Things suddenly clicked for Tinker. The oni were the smugglers; the high-tech goods were for building the gate. Chiyo's cousin must have been the pinned driver who had been shot by the other oni, rather than let him fall into EIA hands and be questioned. Tinker looked sharply at the female; if someone had killed Oilcan, she would—she would… She couldn't finish the thought, the possibilities of Oilcan being caught and hurt in all this was all too real for idle speculation.
"So." Tinker distracted herself with details. "We're missing materials for the gate?"
"No. Lord Tomtom is quite methodical. We have a surplus of everything."
The door opened and the guard came back, carrying a saijin flower.
"What's that for?" Tinker scrambled backward, away from the guard.
"It's time for you to sleep." Riki took another drag on his cigarette, and breathed the smoke out his long sharp nose.
"I don't need that. I'll sleep without it."
"We have to be sure. Please, just take it nicely. With what I'm buzzing on for the pain—" he lifted his foot that she had broken " — I don't trust myself not to hurt you."
Sullenly, she held her hand for the flower, and with everyone watching closely, breathed deeply of its false comfort.
Tinker drifted out of the white fog of drugged slumber, opening her eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling. Where was she? Sleep still clung to her with pulled taffy strength, making it hard to think. She dragged her hand free of the blankets to rub at her eyes, trying to force herself awake. As she moved, she felt the spider again, picking its way carefully across her forehead. She smeared her hand up, over her brow, and combed her fingers on through her hair, finding nothing. What the hell?
The ceiling had changed.
She frowned at the expanse of white, now recognizable as the one above her futon on Onihida. Wait, the ceiling hadn't changed—or had it? Both ceilings had been featureless white; she couldn't say how one was strange and the other familiar. And why would anyone swap ceilings? That didn't make sense. Maybe it had been a trick of lighting. She sat up, knowing that something was wrong, but still not sure what.
Chiyo sat in her corner wearing a fresh kimono and a smug smile.
Tinker fumbled her way into the clothes Riki had brought her the night before, trying to think past the fog banks rolling through her mind. The Levi jeans distracted her from the ceiling mystery. The blue jeans were men's thirty-by-thirty carpenters, which she usually wore, but brand-new. She puzzled over them a moment—wondering how they had gotten the correct size and type—before realizing that Riki probably had just checked the dresser in her workshop. Oilcan might have noticed missing clothes, so the oni bought her a new wardrobe. The oni's thoroughness depressed her.
Riki arrived as she was putting on her boots. Annoyingly, his bruises had faded during the night to almost nothing.
"It wasn't an elf," Tinker said to him.
"What?"
"You said it was an elf that beat you up at the Faire the night Windwolf changed me. It couldn't have been—you would have been healed by the time I got back three days later."
"Tomtom had me beaten," Riki admitted. "He didn't think you were coming back. I convinced him that you'd come back eventually for your cousin's sake, so he let me off lightly."
Tinker grunted at the oni's idea of "lightly." "I want something to eat, and then we can talk about this gate you want me to build."
At least they had good food: smoked trout, eggs poached in heavily salted water, and a sweet, orange-yellow, soft fruit peeled and sliced, all dumped on top of a huge bowl of nutty-flavored, dark brown rice. The only thing she didn't like were oddly pickled vegetables. Chiyo and Riki ate them in a resigned manner.
Riki explained that they were traditional staples from Lord Tomtom's region; apparently in the warmer climates, pickling was the easiest way to preserve food. "And the cook is a seven-foot-tall shankpa whose family died in a famine. He takes wasted food personally."
Shankpa? Tinker refused to ask on the grounds that at some point ignorance started to sound like idiocy. She'd find out later.
"You don't send plates back with food on them." Chiyo tipped her bowl to show it was empty.
"I see." Tinker picked up her pickles and dumped them into Chiyo's bowl.
Chiyo looked laughably stunned for a moment, and then her lip curled back into a snarl. The look vanished away with one murmured word from Riki.
"What's the magic word?" Tinker asked him as they walked the maze of identical stone hallways.
"Which one?"
She attempted to reproduce the word; apparently she didn't come close because Riki puzzled a moment.
"Ah," he said. "That's the act of being deboned."
At the workshop, she found a distance measurer and a piece of chalk. She walked around the vast room, pointing the instrument at the distant walls.
"What are you doing?" Riki perched on a workbench. He'd sent Chiyo off on some errand, much to everyone's relief.
"I'm measuring the room to find its exact size so we can model it on the computer." Tinker tapped the button, called the measurement to Sparks, marked the floor and moved down roughly a foot. "If we're building the gate in this room, then we need to know the maximum size it can be." She paused. "You do want it built in here, don't you?"
"Yes."
"I thought so, judging by your notes and what you told Russell."
"You found that?"
"Yes."
Riki winced but said nothing.
"The gate in orbit is just over twenty-six hundred feet in diameter, basically half a mile." She finished the width measurement and started on length. "The ceiling is going to be the prime determiner. Depending on the slope of the ceiling and the various support beams, it's going to be somewhere between twenty and thirty feet in diameter."
"Russell maintained that it couldn't be scaled down."
"It was only designed that size to allow for spaceships to pass through it. Didn't you show him my father's notes?"
"There's nothing on how Dufae decided on its size."
Gods save her from idiots. "What do you think all the technical specs on the space shuttle were about? He was trying to plot out the minimum size of a colony ship. At minimum, a colony would need something that could safely land people on a planet. He thought that anything going out should be able to have a shuttle riding piggyback on it and still fit through the gate."
"Doh!" Riki said, sounding very human.
Scaling it down presented a host of problems. With the large surface to play with, her father hadn't bothered to economize his design, and the Chinese apparently hadn't dared to deviate from the stolen plans. She'd have to use every trick she knew to compact the circuits. "Where is the ceramic coming from? You said we have surplus of everything."
"We've been stockpiling ceramic tiles for nearly fifteen years. They decided early on, though, that the shield material wasn't needed."
"Yeah, that's just to protect the gate from micrometeor impacts and solar wind." Tinker finished up her measurements by taking the ceiling readings at every grid point that she had chalked on the floor. "Sparks, render that for me."
"Okay, Boss."
While she waited she considered the scale ratio. The easiest might be a simple one to a hundred ratio: 2640 feet shrinking to 26.4.
"Done, Boss." The AI projected it onto the screen.
She snapped out a circle to represent the scaled down gate and moved it around the workshop. Gods, manufacturing the damn framework was going to be a bitch. The nonconductive material used in space wouldn't stand up to gravity. While steel could take the stress load, the amount of metal needed to make the gate would play havoc with the system.