The Guild Conspiracy by Brooke Johnson Read Free Book Online Page A

tapped the edge of the page with her finger, thinking. “No, a spring launch would have worked better, or a pneumatic device.”
    â€œThis is why I leave the mechanical genius to you,” he said with a laugh, rubbing his hand over the edge of his jaw. “There’s a reason I’m in aviation.”
    â€œToo bad you can’t build a flying mech.”
    â€œNot enough air clearance in the recreation hall.”
    Petra laughed and turned back to Rupert’s notes. The rest of the mech’s systems were mostly sound, with a few mistakes buried here and there. Nothing to cause the machine to malfunction outright, but enough to make it operate at suboptimal efficiency. She paused. That gave her an idea. A possible way to delay Julian’s war. But the war machine would have to wait.
    She looked over the designs more closely. With a few adjustments to the engine chambers and connecting gear trains, rerouting many of the linkage paths to provide optimal power distribution, she could easily bring it to full capacity. Calligaris’s combustion-­enginery lecture wasn’t a total waste, after all.
    She marked a few pages of draft notes for further study and then glanced up from the smudged sketches. “Did you bring the tools I asked for?”
    Rupert nodded, dropping his bag on the table with a clatter of metal. Riffling through the main compartment, he dragged out a collection of welding supplies—­a portable blowlamp, multiple spanners, two kinds of pliers, a pair of bolt cutters, several clamps, and a manual hand drill.
    Petra brushed her fingers across the smooth handle of an adjustable spanner and picked it up, the solid metal weight familiar to her hand. It was like coming back to a place she had almost forgotten, reminding her of days spent turning bolts and fitting linkages in a brightly lit office, Emmerich at her side and not a care in the world beyond the grease under her nails and the touch of metal beneath her fingers. She had missed it.
    â€œLet’s get started.”
    They spent the next ­couple of hours deconstructing what was left of Rupert’s mech, inspecting each piece of the machine for damage before sorting the parts into what could be reused and what couldn’t. Petra kept a detailed inventory, recording the measurements and dimensions of each piece before moving on to what was in the crates. When they had finished with that, she surveyed the list of parts, flipping through Rupert’s notes as she considered possible designs for the repaired mech. After watching the mech battle with Selby, she knew she needed a machine that was both fast and destructive, but also hardy enough to withstand a brutal amount of damage.
    There were several options for construction depending on how she wanted to focus her mech’s functions—­speed over hardiness, brute strength instead of agility, or resilience in sacrifice of an aggressive offense. Ideally, the machine would accomplish all of those things, but with a limited number of parts and the short amount of time before the first fight, she had to pick her battles.
    Of course, there was nothing in the rules that said she couldn’t alter her machine between fights. That ought to keep the other engineers on their toes.
    She drummed her fingers against her knee, chewing her lip as she considered the baseline construction of the new mech. Knowing Selby, he would make sure to pit her against the most difficult opponent first, get her out of the tournament as quickly as possible. Likely someone with a strong offense, a mech heavy on weapons, quick and dangerous.
    She glanced at Rupert. “You said anything goes once we’re in the ring, right? Everything but projectiles.”
    He nodded. “That’s right.”
    â€œWhat have you seen so far?” she asked. “I know you said Darrow had a supercharged blowlamp, but what else am I up against?”
    Rupert seemed to think about it for