Origin: A Total Bore

            Max was the first to round the corner and spot the boarded up mine-shaft. Grabbing a nearby pick-axe he began prying the old boards aside. Next came Flint, starring around the grand mountain and taking in the view.

            When Elsie rounded the corner, she didn’t bother taking in either Max or Flint, but just walked up to a lantern and began fiddling with it. Two other of their workers were taking up the rear, and aided in the tearing down of the boards.

            “So,” stated Elsie, finding two lanterns and lighting them, “Where about did you say you were from, Lieutenant.”

            “Don’t believe I did,” said Flint, coldly.

            “I was aware,” replied Elsie, smiling, “Then where did you get back from?”

            “Orient,” answered Flint after a pause, “India. Interesting place.”

            “The world change while you were gone?”

            “Ma’am, the world never changes,” said Flint, turning to stare her down, “And I never left it, I assure you.”

            “Come now, I’m sure the Lieutenant has his reasons,” chuckled Max, throwing aside the last of the wood and resting the pick on his shoulder, “Grab a lantern or a pick. We don’t know what it is like in there.”

            “I’ll keep my guns, thanks,” said Flint, smiling.

            Max picked up a pick and tossed it at Flint, who caught it, “If we try anything, Lieutenant Flint, you can bash our skulls in with that. Come, now. Let’s talk business.”

            Into the mine shaft they went, the five of them. Flint made sure to eye the two workers, but they didn’t seem all that threatening. Elsie, however, was purposefully dodgy and always trying to play him the fool. She put him on edge, and he didn’t like that.

            “So, do tell me,” said Flint, “Elsie Donnahough and Maximus Leadersmith. How interesting that two characters pay a man five-hundred dollars just to follow them into the center of the earth.”

            “We’re taking you to show you the mission,” she said, “Many ears are watching these parts.”

            “So I’ve heard,” spat Flint, “Tell me about these prisoners. Well, why not start with their jailer.”

            “Admiral Haggard? Heartless bastard, round these parts,” stumbled Max, “Was about a year or two back. Republic of Texas gave him full reign over the Oregon Territory right up through the Canadian lands to a place called ‘Alaska’.”

            “There, we know three things,” continued Elsie, “One: That he went crazy. He succeeded from the republic and, there for, the United States and got Russian deserters and local men to build up an army of his own. Two: He somehow came into vast riches. We do not know, or care, how he did, but he has shut off most of his land to visitors and merchants and if anyone is found within his borders who has not been invited… boom.”

            “And, Three,” said Max, “Something happened and he is blaming the Republic of California, now just another State in the United States. He’s declared war on California, and has begun a forceful expansion southward. The United States has warned him to stay back, and his statement was something along the line of harboring criminals.”

            “Great… tensions are high… aren’t they all these days?” said Flint, “How do the prisoners come in?”

            “Fort Border was attacked and over-run about a month ago, and there he has taken up shop,” said Max, “And his forces lashed out maybe a week ago, arresting anyone who they deem to be a threat.”

            “Are those prisoners a threat?”

            “In his eyes, Mister Flint,” said Elsie, “They are members of our order. Architects, writers, postmen… anyone who has schooling or can bring word of his expansion elsewhere.”

            “Uh-huh… nobody too attached to the land.”

            They had walked quite a way by this point. The cavern was beginning to open up.

            “They mined and mined… years back,” said Max, “Looking for Gold. Silver and Iron… that’s all they found. But they took what they could get.”

            “Looks big,” stated Flint, “So, why the mine shaft?”

            “You will see,” said Elsie, almost laughing, “What’s the matter, Lieutenant? Scared to go any deeper?”

            “Just would like not to get shot,” said Flint, “I have been in similar situations. You do outnumber me four to one.”

            “Nonsense, how else will we get our people back!” said Max, laughing.

            “So, they are held in a fort… this man’s base of operations… where his multi-cultured Army is. They are in a prison… guarded,” said Flint, “So you need the Scorpios to… shoot down some airships, barrage the base and provide cover for a real jailbreak? Or…”

            “Actually… you are the jailbreak,” said Elsie, “Your landship has a lot of things that we need, and you’re beginning to gain a reputation, sir. The Scorpios is a landship to be remembered.”

            “That’s great, and I bet we can give them hell,” stated Flint, “However, you are putting way too much faith in me. You need to stop and think. I can’t expect my crew to take on an army.”

            “How much faith do you have in your ship?” asked Max.

            “Normally, unbreakable, but Maximus…”

            “PLEASE, Lieutenant,” said Max, “Do tell me, what is the death of an Airship? How does one truly destroy it?”

            “When it can no longer fly,” answered Flint.

