by Lee Bond
“Never seen drippy-drop do that before.” Thumper admitted.
“Special Northern technique.” Garth pulled a complicated-looking multi-tool from his pocket that Barnabas had ‘loaned’ him on pain of death if it got broken. Flicking through the various tool head types until he found one that looked like it might work with the bolts set flush into the hammerhead, Garth set about removing the side plate without Thumper’s explicit permission.
“How much?” Thumper remembered how easy the blacksmith’s apprentice had pushed the plate in. Thumper knew he was strong, but he also knew he wasn’t going to get any stronger; he’d been killing Kings for fifteen years now and was at peak strength. The drippy-drop pumping through his muscles weren’t doing anything else for him. Never would, ‘less he moved in, which no one wanted to do no more. Ickford was too much fun, the prices so high. Thumper reckoned everyone he knew’d rather spend a night or a week in Ickford being big man than slog through the mess of learning how to do for the tougher Kings inwards.
No one wanted to be little fish anymore.
“For what?” Garth asked dismissively, urging the man to stop talking with all the psychic power he could muster. Quietly freaking the fuck out as he was over the tattoos doing their best impression of working machinery, all he wanted to do was concentrate even more fully on the task before him..
“For them scrolly tattoos. To make me stronger.” Thumper watched the dark-haired apprentice work with impressive precision, dim excitement rising above curiosity.
The last time the hammer’d broke, the smith had taken four whole days to take it all apart to find out what was wrong. Why, he’d been so lonely without the familiar weight in his hands that Quick Wit had written some poems about how sad it’d all been. Everyone else had laughed at the words, but Thumper hadn’t minded on account of how they were all friends.
Coming up to Barnabas’ camp, Thumper’d gotten ready to be without the hammer again for days, but bless the smith, for it seemed he were going to fix it right there on the spot!
“Won’t work.” Garth found the series of bent flywheels buried deep in the hammer’s head. “You’re not from the North. ‘s why it’s called ‘Special Northern Technique’.”
Squinting with his one good eye at the exposed heart of the hammer, Garth smiled eagerly; since everything was connected to everything else inside the hammerhead without being bolted down to the external head, it was just a matter of finding the interlocking puzzle pieces and solving the damn thing like a Rubik’s cube.
The solution for the hammer’s interlocked connections was right there, so Garth followed the mental directions without pause. Sliding pieces around inside the head deftly, appreciating the beauty of the design as thick metal rods unhinged or popped loose, his efforts eventually had the whole internal kinetic engine free of restraint.
The Engineer yanked the device free of the head smoothly, then held it up to the light. He resisted the urge to make Lion King Jokes, but only because he’d sound like an idiot after doing something so badass. Yep. Just as DarkEye had intuited. Three flywheels, each bent about an eighth of an inch out of whack.
Thumper’s sensitivity was impressive. He could’ve used it as it’d been designed for another three weeks or so, with the inner mechanisms trying to do the work properly but bending more and more until … that final swing would’ve proven to be an explosive exclamation point to Thumper’s career in Kingkilling.
Garth showed Thumper the problem, taking time out to explain precisely how the damage was affecting the hammer so similar wear and tear could prevented in the future. Then, looking over at Marc, who was a simmering hotpot of poorly restrained Kingsblood rage, he added, “I can fix this now, right here, on the spot and you can take your hammer home with you or you can keep asking me about the tattoos and it’ll take a week. I’m super sensitive over getting kicked out of my badass gearhead gaggle of … gearheads.”
Jesus he was stupid.
Thumper opened his mouth to protest. There were so many questions! The smith was hardly ‘blooded up at all, saving for that unfortunate big peeper. Them tattoos were amazing!
“And,” Garth wiggled the device back and forth in front of Thumper, “you better not tell any damn person what you saw, neither.”
Thumper grinned. “Or what?”
“Or I’ll fuck your hammer right up. You won’t know when it’ll happen, but one day you’ll be bonking the shit out of a King’s skull then blammo! No more hammer. Just all kinds of sprockets and shit all over the ground and a King’s fist coming right at your stupid, secret-leaking jabber-hole.” Garth shrugged. “And what’s a thumper without his thumper?”
