Tinker's Justice (5 page)

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’re 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 same 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.”

“Well, I still have something to talk to you about, so let me give you a hand.”

The woman followed Rynn into her cabin, failing to take a hint that Rynn had gone to some lengths to leave blunted.

“Listen, you did good today,” Rynn said. “But I need some rest. If you have something to report, talk to Sergeant Hemock and he’ll pass it along if I need to know it. Dismissed.”

The woman snickered and shut the door. “You act like I’m actually one of your toy soldiers.”

Overheated or not, Rynn’s blood ran cold. “Who are you?” she demanded, reaching for her coil gun.

“My name’s Juliana Hinterdale. You won’t be needing that.” She nodded toward Rynn’s weapon.