            “Ok, examples.”

            “Gas leak, balloon failure, Scorpios’ shelling, destruction, explosion…”

            “No, no, and no, Lieutenant,” chuckled Max, “The true death of one.”

            “All those impede flight,” answered Flint, “An airship is as good as dead.”

            “But it isn’t… until what?”

            “It crashes.”

            “HOW? Flint? You are so close.”

            “Max, I am not up for games.”

            “Oh, MISTER Flint,” Elsie laughed, “It’s the GROUND. He’s trying to get out the ground. Rock. Dirt. Earth. The Anti-Element of Air in many cultures, religions, and worlds. The long… unforgiving… hard… ground.”

            Elsie had stepped incredibly close to Flint to nail in these last few words.

            “It’s Lieutenant, Miss Donnahough,” said Flint, “So, what’s your point?”

            “Landships, yours especially, need to learn how to use this key fact against them,” said Max, smiling, “In the Aquatic Navy, many seaships have take to using the water against their airship aggressors, and sink beneath it as a shield, as a cloak, and as a weapon.”

            “Submarines, yes,” said Flint, “Had the pleasure of being aboard one or two. Not all seaships have taken beneath the waves however.”

            “All the ones that cannot afford the guns or the connections to stay above the waves has,” said Max, “Or the ones who can’t afford the safety.”

            “What are you suggesting?” asked Flint, stopping dead in his tracks,” Wait a minute… are you saying we turn the Scorpios into some sort of… Submarine? What? Are we going to use these tunnels to weave it underneath the Fort like a rat or a groundhog?”

            “In a way,” said Max, “Look, right around this next bend… we will show you.”

            Max hurriedly walked ahead and caused Flint and Elsie to pick up their pace as well. After rounding the bend, Flint and one of the other guys removed some debris from a cave in and opened a large opening. Max and Elsie were eager to get in, and their lanterns were turned up to full-blast. Flint and the two workers were next, and they gazed around the chamber they had opened.

            It was a very large chamber, one of the largest Flint could have ever deemed possible. They stood on a platform that jutted out from the side, but a cliff brought the cavern down several stories before the bottom. Flint could barely see the floor in the gloom. The light of the lanterns stretched far into the cavern, before the beams were eaten up by more darkness. Flint was surprised at the scale of the room.

            “This way, Lieutenant,” giggled Max, quickly walking towards some old scaffolding, “And light as many lanterns as you can along the way. As much light as we can have the better!”

            Along the way they went, making their way deeper into the chamber. Along the way they lit whatever they could for light. Lanterns, torches, even leftover candles; nothing escaped Elsie of Max’s gaze along the way. Soon, the room was looking rather dim, and a trail along the path, down scaffolding, and along another stone path shined brightly into the darkness. At one point, one of the workers actually found an old electrical floodlight used by serious mining crews at that time. After starting the generator, several floodlights around the giant cavern burst on, flooding it with light.

            Max stated they should still light as much as they could due to the uncertainty of the generator’s power or fuel amount, so they continued on. Flint now saw that this cavern was nearly entirely man-made. The rock had been chiseled and mined for any precious ore that could be found. The cavern had strange mounds and room carved out of it for the retrieval or the ore, stopping when only rock was yielded. The cavern gave way to a large shaft, or what used to be several close shafts, that cleared a path upwards at an angle for what seemed to go on forever. Similar shafts seemed to continue on at the other end of the cavern, heading downward at the same angle, but Flint could see that at least a few of the shafts ended after only a few paces downward.

            Besides leftover equipment and carts, Flint could see the main objects in the room. A pair of large drills sat off their tracks on the ground. They were bigger then anything he had ever seen. The drills themselves were quite long, with the spiral blade curling up the drills length. They were attached to a machine meant to drive on the dirt, pushing the drills forward, as well as be pushed by a team of men. The large engines were steam powered, their boilers sitting beside them on carts. They were big enough for three large men to stand on each other’s shoulders and walk comfortable down its path. In fact, these bores could probably clear a path for an army through the ground. Steam walkers and large armored trains could follow just behind this machine through a mountain or through a wall.

            Then Flint smiled.

            “My God… what are these,” he asked, walking up to touch the large drill.

            “What you think they are,” said Max, “My daddy used to work for the old mining company. Their history is full of wonder and excitement. Nobody remembers where they really came from, but legend had it back in the old days the ancient race of Dwarven miners worked day and night to design these drills. However, the power needed for them to run didn’t exist. They say it was the mixture of Dwarf, Elf, and Gnome technologies that gave us our Steam powered visionaries, you know.”

            “Child’s talk,” said Flint, “Do not believe it.”

