Future Wars . . . and Other Punchlines Read online

  “Everything ready here?” Roxanne demanded. The senior thaumaturge in charge of the Balloon Brigade wore a power suit with pinstripes of red, Malfegor’s color. Her attaché case was an expensive one made of crimson belly skins, the sexual display markings of little male lizards. Very many little male lizards.

  “Yes, sir, one hundred percent!” Dog Squat said. She frowned. She wasn’t very good on numbers. “Two hundred percent?” she offered as an alternative.

  “Yes, well, you’d better be,” Roxanne said as she returned her attention to the dragon-filling.

  The dragon whelp was no bigger than a cow. The beast didn’t appear to be in either good health or a good humor. Its tail lashed restively despite the attempt of one wrangler to control that end while the other two held the whelp’s head steady.

  Junior Thaumaturge Theobald stood in front of the whelp with a book in one hand and an athame of red copper in the other. As Theobald intoned, a veil of mana flowed into the whelp from the surrounding rock. The creature’s outlines softened.

  Purple splotches distorted the generally red fields of force. The whelp shook itself. The wranglers tossed violently, but they all managed to hold on.

  Dumber Than #1 bent close to Dog Squat and whispered gratingly in her ear. The balloon chief sighed and said, “Ah, sir?”

  Roxanne jumped. A goblin’s notion of a quiet voice was one that you couldn’t hear in the next valley. “Yes?” the senior thaumaturge said.

  “Ah, sir,” Dog Squat said, “there’s been some discussion regarding biting. Ah, whether we’ll be biting the enemy, that is. Ah, that is, will we?”

  Roxanne stared at the balloon chief in honest amazement. The four crewgoblins stood behind Dog Squat, scratching themselves but obviously intent on the answer.

  “You’ll be throwing rocks,” Roxanne said, speaking very slowly and distinctly. She tried to make eye contact with each crewgoblin in turn, but a goblin’s eyes tend to wander in different directions.

  The senior thaumaturge tapped the surface of the plateau with one open toed, wedge-heeled shoe. “Rocks are like this,” she said, “only smaller. The rocks are already in the gondola of your balloon. Do you all understand?”

  None of them understood. None of them understood anything.

  Dumber Than #3 scratched his jockstrap again. Roxanne winced. “Isn’t that uncomfortable to wear?” she said. “I mean, chain mail?”

  The crewgoblin nodded vigorously. “Yeah, you can say that again,” he said. He continued to scratch.

  “But when is she going to tell us about biting?” #1 said to Dog Squat in a steamwhistle whisper.

  The dragon whelp farted thunderously. A huge blue flame flung the rearward wrangler thirty feet away with his robes singed off. The veil of inflowing mana ceased as Roxanne spun around.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Junior Thaumaturge Theobald said nervously as he closed his book. “The mana here is impure. Too much ground water—we must be over an aquifer. But she’s full and ready.”

  “Carry on, then,” Roxanne said grimly to the remaining dragon wranglers.

  The leading wrangler crooned into the whelp’s ear as her partner stroked the scaly throat from the other side. The whelp, shimmering with newfound power, bent toward the pile of coal and burped a puny ball of red fire. Roxanne frowned.

  “Come on, girl, you can do it,” the wrangler moaned. “Come on, do it for mommy. Come on, sweetie, come on—”

  The dragon whelp stretched out a diamond-clawed forepaw and blasted a double stream of crimson fire from its nostrils. The jets ripped across and into the pile of coal, infusing the flame through every gap and crevice. The wranglers directed the ruby inferno by tugging their charge’s head back and forth with long leads.

  After nearly three minutes of roaring hellfire, the whelp sank back exhausted. It seemed to have shrunk to half its size of a few moments before. The two normally robed wranglers clucked the beast tiredly to its feet and walked it out of the way. The third wrangler limped alongside. In place of a robe he was wearing a red gonfalon borrowed from a nearby cavalry regiment.

  The coal pile glowed like magma trapped deep in the planetary mantle. “Come on!” Roxanne ordered. “Let’s not waste this. Get moving and get it capped!”

