Chapter Fifty - Post-Combat

I almost collapsed on arriving at Caroline’s yard. All the exhaustion, the little bit of blood loss from a few cuts that I’d been ignoring, all the adrenaline I’d spent. It all hit at once.

The sun didn’t help, pounding down from above, only occasionally shaded by some passing smoke plumes from Daggerwren burning.

“We should get you cleaned up,” Clin said.

I straightened my back and brushed by him . The elf was fine, barely even dirtied up by all the fighting and shooting.

I shook my head and kept heading towards Caroline’s garage. The woman in question was following behind, and Clin rushed over to the doors, pushing them open so that Sally could stomp her way in. The mech walked right up to the garage, then stopped.

The next step would be shutting down, which was never pleasant when someone was new to piloting.

I moved over to the mech’s front and knocked on the hard steel. “Open up the front first,” I said. “Before you disconnect.”

Didn’t hear a reply, if there was one, but soon enough the front of the mech hissed and opened up with barely any noise. Good maintenance that .

Caroline looked like crap. Her shirt was stuck to her by sweat and a bit of blood. Two needles, I noticed, one in each collar, and both had bled out down front. From the look of it she’d tried to pat the wound down too.

Her hair was stuck to her in wet tangles, and her eyes were a bit wild. Her breathing wasn’t any better. White knuckles were gripped around a surprisingly simple set of sticks, only a dozen controls on each.

“Hey,” I said, soft and low, like I was talking to a stray cat instead of an old friend. I put a foot on the edge and climbed up to be next to Caroline. “Hey, you’re alright,” I said.

Caroline nodded. “I’m okay,” she said.

That was a flat lie, but maybe not a deliberate one. “Yeah, you did really great out there. You and Sally here. She’s a tough little mech.”

“Y-yeah.”

“You ready to disconnect?” I asked. I wiggled out of my coat, wincing as moving my shoulder pulled on some sore muscles. I tossed my jacket out, letting it flop to the ground with a heavy thump. Clin might have been right about me needing a break, but that could wait for after I had Caroline settled down. She looked half-way shell-shocked, and I knew it was about to get worse.

Caroline swallowed, and then she started flicking things off. She was going through each and every one, purging sub-systems and pausing for a while between some of them. It was the long, slow, and proper way to shut down a mech. Never met a pilot that bothered, but Caroline had always insisted that it was how things ought to be done, and she wasn’t a hypocrite.

“Okay,” she said. The mech was nearly shut down. Nearly.

“Alright, you’ll want to do this with your lungs full. Close your eyes first, and then try not to move. Especially your head, that just makes it worse.”

Caroline licked her lips. “Right.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, then flicked a few last switches. The almost imperceptible hum from the mecha stopped. Caroline didn’t move for a moment, then her eyes went wide and she flopped forward.

“Damn it,” I muttered as I caught her. I tugged the needles out of her with two quick flicks while holding her in place. She shuddered, and I heard her breathing in and out, each breath ragged . “Oh, please no,” I said.

Contrary to my wishes, Caroline vomited all over me.

“Okay, okay,” I said as she started to sob. I turned my head away and held her hair back. The good news was she didn’t get any on herself. That’s where the good news ended.

It took a minute for her to stop shivering, and for everything to return to normal with her. Then I helped her down.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Get some water in you. And maybe take a seat while Clin makes us some lunch.”

The elf in question was standing nearby, looking particularly useless. “You want me to cook?”

“No, but I’m not going to, and Caroline’s in no state to cook, so by process of elimination, that leaves us with whatever sorry excuse for a lunch you can pull together.”

He nodded, not even arguing the point. “I’ll warm up some water too.”

I had a change of clothes in Rusty, which would do for a bit, but scrubbing away at all my cuts and bruises wouldn’t be bad either. I could use some wound-licking time.

“Yeah,” I said, even if he was nearly gone already.

“I... should get to work,” Caroline said. “Rusty needs the help, and I think... Sally took some nasty little hits too.”

“She’s fine,” I said. “A bit of sanding, some basic maintenance, and a fresh coat of paint, and she’ll be as good as new.”

Caroline tried on a smile, then sighed. “I’m going to wash off my mouth. I’m sorry for--” she gestured to my shirt.

“It happens.” I patted her on the back. “Especially when you’re cutting off for the first time.”

She nodded, and I walked with her back into her home. Clin was already at the stove, heating things up over core-powered elements. Caroline trudged off to the washroom, and exited some ten minutes later.

I wish I could have spent that time being useful or, barring that, relaxing, but it felt like stopping would be a mistake, and I knew to listen to myself when I felt that way.

Clin helped me carry a tub of hot water to the washroom, and once he left—with a few threats about not missing this time if he interrupted my bath again—I undressed, then stared at myself in the dirty mirror Caroline had stuck over her sink.

The skin over my ribs and breasts was purple and blue. I winced as I pressed it in. The bruise was motley yellow on the side. It would get worse before it got better.

The few cuts I had weren’t too bad. Little things, mostly scrapes from throwing down. My chin and jaw had a nice colour to them. That was going to be hard to hide.

My right arm had a few ugly marks on it too, and I was gaining a few welts already.

I let my shoulders slump, then pushed myself past the pain and started washing off.

Getting dressed afterwards was a chore and a half, but I managed.

I found Clin setting the table. “I’ll get Caroline,” he said.

I nodded and took a seat and started eating while it was still hot.

Caroline genuinely looked better when she returned with Clin. Not by much, but better. Figured she was the sort to drown things out in work.

“Food’s good,” I complimented Clin.

“Thank you,” he replied. “Made with love, and the contents of three unmarked cans.”

I snorted. “The best meat always comes from an unmarked can.”

“Let’s agree to disagree,” he said.

Caroline tittered a bit and took a few bites. Soon, she dropped her spoon and just stared at her bowl. “I... that was hard.”

I paused, then reached out to grab her hand, giving it a squeeze. “Yeah,” I said.

“I don’t think you know,” Caroline said. “You’re not... you’re harder.”

I clenched my jaw. “Wasn’t always,” I admitted. “We’re all soft until we don’t have a choice otherwise. Nothing wrong with it, as far as I figure . Besides, we did good. You did good.”

Caroline looked up, staring at me for a moment. “Thanks.”

“You did,” I repeated. “You kept the heat off me and Clin here. We saved those cores.”

“Just cores,” she said.

“Just the town. Just a dozen buildings, and gods know how many homes and families.”

“Right,” Caroline said.

I patted her hand and got back to eating. It wasn’t often I wished I was more like my mother. She had a knack for comforting people. At least, people not  like me.

We finished up, and Clin picked up after us. Caroline went off to bed early, a rarity for her.

When Clin returned he set a mug before me. “Tea,” he said.

“Dirty water.”

“It’s anti-inflammatory. It’ll help with the bruising.”

I blinked at him, then nodded. “Thanks.”

“No problem.” He sat across from me. “What now?”

“A few days of quiet, I hope,” I said. “I know I’m meant to be protecting you, but I’m in no shape for it. Two days and I’ll be better.”

“I don’t recall humans healing that quickly.”

I grinned. “Alright, then two days and I’ll just grit my teeth and bear it then.”

Clin actually smiled. A small, soft smile, but one that took me by surprise. It only lasted a moment, but it was there. “You’re a strange woman, Charlie.”

“You’re a strange elf,” I shot back.

“I am,” he agreed before standing up. “Do you need help with anything? Otherwise I’ll just wash up.”

“Can you keep guard for a bit?”

“I’ll... try to stay up until Caroline wakes up. I doubt she’ll sleep all night.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks Clin.”

“You’re welcome.”

***

Chapter Fifty-One - Days Off

It took three days.

Maybe I was getting old--and wasn’t that a terrifying thought--but my body wasn’t quite as spry as it had once been.

So, three days, and I was still black and blue all over, the bruises I had grew into large blotches while my little cuts scabbed over. Moving was painful. Breathing was painful.

But I’d had worse.

“You look... distressed,” Clin said.

I sighed and adjusted my hat. “Just becoming contemplative in my old age,” I said.

“Old age? How old are you?”

We were outside, hiding in the shade provided by the garage while Caroline did some last minute things on Rusty. The mecha was in tip-top shape, certainly better than when I’d brought him in. Sally was looking a little better too. Caroline had trusted Clin enough to let him do maintenance on her. I suspect she was still slightly wary of the little warmech. Once bitten and all.

