking it, but it made her feel better, too. She couldn’t do anything to help Madlin, but she could fight for the cause.

  “Form up!” Sergeant Hemock ordered. The medical staff scrambled clear as soldiers lined up in two rows, leaning forward to be ready to run on the order.

  Rynn held up three fingers for the operator of the world-ripper to see … then two … then one. She made a final check, watching the view jitter as the operator kept pace with the engine room of the moving thunderail. When Rynn dropped her arm, the world-hole opened.

  “Move out!” Rynn immediately followed her own advice and was first through the hole.

  Private Juliana had the distinct impression that she was the only one in the squad who was enjoying herself. Clutching her coil gun, she followed Sergeant Hemock through the world-hole, setting foot on a thunderail for the first time in her life. The wind rushed through her hair from the open window in the car, and she ducked to the side, toward the break between the engine and coal car, to make room for her fellow soldiers to pile through. The shouts of the kuduk engineer and coalmen were lost amid the whoosh of the wind and the noise from their own engine.

  One of the coalmen pulled a pistol—it was a military thunderail, after all—but the rest of the crew were blasted full of holes before even drawing a weapon. The world-hole closed, and General Rynn shouted instruction. “Leave the engine running until we sweep the cars! We don’t want escapees.”

  With that, General Rynn hopped the gap to the coal car and led the charge through the thunderail.

  Juliana liked what the general had done with her outfit. The runed plates looked like they would offer plenty of protection from the guns that the kuduk soldiers might be carrying on board a vehicle this cramped. While Private Juliana was no expert on guns of any sort, she was a fair hand with runes, and had more informal soldiering experience than the whole rest of the squad. So she was confident that she could let the general go ahead without her when Sergeant Hemock ordered her onto the top of the thunderail.

  It’s my natural grace and poise he must see. When she saw the straggly tunnel-urchin-turned-soldier who followed behind her as she climbed the ladder to the roof, she revised her guess. Wrong place, wrong time, I suppose. I should have figured it was blind luck.

  Kuduks didn’t seem to be the most nimble of creatures, so aside from a wobbly track, there was likely to be little danger in covering the approach from above. Someone had to do it, of course, just out of sound military thinking. You didn’t let your enemy flank you, even if you thought he didn’t have the balls to climb onto the roof of a moving thunderail. Juliana checked behind her to see that her fellow roof-guard was crawling on hands and knees, with his coil gun still in hand.

  “You afraid of heights or something?” Juliana asked over the wind.

  “Get low, you blasted fool,” the scraggly soldier snapped back.

  Juliana smiled, fighting back a chuckle. “There’s no one up here but us. No one finds their thunderail under attack and climbs onto the roof of it to see what’s wrong. Especially not if they’ve got people shooting at them in the cars already.”

  The coil guns made so little noise compared to the engine of the thunderail that the shots couldn’t be heard from the roof. The only sign of the gunfire was the splintering sound of ball bearings tearing their way through the walls of the cars on their way out.

  “Yeah, well, you’re gonna fall off, if you’re not careful.”

  Juliana just shook her head and walked away, heading down the center of the roof and hopping lightly to the next car. She didn’t worry that anyone inside would hear her footsteps, or the thump from her landing. Juliana had always been light afoot, and she wasn’t overly concerned with what might happen if even anyone did hear her.

  Just then, to her surprise, a head peeked over the edge of one of the last cars of the thunderail. The head’s owner brought a pistol over the edge as well, and aimed somewhere in Juliana’s vicinity and fired.

  No interference, she reminded herself. Drawing her coil gun, Juliana fired off several shots in rapid succession. None hit the kuduk with the pistol, but a few blasted chunks of roof free near his head, forcing him to retreat back down.

  “You see?” she asked, turning to the crawling soldier behind her. “Nothing to it.”

  The scraggly soldier shook his head. “You’re a nutter.”

  She shrugged, firing another two shots off behind her without looking. “I’ve been called worse.”

  Rynn pulled off the helm of her tinker’s armor, shaking her sweat-soaked hair to get it unstuck from her face. The world-ripper was once again just an image, not a hole, and they had made it back with only three injured, none dead. Sosha and her assistants had already carted the injured soldiers off to the infirmary, leaving Rynn to oversee the plundering of the thunderail.

  Turning to look back at the viewframe before ordering it shut down, Rynn had a puerile thought. What would happen if they took the World Ender Cannon and aimed it down the length of the thunderail? How far could they penetrate with a single shot before a deflection or the sheer mass in its way stopped the shot? “Close it down,” she shouted before her impulse got the better of her. The sooner the kuduks got their thunderails back up and running, the sooner Rynn and her rebels could plunder them once more.

  “Good job everyone,” she said to her squad. “We put a hurt on them today, that’s for sure. Tell the barkeep drinks are on me tonight, you hear?”

  There were good-natured jokes and a mock cheer in the wake of Rynn’s pronouncement. She couldn’t tell anymore who was who, but she knew that the soldiers who grew up in Tellurak got the joke. Booze was free on the Jennai, and some commander or other made the same coin-fisted joke when they got back from a successful mission. Rynn took it as a responsibility to make the s
ame inane jest, even though the Korrish troops didn’t get the joke.

  Sergeant Hemock gave the official dismissal, and the squad dispersed. Rynn went her own way, heading back toward her quarters and her private workshop where she could remove her armor and relax. It had done everything she thought it would. She had taken three bullets off the runed, brightsteel plates of her chest piece and arm, and the gauntlet had bashed through locked railcar doors like they were made of foil sheet. Of all the improvements she had thought of while testing out the tinker’s armor, the issue of heat was the most pressing. She was baking. Part of her looked forward to Madlin’s nose healing just so she could see what runes the goblins had used to create the numbing cold. Applied judiciously, they could make the tinker’s armor far more comfortable.

  Halfway to her quarters, she noticed that someone was following her. She tried to be subtle and use Dan’s trick of looking in the aether, slowing her pace so that she didn’t walk into any walls that she would be blind to without seeing light. There were crewmen and women on the floors above and below, and a few scattered in nearby rooms, but she could find no one following. It’s that paranoia again. I’ll get to be like Dan if I go looking at shadows for assassins.

  Just as she reached the door to her cabin, she caught another glimpse, but this time it was not fleeting. It was one of her soldiers from the raid, the taller of the two women.

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” the woman apologized, holding up her hands in a gesture of surrender. We pick ‘em brave, that’s for sure.

  “What is it?” Rynn asked, not bothering to disguise the weariness in her voice.

  “If you have a moment, I have something I need to talk to you about,” the woman said.

  Rynn reached for the door handle. “I really don’t. I’m wearing a boiler and I’m about out of coal.”