Chapter 1 (Part IV): We’re Under Hill and On Air

Always think in terms of what something can do. What it can do is much more important than what it is supposed to do. Often, you’ll be disappointed to find that something doesn’t do what it’s supposed to, but sometimes, you’ll find it can do things you never imagined. The same thing’s true of people, actually.

-       “The Ox” delivering a guest lecture to first year engineering students at Eastern State University

Over the next few days, Ochsner checked off a large part of her to-do list surprisingly quickly, starting with naming the underground citadel. She’d wanted to call it the “Terrordome” because of its heavy use of arches inside, and its location in the Ridge of Bloody Terror. However, Vinny’s ‘cousin’ and the current ranking gnoman soldier, Vicki, had explained that name had already been used by a snake cult in the seas east of Gnomania. Ochsner had finally settled on a simple interim name – Fort Defiance. It was a tad obvious, of course, but it also seemed appropriate.

Securing Fort Defiance had been as simple a task as she’d hoped – she was able to reset the security systems from outside, and the strange rolling mechanical people that had chased them out of the fortress before had not only let them pass unmolested, they’d proven capable of performing basic tasks on command. For more complicated tasks, she had the Gnoman troops prepared to do anything she asked.

She’d been dreading working with the Gnoman soldiers at first; collaborating closely with total strangers did not sit well with her and she was glad that Azraea had left Cu Sith with her so that she would not feel totally alone. Ochsner had always struggled to navigate the subtleties of polite communication when it came to work. She could banter, she could talk about meaningless, silly things, but when there was a task at hand, she wanted to focus on the task and not be distracted by small talk, passive-aggressive arguments, or petty personal hang ups. When something needed to be done, she wanted it done with efficiency and with precision. That usually meant doing it all by herself, and once she came to appreciate the scale of the task she’d agreed to, she’d nearly panicked at the idea. She quickly found out, however, that she wouldn’t be relying entirely on herself. Not only were the Gnomans brighter and better educated than she’d expected professional soldiers to be, their discipline, training, and experience as a unit made group work a surprisingly ‘low drama’ thing. At least compared to working with other students at the university. Suck it Arra, Ochsner remembered an especially reviled colleague, I have minions now. And any one of them is smarter than you.

No, “minion” wasn’t the right term. She’d expected the men and women to act with the sort of single-mindedness she associated with the scolopendrae in the Dark Dweller’s forest. She saw them as essentially the same; mass produced and fielded with unwavering discipline and loyalty, and one purpose – to kill. They definitely had discipline and loyalty, and she had the impression that they had the killing down too, but they didn’t act single-minded at all. They joked, quipped, and even complained, just like the people she’d studied with. Just like Kaira. She realized she’d probably always written Kaira off as an exception to her stereotypes about soldiers – after all, the elf had never actually joined a force of any size, so she wasn’t really a soldier, right?

But no, the gnoman soldiers were certainly not single-minded. “Single-bodied” would be more accurate. Each of them had unique skills, particular habits, different accents, even different ideas about how things could and should be done, but once a decision had been reached, and an order was given, they could suddenly snap together like one large machine with numerous parts operating in concert. Discipline for the gnoman soldiers wasn’t about being dull eyed and obedient, it was about each soldier being able to reliably do his or her job with absolute confidence that every one of his or her peers would do the same.

As a team, their biggest challenge was that only one of the Gnomans, a fellow named Pyrus, could read the form of dwarvish used throughout the fortress, and only one, Vicki herself, knew much about spellcraft. Ochsner put both of them on permanent duty in the big observation room – what the Gnomans started calling the center of operations – while she micromanaged ‘first priority’ tasks.

Ochsner had developed a clearly defined priority system to deal with the overwhelming demands during college, and so she readily fell back on those time-management skills now. Short deadline tasks – those which had to be done now or never – were officially ‘first priority tasks’. Second priority tasks were those which didn’t have immediate deadlines, but which needed to be done soon because they were prerequisite to executing other tasks. After that it was third priority tasks, tasks which had, essentially, a last minute deadline, but shouldn’t be left to the last minute. Fourth priority tasks were, basically, any task that didn’t need to be done. “No priority” tasks were those which Ochsner rationally determined were impossible to complete soon enough to be worthwhile.

First priority was helping her friends, who were now spreading out across Caelia, to get coordinated in the field. At first, Ochsner had gone straight to work on the ballpipe, but she quickly realized that having specific information about when the dragon left Kingstown and, if possible, the capacity to track its approach would be almost as important as being able to fire the weapon.

The giant ballpipe had been bumped to second priority. Strictly speaking, it didn’t need to be ready to fire until there was a dragon in front of it, but Ochsner wanted it done as soon as possible (what the gnomans called “a-sap”), because she expected a whole host of problems to reveal themselves once they actually got it moving. At the very least, she knew there would be an indefinite number of adjustments needed, as well as training time to consider. Unfortunately, getting the weapon ready to fire would not only mean refurbishing the weapon, it would mean evaluating the ammunition and, if necessary, replacing it. Fortunately, she’d found detailed records covering every aspect of the weapon’s construction and maintenance in the archive; probably the same records Reyghar had used to build his own weapons.

Third priority was ensuring the safety of the townspeople below. Ochsner had realized that the underground fortress had extensive enough living quarters and open areas that those in the town who were not able-bodied combatants could rough it inside the fort for a while. There had been some argument with Vicki regarding the security of the facility but, in the end, no one wanted to leave the people in the path of the dragon.

 Finally, fourth priority categorized all the eccentric side projects she’d been brainstorming with her new friends. She and the gnomans alike hated the idea of letting everything ride on the ballpipe’s ability to hit and kill a moving dragon and they had spent any idle time they had entertaining any idea that might improve their chances or serve as backup plans. It was practically a game – “99 ways to fuck up a dragon” Vicki called it.