“I’m twenty-eight,” I said.

Clin blinked, for a moment looking entirely dumbfounded. “Oh, right. That’s... is that really old? You don’t seem old.”

“Thanks, I think,” I said. “And, no, twenty-eight isn’t that old. Certainly around or past your prime though.”

“Really?” Clin asked.

“How old are you?” I asked, a bit suspicious.

Clin shifted minutely, slight discomfort in his motions. “I’m sixty-three.”

I worked my jaw. “Huh,” I said. Made sense, elves lived longer. “You are an adult, right? Like, an adult elf?”

“What? Yes, of course I am. Adulthood starts around fifty,” he said.

“Then what in the hells does that make me?” I asked.

“A human? It’s hardly fair to compare races by age with a one-to-one ratio. Were you a twenty-eight year old elf you’d be mid-puberty. Perhaps preparing to go into higher education.”

I sniffed. “You start treating me like a kid and we’re going to have trouble.”

“I’d never,” he said, and there was no sarcasm there. He just looked at me right in the eye, plain and open. “I know perfectly well that you’re a woman.”

“That’s... that’s right,” I said.

I stomped off to see Caroline. One of my wounds was pulling at my gut, and I needed a walk.

The mechanic was sitting on the edge of Rusty’s cabin, a cloth in one hand and some greasy tool I didn’t recognize in the other. “How’s it going?” I asked.

Caroline looked up, an easy grin on. She tapped Rusty’s side with her tool, a few dull clunks sounding out across the garage. “All prettied up. Or well, nearly.”

I stared up at Rusty, my old friend. He looked cleaner than he had in a long while. Fresh paint, a few new parts here and there. Not too much of a difference overall, but there was something that showed when a machine was well cared for. Still a few dings and dents, but there was only so much that even someone like Caroline could do in just a few days.

“He’s looking good.”

“Handsomer than ever,” Caroline said. She hopped down, landed with a bounce, and spun to face Rusty with a big grin. “You know, if Rusty is ever interested in dating, there’s always Sally out there. I worry, you know.”

“Uh,” I said.

She jabbed an elbow into a sore rib. “Kidding. I’m insane, not delusional.”

I chuckled. “What do I owe you?” I asked.

She shook her head, then gestured across her yard. The goblin mech we’d taken down was sitting there, still as ugly as ever. A few broken husks were lying next to it, fresh bodies from the fight against the goblins.

The sheriff and his goons had been busy picking up and cleaning the town. When more militia folk came in with the Sandpiercer, they were quickly conscripted into working too.

Nearly everyone in town was drafted. Finding the last goblins hiding away, carrying off the bodies and clearing roads.

Surprisingly, the sheriff didn’t seem keen on asking me anything.

“You sure?” I asked. “I’ve got some coin.”

“I’m fine,” Caroline said. “I don’t think I’ve ever had this much work lined up at one time. Might have to start some sort of triage too. Pick out the mecha who can be saved faster. Or maybe I can just charge more.”

“Not a terrible idea,” I said. “You never did charge enough.”

“Aren’t you a repeat customer? It’s not exactly clever of you to tell me that, is it?”

I chuckled. “I’m going to miss you a bit when we hit the road.”

“I won’t miss you,” Caroline said. It sounded like a lie. “None of my other customers force me to sleep at reasonable hours or bathe.”

I shook my head. “Keep talking like that, and I’ll start looking for a man to hitch you to... maybe a wife.”

“Unless she weighs twenty tonnes and can mow down a building with ease, I’m not interested.”

We hugged. Not too hard, on account of the shape I was in, but enough to tell her that I would miss her. “You keep safe, hear?” I asked. “Maybe hire some guards for this place. You’ve got the loot to pay for it, and it wouldn’t do to have no one around to keep you from being bullied.”

“I’ll see,” Caroline said. “Timothy’s pilot was a nice looking guy, and I bet he’ll be around soon for repairs. I’ll ask if he minds having some of his guys hang out. I could use some help too.”

“Good,” I said. “Keep an ear on the ground too. You don’t want to be caught flat-footed the next time some goblins decide to invade.”

“I think we’ll be a bit more ready next time. At least, I hope.”

“Might not be goblins next time,” I warned.

She nodded. Figured she got it. Caroline was a smart woman.

I grabbed onto Rusty and clambered aboard. All our things were packed away; we only had to get going. Caroline moved around, shoving things out of the way while I turned Rusty on. Every gauge twitched, then moved smoothly into place. No more jittering.

Fuel was full up too. I’d  spent  a day crushing cores. Nothing better to do while nearly bedridden. Meant we had plenty of magic in the tank.

Rusty walked forwards with more ease than I was used to. It had also been a few days since I’d piloted him. It had been a long time since I’d taken that long of a break from the pilot’s seat.

“You getting in?” I asked Clin as I stopped just outside the garage.

“I’m coming,” Clin said. He stepped in, his shotgun in one hand until he tucked it away in one of the bigger compartments. “Oh. There’s a chair now.”

I blinked, then half turned to stare back. There was, in fact, a small bench at the back. A tiny thing, with a couple of heavy springs holding it in place. It wouldn’t be in the way, at least. “Huh,” I said.

Clin sat down, then bounced up and down. His lips actually twitched into a smile for just a moment.

Figures, I couldn’t get the man to smile, but make his arse comfortable for a few moments and he was all grins. I shook my head.

Caroline being Caroline, I figured. I settled in after we closed the cabin up, then I brought the control interface down.

Combat Core - RUSTY - Active

... Surface Controls... Optimal

... Cooling... Optimal

... Fuel Levels... Optimal

... Weapons... Loaded

... Mana Circulation ... Optimal

DAMAGE CHECK

...

NONE

WEAPON CHECK

...

Lever-Action, Emberbar Rifle - Functional

Model 1634 Revolving Gun - Functional

Pilot Check

...

Pilot Not Responding...

I grinned. A perfect score. She even fixed that false report with the left arm. I put my hat in its spot, then made sure the crown around my head was snug. The needle pricked in, and I barely felt it, not against all the other aches and pains.

I became Rusty.

It felt a whole lot better to be Rusty than it did to be Charlie. I even let out a chuckle.

“Everything alright?”

“Everything’s perfect,” I said. Rusty felt like a new mech, but he was still familiar. I shifted his arms around, then moved his hips from side to side in a little wiggle that was surprisingly difficult to do in a mech. “Caroline does damned good work,” I said.

“Where are we heading to now?” Clin asked.

I started walking towards the gate where Caroline was waiting and waving. I shot her a quick salute as we moved by.

“We keep heading east. Away from your gnome pals. Maybe they’ll figure you’re dead?”

“They won’t stop until they have my body,” Clin said.

“Hmm. Well, let’s not give it to them. I think I have one idea that might get us away faster.”

I heard his little bench squeak. “What’s that?”

“We’re going to catch ourselves a train.”

***

Chapter Fifty-Two - The Snowpiercer

Daggerwren was recuperating. Not fast, but it was being fixed. Folk were out and about, some pushing wheelbarrows filled with broken stone, others on the backs of utility mechs with pallets of bricks before them.

I saw people on rooftops and others working on setting new glass into window frames.

So the place was cleaning itself up. Not that it would do a lot of good if they were hit again, or if the gnomes decided to take matters into their own hands.

I had an inkling that the sheriff and his people would have a lot more freedom to get a good guard up. Maybe fix those guns on the walls and spend some time actually training someone to use them.

If Daggerwren was given a bit of time, it might well be able to defend itself. At least a little.

The town wasn’t my concern, not at the moment. Rusty moved like the well-oiled machine he was, crossing streets and navigating around squads of men in blue-grey uniforms. More Dreggar militiamen?

“Lots of soldiers around,” I said as I noticed a small walking mech ahead. It was an ancient thing, six-legged and low, with an open back and a heavy gun sitting at the front like the needle on a mosquito.

“That’s hardly surprising,” Clin said. “They were invaded.”

“Hmm.” So they were bringing in more troops.

Well, more implied they had any to begin with. The sorry excuses I’d seen at that meeting with the sheriff didn’t exactly impress me, but I figured they only sent the cheapest, least-useful troops out this far from the capital.

The current lot looked young, too, and despite their uniforms looking fresh, their equipment was dated.

