The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2) (3 page)

The effect right now, however, was like sticking her ear in a nest of baby snakes.  Samanthi fiddled with the connections between the ear and the Snoop, and from the Snoop to her trumpet.  No visible problems anywhere.  “No, agent, it’s not working,” Samanthi said, choking back the more biting response that had come to the tip of her tongue. 
This poor woman’s not a Petronaut
, she thought. 
I’ve gotta keep my damn language clean.  It’s not her fault she’s useless.

She wiped her forehead, cursing the heat instead.  Most of the year, the Tarmic Woods were lush, temperate, and tranquil.  The huge forest covered nearly half of the Anthic Thrust, from west of Kess to the foothills of the Flinthock Mountains at the peninsula’s eastern edge.  But in late Joon, overcast skies and oppressive, muggy heat were the norm.  Between her constant perspiration and the sputtering, sporadic rain they’d endured since leaving Delia four days ago, Samanthi felt like she’d never lose the slimy, amphibious film that had become the new normal for her skin.  As she pulled open a too-small access panel to inspect the snarl of wiring inside the Snoop, she felt acutely that this forested ridge was one of the last places in the world she wanted to be.  She didn’t even care what the small knot of suspicious men and women at the bottom of the steep hill were talking about anymore.  The targets could walk away this instant for all she cared, service to the crown be damned.  The only thing keeping her focused was her ingrained Petronaut imperative; when faced with a malfunctioning machine, she had to fix it.  Samanthi Elena could no more walk away from the broken Snoop than she could drink only half a beer.

“You’ve been at this for ten minutes,” Sir Mathias whispered next to her as she worked, his voice muffled through the visor of his helmet.  Kelley was off to the side, arms crossed over his breastplate, impassive in his black Recon armor.

“Because it’s broken.  Sorry if that offends you,” she snapped.

“We need to act now,” Sir Kelley interrupted, as Mathias raised a huge hand to placate her.  She struggled to keep her voice quiet.

“Well, it’s not working now! This is going to take time.”

“Too late,” Sir Kelley said.  “Agent?  Set down the ear, please.  We’ll need to advance on the targets.”

The field agent shot a quick glance at Samanthi.  She spread her fingers wide across the metal dome and leaned heavily on top of the Snoop, staring down into the loamy earth and clenching her teeth.   She let the listening trumpet drop with deliberate carelessness, and it thumped into the grass.  She held out her hand to the timid agent, who passed her the ear.  Samanthi grimaced as she held its weight with one whipcord-strong arm, flicking the row of power switches down on the far side of the Snoop.  The background hiss of static through the trumpet died away.  She looked into Sir Mathias’ imposing visor.  “Ten minutes is as long as I get for any problem, huh?” she muttered.

“You did good, senior tech,” he said quietly, handing her the fallen trumpet.  She looked away.

“Sir Kelley,” the agent whispered, adjusting her mottled skullcap as she moved to the Petronaut’s side.  She brushed a cobweb out of her freckled face.  “Won’t advancing on the targets increase the chance they’ll detect us and escape?”

“Just like relying on bad equipment increases the chance they end their meeting and we learn nothing.  Alert the Aerial and the rest of your team,” he ordered.

The agent bobbed her head and dashed away through the underbrush, making no more sound than a deer.  Sir Kelley swiveled his wrists, shaking his firing tubes clear.  “Senior tech,” he said, his flat voice carrying softly through the trees.  “Activate the Communicator and monitor any transmissions coming out of the target site.  Report immediately on any broadcast they make through the ether, no matter the content.”

“Sir,” Samanthi said tightly, unplugging the cords from the Snoop in fierce yanks.

She watched Mathias and Kelley slink down the hillside, unnaturally quiet in their thick armor.  Only the faintest whine of motors was audible as they disappeared from her view down the steep ridge.  She finished coiling the coarse cable and set it in its padded case.  Samanthi stopped for a moment, her brown eyes far away.

‘Senior tech this,’ and ‘senior tech that,’ as if we still had a junior...

Samanthi Elena was definitely not crying as she slammed the lid of the case shut.