It took a solid minute of heavy thinking on Thumper’s part to get where he could make a decision. What was a Thumper without his thumper? Well, if he could get tattoos like the blacksmith had, then it didn’t matter what he used to kill a King because when that smith had worked the hammer, it’d been immediately obvious that he was stronger than anyone except a few of the oldest Kingslayers he’d run into down Ickford way, and all without that nasty looking grey skin as them old’uns got when they refused to move in. They were all going to look like that, sooner or later.
Thumpy looked at his hammer laying in the grass between them. He’d had that hammer for ten years. When it weren’t in his hands, he felt lonely. Thumpy looked at the blacksmith’s bare arms. Where had the snaky-moving ink gone?
The blacksmith shrugged and started putting the gewgaw back.
“Wait!” Thumpy shouted. “Wait. Okay. Okay. Fix my hammer now please.”
“That’s what I thought you’d say.” Using the complex multitool once more, Garth repaired the bent flywheels quickly with a bit of skillfully applied brute force engineering.
Holding the device up to the light a second time, Garth gauged his repair efforts with a doubly critical eye. Just because he didn’t like gearheads and firmly believed Thumper was the dumbest thing in all creation didn’t mean he was going to put out shoddy work. Happily, the gaps in the bent metal were gone as gone could get.
The blacksmith’s apprentice decided it would be a year or more before the hammer would need this sort of repair work done. Not bad for a first time effort.
Reassembling the hammer with brisk efficiency, Garth was happy to see that throwing himself into the work at had really had helped with the instinctual and deep loathing of all things gearheaded within. Motioning crisply for Thumper to test-drive his newly repaired weapon, Garth felt stab of envy at how easily the giant carried the three hundred pound namesake.
Garth lay back in the grass and watched Thumper explode the shit out of a few gigantic oak trees, shaking his head in rapt amazement every time the giant hooted and hollered amidst a flurry of wooden splinters.
Dark Iron nanotech was awesome, no doubt about it. The kinetic hammer was a complete and direct manifestation of the sorts of physics-defying power true nanotech could get up to when properly coded and given fertile ground to propagate.
The burning question was, though, was why the King was going to such great effort at disguising everything as something else? It didn’t make any sense!
Trumping the amazement of nanotech in full effect –not to mention the childlike joy Thumper took in exploding the absolute shit out of trees- was the gnawing fear of the changes his own Kingsblood infection was making.
Those tattoos had come to life so quickly, so effortlessly, ramping his strength up to what was obviously –if Thumper’s envious interest was any indication- greater than the hammer-wielder’s already prodigious power.
Then there was the … whatever DarkEye had done to produce the solution to the hammer’s erratic behavior. Unlike the quick burst of strength, there was no reasonable explanation as to how a steamhorse’s fake eyeball had somehow magically started working. Even less sense was to be made of the clarity behind the rapid-fire assessment of the maul’s malfunctioning systems. As nice as it was that his interaction with particulate was capable
of mimicking the savant-like insight borne from his dissipated connection to the extra-dimensionality, it was hard not to look at this turn of events with a healthy dose of skepticism.
If the awful crudey-crude running –however thinly- through his veins continued to react so promptly to desires both necessary and unneeded, efforts at not only being calm, cool and collected but in reigning in subconscious fears and desires needed redoubling ASAP.
Garth picked himself up off the ground and pointed at Shooty Jane. “You’re up, sister.”
A decision made itself apparent.
If all Barnabas wanted to do was stab him with varying degrees of horrific steampunk medical claptrap or stuff him to the tits with Kingsblood or both, maybe it was time to see if there was a way to control the flow without the smith’s help.
He was, after all, an Engineer.