  The capping crew was under the charge of two novice thaumaturges, both of them in their teens. In response to their chirped commands, the four labor goblins lifted the gigantic helmet by means of crosspoles run through sockets at the front and back of the base. They began to shuffle forward, up the earthen ramps built to either side of the pile of coal.

  The porters were goblins chosen for brawn rather than brains. The very concept of intellect would have boggled the porters’ minds if they’d had any. In order to keep the crews moving in the right direction, the novices projected a line of splayed, clawed footprints in front of the leaders on either ramp to carefully fit his/her feet into.

  The goblins on the rear pole set their feet exactly on the same markings. They didn’t put any weight down until they were sure the foot was completely within the glowing red lines. The cap’s rate of movement was more amoebic than tortoiselike. Nevertheless, it moved. Senior Thaumaturge Roxanne drummed fingers on the side of her attaché case in frustration, but there was no hurrying labor goblins.

  The leaders paused when they reached the last pairs of footprints at the ends of the ramps. The porters stood stolidly, apparently oblivious of the heat and fumes from the coal burning beside them.

  The novice thaumaturges turned to Roxanne. “Yes!” she shouted. “Cap it! Cap it now!”

  The novices ordered, “Drop your poles!” in an uncertain tenor and a throaty contralto. Three of the porters obeyed. The fourth looked around in puzzlement, then dropped his pole also. The helmet clanged down unevenly but still down, over the pile. The metal completely covered the coal, shutting off all outside air.

  The horns flaring to the sides of the giant helmet were nozzles. Thick hoses were attached to the ends of horns. The novice thaumaturges clamped the free ends of the hoses into the filler inlets of Balloons Prima and Secundus. Adjusting the hoses was hard work, but the task was too complicated to be entrusted to a goblin.

  Roxanne personally checked the connection to Prima while the junior thaumaturge did the same on the other side. “All right,” she said to the novice watching anxiously from the top of the ramp where he’d scrambled as soon as he attached his hose. “Open the cock.”

  The novice twisted a handle shaped like a flying dragon at the tip of the horn, opening the nozzle to gas that made the hose writhe on its way to the belly of Balloon Prima. The senior thaumaturge stepped away as the balloon began to fill.

  The balloons were made from an inner layer of sea serpent intestine. The material was impervious to gas and so wonderfully tough that giants set bars of gold between layers of the stuff and hammered the metal into foil.

  Prima bulged into life, inflating with gases driven out of the furiously hot coal in the absence of oxygen to sustain further combustion. The four drag ropes tightened in the clawed hands of labor goblins whose job was to keep the balloon on the ground until it had been completely filled with its inlet closed.

  “You lot!” Roxanne said to Dog Squat and her crew. “What are you waiting for? Get into your gondola now!”

  Dog Squat opened her mouth to explain that she’d been waiting for orders. She forgot what she was going to say before she got the words out. “Dumber Thans,” she said instead, “get into the little boat.”

  The wicker gondola creaked as the five goblins boarded it. The balloon was already full enough to lift off the ground and swing in the coarse steel netting that attached the car to it. A light breeze swept down from Malfegor’s aerie, ready to waft the brigade toward the enemy on the plain below.

  The floor of the gondola was covered with rocks the size of a goblin’s head. Many of the missiles were delightfully jagged. #3 patted a piece of chert with a particularly nice point.

  Balloon Secundus
lifted into sight from the other side of the helmet. It was sausage-shaped, like forty-nine percent of the brigade’s equipment. Prima was one of the slight majority of balloons which, when seen from the side, looked like a huge dome with a lesser peak on top. The attachment netting gleamed like chain mail over the pinkish white expanse of sea serpent intestine.

  Dog Squat picked up a rock and hefted it. A good, solid chunk of granite. A rock that a goblin could really get into throwing, yep, you betcha. Dog Squat had heard some principals would try to fob their crews off with blocks of limestone that crumbled if you just looked crossways at it, but not good old Malfegor. . . .

  “Shut off the gas flow!” Senior Thaumaturge Roxanne called to the novice on the ramp above her. She released the catch on the input. When Prima wobbled, the hose pulled loose, and Roxanne clamped the valve shut.

  “Cast off!” she ordered the ground crew.