Sir Mathias hung back, moving his feet carefully among the ferns and fallen twigs.  He took momentary cover behind a wide-leafed rhododendron, its blossoms vibrantly pink this time of year, and watched Sir Kelley creep his way further down the hill towards their targets.  He could see three men and two women in low conversation, with another man hanging back as a guard, a long musket ready in his hands.  Pistols and swords were visible on every hip. 
Bird-watchers they are not,
he thought, muscles tensed to spring at the first sign of their detection.

Approaching this group felt like a mistake.  It was common knowledge that the long kilometers of forest between Delia and Kess, its neighbor city-state to the north, were full of smugglers and brigands.  The overworked guards at the sawmills and the furriers who found their traps prematurely emptied could attest to that.  Some criminal bands traced their heritage back to the Warlord years, claiming they were the elite remants of this army or the descendants of that conqueror, with grandiose mythologies that only inflated  as those dark days on the Anthic Thrust receded further into legend.  Most of them, however, were just gangs of hardscrabble drifters doing business on the wrong side of the law.

The black market trade in Kessian wine and art for Delian cloth and technology was a costly nuisance for the city-states, depriving them of a small fortune in tariff income every year.  But patrolling every centimeter of the Tarmic Woods would have required an enormous armed police presence, and much more cooperation than the two coolly tolerant nations could typically muster.  So small-scale criminals who were cautious with how they fenced their goods on either end of the trade route were largely ignored.

Just like we should be ignoring this scruffy gang
, Sir Mathias thought, slinking as quietly as he could to the next tree. 
The odds that these individuals know anything we need are tiny.  And if we had Abby along to run the numbers, that’s exactly what she’d tell us. 
But Mathias knew as well as Kelley did that the Regents were desperate for information, and that in their eyes any lead—no matter how tenuous—was worth pursuing.  More than two weeks after the magical attack on Princess Naomi, Delia was no closer to knowing who was behind it, or why.

The wizard Jilmaq had been more than willing to talk (and plead, and rant, and weep) to questioners on a variety of topics, but his desperate testimony only proved how little he knew about the plot.  By contrast, the traitorous steward Davic Volman spoke barely a word after his confessions on the feastday. He had stolen her Highness’ braid, recruited Jilmaq to the cause with a pouch of coins, and killed a serving-boy for coming too close to the truth; but as for his motives, his accomplices, or any other traitorous acts performed in a lifetime of service to the Crown, absolutely nothing was known.  The heartbroken old man carried his silence to the grave, since Princess Naomi categorically forbade the Regents from having Volman tortured.  Five decades of tireless, faithful service to the Haberstorm family had earned him the right to face his execution with some dignity, she argued.  The four Regents raised an uproar, but she’d remained unmovable.  Ignoring the whims of a child princess was one thing, but openly defying an heir who had completed the First Ordeals—especially if the heir went to the press with news of the Regents’ disobedience—was a much graver risk.  So they relented, and the heir and her council watched, one gray morning, as a firing squad took Volman’s life behind the gatehouse in a moment of private violence, away from jeering crowds and stone-throwing patriots.  The best potential source the investigation had was buried in an unmarked grave in the royal hunting grounds.

A bird warbled overhead as Sir Mathias pressed his broad back against a tree.  He exhaled through his teeth, his warm breath filling his helmet. 
There’s one other person our questioners should bring down to the dungeons
, he thought grimly.  The four—well, three—members of the Reconnaissance squad were the only people in Delia who even suspected that the royal sorceror Ouste had been a part of the plot.  Lundin and Samanthi were convinced that she’d set up phony magical trappings on the feastday, intending to let the Princess die while going through the motions of an arcane defense.  Only some hasty magic from the squawk box had charmed Ouste into doing the right thing and Warding off Jilmaq’s spell.

Mathias believed his techs completely; but Ouste was incredibly popular, since, as far as the rest of Delia knew, she had saved Princess Naomi’s life.  Convincing them that the sorcerer had only protected their Heir because she’d been under the influence of a sing-song spell of friendship cast by a squawk box in a linen closet would not go well, the squad had decided.  So Ouste was untouchable, for now, which brought the investigation back to an empty slate.