Was the entire army unprepared, or were they just sending the nobodies to Daggerwren?

I set that aside when we reached the train station. Not the yard where we’d fought, but the station proper. The building had a number of folk around it, some mechs waiting off to the side and a few containers looking like they were waiting to be shipped off.

No train though.

I sat Rusty by a line of other mechs, then disconnected and stepped out, leaving Clin behind to guard Rusty in case anyone tried to break into him. I doubted anyone would try. Of all the mechs in the line, Rusty was the heaviest, and one of the only ones that was armed.

Getting two tickets for a passenger carriage was easy. A couple of silver each, which meant a meal onboard and that was it. The man behind the booth was a chatty fella, and he explained that the Sandpiercer wasn’t heavily loaded on the way out of Daggerwren. Tickets to here were expensive, tickets out weren’t.

Figured.

Getting the permission to load Rusty aboard was a whole other mess. I had to meet an engineer who walked around Rusty a few times, then measured my mech up real fast. He’d fit, but only just.

The price had me balking. It was ten times what I’d pay for the cores just to walk over to Flatbluff.

I tried to haggle it down, but the guy in the booth was a stubborn fellow. He insisted that the West Cinder Railway Union set fair prices. I did get some extra meals for our tickets, and I managed to convince him to give us a room for cheap since we were paying customers, but that was it.

I didn’t curse him up a storm as I set a few good gold on the counter, but I was damned tempted to.

I was on my way back to Rusty when I heard a hubbub rising. More people had been arriving, normal folk, probably more than the station usually saw, judging by all the hastily packed bags. A few soldiers too, though not in any sort of formation.

Didn’t take a genius to follow everyone’s gaze out across the town. The walls were opening, two large doors set into them sliding apart with the slow shift of something heavy being moved by an engine that was too small for it.

Out past the still-grinding doors was open desert: leagues of nothing but sand with some bushes poking through and reddish stone where the wind had blasted the top-sand away. Cutting across that were two tracks, and on those, still way off in the distance, was a wall of smoke.

I glanced around until I found a bench next to a light pole. The couple sitting on it gasped as I jumped up and used the back of the bench as a place to stand, an arm wrapped around the pole.

The view wasn’t much better, but it let me see over the dozens of people waiting.

The Sandpiercer was a beast.

Even from what had to be two or so kilometers away, I could tell that it was massive. A huge engine, shaped roughly like a bullet and with a slit cut into the top of it where the crew were likely watching. A large pair of blades ran out before it, both of them wedge shaped and probably weighing more than Rusty did. They hovered over the rails, cutting apart sand-dunes and sending twin waves of sand shooting into the air around it.

I felt the ground starting to tremble.

Then they applied the brakes and I winced as a piercing squeal echoed across the desert.

What had to be thousands of tonnes of steel slowed down, smoke pouring off of braking pads that glowed such a bright red they made the entire underside of the train seem like it was aflame.

The Sandpiercer slid into the walls of Daggerwren, moving barely any faster than I could walk, and yet it still felt as if it was coming fast.

The engine was massive. Twice as wide as Rusty was tall and maybe three dozen metres long from sandcatcher to the rear.

It slowed down to a complete stop just within the gate, then, from its side, huge legs folded out while a few engineers jumped off the engine and ran to the back.

Seeing something so large stand up and scuttle forwards was, in a word, awesome.

Then it all turned rather mundane.

The engine moved to the side and started to turn around, each step from its many legs only turning it a fraction of a full rotation, like the minute hand of a clock ticking around.

A smaller engine moved out of the station and pulled the carriage forward, first the passenger carriages were brought to the station proper, then the cargo wagons were detached and rolled back to the trainyard.

I jumped off the bench and headed over to Rusty. I didn’t want to get involved in the controlled chaos of the station until it was Rusty’s turn to embark.

“Big thing, isn’t it?” Clin asked. He was leaning against the inside of Rusty’s control seat, eyes on the Sandpiercer.

“Yeah,” I said.

“We don’t have trains that large. Smaller, sleeker ones, sure, but nothing that imposing. I suppose it’s built to tackle a different set of circumstances.”

“I suppose so,” I agreed easily. At least the cabins at the back, while just a bit less wide than the train proper, weren’t anything too special. Boxes. Some boxes with windows, others just steel boxes on wheels.

Eventually the mechs ahead of us started moving, and with the help of some engineers that came out of the train, we were directed to the trainyard where they were dismounting some ancient warmechs  from the train.

I watched the old things walk around and felt bad for the poor saps piloting them.

“Those are nearly pre-Calamity ,” Clin noted.

“Don’t know what they’re thinking,” I said. The guns on them were small, maybe standard 18mm. Nothing that would stop a gnome warmech.

There were plenty of troops getting out of the train, but again, they looked like grunts, with decades old equipment, and barely any hair on their chins. If they were planning on stopping a gnomish invasion here, they’d need to step up their game.

A few hundred kids with 10mm bolt-action rifles that were made when their parents were still young wouldn’t fare well against a modern military.

Or maybe they just needed enough troops to make the gnomes think twice.

Politics was  something best left out of my hands, I figured.

We were the last to load onto the carriage designed for mechs. Rusty fit, but it was tight, and a bit of a challenge of my skills as a pilot to squeeze him into the heavy frame without scraping off a layer of fresh paint. Still, I had a few folk guiding me, and there wasn’t any sort of immediate rush. I locked everything up, and soon Clin and I were out of Rusty and headed for the passenger cars while my mech was strapped in.

Now we just had to sit tight, and enjoy the peaceful ride all the way down to Flatbluff. It would be the easiest part of our entire trip, I figured.

***

Chapter Fifty-Three

The train made me nervous.

Actually, sitting down and not doing anything made me nervous; the train just forced me to do that.

Clin and I had been sitting in the passenger car for nearly two hours before the train finally started to move. The car wasn’t uncomfortable. Barely-padded cushions covered in some cheap beige cloth, a sheet metal ceiling and floors and walls. There was some effort to keep the cabin cool, with little vents blowing lukewarm air around, but it wasn’t all that impressive.

At least we had a small view from the round windows lining the walls. We’d get to look out and see the spectacular dunes, and sand, and more dunes, and maybe even some sand until we made it to Flatbluffs.

“Are you okay?” Clin asked.

I shrugged. We were sharing a bench, a narrow one that had our shoulders rubbing. “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said.

He nodded slowly. “If you say so,” he agreed. “I regret not bringing a book or two.”

“Never was much of a reader,” I said.

“Really? You don’t seem uneducated.”

I eyed him for a bit. “I know my letters and numbers,” I said. “Just never been minded that way like some folk are.”

“That’s fair,” he said. “Not everyone has the gift for poetry or math.”

I sniffed. “You do poetry?”

He shifted, nose rising. “I’ll have you know that it’s considered quite appropriate for a young elf to know the classics.”

“Please don’t,” I said.

His ears twitched, just a bit. They were partially hidden by his hat, but not so much that I couldn’t see them from this close up. “Between you and I, I never did like it. It’s all very pretentious, and hardly enjoyable at all.”

“Then what does the brave elf engineer read?” I asked.

‘ You wouldn’t like it,” he said. “Mostly non-fictional texts. I enjoy keeping up with the trends in the industry, and seeing the work of other inventors and engineers. Sometimes they give me ideas, other times I can steal something particularly clever for myself. And, of course, it allows me to know who’s who, with the hopes that I might meet some of the more interesting inventors.”

“Huh,” I said. I didn’t know what to do with that information.

“What about you?”

“Like I said, I don’t read much. Never had the time or inclination for it. Time I spend sitting around with my nose in a book is time I could spend doing... just about anything else, really.”

“I suppose,” Clin said.

The silence stretched, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. Clin was a good fellow, and I think we’d spent enough time near each other without chatting that I’d grown used to just being near him without having to fill the void with idle noise.

I spent a bit of time watching the desert roll by. The constant rumble and thump of the rails below was soothing, a mechanical song accompanied by the drumbeat of the Sandpiercer’s engine way out at the front.

We weren’t alone in the passenger cabin, but for all that there were plenty of folk leaving Daggerwren, there was plenty of cabin space. No crying children or anyone with a cough, at least.

I’d still have rather been in Rusty, but I couldn’t have everything.

I don’t know how or when, but I fell asleep.

