Elfhome

At first glance, the passages seemed undamaged. Then she noticed the small lumps on the pavement near the halfway point in both tunnels.

“What are those? Did part of the ceiling collapse?” Tinker played with the video controls. She found the zoom feature and panned over the objects. They were obviously not part of the tunnel. They were some kind of device, fairly simple in design — seemingly nothing more than a stack of bricks with wires sticking out of them — but she couldn’t recognize any of the individual pieces accept an obvious tripwire that stretched across both lanes of the tunnels. “What the hell are they?”

“Something bad,” Stormsong said.

Tinker turned to look at the female when nothing more was forthcoming.

Stormsong shook her head. “I don’t know what they are, but my talent says that they’re very dangerous.”

Elves described magic as the power to render things down to possibilities and reshape them. The intanyai seyosa was an entire caste who had been bioengineered to take “educated guess” to scary levels. Stormsong’s mother was the queen’s oracle and the female sekasha had inherited some of her mother’s talent. If Stormsong said the objects were dangerous, then they were.

Tinker studied the twin machines. The tripwires were connected to a cylindrical object about three inches long that was inserted into what looked like blocks of white molding clay. Tripwire. Clay. Tinker suddenly realized what she was looking at.

“Shit! They’re bombs.” Tinker pushed the elves toward the door. The tunnels would direct most of the force of the explosion laterally, but there was no telling what would happen once the tunnels collapsed. “Everyone out. Out!”

“Our shields are not strong enough to protect us from bombs.” Stormsong caught Tinker by the good arm and made sure Tinker followed them out.

“I figured that,” Tinker said. The spells tattooed onto the sekasha were meant to counteract other sekasha’s attacks; their protective shields could only deal with swords, normal arrows, and to a limited extent, bullets. Tinker’s domana shielding spell was nearly impenetrable, but penetrating was only the start of the forces at play.

“Your shield won’t keep you from being buried if the roof comes down,” Stormsong continued.

“I fully understand the physics involved.” Tinker snapped. “I’m not going to do something stupid.”

They did an odd mutual herding back to the cars and then milled about at the — possibly — safe distance.

“So what do we do?” Blue Sky asked.

Tinker took out her phone. “Find someone that knows about bombs.”

#

The director of the EIA answered his phone with a barked, “Maynard.”

“I have bombs in the Squirrel Hill Tunnels,” Tinker told him.

There was a long pause, and then Maynard asked overly polite high Elvish. “Tinker ze domi, why are you going to blow up the tunnels?”

“What? Me? No! Someone else put them there; I’ve just found the stupid things.”

“Oh, okay,” and then Maynard leapt to the same conclusion as Stormsong. “Oh please god, tell me you’re not trying to disarm them.”

Tinker sighed. Why did everyone think she’d try? The only things she knew about bombs came from movies — which boiled down to cutting colored wire before a timer ran out — and a few childhood experiments with ANFO. Her experiments had been very educational on the destructive nature of explosives and how they could go wrong. “I’m not! I need someone to come get rid of them.”

“I’ll send my bomb squad,” Maynard said.

“You have a bomb squad?”

“Yes. So when we find bombs, someone knows how to disarm them. Give me your word that you’ll wait for the bomb squad to make the tunnels safe.”

Tinker sighed, recognizing the verbal snare that Maynard just put out. If she promised him, she’d have to keep her word, no matter how long it took to dispose of the bombs. On the other hand, there was no way she could attempt disarming the bomb without getting all the elves and Blue Sky involved. The bombs looked simple, but they could be booby trapped. “Yeah, sure. I promise.”

#

Apparently after living over a hundred years, standing idle for a few hours was no big deal. While her Hand were perfectly fine with doing nothing while they waited for the bomb squad, Tinker didn’t have that kind of patience. There were ironwoods growing beside the bridge into the tunnels, their trunks far below in the valley underneath the highway. After the sekasha triple checked the trees for strangle vines and steel spinners, Tinker settled in their shade to work on her datapad.

Inspecting the tunnels was just the start of the work needed to reconnect Pittsburgh to Earth. Next step would be pin down Impatience to work out the spell. Considering the fact that her Hand was in protective overdrive, it might be saner to put that conversation on hold. The dragon had the attention span of a five year old on a sugar rush. Having the large hyperactive dragon and the jumpy sekasha in one room together would be like doing cigarette tricks in a fireworks factory.