***
Garth and Barnabas watched Mental Marc and his odd gaggle straggle off into the distance. They promised to be back in a day or two to pick up the rest of their equipment. The master smith had four different weapons more complicated than Thumper’s hammer to work on as well as a consignment piece for Mental Marc himself; the clockwork longcoat shoring up his neck when them brain-pistons started thumping needed enhancement, especially as it seemed them queer things were growing faster than they should. That kind of detailed work –fixing the neck up not for ‘right now’ but for ‘down the road when it were bigger still- … that meant a long night and part of a day.
Once all they could see was dust in the air, Garth turned to his traveling companion. “We’re going to have a problem.”
Barnabas raised an eyebrow. “Oh? You and I?”
“No, man, not you and me. We, as in ‘the two of us against them’ kind of problem.” Garth pressed the three clamps against his eye and waited for the burden to weaken enough for the hat to come off. He sighed in absolute relief when the braces popped off. With a devilish grin, Garth yanked the heavy felt hat off his noggin, massaging the top of his skull with a free hand. He moaned and groaned with obscene pleasure, hamming it up to make the other man uncomfortable.
“Explain yourself, hey?” Barnabas started walking towards his design table. On it were blueprints for the modifications that Marc needed. Ordinarily, he’d never even touch summat coming out of foul Ickford, but he had it on Marc’s honor that he and his crew weren’t never going to that cesspool again. Were Harvard to see who’d done the upkeep, why, Barnabas warranted the smith’d send of his bullyboys round to trouble a wandering tinkerer, wouldn’t he just?
The King didn’t want that kind of business, not with the end so close he could taste it. Not with Nickels the Infuriating roaming the countryside, neither.
The King was skeptical that Marc would indeed keep his gob shut, but as with all the degenerates of Arcade City these days, you just had to take them at their word and hope for the best.
Garth tucked the hat under an arm and trotted after Barnabas. “There was an … incident.”
Barnabas scratched at his chin. “You’ll have to be more explicit than that, my son. This place is full of incidents. You have but to look no further than your own nose as proof of all that, hey? What, pray tell, happened? Be precise as you can, now.”
Garth dropped his hated hat on the desk next to Barnabas’ designs, noting that the older man had freehand scrawled a collection of augments to Mental Marc’s clockwork coat with the sort of precision you’d normally only find with computerized drafting equipment. A lot could be learned from the cantankerous old fuck.
If there was only a way to deal with the old dude’s completely assholish attitude.
He started talking, ever mindful to keep his quadronium implants and sub-atomic circuitry a complete secret.
Barnabas’ interests in ‘outside technolergy’ bordered on the obsessive and he’d willingly listen to technobabble for hours on end, absorbing every word.
***
“Well.” Barnabas said as soon as Garth closed his mouth. If only there was a way to watch the man closer! The King fretted over Nickels’ awareness of when Will was being used in his presence there, at the very beginning, when the lad had walked through the walls to enter Arcade City, he’d been subconsciously aware of the scrutiny.
How much more prescient could he be now?
Could it be that Trinity really had figured out summat of Will, not only inoculating the lad against full infection but arming him with extra-sensory perception as well? Too many unanswered questions!
Had he even known summat like metallic tattoos moving, providing fuel to muscles was even possible … why, the King would’ve put the whole damn gaggle into a coma right there on the spot!
Alas. Hindsight were always 20-20, weren’t it?
Still, there was more than one way to skin a cat, hey? Eyeing the obviously uncomfortable Nickels, Barnabas Blake decided it were time to try a fresh approach. “That is certainly weird, my son. Never seen nor heard of summat like that before now. What I wouldn’t gi… Say now. Care to try again?”
“What?” Garth laughed scornfully. “Hah. No fucking way. Not on your life. My fucking hands reek like burnt oil. Worse than ever.”
“Be reasonable, lad.” Barnabas put a hand on Garth’s shoulder. “Look at you right now. You’re completely fine, hey? You struggled to push the plate in, your Kingsblood did rise to the challenge, then went right back away the moment you were done, no? Do you feel the urge to do as you done before? To kill all manner of people, then run off into the darkness bellowing like a banshee?”
