Harbinger

21: KNICKKNACK PADDYWHACK GIVE A DOG A BONE

Tommy started cautiously around the old racetrack on Neville. He’d studied it closely while building his own course but it had been years since he had taken its insane jumps and sharp, unexpected turns. Everything was in better shape than he expected. The banks were clear of weeds and the jumps had been recently reinforced.

Someone had to be using it for practice. Was it workers from the shipyard? If they were rabid hoverbike fans, they would recognize Tommy. They would know that he kept a stable of prostitutes who worked Liberty Avenue.

The track went under the interstate and split. The main branch looped back but a small section followed an older go-kart track through the maze of side streets. On the turn’s inside wall, someone had painted a black crow on a bloodred field.

Tommy hugged the inside curve to get a better look at it. It was definitely Team Providence’s tag. They must have fixed up the old course in order to secretly train their rider. It meant that the off-worlders at the shipyard probably wouldn’t recognize Tommy.

As he came looping back, he saw Gaddy had faked a breakdown just before the shipyard’s driveway. He pulled to a stop beside her, careful to place an electric pole between him and the armed guards inside the fence.

“I hit a ley line!” Gaddy called to Tommy, louder than necessary. “It made my spell chain slip. I’m just adjusting it.”

Like that would ever happen, but it sounded feasible to anyone who didn’t know real bike mechanics. The guards didn’t seem to be paying much attention. They were gathering in groups, pointing toward the tall windowless building and shaking their heads.

Tommy scanned the shipyard looking for ways into the compound and signs of the kidnapped Undefended. Most of the vehicles in the parking lot had some version of the crowned lion logo on them. Some had the word “Midas” under the logo or “Midas Exploration,” while others had the German word Erobern. It was hard to tell if there were multiple companies represented or just one with a branding problem. The unmarked van that the attackers had used at Toad Hall sat near the gate. In the mud, just behind the back tire, was a black flannel stuffed cat. It looked like a typical Mokoto handmade special: big derpy eyes, a green heart stitched onto its flank, and a body filled with lavender that Tommy could smell from the street.

Knickknack definitely had been brought to the shipyard.

“You good?” he asked Gaddy.

“Yeah, I’m good.” She started her bike back up.

They headed back toward the cargo truck.

Tommy had very limited experience with average human teenage girls. His cousins didn’t qualify because their half-oni status made their lives anything but normal.

Makoto had said, “Something nasty happened to Red on Earth. She kept walls up around her. Massive stone fortress walls. Nobody got in.”

The EIA intern, Aiofe, kept a constant flow of information going between her and the elves. So far Tommy had learned indirectly most of her life story including the fact she had three older sisters, went to an all-girls school in Ireland, and was far from comfortable with the male side of any species.

All that Tommy had learned from “Olive Branch” herself was that her human name was Olivia. No last name. No clue to why a teenage girl had been walking the streets as a prostitute last month and was now acting like a drill sergeant to a herd of juvenile elves. Nothing about her made sense. While tall and curvy with beautiful long flame-colored hair, she was modestly dressed in a sundress and sensible shoes. Her hips and ample bust said she could be as old as sixteen but, now and then, her face could be as doe-eyed innocent as a twelve-year old’s. Her baby bump said that she was close to three months pregnant by someone other than Forest Moss, who had arrived in Pittsburgh a month ago. Given that Mokoto hadn’t seen Olivia on Liberty Avenue prior to a month ago, the pregnancy might be why she was on Elfhome, running from whoever preyed on innocent children.

Tommy could understand running from something like that.

It was becoming obvious that Olivia was clever and cautious but in over her head. She was smart enough to know that they needed to recon the shipyard before using the strength that the royal marines gave them, but she wasn’t sure how to do that. She didn’t have Tinker’s knowledge and control of magic nor her knowledge of the Pittsburgh area and its people. She didn’t know about Tommy’s powers. Sooner or later she would probably turn to the EIA, which would mean that all the Undefended would probably be detained and deported once Tinker did get her gate up and running.

