Tinker (34 page)

"Except the whole plan depends on her," Riki said, standing at the door, his arms full of clothing. Chiyo barked something in Oni, which got a sputtering laugh from Riki. "Dream on, little kitsune. It's not going to happen. We're never going to be more to them than what we were created to be: tools. You don't turn a hammer into a noble just because it hammered down a stubborn but vital nail. You either whack another nail with it, or shove it away and enjoy what you've made using it."

"A noble?" Tinker asked. So the whole "Lady Chiyo" was the female's desired reward for spying on Maynard and guarding her.

"Onihida is mostly feudal, with a few small bright sparks." Riki had healing spells inked over his foot, and it looked normal—for him—but he limped as he walked, wincing in pain. "We seem forever stuck in the dark ages. Nobles are usually greater blood, but occasionally a lesser blood can work its way up to a minor lord by being brutal and meticulous. Lord Tomtom is one. Mostly, though, lesser are tools made by the greater bloods, just like Windwolf made you."

"Windwolf changed me, but he didn't make me."

"Make, change, twist, mold; it's all the same. Here are your clothes."

He handed her the clothing. The stack contained five changes of panties, socks, shirts, and jeans. The underwear were silk, and the jeans were Levi's, all in her size. Behind a mask of vivid bruises, Riki's eyes were dilated into wide cerulean blue discs. If she hadn't read Russell's journal, she might have felt guilty.

"I'd tell Windwolf to piss off before I'd betray a friend."

"Sometimes you get stuck in a trap of your own design." He limped to the window to collapse onto the deep sill. "I didn't know what Tomtom had done to the other scientists, just that they were dead, and they needed someone that could pass to find Dufae's son."

"Why the hell did you even get involved with them? You nearly have a doctorate of physics, why the hell would you give it all up to be a tool on some backass world?"

"You wouldn't understand." Riki fumbled through his pockets, found the MP3 player, gazed at it sadly, and put it away to pull out cigarettes.

"No, I don't. Nothing could make me do what you're doing."

"Really?" He tapped out a cigarette, his motions slow, like he was moving through deep water. "What if someone sealed away your intelligence? Made you an idiot but left the memories of your brilliance? At night you'd dream that you were smart again, creating clever gadgets, having that wildfire of creativity, and wake up to find it all ashes. What would you do to get it back?"

She swallowed down sudden terror. "I wouldn't do this."

"Liar," Riki whispered. He clicked his tongue and the cigarette lit.

"What is it that you get out of this deal?"

"I'm a tengu." He took a deep drag off the cigarette, and languidly raised the hand to rest against his temple. "Hard wired in this brain is the instinct of flight. Millions of years of evolution focused on that one thing, tightly packed away," he held out his hand, showing it innocent of feathers, "in a body that can't fly. You can't imagine—even with your marvelous brain—what an endless torture it is. Tengu don't die of old age on Earth—sooner or later, they just climb the tallest mountain and throw themselves off, just to feel that oneness with the sky."

"There's hang gliding."

Riki's shoulder shook with a short, silent laugh. "Hang gliding, parachuting, high diving . . . I could name them all, but the thing is, you only go down, you never come back up."

"You could have just gone to Elfhome. Obviously the spell works there."

"When people throw themselves off mountains, normally there's not much left to salvage." He took another long drag on his cigarette. "But we tried. We skinned the bodies of the old ones who had the tattoo, preserving them for centuries, waiting for a chance to have our wings and our freedom at the same time, slowly going mad."

"But it didn't work, so you sold yourself back into slavery."

"Yes," he murmured and then looked sharply at Chiyo. "Hey! Chiyo! You can't go to sleep!"

"I'm so tired," Chiyo moaned.

Riki sighed, and gave a sharp whistle. The guard from the hall opened the door and looked in. Riki flicked the hand with the cigarette, giving a command in rapid Oni. The guard glanced at Chiyo, then to Tinker, nodded and went out.

"What?" Tinker asked.

"We have a slight personnel problem. One of Chiyo's cousins was killed in a car accident the Shutdown we missed our kill on Windwolf. It leaves us shorthanded."