Something shook me, and I woke with a start to find my face pressed up against Clin’s shoulder.

“The food is being served,” he said.

I swallowed, sat up straighter, then turned my face away to wipe my mouth clean. I could feel my cheeks warming for just a moment before I cleared my throat. “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

Food, as it turned out, wasn’t anything special. Some boiled tubers, a bit of sauce that tasted a bit like diluted goat’s cheese, and a tiny slab of what the person handing the meals out called a steak, and I called a boot heel.

I hadn’t been expecting much, and yet I was still disappointed.

“You might want to go to bed after all of this,” Clin said.

“I’m good,” I said.

I felt, rather than saw, someone leaning up from behind me.

My hand dipped to my gun.

“Oh, sweetie,” an older, crooning voice said. “You know, with all the noise this old train makes, hardly anyone can hear you having a bit of fun.”

I blinked and turned to find an old woman leaning forwards from the seat behind ours. She was smiling a big, toothless grin, one hand on our bench and another... rubbing the knee of the person next to it.

“Now, all that rocking you feel? If you go along with it, it just adds to the pleasure.”

“I’m... very sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

Clin was staring out ahead, his face having taken some colour even if he was as emotionless as ever.

“No need to be shy, love, this old hag has heard and done it all. You should enjoy a bit of peace and quiet with your boy here. Once you have a few brats, it’ll take gods know how long before you find a bit more. Why, my husband and I were just enjoying our retirement until that little fiasco with the goblins.”

I looked at the woman, partially impressed by her daring--she wasn’t exactly keeping her voice down, and we were hardly alone--and somewhat horrified at how wrong she’d gotten things.

Clin wasn’t the last man on this dustball I’d sleep with, but he wasn’t my first choice either. “I think you’re having yourself some fundamental misunderstanding, ma’am,” I said.

“Oh, don’t be a prude, you’re too young for that,” she said. “It’s best to enjoy these things while you’re still young and spry. My, by the time you’re my age, things dry up worse than that desert out there.”

“I think,” Clin said as he stood up. “That the lady is entirely correct. Shall we?”

I gave him a look, but there wasn’t anything suspicious in his eyes, so I took his hand and got up, much to the old lady’s cackling delight. Clin guided me to the back of the passenger car, then out into a small, sandy airlock between train cars.

“I do hope you’re not thinking you’ll be having a fun time,” I said.

“No, hardly,” he replied.

Somehow, his easy dismissal pissed me off a little.

“I just didn’t feel like dealing with the lady’s prattling. She talked the ear off another couple while you slept. I don’t know if I have the patience to be the centre of her attention.”

“Hmm,” I replied. We crossed from one car to the next, heading towards the front of the train. I couldn’t help but eye the drop between cars and the rails flashing below.

The cabins weren’t all that big. Maybe some two metres deep and a meter wide. No windows or anything, and just a vent in the ceiling to keep the place cool. The centre of the car was bisected in half, with cabins on either side of the wide car.

There was one problem that immediately came to mind as I took in our room. There was just the one  bed.

Clin stared at it, then very carefully let go of my hand which he was still holding onto. “I’ll sleep on the floor,” he said.

I rolled my eyes. “We’ll sleep opposite  ways. Just don’t stick your elf feet in my face and we’ll both come out of it better.”

“You know, it’s considered very taboo to sleep with a woman you’re not married with, at least in my culture.”

“Keep your little sandsnake in its hidey place,” I said. “This is for literal sleep. I think you’ve seen me kill enough things stronger and tougher than you to get a good idea of the sort of pain I’d inflict on you if you had any idea otherwise.”

Besides, I was hardly going to sleep in the buff. What if some punk tried to rob me in my sleep?

I did remove my boots, the old leather things peeling off with a comforting squeeze. I left my hat on a hook by the door.

I picked a side, the one that would allow me to shoot anyone coming into the door unannounced, then made sure my revolver was close at hand.

We had a night of this, then the entire next day onboard this train. It was a day and a half long trip. With the amount of time it took us to leave, I figured this might not be our only night aboard.

Clin took a place next to me, keeping his distance and minding his hands. He didn’t even get under the covers.

Smart man, that Clin.

I was surprised at how easy it was to finally slip back to sleep.

***

Chapter Fifty-Four

I woke up and immediately started looking around for trouble.

Didn’t take long for my heart to settle, not when I saw Clin’s sock-covered feet just ahead of my face. I sighed and listened for a bit. The constant thump of the train engine, the chug of the rails shifting over the tracks... the sounds of two people having a good time muffled by the thin walls of our cabin.

Shifting so that my back was to Clin, I tried to return to sleep.

There was a mighty annoying problem though. I had to take a piss.

Grumbling, I shoved off the bed, then rubbed at my face.

“Are you alright?” came Clin’s sleep-addled voice.

“Need to piss.”

“Ah,” he said.

I looked for my boots and slipped them on, then I took them off and put them on the right feet. Still a little tired, I made sure my belt was on and my gun was holstered before I walked over to the door. “Be right back.”

“Mmm.”

The washroom was a cramped little cubicle, way off at the end of the cabins. There were two of them, marked by gender. I slid into one, locked the latch on the door, and did my business. The fact that the toilet was just a seat over a hole with the tracks going by beneath wasn’t optimal, but I lived with it.

There was a little window next to the toilet, just low enough that I could see out of it while I did my business.

There were lights out ahead, in the desert.

Strange.

Looked like some mecha, maybe. Nomads? They never shied away from using light, even at night. But these were just a few glowing dots next to some dunes, and they flickered off almost as soon as I focused on them.

And then I heard the distant thump of an explosion.

It wasn’t the engine. I’d heard enough explosions to recognize the sound.

I had all of half a second to brace before the Sandpiercer’s brakes started to squeal.

I was thrown forward, and with my  legs  caught at my ankles and my faculties addled by sleep, there wasn’t anything graceful about my fall. I used a few choice words to describe my situation, in case any errant gods were listening in.

The train started to move in a direction that wasn’t forward, which could only mean we’d come off the rails.

We stopped, wheels digging into sand with a familiar sort of shifting halt. The car wasn’t even with the ground anymore, but it wasn’t too far off.

I tugged my pants up and did up my belt before scrambling to my feet. The cabin was lit by a single tiny light, the sort fed by a sprinkling of core dust that warmed up an element. It was flickering.

Either the battery was knocked loose, or there was some heavy magical interference in the air. I was willing to bet it was the less favourable of the two options.

I stuck my head by the window and looked out.

A golden flash, in time with the crack-boom of a cannon firing and hitting. Something exploded out ahead.

Bandits?

A couple of fidiots with some old mechs trying to strike it rich by robbing the passengers? I heard a clunk from somewhere above and ahead, and by leaning to the side I could make out a gun-emplacement on the roof of the car ahead of ours. Two guns, in ranks sticking out of a glass dome. The sort of thing used to scare off animals and shoot down nosey sand-wyverns.

The guns opened up, twin tracers of green fire zipping across the night and impacting a dune before the gunner walked the shots over to the nearest mech partially hidden behind sand.

I swallowed dry.

It wasn’t a bandit, not unless the bandits around here had gotten their hands on new-looking gnomish warmechs, the same sort that had tracked Clin down some time ago.

The AA guns did nothing to the mech.

The return fire was a whole lot more effective.

I ducked down with a wince as a golden beam tore the roof and gun emplacement apart, the explosion shattering the glass of the window I was looking out of.

“Damnation,” I swore.

I had to get my gear, and Clin.

I could make out some small lights racing across the dunes, some of them already at the cars ahead. Soldiers, in groups of five.

Not an entire army, but at least some ten squads.

I didn’t know enough about gnomish doctrine to know how many mechs would be supporting that many foot soldiers.

I ran out of the washroom. Folk, at least a couple of them, were stepping out of their cabins. “What’s going on?” I heard someone ask.

“We’re under attack!” I screamed. “Bandits! It’s bandits!”

Explaining that there was a gnomish army out there would take time, and folk would try to run. Against some bandits though? I saw some of the tougher looking guys rushing back to their cabins and I heard the familiar sound of guns being loaded. Some of the people here were militia on their way back. They’d either rally or not, but either way, I was hoping for time.

I burst into the cabin Clin and I shared. “Get up.”

“Is something happening?” he asked. He was moving, but not nearly fast enough.