There was no one on the planet that Tommy trusted more than Mokoto. His little cousin might not be a brute force like Bingo, but he was fearless, clever, and ruthless. More importantly, Mokoto could pass as human. At any point, he could have walked away and left it all to Tommy and Bingo to protect the family. He could have even escaped to Earth and vanished completely. But he hadn’t. He’d stayed, backing Tommy at every step, always putting family first, always taking whatever shit life threw at them.

Knickknack was an off-worlder stranger but Mokoto loved him. Tommy knew how shitty it was to fall in love with the wrong person. Annoying as it was to have to sneak around to be with Jewel Tear, at least he had the comfort of knowing that she was safe and sound.

Olivia waved as he and Gaddy roared up to the cargo truck.

“The kids were taken to the shipyard,” Tommy said. “We still don’t know if they’re actually alive or not. The place is heavily guarded.”

“From what I overheard, a machine that isn’t supposed to be running got turned on and no one seems to know how to turn it off,” Gaddy said. “They’re not even sure if they should attempt it. They’re distracted. Now would be a good time to move.”

“How many guards?” Olivia asked.

“I saw at least two dozen different men,” Gaddy said. “Not all of them were armed. It seemed to be a mix of workers and guards. Technically we outnumber them.”

“Barely,” Olivia murmured, still studying the distant building. “Violence will beget violence. It could escalate out of our control quickly. They have the home advantage and solid cover. We would need to breach first the wall and then the buildings. There could be booby traps. They could kill the hostages before we found them. This is like hide-and-seek but in reverse. You can’t pull the trigger until you’re sure you have the person hiding trapped or you have to race every player to home.”

It was an odd way of putting it, but she was right. If the kidnappers wanted Knickknack to build a gate and he was cooperating to keep the girls safe, then it was unlikely that the boy was being held with the others. While Tommy’s focus was Knickknack, Olivia had made it clear that saving Peanut Butter Pie was her priority.

Tommy didn’t want to walk alone into the armed camp. He didn’t like having the women — young, inexperienced, and complete strangers to him — as backup. He considered calling Bingo or Babe but they looked too much like their oni fathers. He couldn’t be sure that the royal marines wouldn’t kill them. Most of his cousins who could pass as human were still teenagers or younger. Much as he didn’t want to go in alone, he couldn’t see another way to save Knickknack where the boy wasn’t immediately locked up by the EIA. “I noticed a ramp down that dirt side road. I can use it to get over the fence behind the building. If you create a distraction at the front, I can go over the fence and scout for the kids.”

Olivia considered and then nodded in agreement.

“I’ll move out first,” Olivia said as she waved to the marines to get into the back of the truck. “Gaddy, keep pace with him until he slows down to stop, then keep going around the track. Anyone not paying attention to me will probably keep an eye on the moving bike over the one that has stopped.”

“Sounds good,” Gaddy said.

“Godspeed.” Olivia said it like a blessing.

They moved out with the truck in the lead.

This wasn’t as insane as taking on a pack of oni warriors by himself in the middle of the forest. It was his experience that humans normally didn’t react instantly or fight to the death. They didn’t come from a kill-or-be-killed culture. Among the more beast-like lesser oni, the winner often ate the loser. It meant that humans at the shipyard probably wouldn’t shoot to kill if they saw him. Probably. He never liked the word “probably.” Too often it really meant “you thought wrong.”

The big truck trundled the mile to the shipyard, occasionally jumping the curb and riding on the sidewalk. Olivia wasn’t the best of drivers although she hadn’t stalled the big truck once. The shipyard had two driveways. The first was a dirt road that led back to the small jump Tommy had spotted earlier. Rusty signs stated NO PARKING OR TURNING AROUND. Judging by the weeds, it was last used when Neville Island was still on Earth. Three hundred feet farther on, the shipyard’s gate stood guard on a wide paved driveway.

Tommy veered onto the dirt road. Gaddy roared on, passing the big cargo truck as it put on its turn-right signal and slowed to awkwardly make the turn into the driveway. Olivia either misjudged the stopping distance or intentionally didn’t stop in time, bending the front gate with her reinforced front bumper. She beeped once, quickly, perhaps hitting the horn by mistake.