Things suddenly clicked for Tinker. The oni were the smugglers; the high-tech goods were for building the gate. Chiyo's cousin must have been the pinned driver who had been shot by the other oni, rather than let him fall into EIA hands and be questioned. Tinker looked sharply at the female; if someone had killed Oilcan, she would—she would . . . She couldn't finish the thought, the possibilities of Oilcan being caught and hurt in all this was all too real for idle speculation.

"So." Tinker distracted herself with details. "We're missing materials for the gate?"

"No. Lord Tomtom is quite methodical. We have a surplus of everything."

The door opened and the guard came back, carrying a
saijin
flower.

"What's that for?" Tinker scrambled backward, away from the guard.

"It's time for you to sleep." Riki took another drag on his cigarette, and breathed the smoke out his long sharp nose.

"I don't need that. I'll sleep without it."

"We have to be sure. Please, just take it nicely. With what I'm buzzing on for the pain—" he lifted his foot that she had broken "—I don't trust myself not to hurt you."

Sullenly, she held her hand for the flower, and with everyone watching closely, breathed deeply of its false comfort.

* * *

Tinker drifted out of the white fog of drugged slumber, opening her eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling. Where was she? Sleep still clung to her with pulled taffy strength, making it hard to think. She dragged her hand free of the blankets to rub at her eyes, trying to force herself awake. As she moved, she felt the spider again, picking its way carefully across her forehead. She smeared her hand up, over her brow, and combed her fingers on through her hair, finding nothing.
What the hell?
 

The ceiling had changed.

She frowned at the expanse of white, now recognizable as the one above her futon on Onihida. Wait, the ceiling hadn't changed—or had it? Both ceilings had been featureless white; she couldn't say how one was strange and the other familiar. And why would anyone swap ceilings? That didn't make sense. Maybe it had been a trick of lighting. She sat up, knowing that something was wrong, but still not sure what.

Chiyo sat in her corner wearing a fresh kimono and a smug smile.

Tinker fumbled her way into the clothes Riki had brought her the night before, trying to think past the fog banks rolling through her mind. The Levi jeans distracted her from the ceiling mystery. The blue jeans were men's thirty-by-thirty carpenters, which she usually wore, but brand-new. She puzzled over them a moment—wondering how they had gotten the correct size and type—before realizing that Riki probably had just checked the dresser in her workshop. Oilcan might have noticed missing clothes, so the oni bought her a new wardrobe. The oni's thoroughness depressed her.

Riki arrived as she was putting on her boots. Annoyingly, his bruises had faded during the night to almost nothing.

"It wasn't an elf," Tinker said to him.

"What?"

"You said it was an elf that beat you up at the Faire the night Windwolf changed me. It couldn't have been—you would have been healed by the time I got back three days later."

"Tomtom had me beaten," Riki admitted. "He didn't think you were coming back. I convinced him that you'd come back eventually for your cousin's sake, so he let me off lightly."

Tinker grunted at the oni's idea of "lightly." "I want something to eat, and then we can talk about this gate you want me to build."

* * *

At least they had good food: smoked trout, eggs poached in heavily salted water, and a sweet, orange-yellow, soft fruit peeled and sliced, all dumped on top of a huge bowl of nutty-flavored, dark brown rice. The only thing she didn't like were oddly pickled vegetables. Chiyo and Riki ate them in a resigned manner.

Riki explained that they were traditional staples from Lord Tomtom's region; apparently in the warmer climates, pickling was the easiest way to preserve food. "And the cook is a seven-foot-tall
shankpa
whose family died in a famine. He takes wasted food personally."

Shankpa
? Tinker refused to ask on the grounds that at some point ignorance started to sound like idiocy. She'd find out later.

"You don't send plates back with food on them." Chiyo tipped her bowl to show it was empty.

"I see." Tinker picked up her pickles and dumped them into Chiyo's bowl.

Chiyo looked laughably stunned for a moment, and then her lip curled back into a snarl. The look vanished away with one murmured word from Riki.

"What's the magic word?" Tinker asked him as they walked the maze of identical stone hallways.

"Which one?"