“Gnomes. I saw one mech, and about fifty infantry. They’re heading this way.”

As if to punctuate my words, the distant pop-pop of guns started from somewhere at the front of the train. Were they not going to hit from every direction at once?

Then again, did they need to?

“They derailed the train?” Clin asked. He was moving faster now, shoving his feet into his boots and scrambling for his coat.

“Yeah. Will they take prisoners?”

“No,” he said right away. “This was an act of war, or as close as you can get to one. No witnesses.”

“Then we’d best get out of here. Rusty’s at the back.”

“We’re taking the mech?”

“We’re not going to go off on foot,” I said. “Might as well surrender at that point.”

He nodded and tucked his hat on. “Right.”

Clin had left his shotgun in Rusty, and I’d left my rifle there too. No need for something like that on a train.

I regretted it now as I pulled out my revolver. “I’ve got six in the gun and six in my pockets,” I said. The rest of my ammunition was in my mech. Nice and safe and far from me.

“I’ve got three rounds,” Clin said.

I snorted. “Don’t miss.”

We exited into a corridor filled with uncertain people. No one had taken charge, no one was giving directions, and all of them were huddling around, waiting for the inevitable. It would just take one gnome with an explosive to subdue the entire damned carriage.

I shoved my way towards the back, Clin keeping up with me.

“Hey! Where are you going?”

I half-turned to see some guy wearing half a militia uniform looking my way.

“Stay here. We’re stronger together,” he said.

I snorted and kept on going. Maybe they’d serve as a break, slowing down the gnomes, but I doubted it.

Clin and I moved into the little airlock room at the back, and I reached up and smashed the handle of my gun against the light, plunging us in darkness.

“Thanks, I hate being able to see,” Clin said.

“The dark’s as much an advantage to us as it is a disadvantage,” I said. “Hope you have decent night vision.”

“Are we going to the other cars?”

It was a fair question. We could cross the train from the inside, with decent cover, or take our chances in the sand and in the open.

“We’ll use the cars as much as we can. If we get caught in one we won’t have any room to escape, but they’ll give us some cover.”

“Understood.”

I nodded to him, then opened the door leading out while trying to be quiet about it. It was cold outside, the lack of sun showing. Cold and dark.

The pops of gunfire were louder, but also intermittent. The gnomes were being professional, or maybe they really weren’t meeting all that much resistance.

The door behind us slammed open, and I spun, revolver rising.

It was the old woman, the pervert we’d met yesterday. She was bleeding.

Behind her, at the other end of the car, I could make out the forms of people moving in, civilians, some injured, others not, and past them flashes of red light.

They were being chased.

“Let’s go!” I said. The last thing I wanted was to be caught in the press of the crowd before the gnomes came around to execute us.

“I wish I had a few more hours of sleep,” Clin complained.

“We can sleep when we’re both dead,” I hissed back.

These gnomes were really starting to irritate me.

***

Chapter Fifty-Five

People were dying, and it was incredibly convenient.

Not their dying so much as how their deaths were rallying others.

Folk didn’t go around unarmed; that just wasn’t done. Even if it was just a boot knife, everyone had something to defend themselves with. The gnomes were running into some trouble on that account.

“Down!” I screamed, one hand wrapping around Clin’s neck before shoving him behind a seat.

Moving through the carriages had been a mistake. It funnelled us in with the other passengers in one of the seating cars. When a squad of gnomes burst through from the opposite entrance the only cover we had were some chairs.

I winced as red beams sliced through the air above me and someone’s terrified scream was cut off between one bang and the next. Some lucky bastard took a few shots, filling the air with greenish smoke as they returned fire.

The gnomes were better equipped. Repeating rifles, likely in 5mm. Shit rounds which wouldn’t pierce through even thick enough leather, but against a bunch of normal folk it didn’t matter any.

I pressed Clin down lower, then dropped to the floor. I could see a few bodies slumped ahead, and some folk huddled on the ground. And, at the far end, the black-booted feet of the gnomes.

Laying myself flat, I brought my arm out, revolver in hand, and took my time aiming. I couldn’t afford to be distracted by the screaming and the echoing gunfire from the gnomes and passengers.

I bit my lower lip, closed one eye, and fired.

The gnome I hit crashed to the floor with a scream muffled by his mask, his leg a charred mess now that it was missing its calf.

The others might be able to trace the golden light from my revolver, but it passed under the benches, and there was plenty keeping them occupied.

I turned my aim to the next, pulled back the hammer, and fired again, then again.

Gnomes needed their legs just as much as anyone else.

“You bastards!” someone screamed. With a couple of them down, the tide turned, and some of the braver passengers rushed ahead.

I pulled myself out from under the bench while the gnomes reaped what they’d sown.

I glanced over, making sure that none of them were alive enough to cause trouble, then I helped Clin to his feet before walking to the front and shouldering my way past a man with bloodied fists.

Kneeling next to one of the gnomes, I tore the mask off his face and stared. Young. Not an adolescent or anything, but not an adult either, at least not by my reckoning of gnome’s age. If he was human I’d guess him to be between seventeen and eighteen. “They’re sending children?” I asked.

“The Shadow Kingdom has mandatory national service,” Clin said. He was looking a little pale.

I tore the rifle out of the soldier’s hands. No matter how young, he’d managed to fire at a room full of normal folk. “Let’s keep moving,” I said as I shouldered the gun. It was a drum-fed piece of junk, with a handle at the front under the barrel and a crank set into the side. Terrible for aiming, but they made up for that with rate of fire.

We reached the back of the car and I gestured to the side. “We can’t count on having others drawing fire away from us forever,” I said.

The folk behind us were tending to the injured, or finding weapons where they could. None of them seemed eager to leave the carriage and brave the dark.

These were people that had lived in cities and towns their whole lives, with walls between them and the creatures that made the desert their home. They’d need to be a whole lot braver to step outside.

The gnomes hadn’t closed the door at the back. I leaned out quickly and glanced around, then pulled back. I hadn’t seen anything.

“Are we moving to the next car?” Clin asked.

I shook my head. “No. On foot. We’re going to the... the right. Away from the mechs.”

Clin nodded, his pitiful handgun raised and held in both hands, as if it needed two hands.

“Keep your elf eyes open,” I said.

“Elves don’t see that much better than humans,” he hissed.

“Then use your elf ears, or your elf mouth’s ability to shut up,” I hissed before jumping down. My boots thumped into the sand around the tracks and I lowered myself into a crouch, crank-gun tucked into my shoulder as I looked around.

There were plenty of red flashes by the front of the train, and the occasional spark of some other colour as people fought back, but I figured that wouldn’t last long.

The gnomes had mechs, they had better armaments, and for all that some of them were likely young and stupid, they had some training. Against a trainful of recently-awakened civilians with nothing bigger than a handgun, there was no way anyone was making it out of here alive.

Which was a problem, because I was included in that ‘anyone’ and I wasn’t keen on dying with only half a night’s sleep in me.

Clin landed with a crunch next to me, then knelt down and turned his head this way and that.

I pointed to the back of the train, and saw his head bob up and down by the light pouring out of the passenger car.

I started moving, not a jog or a run, but a quick lurching step that kept my shoulders even and my torso twisted so that I could aim ahead.

The train had buckled on getting derailed, the cars jack-knifing so that they zig-zagged out of their straight alignment. It meant that we’d either need to stick close to the train, or go around. The sand here was loose, the sort of wind-swept sand that tended to appear where there were few barriers.

The passenger cars were just behind the engineering section where fuel was stored and where the train’s crew stayed, placing us near the front-middle of the train. Rusty was near the rear, somewhere with all the cargo wagons.

I slowed down, then reached back and pressed a hand against Clin’s chest to stop him too. There were others out there with us, their footsteps crunching against the sand.

I dropped down and aimed under the car. Gnomes weren’t tall, but they were tall enough that I could only see them from the hip-down. Was I going to pull the same trick twice?

As long as it worked.

Five sets of feet were moving by at a decent pace, walking with their backs straight. Overconfident.

I cranked the rifle’s trigger mechanism and felt it kick back as the first round shot out. It went wide, red beam scything past the gnomes’ little formation. I adjusted, before they’d really figured it out, and fired a second shot on the backswing of the crank.