  Three of the goblins dropped their ropes. The fourth, an unusually powerful fellow even for a labor goblin, continued to grip his. His big toes were opposable, and he’d sunk his claws deep into the rock of the plateau.

  Balloon Prima lifted at an angle. The gondola was nearly vertical, pointing at the goblin holding the rope.

  “Let’s go!” Roxanne screamed. “Drop the rope!”

  She batted the goblin over the head with her attaché case. He looked at the senior thaumaturge quizzically.

  “Let go!” Roxanne repeated. “Don’t you understand what I’m saying?”

  The goblin blinked. He continued to hold onto both the rope and the ground. Balloon Prima wobbled above him.

  Roxanne looked up. Dog Squat peered down at her. The balloon chief wore a familiar puzzled expression. The crewgoblins were stacked, more or less vertically, on the back of their chief. A gust from the wrong direction and the contents of the gondola would tip out promiscuously.

  “You!” the senior thaumaturge said. “Hit this idiot on the head with a rock. A hard rock!”

  Dog Squat looked again at the rock she held, decided that it would do, and bashed the handler goblin with it. The victim’s eyeballs rolled up. He dropped the rope and fell over on his back.

  Balloon Prima shot skyward, righting itself as it rose. The rope the goblin dropped whipped around Roxanne’s waist and dragged her along. The senior thaumaturge weighed scarcely more than any one of the rocks in the bottom of the gondola, so her presence didn’t significantly affect the balloon’s upward course.

  Dog Squat looked over the side of the gondola at Roxanne and blinked. The senior thaumaturge, swinging like a tethered canary, screamed, “Pull me in, you idiot!”

  “I didn’t know you were coming along, sir,” the balloon chief said contritely. She rapped her head hard with her knuckles to help her think. “Or did I?” she added.

  “Pull me—” Roxanne said. The rope, kinked rather than knotted about her, started to unwrap. Roxanne grabbed it with both hands. Her attaché case took an obscenely long time to flutter down. At last it smashed into scraps no larger than the original pelts on the rocks below.

  Dog Squat tugged the rope in hand over hand, then plucked the senior thaumaturge from it and lifted her into the gondola. Roxanne’s eyes remained shut until she felt throwing stones beneath her feet rather than empty air.

  “Are we . . . ?” she said. She looked over the side of the gently swaying gondola. Because of its heavy load, Balloon Prima had only climbed a few hundred feet above the plateau, but the ground continued to slope away as Malfegor’s sorcerous breeze pushed them toward the enemy lines.

  “Oh, mana,” Roxanne said. “Oh mana, mana, mana.”

  “Boss,” said Dumber Than #2, “do you remember when I ate that possum the trolls walked over the week before?”

  “Yeah,” said Dog Squat. Everybody in the crew remembered that.

  “Well, I feel like that again,” #2 said.

  He did look greenish. His eyeballs did, at least. He was swaying a little more than the gondola itself did, come to think.

  “Where did you find a dead possum up here, Number Two?” Dog Squat asked.

  “I didn’t!” the crewgoblin said with queasy enthusiasm.

  He frowned, pounded himself on the head, and added, “I don’t think I did, anyways.”

  “Oh, mana,” the senior thaumaturge moaned. “How am I ever going to get down?”

  “Getting down is the easy part!” Dumber Than #3 said brightly. “Even rocks manage to get down! You’re probably lots smarter than a rock, sir.”

  Senior Thaumaturge Roxanne took another look over the side of the gondola, then curled into a fetal position in the stern.

  “Did you eat a dead possum, too?” #2 asked in what for a goblin was a solicitous tone.

  Balloon Prima had continued to drift while the senior thaumaturge considered her position. The battalions of white-clad enemy troops were by now almost directly below. They didn’t look the way they ought to. They looked little.

  Dog Squat frowned. She wondered if these were really the people she was supposed to drop rocks on.

  “Boss, are we in the right place?” #4 asked. The gondola tilted thirty degrees in its harness. All four crewgoblins had leaned over the same side as their chief. “Them guys don’t look right.”

  “They make my head hurt to look at,” #3 added. “They’re—”

  Goblins didn’t have a word for “square.” Even the attempt to express the concept made lights flash painfully behind the crew-goblin’s eyes.