While information about the plot in the Palace was hard to come by, there was also the matter of the thugs and the Petronaut who’d been guarding Jilmaq in Drabelhelm district.  Dame Miri and Sir Sigurd had barely survived their ambush.  Sir Mathias repressed a shudder, imagining himself going up against a band of killers like that with nothing but flimsy, glitzy show armor to rely on.  Ever since the feastday, the low-level insults the Parade squad typically had to deal with from other ‘nauts—“lightweights,” “dabblers,” and “loafers” came to mind—had fallen silent.  He suspected that the sniping would stay away long after Miri and Sigurd’s wounds healed.

The sole surviving thug had been hauled to the palace dungeon for interrogation.  He was a highwayman with a few murders to his name on the winding roads between Delia and Kess.  He was also apolitical, and, the questioners quickly decided, completely ignorant of the larger importance of the guard mission he’d been paid handsomely to undertake.  Any hope for meaningful intelligence would come from the dead ‘naut’s body, which had been hastily whisked away to Workshop Row before the public or the press got sight of it.

The Petronaut’s face had been destroyed by Sir Sigurd’s fireworks, which made identifying her impossible.  Her suit, however, told a fuller story.  The ranine coils in the legs were ingeniously pressurized, following a design that could launch a ‘naut faster and higher than Delian models at the expense of reliability.  The techs estimated that the suit’s coils would likely need serious maintenance or replacement after only forty jumps; a completely unacceptable lifespan, by Delian standards.  The extendable claws were cunningly crafted, but took up valuable forearm space that most suit designs saved for a projectile weapon.  The blank-faced mask was wood, the run-of-the-mill sort any costumer could make. Its varnish was an unfamiliar compound, toughening it significantly against slashes and impacts by its unfamiliar varnish.  Dame Miri and Sir Sigurd had described a sinister yellow glow emanating from the eye sockets, but the flash disk’s detonation inside the mask had removed any traces of the machinery that created it. There was no way to even hypothesize what had created the glow, or what its function was.

Even more head-scratching came from studying the breastplate, boots, and gauntlets, which were made of an incredibly tough, woven, non-metallic compound the technicians couldn’t identify.  Some experimental Delian designs had tried going away from steel in ‘naut armor, turning to ceramics or even layers of dense fabric in efforts to strike a new balance between protective power and mobility.  But they’d never deployed any designs like that on the battlefield, not trusting them to adequately protect Delia’s ‘nauts.  Protection seemed almost an afterthought for the foreign ‘naut, whose woven armor was full of seams to slip a knife into and left critical regions like the neck exposed.  What was more, while Delian Petronauts had full body-suits which mechanically augmented their muscles and joints from head-to-toe, the only meaningful machinery in the foreigner’s suit was in the boots, with their ranine coils, and (presumably) the mask.  This meant that her power needs were miniscule compared to even the lightest Delian suit, and the fuel bladder in the small of her back was correspondingly a fraction of the size.  She was more vulnerable, and her suit lacked the profusion of equipment Delia’s gadgetheads crammed into each suit of armor; but she was tough, light, agile, and could keep fighting for years on a single barrel of ‘tum.

The conclusions were inescapable.  For the first time since the city’s founding, someone outside Delia was building ‘nauts that could stand toe-to-toe against what Workshop Row could produce.  For the Board of Governors, knowing that someone else on the Thrust had erased Delia’s technological edge was crisis enough.  The fact that that same someone was willing to deploy ‘nauts on Delia’s streets to kill her citizens and threaten her crown elevated it into a nightmare.

And so
,
here we are
, Mathias thought, his arm raised to cover Sir Kelley as the senior ‘naut sank into a crouch behind a fallen tree, forty meters away. 
Chasing random smugglers in the woods, on the off chance that they know who’s been supplying tech to a shadowy workshop that’s a decade ahead of the best ‘naut construction we’ve seen from Kess, Svargath, or the Halcyon Territories. What an efficient use of our time.

He shook his head clear.  Useful or not, this was the mission the Board and the Army had assigned them to, at Lady Ceres’ direction; and anything was better than sitting at home and waiting for Delia’s enemies to attack them again.

Sir Kelley was intently listening to the knot of smugglers, his head cocked and his armored body absolutely still.  The men and women were too far away for Sir Mathias to make out their low conversation, but Kelley had closed the distance enough that a single enhanced leap from his hiding place would land him right in their midst.  If they were saying anything of interest, hopefully Kelley was picking it up.