By mistake or on purpose, she got what she wanted: everyone in the compound focused on Olivia as she leaned out of the truck’s window. Aiofe wasn’t in the front cab with her; the translator must have gotten in the back with the marines.

“Sorry!” Olivia called and waved at the guards. “Hello? I’m sorry about your gate! I’m not used to driving something this big through a city.”

Olivia was going with a hapless female ploy. With her modest sundress and often childlike face, she was going to throw the men for a loop. She didn’t look like someone who had shot a man just minutes ago.

Tommy popped up and over the fence. He slid across the compound where tarps covered pallets loaded with spools of structured fiber filament and five-gallon buckets of gloss white marine paint. He tucked his hoverbike between pallets of paint and pulled the tarp over it. No one seemed to notice his arrival but it could be because Olivia had just put the truck the rest of way through the front gate — slowly — while claiming that she was attempting to back up. She was doing a great job of grinding gears, making it seem like she had no idea what she was doing. Certainly Tommy would buy it if he hadn’t just followed her around the city for over an hour. Her steering had been rough but her shifting was fine.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” a man was shouting in a tone that was annoyed but not furious.

A squawk of a radio warned Tommy that someone was coming around the far corner of the building. He reached out with his mind and erased himself from the compound. A man carrying a rifle rounded the corner and walked past Tommy without checking his stride. The man swore softly as he saw the truck parked on the remains of the gate with Olivia picking her way down out of the cab going, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

The rifleman hadn’t been in the back lot as Tommy popped over the fence so he must have come out of the building. Unless the door locked behind the man, there was a way in.

Tommy slipped around the corner. There was an unremarkable steel door on the windowless wall. He tried the handle. The latch clicked. The guard hadn’t locked it behind him.

He opened the door.

The inside surprised him. He hadn’t considered what might be within the building but he would have never imagined what he found.

It was a huge pure white space. The walls and ceiling were all a smooth, slick whiteness. It was like being inside a massive, very clean bathtub. Lights blasted the area. A huge complicated machine was running, humming and whirling and buzzing. It had robotic arms that were placing and removing items. He couldn’t guess what it was making. The unfinished item didn’t look very boat-like.

There was a path painted on the floor, indicating where it was safe to walk and not be hit by moving machinery.

A man was talking loudly on the far side of the massive room. “I can’t tell what’s it doing. You know how complicated it is. Some of the pieces in the assembly bins were quite small; it might have been processing for hours before anyone noticed.” The man paused as if listening to someone. Tommy’s sensitive ears didn’t pick up the other person. The man continued as if in response. “No, the kid doesn’t have access to anything that can connect with it. I’ve tried that. And that. And that too.”

Moving machine parts obscured the person as Tommy threaded his way through the room. He reached out with his mind. He encountered two different knots of emotions. One person was irritated and considering violence. The other was filled with fear.

The speaker sounded angry. Was the terrified person an Undefended? Tommy’s gut feeling was that he’d found one of the missing whores. Tommy focused on locking his mind-clouding ability on the angry person.

After he dodged three massive rolling robotic arms trailing wires, he spotted his target on the opposite side of the building. A big man paced back and forth while talking on a smart phone. Knickknack sat at a table with a laptop, trying to ignore the angry man behind him. The boy was shackled to the floor by a ten-foot chain. The girls were nowhere in sight.

Tommy could cut the big man’s throat before the brute realized he was there but there was the problem of whoever was on the other end of the phone. Was the person someone close by or on the other side of town? With Knickknack chained to the floor and the girls possibly chained elsewhere, Tommy didn’t want to be dealing with reinforcements.

Tommy erased himself from the man’s mind as he stalked toward the table. The shackle on Knickknack’s ankle was jury-rigged from a heavy chain bolted to the floor and a padlock. As Tommy neared the two, he noticed that Knickknack’s eyes kept going to the key ring at the big man’s side. Did it have the key needed to free the boy?