  In a fuzzy red flash, Dog Squat gained a philosophy of life: When in doubt, throw rocks. “We throw rocks!” she shouted, suiting her actions to her words.

  The goblins hurled rocks down with enthusiasm—so much enthusiasm that Dog Squat had to prevent Dumber Than #1 from tossing Roxanne, whom he’d grabbed by a mistake that nearly became irremediable. When Dog Squat removed the senior thaumaturge from #l’s hands, the crewgoblin tried to bite her—probably #l’s philosophy of life—until Dog Squat clouted him into a proper attitude of respect.

  The gondola pitched violently from side to side because of the repeated shifts in weight. The entire balloon lurched upward since the rocks acted as ballast when they weren’t being used for ammunition. The crew of Balloon Prima was having as much fun as goblins could with their clothes on (and a lot more fun than goblins have with their clothes off, as anyone looking at a nude goblin can imagine).

  They weren’t, however, hitting anybody on the ground, which was increasingly far below.

  The tight enemy formations shattered like glass on stone as Balloon Prima drifted toward them. That was the result of fear, not actual damage. The goblins could no more brain individual soldiers a thousand feet below than they could fly without Prima’s help.

  That didn’t matter particularly to Dog Squat and her crew. Throwing rocks was a job worth doing for its own sake; and anyway, the collapse of ordered battalions into complete disorder fitted Dog Squat’s sense of rightness. The universe (not as clear a concept as it would have been to, say, a senior thaumaturge; but still, a concept in goblin terms) liked chaos.

  White-clad archers well to the side of the balloon’s expected course bent their bows in enormous futile efforts. The altitude that made it difficult for the goblins to hit targets on the ground also made it impossible for archers on the ground to reach Balloon Prima. The arrows arcing back to earth did more damage to other whiteclad troops than the goblinflung rocks had done.

  Malfegor’s breeze continued to drive Balloon Prima in the direction of the enemy command group. The hail of missiles from the gondola stopped.

  “Boss?” said #4. “Where are the rocks?”

  Dog Squat looked carefully around the floor of the gondola. She even lifted Roxanne, who moaned softly in response.

  “There are no rocks,” Dog Squat said.

  Dumber Than #3 scratched himself. “I thought there was rocks,” he said in puzzlement.

  “Can we bite them now, Dog Squat?” #1 said.

  Dog Squat looked ove
r the side again. She hoped there might be another thaumaturge or somebody else who could tell them what to do.

  There wasn’t. Dog Squat checked both sides to be sure, however.

  The enemy had made preparations against the Balloon Brigade’s attack. Two teams of antiballoon ballistas galloped into position between Balloon Prima and the white command group. The crews dismounted and quickly cranked their high-angle weapons into action.

  A ball nearly the size of the rocks the goblins had thrown whizzed toward the balloon and burst twenty feet away in a gush of white mana.

  “Oooh,” said Dog Squat and three of her crewgoblins.

  The breeze shifted slightly, driving Balloon Prima in the direction of the white blast. Malfegor was hunting the bursts on the assumption that the safest place to be was where the immediately previous shell had gone off.

  “Ohhh,” said Dumber Than #2, holding his belly with both hands. “The more we shake around, the older the possum gets.”

  Sure enough, the next antiballoon shell flared close to where Prima would have been if she’d continued on her former course. The breeze jinked back, continuing to blow the balloon toward the command group below.

  The hostile artillerists cranked their torsion bows furiously. They were also trying to raise their angle of aim, but Balloon Prima was almost directly overhead and the ballistas couldn’t shoot vertically. By the time Prima was in the defender’s sights again, the balloon would be directly over the command group.

  Dumber Than #4 nudged Dog Squat and pointed to the tightly curled senior thaumaturge. “Can we throw her now, boss?” the crewgoblin asked. “Seeings as we’re, you know, out of rocks?”

  Dog Squat pursed her lips, a hideous sight. “No,” she decided at last. “Throwing rocks is good. Throwing thaumaturges is not good.”

  At least she didn’t think it was. They ought to throw something, though.

  “Can we bite them, then?” said #l.

  Dumber Than #2 vomited over the side with great force and volume, much as he’d done after the never-to-be-forgotten (even by a goblin) possum incident.