I grit my teeth and wondered which ergonomically-challenged fidiot designed this gun as I fired faster and faster at the squat gnomes, rifle rattling with every bullet shot. At least the calibre was pitiful enough that I didn’t have to deal with much recoil.

The gun stopped firing. Out of ammo, or something broke. I didn’t feel like wasting time figuring it out. “Go!” I shouted to Clin before flinging the gun down onto the sand and taking off. The elf kept up easily enough.

That was at least two or three gnomes down, but I didn’t know what fraction that represented.

If they were sending younger, less experienced soldiers out, did that mean they expected it to be a cakewalk, or were they sent because they were expendable?

Taking out the Sandpiercer was an act of war, there was no disguising that. Why send out inexperienced troops... unless the veterans were needed elsewhere?

Clin and I reached the next connection and I jumped up, then turned to help Clin up. No passage through this car, it was all cargo, but there was a ladder leading to the top. I grabbed onto it and pulled myself up, Clin following just behind.

I could hear gnomes shouting orders, and another screaming out.

Hard to feel pity when his screams were mixing with that of the passengers that were still alive. Clin and I ran across the tin roof of the cargo car. There was no being stealthy here.

It didn’t matter. I recognized the next car, a big one, with tin sides and no roof. We jumped across, and with arms outstretched for balance, I reached the middle of the car.

Rusty’s head was visible, a cloth-covered silhouette poking above the rest. I could recognize my old friend regardless. We’d need to undo some chains, cut some ties.

And then I was going to see if the gnomes like  fighting on an even playing field really soon.

***

Chapter Fifty-Six

Rusty had straps running before him, holding him in place and preventing any unfortunate rocking during transit. They made a lot of sense, but right then they were in the way.

I slashed at a strap, then cursed as it shivered like a plucked lute string and I almost dropped my knife.

“Are you okay?” Clin whispered. He was above, partially hidden by the top of the train. He was watching out for gnomes, but I didn’t think there was too much danger. There was still some fighting going on, still some people shooting back.

“Rusty’s locked up tight,” I said. I sawed through one of the straps, then, once it was cut apart, started to tug it off Rusty only to find the cinch that held it in place.

I felt a little stupid, but in my defence, it was dark, and I didn’t dare try to find any light, not when that would mean alerting everyone that we were here. The gnomes knowing would be bad. The other passengers too. I had enough on my plate keeping Clin and myself alive.

“Shit,” I muttered as I followed one of the chains around Rusty’s legs to a brace in the floor. They were held in place with a heavy padlock.

A smart way of making sure that no one left with a mech without permission. But at that moment, real inconvenient.

“Clin!” I hissed. “I need help.”

Clin dropped down onto one of the other mechs, then to the floor of the car. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

I gestured to the padlock.

“Do you know how to pick a lock?” he asked.

“No.”

“Oh, I thought you would.”

I shook my head. “Why would you think that?”

“Nevermind,” he said. “Can you move Rusty anyway?”

I tugged the chain. Not hard enough to make it jangled too loud, then followed it with my eyes. It looked around Rusty’s hips, then back around over the mech’s shoulders. There was another identical chain on the other side. They were relatively thick. I didn’t think Rusty could break them.

The mooring, though, wasn’t as impressive. The wagon’s floor had reinforced iron beams across it, but over that was plain wood, and the loop the padlock and chain were hooked onto was screwed into a thick plank. Two thumb-thick bolts. “Yeah,” I said. “It’ll make a whole hell of a lot of noise though,” I said.

“We won’t exactly be leaving here with any subtlety, I don’t think,” he replied.

That was a fair point. I let go of the chains and shifted over to Rusty’s side. We tugged open the mech’s front, Clin preventing it from hitting the mech ahead of us. It was a tight squeeze, but I managed to slip in and fumble my way onto the pilot seat.

I buckled myself down, tossed my hat into its spot, and lowered the control interface onto my head.

Clin pulled himself in without making too much of a racket, which was about what I could ask for, and he shuffled to the back and onto his little seat. “I don’t like being unable to do anything,” he said.

“Tough,” I said. “I’m not about to let you sit on Rusty’s shoulder while I run out of here.”

“Is that the plan?” he asked.

“To run like every god is angry at us?” I asked. “Yes. Yes, that’s the plan.”

Clin was quiet for a moment as I jabbed the control needle into my collar and tried to focus through the disorientation to get everything started up. I was trying to keep things quiet, but there was only so much quiet a mecha could manage.

“We are not gonna save the passengers?” he asked.

I considered it. “No. There are too many gnomes, as far as I can reckon, and even if they only have one mech, that’s one too many for my tastes. I doubt they have that few.”

“How many gnomes did you see?”

“A few groups of them. I can’t give you any specific number. Maybe ten groups? Squads?” I wasn’t all that knowledgeable on military matters.

“The gnomes like standardization. That’s five squads to a platoon. Three mechs per platoon.”

“So six,” I said. That was about five more than I figured I could take with any sort of chance to live.

“Yes, but those six won’t all be the same. One combat mech, certainly, but two transports, especially for a deployment this far afield. The walker transports they use are armed and armoured, but, well.”

“They’re transports first,” I said. I might have seen a few of those around, or maybe older ones. Big cumbersome machines, with some light armour on the sides and at least four legs. I imagined the military transports had a few guns, but maybe they weren’t anything to worry about.

I leaned forward, pulled my spare flask from under my seat, and took a big gulp.

“What’s that?” Clin asked.

“Whiskey.”

“... May I have some?”

I laughed and handed the flask back. “Don’t get wasted, I might need your fancy elf fanciness to help me through this.”

“I’ll do what I can,” he said, then he coughed. “What is this swill?”

“Expensive, so don’t waste it.”

Rusty shifted. The mech was squatting down a little. That changed as I straightened him out. The chains around us strained, stopping me from standing straight, but I kept pushing. Legs able to lift the several tonne bulk of Rusty fought against some old wood holding the mooring points in place.

Rusty won.

The chains snapped past, and I launched Rusty to the side.

We tore through the support bar caging us in, and I had to kick my legs out fast to steady Rusty as we crashed to the ground. I immediately reached over Rusty’s shoulder and pulled the mech’s rifle from where it hung even as the remains of the chain rattled as it slipped off Rusty’s shoulder.

“Let’s get going,” I said.

And then some fidiot shot me.

I winced as the bang echoed through the cabin.

“That was loud,” Clin said. He took another long sip from my flask.

“Give me that,” I said. He pushed it into my waiting hand and I took a swallow. The burn was wonderful.

Then we were shot again.

“We just repainted,” I swore as I gave Clin the flask back and turned.

It wasn’t hard to trace the bullet-trail back to a single gnome with a bolt-action rifle standing next to one of the cars.

I shifted one of Rusty’s legs back, tucked the rifle against the pads on the mech’s shoulder, then made sure the magical lines were properly connected to the rifle. I barely even aimed.

Rusty’s vision was a pain to deal with during the day, turning the desert sand into a bright, colourful mess, and any living thing into a barely discernible blip.

At night, everything was a beautiful dark blue, with a haze above it in the evening as the warmth was leached from the sand. People stood out as red beacons in the darkness.

The gnome’s orange glow turned into a splatter as a 25mm round punched through his torso and kicked up sand behind him with a boom that echoed out across the dunes.

“I suspect they heard that,” Clin deadpanned.

“How unfortunate.”

I might have been in a snarky mood, and lacking sleep, and perhaps I’d taken my first step toward inebriation, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have a head on my shoulders. I started to run out towards the dunes, on a path that would follow some of the train cars until they bent the other way. Then it would be straight for the edge of a dune. If I could put some hills between the gnomes and myself, then that would be for the best.

A window was smashed open on the side of a passenger car, and some gnome that thought he was clever jammed his crank-fired gun in the hole.

I worked the lever on Rusty’s rifle, turned while still walking, and fired into the side of the car.

When the red light of Rusty’s round faded, it revealed a man-sized hole in the train car’s tin side, bits of dead gnome behind it. There were more within though, and a lot of other bodies scattered on the ground, their heat fading.

I fired another round, then started to overload the next one.

The explosion made all the windows burst. I kept moving on while carefully reloading.

Maybe the big rifle was a little bit of overkill on infantry.

The fidiots definitely deserved it though.

I came around the back of the last train car in the row, then stopped and stepped back.

A beam of brilliant light scythed through the air where I would have been with another forward step.

Maybe not all fidiots.