The boy noticed Tommy. “What the—”

Tommy put a hand over Knickknack’s mouth. Tommy shook his head. He could cloud the mind of the man beside him but not the person on the other end of the telephone conversation. He reached over and plucked the key ring from the man’s side. He handed the keys to Knickknack and pointed down at the padlock.

The boy’s brows knitted together in annoyed confusion. Knickknack glanced at the man, who was clearly unconcerned by Tommy’s presence — not realizing that it was because the man was unaware of him.

Was Tommy going to have to beat the boy into unlocking himself?

Tommy’s irritation must have shown on his face. Knickknack’s eyes went wide and the boy knelt quickly to fumble with the padlock.

There was a crash in the direction of the front gate. What was that Olivia doing now?

“What the hell was that?” The big man glanced toward the table but Tommy made sure that all he saw was Knickknack still typing on the laptop. “I need to go. I’ll call you later.”

The man strode off as Knickknack carefully placed the unlocked padlock quietly on the floor.

The boy had a black eye but otherwise seemed fine. He was a hair taller than Tommy, dressed in shorts and T-shirt that read YOU MATTER, UNLESS YOU MULTIPLY YOURSELF BY THE SPEED OF LIGHT…THEN YOU ENERGY. Tommy wasn’t sure what it meant; was it supposed to be funny? Knickknack had on bright yellow tennis shoes that had Japanese lettering written on them. He smelled like he hadn’t showered or changed his clothes for days.

“Where’s the girls?” Tommy whispered.

“What are you doing here?” Knickknack whispered fiercely. “Are you working with these assholes?”

“This is a rescue, idiot. Where are the girls?”

“A rescue? Is Mokoto here?”

Tommy bounced the boy against the nearest wall. “Where are the girls?”

“They’re in the female employee locker room.” Knickknack fumbled through the key ring. “I think this key unlocks the door.”

The keys jingled softly, betraying the fact that the kid was shaking in fear. It made Tommy angry.

“We’re here to save you,” Tommy snarled as he took the keys.

“Mokoto is here?” Knickknack repeated.

Tommy bounced him again. “Take me to the locker room where the girls are.”

Knickknack indicated the door that the big man had taken. “There’s a guard on the girls.”

“I’ll take care of him,” Tommy said.

“Wait.” Knickknack started to gather up stuff on the table. “I tried to talk sense into these assholes but it was like talking to a brick wall. They don’t understand the danger. There’s multiple worlds out there. I have no idea how you key to the right world. I could have been opening a doorway to literally anywhere. There could be massive colonies of man-eating ants, or AI-driven death machines, or diseases that make the Ebola seem like the common cold, or a literal black hole that will use the doorway to tear Pittsburgh into little pieces of matter.”

“Just leave it,” Tommy said.

“No, I can’t. They set up a backdoor to all of Tinker’s files. I want to be able to block them after we get out of here — or they’ll just do this with someone else.”

“We need to hurry,” Tommy said.

“Got it!” Knickknack took off running.

A fireproof door led to a maze of hallways and offices.

Knickknack paused at one turn to whisper and point. “The guard is around the corner.”

Tommy reached out with his mind. There were lots of minds around the corner. He couldn’t tell the girls from their guard. They were too close together and they were all bored.

He signaled Knickknack to get closer to him.

“What are you going to do?” Knickknack whispered. “Shoot him? Everyone will hear the—”

Tommy shoved Knickknack out into the hallway.

Knickknack yelped in surprise, nearly falling on his face before he recovered his balance.

One mind stopped being bored. “What are you doing here, kid?”

“Hey, Zhukov! I need to use a real toilet, not just a piss jar.” Knickknack pointed back behind him. “Mulligan said I could come down here and go proper-like.”

Tommy locked his thoughts onto the guard and erased Knickknack from his vision.

“What the hell?” Zhukov said as Tommy stepped around the corner. He was a beefy man with a full beard. “Where did you go, kid?”