            “Well, either way, the legend continues. They built the drills out of the hardest stone, the strongest steel, and the greatest design that ever did happen. It was decades until they were found, they say, and sold to the humans. They were used in Europe to revolutionize mining. Now, legend turns to fact. Over the years these massive drills have been upgraded. From men pushing and turning it themselves to water power to other such technologies. It was bought out by the Germans many years ago, and brought into the new age. They outfitted the engines with Steam power, the first of their kind, and sold them as industrial machines.”

            “It’s amazing the Earth isn’t torn apart by now,” said Elsie, “Drills like these went all over to the wealthiest bidders and helped shape the world as we know it.”

            “I’m sure you’ve seen many like it,” said Max, continuing, “The company bought out many of them when they first started, and mined in Africa and India. However, they moved to the States when the American territories started expanding. A Mixture of mining operations as well as insuring the transportation business paid them for any and all needs kept them busy for many, many years.”

            “But they closed down about… three years back,” said Flint, smiling, “I heard the news. Airships make trains and automobiles last years fling, huh?”

            “But these Drills are some of the originals,” said Max.

            “If we could get these big old things to work for us, then they could dig through anything… anywhere,” said Elsie, pointing at Flint, “Even right underneath the fort… and right through their walls and defenses into the cell itself!”

            “I see,” said Flint, “Jailbreak right through the jail. Pop up, screw with their minds, get the Prisoners, then back through the ground where their air superiority will be useless.”

            “They won’t know what hit them,” said Elsie, “We can disorient them and claim our people!”

            “Why the Scorpios?” said Flint, not wanting to put two and two together on his own.

            “If we can find a way to attach a drill to your Landship, we can use it to drill your landship underneath like a land submarine,” smiled Max.

            “We cannot be accurate enough to get into each cell unnoticed to have them escape,” said Elsie, stroking a lever on one of the drills, “Or even accurate enough inside the Prison. If we go anywhere else, we are still susceptible to Airship and troop fire.”

            “And we can’t expect these prisoners and possibly wounded to run down miles of tunnels on their own without getting caught by troops following us.”

            “Perfect,” said Flint, almost laughing, “So, we slap one of these on the ship, we dig out way under, I pop up like a demon from hell and begin firing and causing hell from INSIDE the base. You guys get yours poor souls onboard just in time for stuff to get too hot for our taste then suddenly… BOOM, we are back underground and digging away.”

            “You think it could work?”

            Flint thought a moment, but his heart began to pick up pace and his head was racing. He began to pace, looking at the one drill, then the other. After a second he began to murmur before his pacing picked up pace.

            “Not one,” said Flint, pointing at the drills, “They are two small, the Scorpios couldn’t fit. We’d need two. Two will also pick up digging pace. We would need to be fast. It we are too slow we will just alert them. We’d have to travel just as fast as a Submarine would in water for it to work in our advantage.”

            “They say these drills are so well aligned you cannot even fill the rumble of the earth beneath you while they dig,” smiled Max.

            “Bull-spit, says I,” said Flint, “However, let’s pray that is sort of true. However, with enough power they can feel an earthquake for all I care. We just need to hit them like an underground lightning bolt.”

            “You’d need some serious power,” Elsie said, crossing her arms.

            “Easy,” said Flint, “However, I’d need to put them on their own… things… to have more control.”

            “So, you’ll do it?” said Max.

            “What?” said Flint, pulled from thought, “Oh… well… I am interested in these drills… and how to make them work. Look, Maximus and Miss Donnahough, I can’t promise anything. You are still talking about the Scorpios going after a small military fleet on its own, maybe even more. On top of that, you are suggesting we attack a fort. In fact, you are suggesting we not only do these, but we start off right in the middle of the mess without promise of proper escape. We are… screwed if anything were to happen!”

            “So?” asked Elsie, smiling.

            Flint sighed, “What I am promising is I will immediately start designing a way to hook these up. I’ll have to call in some favors and get into debt, but I think this could work. But I will not do ANYTHING until this is tested and we see how the Scorpios handles this.”

            “Oh, so you accept to work for us, Mister Flint?”

            “Look, Miss Donnahough,” stated Flint, being more forward then he had yet, “If we are going to be working together you are going to have to address me correctly or not at all. It’s Lieutenant, whether you like it, believe it, or neither. Lieutenant Flint. I will even accept Flint. If you can’t do either… then… you call me Nathaniel, Nathan, or Nate.”

            Elsie seemed to laugh with happiness in an awkward show of glee, and she stepped forward, eyeing Flint, “And you… can call me Elsie.”

            Flint smiled, giving her a wink, “Alright then. Elsie it is. So, gentlemen… let’s get to work before these lights go out!”