“No, but.” Garth shook his head and stepped back, eager to break the physical connection between him and Barnabas. The older, bombastic and gregarious blacksmith was very fond of making physical contact with whoever he spoke to; Garth had noticed it throughout the man’s dealings with customers and … he didn’t like it. Not one bit. Nor, the Engineer suspected, did gearheads.
Yet they all tolerated the smith’s violation because of what he could give them. Question was, was what Barnie had to offer worth the discomfort of his continued presence?
Garth shook his head. “I don’t want to get used to it. I don’t want to …”
A sudden, thunderous boom, the sound of massive and impossibly heavy machinery shifting into some new configuration filled the air. Both Garth and Barnabas clapped hands to their ears as the noise only grew louder and somehow heavier, driving both men to the ground. Garth flopped over onto his back, as did his ‘partner’. They lay there, trying to survive the onslaught, shouting incoherently against the sudden acoustic storm.
As the sound rose to apoplectic Armageddon, they lost consciousness, their very thoughts swallowed by the furious dissonance.
17. Harmony wants YOU!
“Are you certain you want to do this?” Candall asked his friend desperately. Shane’s plan was madness.
Shane looked up from the report he was reading. It was difficult, getting accustomed to using non-AI tools, but the thin Sheet was easing the transition quite nicely. “I don’t really have a choice, now do I?”
Candall looked over his shoulder at the Latelian Army commander, some lug who hadn’t even bothered to introduce himself, actually grinning to himself when he realized he’d really rather be dealing directly with Herrig and his girlfriend, the gigantic Sidra. He looked back to Shane, who looked … smaller … than before. Losing the planet to a single Harmonized God soldier had been a devastating blow to the man’s confidence.
Unused to being so aware of another person’s feelings, Candall refused to let the matter lie. “There’s always a choice.”
Shane shook his head. “Not this time, no. I don’t. None of us really do. You’ve seen the footage, Candy, but you weren’t there.”
Candall knew what Shane was talking about, of course. Everyone assigned to stop Shane from turning Sarelsa’s heavy industry workshops into war factories had seen what the scarred Trinity captain was talking about and a very large part of Candall wished he hadn’t been a par
t of it; Shane Markson wasn’t the man he’d … he’d been, and there was no turning back, not now.
The plan to lure the Trinity Captain and his men into stealing supplies from a poorly guarded convoy had worked like a charm. Shane, calmly annotating a report on yet another Trinity outpost with what he either knew or suspected about the installation’s captors, had fallen for it without hesitation, dismissing the risks in favor of the inestimable boon proffered up by the relatively unguarded vessels and his confidence in the source of the info.
Making matters worse, Shane held no grudge over the betrayal. Every time Candall tried apologizing, the Captain declared that all was fair in love and war before changing the subject. Candall wished it weren’t so, wished that Shane grew angry or … or something. After defeating the paltry forces guarding the vessel and securing their ship to the hull with magnetic grappling hooks and burrowing airlocks, Shane and his men had made their way inside unchallenged.
Almost as if following Ute’s predicted timetable down to the second, the massive cargo container allegedly containing valuable munitions and other deadly Latelian weaponry had been located with relative ease, and off they’d gone back to their heavily fortified base on Sarelsa, pleased as Punch and eager to catalogue their ill-gotten gains, never once catching wind of the fiction into which they’d been cast.
Not until it’d been too late, of course.
Even with AI support systems, cracking the heavily encrypted locks had taken Markson’s tech teams two solid days of round-the-clock effort. But when success came in the form of heavy doors swinging outward …
The inverse of chaos.
The opposite of destruction.
Candall shook his head. That wasn’t entirely true. Though the God soldier had been tasked with limiting death and destruction to a bare minimum, Shane’s team had responded as soldiers always did, a brutal fact of life resulting in copious amounts of both. From the very moment the Harmonized God soldier had crawled free, he’d been beset by weapons fire. Shane’s bellowed commands rang in Candall’s ears as if he’d been there on the ground with one of the few men he admired; the leader of Landmark would never admit this to anyone –least of all Shane-, but he watched the footage at least once a day, caught in his own personal hell.