Knickknack looked at Tommy walking toward him, back at Zhukov who was turning in circles, and then back at Tommy. He spread his hands with a silent “What?”

Zhukov had a radio and sidearm and probably combat training. Tommy couldn’t just whisk the girls away and not count on the man summoning help.

“Take the keys.” Tommy handed the keyring to Knickknack. “Free the girls, get them headed back to where you were chained.”

“What are you going to do?” Knickknack whispered.

“Focus on the girls.” Tommy checked the door to the men’s locker room. He wanted to keep the Undefended females out of the fight. They were like alley cats when it came to fighting: painted claws out and scratching while howling curses. It might be effective against other girls on street corners, but not against men armed with guns.

The door swung inward. Zhukov was bigger than Tommy but not braced for an attack from the rear. Tommy caught the man by the collar and dragged him fast through the door.

The locker room was an assault on Tommy’s nose, of piss and damp and mold. Nor was it empty; two men stood by the wash sinks on the far back wall, looking surprised. Zhukov spun out of Tommy’s hold and pulled his gun.

Tommy stepped back. He fed into Zhukov’s mind the image of two lesser blood oni warriors standing in place of the men: the ones that were over six feet tall with a pig-snout nose and tusks. Their sharp nasal grunting. Their musky reek. Zhukov shouted with surprise and emptied his gun into his coworkers.

“Blyat!” Zhukov shouted the word like a curse. The gun shook as he kept it aimed at the dead bodies. “What the hell are those? How did they get in here?”

There was a sudden barrage of gunfire outside the building. The cargo truck’s loud horn sounded long and urgent. Tommy had never heard a more clear “come now” signal.

The door opened behind Zhukov. Knickknack stood in the doorway, looking shocked.

The guard whirled and pulled the trigger on his gun. Luckily, it was empty.

“Stupid fuck!” Tommy cut Zhukov’s throat. “I told you to focus on the girls!”

Knickknack backed out of the door, mouth open, eyes wide. “I–I-I thought you might need help.”

Tommy wiped his knife on Zhukov’s clothes and sheathed it. The gunfire outside was only increasing in volume. What the hell was happening out there? “Come on.”

The hallway was crowded with frightened girls. They apparently had afforded themselves use of the showers in the woman’s locker room: they smelled of cheap hand soap and clean flesh. Without their heavy streetwalker makeup, they all appeared young and innocent. He might have been wrong about their ages; none of them looked older than eighteen. All the kids were bruised and battered. Knickknack wasn’t the only one with a black eye and the girls all had marks on their arms to show that they had been roughly held by men with large, strong hands.

An alarm started to sound as they headed cautiously through the maze of hallways back toward the big machine room.

“Is that a fire alarm?” Peanut Butter Pie said.

“Maybe,” Knickknack said.

Tommy wanted to get back to his hoverbike without running into any more groups of armed guards.

In the machine room, the far wall was slowly lifting. He hadn’t noticed before but it was actually a huge airplane hangar-like door. The entire massive wall was folding up in four separate sections. Beyond the gleaming white manufacturing room, rails led down a steep concrete slope to the water. The muddy scent of the river was spilling in through the opening doorway.

The loud alarm might be to warn people that a boat was launching. Certainly the freshly created machine seemed to be preparing to leave — arms and clamps were retracting and the hum of a motor was coming from the thing. There was a weird chiming noise, similar to a hoverbike’s spell chain spinning up.

Bullets pinged off the side wall. Tommy glanced out toward the river. There was a tugboat maneuvering a river barge filled with oni warriors toward the boat ramp.

“Shit,” Tommy hissed. “Run!”

Loud elf fusion music started to play on a loudspeaker and a squeaky girly voice announced in English, “We are Pittsburgh! We are Team Tinker! Hooyah! Launching Tesla Mark Two Point Oh! Team Mischief, Go!”

The large newly fabricated machine lifted up and roared sideways out the opening. It had been a spell chain spinning up that he had been hearing.

“What the hell is happening?” one of the girls shouted.