“You said two warmechs, right?” I asked.

This was going to be such a pain.

***

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Mech to mech combat was an interesting game.

With the right kind of ammunition, a single sufficiently-powered shot was enough to take out a mech. Which meant that all it took was one shot in the right spot.

In that way, it was similar to a normal gunfight. I’d seen some tough men go down sobbing because they’d been hit in the leg or struck in the arm. Not lethal wounds, but enough to put someone on the ground and make them reconsider all the mistakes they’d made in life.

A mech was tough, sure, but it could only take so much, and most mechs built for war were designed to deliver a lot more than ‘so much.’

I crouched Rusty down behind the last train car and considered things.

The mech was, I suspected, one of those tracked gnomish warmechs. That meant that it had a turret atop  it, a small crew, and likely the ability to communicate with the other mecha that had come out here to play train-bandit.

I probably had better mobility, but worse forward-speed than it did. The turret would have a slower traverse than my gun, but a more stable base and a gunner whose entire job would be to shoot me down. They didn’t need to split their attention the way I did.

What else? Armour-wise, the gnomes had it better than I did. I could remember my revolver round bouncing off their plate. Rusty’s lever-action had a bigger calibre, and packed more of a punch, so maybe that would make their armour a moot point.

They had a stationary gun. A small one, but more than enough to murder Clin and I.

So I had to resort to being better than them. Which wasn’t pleasant when there were more of ‘them’ than there were of ‘us.’

“We’re going around,” I said.

“Very well,” Clin replied easily. “Do you have any more whiskey?”

I spun Rusty around and started heading back towards the rear of the train at a brisk jog. It would be noisy, but they knew I was here already, so there wasn’t much lost.

“Yeah, I do. Taken a liking to it?”

“No, it still tastes like swill. I just... well, getting drunk is seen as terribly uncouth, but I think this situation calls for it.”

“Oh, calm down,” I said. “We’ll get out of this one just fine.”

One of the train cars nearby was this long flatbed, with tall posts on either end and nothing on it. I slowed down, then climbed aboard it, keeping Rusty as low as I could while scanning the desert ahead.

No gnomish mech in sight, but the landscape was dominated by one large sand dune, and I didn’t doubt there could be more of them.

Worse, it looked like the mech that had fired at me had moved forwards. Orange marks left on the sand hinted at where it had been idling before.

Was it trying to come around to fire at me from behind?

Maybe they didn’t know we were armed? Though that seemed like a stupid assumption for anyone to make.

Reddish blobs were moving about, out of the passenger cars. Some of them forming a line, while others grouped up near them. Gnomes, certainly, but with prisoners.

I couldn’t tell them apart, not entirely. Not until some of the blobs pushed those in a line down, then fired at them. People fell onto the sand, the warm colours Rusty’s eye picked up fading away as they died.

A mass execution.

“What a bunch of assholes,” I muttered as I brought my rifle around.

Did they decide to just ignore me as a threat? They must have heard the noise from when I fired, and it was impossible that they missed their own mech rolling by to flank me.

I fired into the largest group of what I figured were gnomes.

Sure, my goal was to get away, not save people. But that didn’t mean that having more dead gnomes would hurt. The fewer of the short bastards were left, the fewer would be able to chase us across the desert.

The red beam cut through the centre of the group, throwing gnomes back and killing a few of them.

I racked the lever and aimed a little higher, towards the next group. Still had to wait for the train car to stop rocking. It didn’t make for a good base to shoot from.

The gnomes split up, some of them running back, others trying to rally the other soldiers. The clever ones ran for cover.

The not so-clever ones opened fire on the prisoners.

I fired at one of the fidiots who was more worried about killing innocents than getting his dumb ass into cover.

The passengers broke, running back for cover, with one or two of the braver ones jumping at their captors and wrestling them to the ground.

I didn’t give them good odds, but at least they’d go down swinging.

I scanned the dunes around us while standing up. I had to keep moving. The gnomes on foot likely couldn’t see us in the dark, but the glowing red dust left in the air would lead them right to us. I didn’t have enough ammo to shoot all of them down if all they did was run at us.

But then, these weren’t goblins.

I jumped off the flatcar and started to circle my way up the dune. The footing wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible enough to slow us down much, and I wanted to put some room between me and the train. The gnomes were in disarray; I'd done what I could.

It was only because I was looking ahead that I saw it.

A mech, short and stubby, moving right up to the edge of the dune even as its barrel slowly swung around to point my way.

“Shit,” I swore.

“You never did tell me where that bottle was,” Clin said.

I let Rusty fall to one knee, the motion making everything in the cabin bounce, but at least it lowered our profile a little. I brought my rifle up, and just as the gnomish tank was nearly done turning its barrel, I fired.

The red flash of my gun going off lit up the side of the dune, and a single tight beam traced its way to the side of the gnomish mech.

I held my breath, then cursed.

The mech was still there. A little blemished, and with a fist-sized hole smoking on the edge of its frame, but otherwise it was intact.

A poor, unlucky shot.

The turret finished turning, then lowered... but not enough.

It felt like everything paused for just a moment as everyone involved realized what had happened.

The gnome’s gun couldn’t depress at enough of an angle to do anything but fire above Rusty’s head.

I started to laugh even as I poured magic into an overloaded shot. More than was safe, even. I lowered my aim, and just like that one gnomish mech had done to me some days ago, I fired at the dune right under the mech.

Sand and dirt and stone exploded apart, showering down the side of the dune in a small avalanche. Then, with a heavy crunch, the mech followed.

The pilot was decent. They managed to spread the mech’s legs out, and had the tracks spinning hard enough to kick up sand all over.

I watched them slide down while reloading as quickly as I could.

The mech hit something on the way down, and tipped onto its side, finishing its tumble with a dirty roll and a heavy crash.

I didn’t envy the gnomes in there .

Especially when I raised my gun and fired.

Four shots, delivered with barely a second between them.

Four holes punched into the armour of the fallen mech, each one half a pace apart. There weren’t any grand explosions, unfortunately, but I figured it was out of the count.

My grin turned wooden as I looked up. Motion, near the front of the train. The mech that had followed me around had apparently retraced its steps and was walking around the front of the Sandpiercer.

I started to fumble to reload my rifle. I didn’t want to be shot out here in the open.

I kept an eye on it as the mech stopped and its turret started to turn my way.

“Damn, damn, damn,” I swore as I started to run up the dune. Rusty’s feet slid in some loose sand, and I almost tripped us up in my hurry to climb faster.

There was no way I was going to make it.

And then the Sandpiercer started to move.

Huge legs, each one as big and thick around as Rusty, shifted out of the side of the train engine and slammed into the ground with dull booms.

The gnome mech turned around even as the Sandpiercer rose up and up, hundreds of tonnes of metal rising on eight legs like some sort of monstrous spider.

The gnome fired at it, and I stared as the round glanced off the engine’s side with an echoing crack.

The smaller mech started to race backwards, but for all that it was likely faster, it had a ways to go, and it wasn’t designed to move in reverse.

With deceptive speed, the Sandpiercer scuttled over, huge legs working like massive pistons until, finally, one of them rose up and then came crashing down onto the gnomish mech.

I twisted my head away and shut off Rusty’s eye as a brilliant explosion lit up the night. The gnome mech’s core had gone off.

When I blinked the eye back on, it was all done. The Sandpiercer stood, one leg running through the gnome mech, with smoke pouring out around it as if it was some infernal creature summoned from the depths.

“Well, damn,” I said.

***

Chapter Fifty-Eight

“Now what?” I asked. We were still parked on the side of the dune, the long train splayed out below us, cars jackknifed across the entire thing. It was going to take a whole lot of effort to straighten it out.

That was if there were people able and willing to work on it. I could still make out flashes of colour, reds and greens and golds against the dunes. Either the gnomes were finishing off the last of the passengers, or people were fighting back.

“That would depend, I think, on whether or not we can help,” he said.

“Help, how?” I asked.

“How many gnomish mechs remain?”

“At least four,” I said. “Maybe more, but some or all of them are likely transports,” I said.

“Can you take them?”

“Easily,” I said. “The question is whether or not we should. I’m no hero, Clin. Risking myself unnecessarily isn’t how I managed to live as long as I have.”

“Aren’t you a hero?” Clin asked.

