Wen Spencer - Tinker

"According to the CMU entrance test, you understand the gate theory well enough to create a functioning gate."

So much for the NSA keeping that news from leaking out. "Theoretical design and actual working prototype can be years apart."

"You don't understand. Lord Tomtom is immortal, and now, so are you."

So she could be here forever, building until she got it right, or Lord Tomtom got impatient.

At the back of the shop, a skylight threw a shaft of sunshine down into an office area, complete with drafting table, desk, and computer equipment. There were designs already laid out on the table: blueprints for the orbital gate. She glanced to the legend. Her father's name was printed there in neat drafting print. "Your people killed my father and gave his work to the Chinese."

"He wasn't supposed to be killed," Riki said. "They were just trying to kidnap him. The car was truly an accident."

"Were you there?"

"No. I was in high school, being a geek: playing on the Internet, learning basic physics, and sitting out gym class on a doctor's excuse."

"So you don't know what really happened."

"Lord Tomtom wanted him alive. You've seen how he punished the oni that merely put you at risk. I won't upset you with the details of what he does to those who utterly fail him."

"Your people killed my father while trying to kidnap him—just to get back to a world you'd never seen which is ruled by immortal sadistic madmen?"

"That's about the size of it."

"You're all insane."

"Perhaps," Riki said.

She was hoping for a less unsettling answer. On the desk was a datapad with a complete download from her pad. She glanced at the computer system, identical to her own, down to style of printer, scanner, and holo projector. "Sparks?"

"Yes, Boss?"

"Fuck." She whirled on Riki. "You copied everything while I was gone! I trusted you. Oilcan trusted you! But you just used him to break into my security and steal my thoughts."

"I had to," Riki said.

She hit him, a stupid girlie smack the first time, and then, realizing that he wouldn't dare hurt her, she hauled back and punched him right. Then did it again, and again. All her fear became rage and she funneled it at him. He grabbed her right wrist, so she stomped down on his bare foot, and jerked out of his hold as he fell. There were tools lying on the table beside her; she snatched up a heavy monkey wrench and laid into him. He managed to block most of her hits, so she flung the wrench away and grabbed a crowbar off the table.

Riki scrambled backward, holding out his hand. "Tinker, I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I really am. But the moment I came to Pittsburgh, it was do it, or die horribly."

Tinker stopped, crowbar cocked back over her shoulder, panting. His words hadn't checked her—it was the sudden knowledge that she wanted to kill him, and had the means tight in her hands. Already he was bleeding from his nose and mouth and a cut along his cheek. She'd caught him in one eye with something, and the white was now a shocking red. There were bruises on his arms from fending her off. From the odd look of his foot, she'd broken at least one of the bones. She could beat him to death—but what would that gain her? Certainly not her freedom. And she was in his shoes now; do or be tortured, with an entire world staked on the outcome of her intelligence.

Think, you idiot, don't react.

"Okay, I forgive you." Tinker lowered the crowbar, but didn't put it down.

The NSA agents Durrack and Briggs said that someone had kidnapped several scientists. Obviously it was the oni. Obviously the scientists refused to work on the gate, or tried to escape, or just hit the end of Tomtom's patience. She was just the most recent victim. The seer said that there was no stopping the door from being opened. Tinker was the pivot. If she said "fuck off" then they'd just kill her and get someone else. She had the means, somehow, to stop them cold. Why hadn't the damn bitch just told her how?

Chiyo was talking to Riki in Oni again. Tinker glanced at her, irritated, and considered whacking the female a couple of times with the crowbar instead. She might even be able to get the guards to hold the little bitch down for her, just like they'd done with the tortured oni. Tinker's look was enough to make Chiyo yelp in fear and dart out of range, crying, "No, no, I'll stop!"

"Good." Tinker put aside the crowbar. "We all understand each other now."

"Yes." Riki wiped the blood from his mouth. "I think we do."

"Don't you ever sleep?" Chiyo asked peevishly.

"Sometimes, I do." Tinker squirmed around on her futon bed to put her feet on the wall without taking her eyes from her datapad. "Sometimes, I don't."

Chiyo whimpered.

With the exception of the skylight, the warehouse office hadn't been set up with comfort in mind. After a few hours on the padded stool that was the office's only seat, Tinker moved back to her bedroom. Annoyingly, everything that the oni missed when they killed her father, Riki had copied off her home system. He had made notes in a separate file, obviously trying to design a land-based gate himself. He'd gotten far enough to confirm that he had a degree of physics from Caltech, and that while gifted, was seriously out of his league.

Riki had also added everything ever published on the gate since the Chinese received her father's plans from the oni. Some of them were in original Chinese, and others had been translated, hopefully accurately. There was an entire folder on as-built drawings for the space station, the hyperphase gate, and the power systems for both. Reading over the files, it became obvious that some of her father's obscure notes relating to the Dufae Codex had been translated by an oni familiar with both physics and magic.

She was familiar with everything published after the gate was built, as Western scientists scrambled to reverse engineer the device that the Chinese seemed to produce out of thin air. She skipped them, reading only papers published in the last three months and making notes in a scratch file.

Of the missing scientists, there was frighteningly little. She checked to see if maybe Riki loaded files and then deleted them without doing a deep scrub. She found Harry Russell's journal of his captivity. In a stunning display of iron will, he'd resisted the oni while they whittled him down, first finger by finger of his left hand, then the hand itself, and finally his arm. They broke him too completely, and after a brief stuttering dictation as Russell fell into shock from pain, the journal ended abruptly. She scrubbed the file completely off her datapad.

All the while, she pondered the seer's words, or lack of them. For the first time she saw a certain Heisenbergian logic to the seer's silence: the act of seeing the future—thus able to avoid it—made it more unlikely that path would be taken. The seer didn't want her to deviate from some path she'd naturally take—perhaps. It would be nice, if she had some clue as to what she was supposed to be doing. Just as a straight «no» to the oni wasn't the answer—as Harry Russell found out—fully cooperating with them surely couldn't be either.

Finally sick of the whole mess, she dropped her pad onto the futon and went to the window to stargaze. The moon was out and full, looking the same as Earth's or Elfhome's. She looked for the planets that had been in conjunction the month before on Elfhome.

"Stop looking out there," Chiyo moaned from her corner.

"Why?"

"Because it gives me a headache."

"Why does my looking out a window make your head hurt?"

"Because you are a stupid little fake elf, and this is a stupid waste of my abilities. I was meant for greater things than being your jailer. You'll never figure out this gate, and all my time and effort will be wasted."