That was what Tommy wanted to know. He wasn’t sure what the giant mongrel hoverbike thing was but it seemed to be on their side.

Olivia was desperately honking the cargo truck’s horn again as Tommy led the Undefended out of the big building and around the corner to where he had left his bike. He was glad to see she’d shifted the big vehicle so that it was protected by the building. The marines were behind heavy cover, returning fire at the oni. There was no sign of the Midas Erobern people; the rats had piled into their cars and fled. At some point Gaddy had slipped through the trashed gate and now sat on her hoverbike beside the truck.

The Undefended skittered in circles, not wanting to get closer to the gunfight.

Olivia spotted them and scrambled out of the cab to wave the Undefended toward her. “Come on! Get in the truck!”

“Go!” Tommy ordered, shoving them. He stopped at his hoverbike. All the Undefended except Knickknack ran to the truck.

The boy paused to look around. “Is Mokoto here? It’s all my fault that Joyboy is dead. I don’t want Mokoto hurt because I was stupid. None of this would have happened if I didn’t let Toad talk me into growing those drugs. If I hadn’t started to work Liberty. Hell, I should have just gone home for the summer! Mokoto didn’t come, did he? He’s not getting shot at?”

“He’s not here!” Tommy roared. “He sent me, okay?”

Knickknack looked relieved and pleased. “Oh! Good! Okay. Right. I’ll get in the truck, then.”

“They’re setting up a heavy machine gun!” Dagger shouted. “We cannot hold this position!”

“Pull back!” Olivia ordered. “Get in the truck! We’re leaving!”

The marines dashed back, covering one another as they retreated. The machine gun opened fire, chewing through the pallets that the marines had been hiding behind. The truck had heavy cover behind the building but they needed to pull into the oni firing range to clear the gate.

“Hold on!” Tommy called as he pulled his hoverbike up beside the cargo truck. “We need to take out the machine gun before driving through its line of fire!”

“I can try ramming the fence,” Olivia said.

Tommy scanned the fence line. Yes, the truck could probably easily ram through the chain-link fence but the jumps for Tinker’s racetrack blocked the sidewalk beyond.

The large flying vehicle suddenly swooped down to hover beside Tommy. Up close and without all the fabricating machines attached to it, the thing looked more like a tank, with a long tube barrel sticking out in front. “We are Pittsburgh!”

“We are Team Tinker?” Gaddy said even though she wasn’t on Tinker’s hoverbike racing team.

“Hooyah!” the hovertank said in its little girl voice. “Leave that barge to us!”

“Okay,” Tommy said when it became obvious that everyone else was speechless.

The hovertank swooped around the corner of the building with the speed of a hummingbird. There was a quiet poof and a small white ball went sailing out of the cannon. A foot or two from the muzzle, the ball transformed into a massive ray of white-hot energy that flashed forward. The beam hit the machine gun and sliced through the deck of the barge.

“Chi-chi-chi!” one of the marines cried. “Spell arrow!”

Tommy had never seen a spell arrow do that kind of damage. How did anyone get it ramped up to do that? Why was the hovertank using something akin to a spitball? How?

The hovertank ducked back behind cover as the oni used rifles to shoot at it. The barge was already listing as it took on water. The oni warriors rushed toward the smaller tugboat as the water became thick with feeding river sharks. A true blood was trying to detach the barge before it dragged the tug down with it.

“There,” the little-girl voice said from hovertank. “No more problem! You should go someplace safer. The oni are launching an attack on Oakland. Okay, got to go, bye!”

The tank soared off.

“We should go,” Olivia said after a moment of stunned silence. “Somewhere. Someplace safe.”

Tommy doubted that anywhere in Pittsburgh was safe. He needed to get back to his family. Motoko and Babe would still be asleep. Bingo and the others were distracted by the hotel; they might not notice the incoming oni until it was too late. At least with the human businessmen coming and going, no one who couldn’t pass for human should be in the lobby. They could discuss tactics after he warned his family.

He revved the engine on his hoverbike, adding power to the lift engines so he drifted upward to cruising height. “Follow me.”