39
“Yar,” the pirate said, seconds before his head exploded. “Who goes there?”
Splat.
Tania’s camouflage flickered as she stepped out from behind the headless corpse. Her fist dripped gore. “Ninety-eight mugs of grog on the wall,” she hummed. “Ninety-eight mugs of grog. Take one down by punching that clown, ninety-seven mugs of grog on the wall…”
Selma stepped out of a nearby alley with Milo just behind.
He had his rifle held ready in front of him. “We clear?’
“Clear,” Tania confirmed. “Ain’t no more scurvy dogs I can see.”
“Scurvy dogs?” Selma asked.
“Didn’t you read the list of pirate slang I gotcha, sister?”
“No.”
“Maybe ya should’ve. Then you’d understand.” Tania crouched to wipe her hand off on the pirate’s coat. “Honestly, sister. Ya came to a new level and didn’t bother to learn the local lingo? Tch.”
“Ahoy there!” a voice called from further up the street. “Who goes there?”
“Quick!” Tania hissed. “Into the alley!”
“I thought you said we were clear,” Selma hissed back.
“That was before!”
“Well, before was just now.”
“No, it wasn’t!”
“Yes it was!”
“No, it was then! This is now. Just move!”
Ignoring the bickering golems, Milo crouched down behind a few large barrels. They smelled like they had once carried wine. The sour stink of it reeked.
Not enough to hide the stink of dried fish, though.
They were in one of dozens of narrow streets which formed a steep shanty town. The town itself climbed up a cliff which overlooked a bay. The bay, while small, could still harbor ten or so large pirate vessels. There were currently eight of them at dock.
Which meant the town was crawling with drunken sailors and reeling mates whose lust for violence was almost as strong as their lusts for other unsavory things.
The shacks which formed the town were ramshackle and built using debris from shipwrecks. It wasn’t uncommon to see an anchor, mast, or even a figurehead being used to reinforce or decorate one of the rickety structures.
Patched sails made up most of the doors and even some rooftops and it wasn’t uncommon for the little streets to fall away in favor of an old rope bridge or something equally flimsy.
Tania squatted down to his left. Selma to his right.
The two golems each pressed tight against his shoulders. To the point he felt squeezed between them. But was unable to say anything as the drunken sailor staggered up the street, squinting at the body laid out in front of him.
“What’s this? What’s this?” The drunken man was fat and grubby. As he passed their hiding place to drop down by the headless corpse to inspect it, Milo caught the strong stink of tobacco and sweat.
Old sweat.
He winced at the stink.
Tania’s camouflage flickered as she activated it.
“Bally-Oh? That you? Without yer head, it’s hard ter see.” The fat sailor lifted a head to the sky and moaned. “Oh, lad, you were my bestest friend! What landlubber laid ya out like this? I’ll never forget ya, me old matey!”
Then he started rummaging through the corpse’s pockets.
“What’s this?” He pulled out a little spyglass and tossed it over his shoulder. “Junk.”
Kept rummaging.
And found nothing.
He let out a sigh. “Poor Balley-Oh. Such a wretched life ya led. Not even a piece o’ eight ter yer name. Or is it?”
He started tugging off the corpse’s boot.
Then he let out a nasty chuckle as a small leather pouch dropped out of the boot and into his waiting hand. “Ah-ha! I knews ya kept a little back, yer scallywag! Well, I’ll spend it well, me old matey. Spend it well, I will. On grog! On women! On grog and women!”
Tania’s dagger caught him in the back.
“Oww!” he cried. “I’ve been murdered!”
Then she slit his throat and he slumped over his friend with a last pitiful twitch.
Tania took the little leather pouch and gave it a shake. “Huh,” she growled. “Any gal who fell for him for this much deserved the disappointment.”
“You gonna check his boots, too?” Selma asked.
“What? And smell his stinky tootsies? No fear.”
Suddenly a loud shriek came from above.
“Blast!” Milo grunted. “A parrot!”
“Murder! Murder! Ahoy, ya scurvy dogs! Murder!”
Without pausing, Milo aimed. Pulled the trigger.
The parrot exploded in a puff of feathers and blood.
“Run,” Tania spat, taking off down the street, Milo and Selma in her wake.