I turned in my seat, enough so that I could see his face by the slight glow of Rusty’s core. “What in tarnation gave you that idea?” I asked.

The elf’s eyebrows rose a fraction. “You save  me. You acted in Daggerwren when you didn’t need to, and you’re hesitating now. You know that leaving would be the pragmatic thing to do, but you’re also asking me to ask you to save those people down there.”

“I’m asking no such thing,” I said. Who did he think I was?

The bastard actually had the temerity to smile at me. Just a quirk of his lips, but about as much of a smile as I’d seen on him. “Charlie, do you think we could help those people down there? I think it would do wonders for our reputation, and having the favour of the Dreggar and whomever else wouldn’t want that train lost would perhaps help a lot. It’s also the right thing to do.”

I spun around and glared at nothing. “You’re a right ass, Mister Teast’wood,” I said rather tersely. I jammed my foot down, and started to climb back up to the top of the dune while making sure my rifle was loaded and ready.

I slowed near the top, then angled Rusty so that the mech’s head would be the first thing over the edge.

Turned out to be a decent idea. As I came around I could make out some reddish blobs below. Two mechs parked next to each other on the flats past the dune. Fat, six-legged mechs, each limb ending in tread-ed feet that would allow them to roll across bumpy terrain.

One of them had its sides lowered, and I could make out a decently sized compartment within, with seats down the middle and racks for weapons and equipment, all empty. The front of the mech was taller than the rest, with a turret set to one side and a dome of glass panels on the other.

So they didn’t need their pilots to jack in? That made it less of a mech and more of a plain utility vehicle of sorts.

A few orange blobs were moving about, gnomes checking on things, two of them were setting up a tent and at least one was sitting there smoking while the others worked.

Had they not heard the explosions and gunfire? Or maybe they figured that their side was fine. After all, they had proper warmechs attacking a civilian-filled train. There was no reason for any of them to worry.

I decided to give them one.

I tucked Rusty’s rifle against my shoulder and aimed down sights that Caroline had recently fixed.

Zeroing in on the mech nearest me, I hovered the centre of my crosshair over the centre of the mech, then moved to the front. “Clin,” I said.

“Yes?”

“Gnomish transport mechs. Turret on their... right side, smaller calib er , maybe 25  millimeter , maybe a bit smaller. Dome on the left for what I think is the pilot.”

“I think I’m familiar with the model, yes. What of it?”

“The central part looks like it’s nothing but empty space. There has to be some piping in there, but I’m not going to waste a shot on that. Where’s the core?”

“Ah, yes. The core should be near the centre. There’s a three-person crew for those. The gunner acts as loader as well, the pilot sits in the centre, and the communications officer is in that glass dome.”

“So the pilot’s jacked in?”

“Yes. The pilot’s seat is near the rear of the forward section; they can access the main cargo space fairly easily.”

I adjusted my aim. “So the core’s near the centre of the forward-most section?”

“Just about. We’re firing from above? If you have any sort of explosive round, maybe put it through the communication officer’s viewport. It’s armoured glass but it’s not that armoured. The gnomes use those for policing, mostly.”

My aim twitched down. “Figures if I just wreck the interior  that’ll take it out of action in either case.”

“Quite.”

I fired. A lingering red beam sliced across the night with a crack-boom.

When the magic circle faded from the air around Rusty I aimed back down-sights and took in the mech. It hadn’t exploded, but the dome was shattered and the gnomes puttering around it were damned-certain that they weren’t as safe as they figured.

I aimed up at the second mech and aimed at  the dome again, adjusting my aim a little to account for range  a little . My last shot looked to have got  a pinch low.

Another shot.

I grinned as I felt a tremor through Rusty’s feet, the ground kicking out as the mech-transport exploded beautifully.

“That’s better,” I said.

The few gnomes down there scattered, some of them having been blown away by the explosion, others just running off to gather their things.

I didn’t have the time or ammo to take them all out.

A few rushed to the first mech I shot, but by the looks of it, they couldn’t get the thing started. I saw them crawling around the cabin.

“Clin, how good are gnomes at field repairs?”

“Fairly? They have a mechanics cor e  that’s impressively well-trained. They know how to fix their own things, but little beyond that. It’s a very focused sort of education.”

“You’re sounding snootier  than usual,” I said as I glanced around. Didn’t need a shot in the back, and mono-focusing was a great way to get just that. Things seemed clear though.

“I respect the initiative, but their mechanics know how to replace parts and fix a few components and little beyond that. It’s disappointing,” he said.

“Could they fix that one mech there?”

“The core wasn’t hit?”

I shook my head. “Just a shot through that glass dome and into the interior. I figure it made a mess of things, but who knows?”

“No harm in taking another shot then,” he said.

I sniffed. “The harm is in using another round,” I said as I tucked the rifle up against Rusty’s shoulder. I overloaded the next shot. Not too much, but enough that when I pulled the trigger in the control glove and the round slammed into the transport mech’s cabin, it hit with a heavy bang and a burst of wild, uncontrolled magic.

Still no grand explosion, but not many mechs would be ready to operate after having an explosion go off in their cabin, and I was pretty sure some of the orange-y blobs I saw moving around in there were gnomes.

Moving in the past-tense sort of meaning. They were either dead or wishing they were. “Right, that’s that,” I said.

The gnomes still alive down there, and there were a good four or five of them, would only be a threat if they ran over to the train guns blazing, and they looked like communications people and their officers. Fat lot of good a chain of command would do when they couldn’t scream at anyone.

“Let’s move on,” I said.

“Certainly,” Clin replied.

I snorted. “How magnanimous of you. Ruling from your iron throne.”

“Are we calling this seat a throne now?” Clin asked. “I’ve seen thrones, I’ll have you know. They’re often uncomfortable as some sort of symbol about  power and responsibility, but I think this one in particular is taking it a bit far.”

“I can walk with more of a bounce if you want.”

“I’ll pass.”

I grinned as I turned back to the train. Two mechs were coming down the hill with a wash of sand behind them. “Looks like the rest of them have come out to play too. I suppose it would be kind of us to help, but someone had better start paying me per bullet  because this is getting expensive.”

“I’m certain that someone, somewhere, will be willing to sacrifice a few gold to replenish your stock.”

“We’ll see,” I said before locking Rusty’s legs in place to slide down the side of the dune. It was time to put an end to this little ambush, and then maybe I could get back to sleeping.

***

Nation

Calib er s

Effects

Gnomes

5mm, 25mm, 45mm

Lots of special magical effects. Flamethrowers and explosives

Orc

13mm, 18mm, 36mm, 47mm

Big bullets go brrr

Humans

6mm, 10mm, 12mm, 18mm, 25mm, 50mm

Few magical effects. Most ammo can be overloaded

Elves

6mm, 12mm, 18mm, 24mm, 30mm, 36mm

Heavy reliance on magical effects in nearly every round

Dwarves

14mm, 21mm, 28mm, 35mm, 42mm

Heavier powder loads. Every round is overloaded.

Mecha details:

The mech carries two weapons. A revolver strapped to one hip. A lever-action rifle that it carries over its back or in both hands.

I'd really like something that looks like its been hanging around a desert for a long time. A bit beaten up and rough.

I am very fond of the colour and design of this mecha:

https://64.media.tumblr.com/2f36e20716b44c7abe97f7a1e60e3e76/tumblr_pd91lpDCRu1qlxan5o1_500.jpg

Something a bit bigger at the torso would be nice, since the main character needs to fit within it. Maybe some bandoleers or pouches?

Minor details:

The right arm is covered in cloth over its mechanical bits

The left arm is a bit bigger than the right, and has more armour. It’s an arm torn off of another mecha, and not the original.

The main character:

Female bounty hunter, carries a revolver and a lever-action rifle.

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/a9/0b/ab/a90bab92ab1f92dc97fd0ac8167b04ae.jpg

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/b0/5c/d4/b05cd4f471cebd217dd794e220b2545d.jpg

The important notes are that she has a long coat, a hat, a revolver and long-rifle, and that she’s been in the desert for a long time. So, no exposed breasts or anything silly like that.

Clin

5mm derringer

Charlie

Lever action = 5 rounds  - Red light

6mm Revolver = 6 rounds - Gold light

Rusty

Revolver = 5  Golden light

25 Millimeter rounds

Lever action = 4   Red light

West Cinder Railway Union  WCRU