She attempted to reproduce the word; apparently she didn't come close because Riki puzzled a moment.

"Ah," he said. "That's the act of being deboned."

* * *

At the workshop, she found a distance measurer and a piece of chalk. She walked around the vast room, pointing the instrument at the distant walls.

"What are you doing?" Riki perched on a workbench. He'd sent Chiyo off on some errand, much to everyone's relief.

"I'm measuring the room to find its exact size so we can model it on the computer." Tinker tapped the button, called the measurement to Sparks, marked the floor and moved down roughly a foot. "If we're building the gate in this room, then we need to know the maximum size it can be." She paused. "You do want it built in here, don't you?"

"Yes."

"I thought so, judging by your notes and what you told Russell."

"You found that?"

"Yes."

Riki winced but said nothing.

"The gate in orbit is just over twenty-six hundred feet in diameter, basically half a mile." She finished the width measurement and started on length. "The ceiling is going to be the prime determiner. Depending on the slope of the ceiling and the various support beams, it's going to be somewhere between twenty and thirty feet in diameter."

"Russell maintained that it couldn't be scaled down."

"It was only designed that size to allow for spaceships to pass through it. Didn't you show him my father's notes?"

"There's nothing on how Dufae decided on its size."

Gods save her from idiots. "What do you think all the technical specs on the space shuttle were about? He was trying to plot out the minimum size of a colony ship. At minimum, a colony would need something that could safely land people on a planet. He thought that anything going out should be able to have a shuttle riding piggyback on it and still fit through the gate."

"Doh!" Riki said, sounding very human.

Scaling it down presented a host of problems. With the large surface to play with, her father hadn't bothered to economize his design, and the Chinese apparently hadn't dared to deviate from the stolen plans. She'd have to use every trick she knew to compact the circuits. "Where is the ceramic coming from? You said we have surplus of everything."

"We've been stockpiling ceramic tiles for nearly fifteen years. They decided early on, though, that the shield material wasn't needed."

"Yeah, that's just to protect the gate from micrometeor impacts and solar wind." Tinker finished up her measurements by taking the ceiling readings at every grid point that she had chalked on the floor. "Sparks, render that for me."

"Okay, Boss."

While she waited she considered the scale ratio. The easiest might be a simple one to a hundred ratio: 2640 feet shrinking to 26.4.

"Done, Boss." The AI projected it onto the screen.

She snapped out a circle to represent the scaled down gate and moved it around the workshop. Gods, manufacturing the damn framework was going to be a bitch. The nonconductive material used in space wouldn't stand up to gravity. While steel could take the stress load, the amount of metal needed to make the gate would play havoc with the system.

A good fit on the model drew her attention back to it. She locked the circle down. "Let's see if this works."

As Sparks read off the gird coordinates, she found the matching points on the workshop floor and circled them in chalk.

"Is that it?" Riki asked with quiet awe.

She snorted in disgust. "That's the easy part. Of course if I make a mistake now, we might not know until the last moment. Let me think on this for a while. Get me a list of supplies that we have, and see if you can find some more comfortable chairs."

* * *

She'd shifted the locations three times including rotating the gate half a turn as she considered factors from height clearance, use of the overhead crane during construction, the ease of getting large materials into place, and finally the local ley lines, faint as they might be. Riki reappeared with the materials list and a surprising array of office chairs just as she was spray-painting the final location onto the workshop floor. He also had a lunch of steamed fish, brown rice, and more pickles.

She took the list and studied it as she ate. Again, she found the oni depressingly efficient, though noncreative; they had slavishly gathered what had been used to build the orbital gate and nothing else. "We need something for the superstructure of the gate, something inert and nonmetallic. If we were on Elfhome, I'd use ironwood. I don't suppose you have something similar?"

"Ironwood?"

"Yeah."

"You want to use ironwood?"

She flicked her pickles at him. "Hello! That's what I said. I know you understand English, Mr. Born-and-raised in Berkeley."

"It's just using wood is so low tech."

"To quote you—doh! From little minds come no solutions. Ironwood is stunningly strong, renewable, non-toxic, recyclable, and easy to work with. Do the oni have anything like it or not?"