Milo worked quickly to reload. “I think we take a left up ahead.”
“Sister?” Tania lurched to a stop. “Bunch of bean-spillers up here got your name on them.”
Selma lifted her sword with a nod. “I got it.”
As the bigger golem strode to meet a small crew of pirates tumbling out of a nearby shack, Tania slapped her on the backside. “What do ya reckon, Milo? This the booty these bilge rats are looking for?”
“Eep! Tania!” Selma squealed girlishly. “I’m working here!”
“Then hop to it, sister. Ain’t gonna shine no buttons standing around!”
Milo shook his head at them, sinking down behind another old barrel. This time he rested his rifle across the top and adjusted the sight while keeping an eye on everything. “Tania! To your left!”
“I got it,” she called back, already moving.
He held back from firing, letting his golems do their thing.
As he watched them pull apart the pirates with cool efficiency, he marveled at the mechanical wonder of their existence. The dwarves had been geniuses. He was convinced of it.
A part of him found it hard to believe he’d built them with his own hands.
He wanted to pat himself on the back, but he wasn’t that shameless. As a clocker, he’d built more than his fair share of clocks. But he’d always used someone else’s design. This was no different. He hadn’t truly created them.
Just assembled them.
And while the assembling was itself a skill and he knew he was better than most clockers he’d known, he found himself continually downplaying his involvement. Part of that was because he understood the mechanics of their working, but not the important parts.
Like, how did their Machine Intelligence Matrixes work?
If he could know that, he could know how to tweak their personalities.
He thought about the personalization options the golems had. And wondered why he couldn’t tweak their personalities in that. Why couldn’t he, say, request them to be a little more conservative?
Why couldn’t he get Tania to stop showing her coochie to him at every opportunity?
Even now, as she ripped through pirates, she was continually positioning herself so he could see her body in a way that flattered her curves. She leapt often, knowing her short skirt would lift to show her panties to him.
It was as though she was built to prioritize that thinking over any other thought. With a clock, he understood why it told time.
With the golems, he couldn’t understand why they talked.
He understood the how. That was all mechanical.
It was the why that troubled him.
The mysteries of their cores were something he wanted to unravel more than anything. He had a feeling if he could really drill into that, he could understand dwarven technology to a point he might not just be copying it. He might be innovating on it.
That would be exciting.
He might even be able to design his own golem from scratch.
“Look at me, Milo!” Selma chirped, splitting a pirate in two from head to groin. She thrust out her bottom towards him. The chainmail bikini hid nothing. “Can you see?”
He felt his lips twitch despite himself.
There was an innocent cuteness to her method that Tania didn’t have.
Which was also confusing in its way. How could their personalities be so different if they were just machines?
“Ah, ya blushing violet,” Tania growled, shooting a poison dart which whipped past Selma’s cheek and buried itself in the eyeball of a pirate sneaking up on her. “Keep yer peepers peeped!”
Selma scowled. “I knew he was there!”
“Sure ya did!”
“I did!”
An alarm blared as one of the pirates managed to sing out loud enough for someone in the next street to pay attention.
“Well,” Milo huffed. “That’s another plan gone to shit.”
“Don’t sweat it, Milo,” Tania said, finishing the last of her crew off with a punch that blew his head apart. “They’re all just a bunch of brush apes and klucks. Ain’t nothing here to get all worked up about.”
“They’re easy,” Selma agreed.
“No, sister,” Tania said easily. “You’re easy. They’re simple.”
“I’m only easy when Milo’s hard,” Selma countered.
Tania’s mouth dropped open.
Even Milo blinked at her.
Selma looked from Tania to Milo, then back. “What?”
“I can’t believe you just said that,” Tania said. “It ain’t like you.”
“Well, Cerena said I needed to be more confident.” Selma shot Milo a coy look and pressed a finger to her pursed lips while fluttering her eyelashes at him. “Is it working, Milo?”
Times like this confused him.
Which is why he was happy when a heavy-looking pirate lumbered through a shack. It smashed its way through, tossing the wreckage aside while heaving angrily as it took them all in.
“Yarr! Which one of ya landlubbers wants ter die first?”
Tania pointed at Selma. “She does.”
“Eep!”