"Stay focused," she murmured, and jumped slightly as Pony set a bowl down in front of her.
"Forgiveness."
"Oh, it's just Chiyo with her damn snakes and prying thoughts keeping me on edge on top of everything else. Rice and fish again? Bleah."
Pony grunted slightly. She looked up, and noticed that he was focused across the warehouse. A patrolling oni warrior had come into the warehouse, strolling around the massive wooden ring.
"A new one?" she asked, returning to her food and diagrams. Non-workers wanting to see the imposing gate were an annoyance she suffered for Pony's sake; he used the opportunity to track the onis' numbers.
"Sixty-one," Pony whispered. "Small, rifle and sword, no pistol."
Tinker winced at the number, which climbed daily. Already the oni warriors outnumbered Windwolf's sekasha three to one. Pony was of the opinion, though, that oni weren't as skilled fighters. "The ones in charge are always the biggest and loudest, they run toward fat, and I haven't seen any sign of weapon practice."
Riki came up, checking things off his datapad. "I think we finally nailed down the wiring. How's the circuit coming?"
"I'm just finishing—I think. I want to run them through a simulator before committing them to tile."
Riki nodded to the wisdom of this.
Tinker sensed Pony tensing, which probably meant Chiyo was closing on them. She spared a glance to check. The kitsune had paused, standing in profile to them to talk to one of the oni doing the wiring. Already the kitsune looked like she had a small pumpkin under her kimono. Riki had mentioned that a kitsune gestation was only fifty days; at ten days she was nearly the equivalent of three months in human pregnancy.
I can't let the oni into my world, Tinker thought for the thousandth time, and then firmly locked away her thoughts. "What is your plan? Do you have an army sitting on the other side of this gate?"
"Yes," Riki said.
"It started to amass last year." Chiyo joined the conversation. "I'm told it numbers in the tens of thousands."
"This gate is only good while Pittsburgh is on Elfhome," Tinker pointed out. "Even if you wait until after Shutdown to start bringing over your army—to maximize your time before the humans can react—you only have twenty-eight days until the next Shutdown. Then Pittsburgh goes back to Earth, either fully loaded with oni, or a war-torn ghost town. What little I know of the United States, they usually don't take kindly to that kind of shit."
"We'll ride this Shutdown out," Riki said, unconsciously echoing Oilcan's phrase. "And after that, there won't be another Shutdown."
"What?" Tinker yelped. "How can you stop Shutdown?"
"Shutdown is just flipping a switch," Riki said.
Chiyo laughed. "Oh, stupid fake elf, if we had the station built, don't you think we can control when it turns on and off?"
"The oni are working with the Chinese?" Somehow Tinker thought the oni had merely been feeding the Chinese information. But even as she said it, she realized that the cooperation would have to go deeper than that.
"I told you that some of us were stranded on Earth for hundreds of years," Riki said quietly. "Many of the kitsune's mental powers, like the mind reading, do not need magic to work. They have infiltrated the Chinese government to the highest levels. They're the ones that pushed through the building of the gate."
Tinker frowned. "The gate was wholly an oni's project? What about the colony at Alpha Centauri?"
"There is no colony," Riki said. "It's an elaborate sham that the tengu and the kitsune dreamed up. The gate is nothing more than a huge magician's box that we pull rabbits out of."
The problem with liars was knowing when they were telling the truth. Tinker couldn't believe that the entire twenty-year colonization program had been a sham. "Where the hell are the colony ships going?"
"Don't know." Riki shrugged. "We were hoping that they would go to Elfhome, or, failing that, Onihida, but they didn't go to either. We don't know what star system your father calibrated the gate for, so we picked one for the media. As far as we know, the ships could be on the other side of the galaxy, or a fourth dimension of Earth. Wherever they are, they've got a lot of empty cargo pods—we had to keep pushing stuff through the gate to justify leaving it on."
"They've been without supplies for twenty years?" Tinker stared at him, stunned. Lain and the astronomers had filled her life with information on the colonists until they were intimate strangers. "How could you do that?"
"We don't even know if they've survived the jump. If they came out next to a black hole, or any exotic star system—like a red nova or white dwarf—all the supplies in the world couldn't keep them alive."
"But—but—but all the progress reports from the colony?"
"We didn't have to worry about reports immediately, as Alpha Centauri is light years away. Eventually we put up a satellite in an extreme orbit with correctors to fake a signal from the colony. Beijing beams the feed up to the satellite that bounces it back in a wide enough spread that you can pick it up anywhere on Earth."
She noticed Chiyo's gaze fixated on her, like a hunter seeing prey, and concentrated on factoring numbers. "Stay out of my mind, you little bitch."
Riki picked up the dirty dishes and handed them to the kitsune. "Make yourself useful." They watched Chiyo carry the plates away. "If it makes you feel any better, all the first colonists were tengu and kitsune. They knew the risks. And we did send supplies for the first few years—they were our family—but Tomtom decided it was a waste of food and goods. He diverted the cargo to Onihida, where starvation is common."
"There's been ships full of people every five years since then!"
Riki nodded, bleak. "Yes. There have."
16: End Game
Tinker was sick of keeping Chiyo out of her head. Working on the various mathematical and mechanical problems of the gate had provided automatic protection for the first two weeks, but the last few days—as much of the work resolved down to grunt work, little fiddles and small fixes—she had to switch to solving random math problems. More annoying was that she hadn't been able to share with Pony anything she didn't want Chiyo to pick out of his head. The level of trust that her bodyguard had in her was unnerving; if their places were swapped, she'd be climbing the wall to know "the plan." Pony, however, seemed content to wait and see what she pulled out of the hat.
The first step of "the plan" was simply to finish early. Tomtom would be on hand during the twenty-first day, so she slaved everyone unmercifully to hit the twentieth. Stunningly, they actually managed to finish early in the morning, but she dawdled, going so far as creating minor glitches. She wanted the cover of night—and confusion on both ends of the gate—when they activated it.
But what if it didn't work?
She tried to ignore that worry. Dusk grayed the sky as the dinner bowls arrived. As usual, afterward it fell to Chiyo to clear the dishes. Sexism, got to love it sometimes. Tinker gave Riki the chore to start moving the heavier tools and equipment to the second gate site.
For a few spare seconds, she and Pony were alone with a handful of guards that didn't speak Elvish.
"I've finished the gate, and I think it works," she murmured to Pony. "We'll see in a few minutes. I kept my promise. We go as soon as I turn it on and we can slip away."