While most of the Gnomans were either starting work on physically restoring the ballpipe or discussing evacuation plans with the people of Defiance, Ochsner was working with Vicki and Pyrus on the final steps of their highest priority task, which had expanded beyond ‘let’s improve field coordination’ to ‘let’s restore and modify a half-magic-half-machine arcane information processing system powered by the souls of dead dwarves.’ She realized that she’d let that task get a little out of hand.

Vicki and Pyrus had spent the entire day helping her to very carefully and cautiously disassemble and systematically test the system that routed spells from the archived scrolls to the tablet interfaces and commands from the tablets to the fort’s systems. Their work was hopefully about to pay off.

Vinny had left them with the potion for the communication enchantment. The spells, in potion form, could be applied to any two objects, and would send any sound encountering one object to the other object, as if they both occupied the same place. The Gnomans used these complex spells to communicate with their home country, to listen to other people’s conversations, and such. Ochsner had even wondered if the Gnomans couldn’t have enchanted their gold with it, and tracked its movement through the country, but the Gnomans assured her that in potion form the spells were too costly and didn’t last long enough for that sort of thing to be very useful.

Despite the potion’s cost, Vinny had been concerned enough about coordinating things that he’d enchanted objects for Azraea, Kaira, and multiple scouts so that they could call back to the citadel and receive calls from the citadel. Back here at the fort, though, it was a complicated system to manage. Ochsner had started out setting up all of their objects on a desk in the center of operations, but quickly found that the gnoman assigned to manage them was constantly being asked to relay messages between Vinny and his scouts in the field. The poor fellow stuck with the job became really quite good at it, but Ochsner knew it would require multiple Gnomans operating in shifts to accommodate their 24 hour communication needs, and she couldn’t spare the manpower. So, after a caffeine bender with the poor soul who was on the third shift, she had pried open one of the ancient dwarven boxes to get an idea of how her long dead relations had built an entire fortress that relied on sending information through the air from one place to another.

What Ochsner found was stunning – the box was filled with hundreds of wafer thin titanium plates etched with runes so fine they were barely legible. In fact, she eventually realized that her dwarven ancestors probably used their sensitive finger tips, rather than their eyes, to read the etchings. The spells, provided you knew the language they were written in, were not too dissimilar from spells commonly used in the present; there were simply a lot of them, very elegantly written, and very powerful. The boxes were packed with so much mystical power that some of the spells written into the wafers were frost spells, simply used to keep the other enchantments from melting the box.

Vicki and Pyrus had followed up by going through and systematically removing and replacing plates to see what plates were connected to what parts of the base. Now that they had one of the boxes fairly well understood, they were, as Ochsner watched, attempting to integrate Gnoman enchantments with dwarven ones, literally patching the written versions of their potion-based communication spells into the existing dwarven inscriptions, and in so doing, hopefully connecting Vinny’s awkward network of communication spells to their own network in the citadel. Trying to convert chemically cast spells to written spells, and then combine written spells from two different languages was a feat of spellcasting, but studying the tablet’s ability to automatically translate its user’s somatic gestures to written spell casting had taught them some tricks.

Vicki carefully slid the last panel back into place and the inside of the box lit up as the spells became active. “Okay,” she said, “we’re go. I hope.”

“Where’s the patch?” Ochsner asked as she flipped through pages on her tablet.

“I put it in the archive directory,” Pyrus said, “In the ‘C’s. Well the dwarven equivalent, anyway.”

Ochsner flipped to the archive as if she were retrieving a scroll from one of the many rooms below and found a new entry for a non-existent room – sure enough, the ‘room’ contained a number of entries that she knew weren’t scrolls – they were the spells that connected them to their agents in the field.

“Is it there?” Pyrus asked, apprehensively.

“Yeah, it’s here, but there’s no way to tell what’s what. The different spells are just identified by number sequences.”

“No sweat,” Vicki said as she went to her desk and picked up the tablet she’d been assigned. She couldn’t read dwarven, but she was learning enough dwarven symbols and numbers that she could manage certain tasks with it, “We can wait for people to talk to us, and work out a list of who has what numbers pretty quick.”

“Good, yeah,” Ochsner said, “Pyrus, can you look at these numbers and tell me if they look odd to you?”

“Odd? How?” Pyrus examined the tablet, “Well, okay, yeah, that seems a touch unlikely.”

Dwarves used a base 10 number system, but in each sequence, every number fell between 1 and 8. It was possible it was just a coincidence, but, as Pyrus said, it seemed unlikely. The system they’d patched into had automatically differentiated the gnomans' written spells with numbers, but whatever quantities it was basing the differences on were measured on an eight point scale.

The dwarven communication spells weren’t functioning like normal written spells. So what was special about them? They were more robust and specialized than anything Ochsner had ever learned, but their composition was familiar. Composition… whatever form they took, bardic spells were always composed. Ochsner recalled their fight with the scolopendrae swarm, and how she had used her cello to take control of the living machines and shut them down.

“Octaves,” Ochsner suddenly realized, “The numbers represent octaves. The system is translating between one set of spells and the other using bardic casting as a universal language. The numbers it’s assigned to each of your Gnoman spells tell us the composition for each one based on musical notes…”

Vicki studied the numbers and broke out into a big grin as she understood what Ochsner meant. She whistled the first sequence in the list; when she finished there was a soft chime, and then a voice came from the tablet in her hands.

“This is scout two,” the Gnoman voice said, “What’s going on? I heard this thing make a dinging noise or something.”

Ochsner and the two Gnomans whooped and cheered over the success.

“Seriously, is everything okay?” the voice said again.
“Yes scout two,” Vicki said, “Base is just revolutionizing the art of remote communication. Please resume your post.”