Hometaker: A Steampunk Dystopian Action Adventure (The Great Iron War, Book 6)

by Dean F. Wilson

   So Nox pushed on, for as the battle burst to life in the plains below, the first Behemoth continued to burst through the rock and sand that buried it, taking its first fateful steps towards the fray. It could crush all, friend and foe, and keep on crushing. To Nox, this was at the top of his Wanted list.

  Mudro dived and rose from the hatch on the top of the carrier's cockpit, lobbing grenades out into the fracas, while the driver below piled up some more and pulled the pins on them one by one. His throw was good, and the explosions ripped the legs off Moving Castles, sending their crew plummeting, or tore holes in the sides of landships, or blew their turrets off completely.

   “We're running out,” the driver called from inside.

   Mudro lobbed the last few, then ducked inside again, closing the hatch behind him. It was dark inside, almost pitch. They had closed the viewports and sealed every door. It made Mudro wonder just how dark it was for Brooklyn in the back—if he was in the back. Now it almost did not matter that they were defending the Hometaker, or keeping up the ruse; it mattered that they kept the carrier intact for their own survival.

   “Is there anything else we can use?” the doctor asked.

   “Not really,” the driver replied. “I think we should save the bullets from our pistols. They're not going to do much against landships.”

   A sudden explosion shook the carrier.

   “I think we should get this moving again,” Mudro suggested.

   “It'll mean opening some viewports.”

   The bullets pinged off the surface, even the hatches of the viewports, as if the remind them that the metal desperately wanted to get inside.

   “No,” Mudro said, holding up his right index finger. “I think I can drive this blind.”

   They swapped seats, and Mudro turned on the engine. Then he set the gear to reverse, and backed up, and kept backing. They bumped off something, then heard the crashing of a Walking Castle, with the distinctive droning of its iron limbs. They struck the edge of something else, larger, like a landship, which might have been one of their own, and then the crunch of debris beneath the carrier, and then the smoothness of the open sand again. He kept on backing up, relying on Rommond's eagle eyes to spot them, and do everything possible to wall off the enemy from coming after them.

  * * *

  General Leadman let his fury guide him. He heard the Regime reports of the battle waging at the Dune Burrows, and so he turned his forces in that direction. General Ertalak's platoon went with him, and from the back of Ertalak's landship hung the body of Commander Trokus, his legs dragging across the ground. He would never see his family again, and they would not want to see him—not like this.

   “A bit grim, don't you think?” Leadman had asked Ertalak.

   “He's a traitor.”

   Some might say I am too, Leadman thought. He did not like that it bothered him. He was in too deep now. He had to go all the way.

   They had long lost track of Brooklyn and the Hometaker, but as they approached the Battle at the Dune Burrows, they spotted something fast approaching: another giant Resistance carrier, backing its way swiftly through the desert.

   “Another one?” Ertalak asked through the radio.

   “Three of them set out,” Leadman explained.

   “Does this one have a bomb?”

   “I doubt it.”

   “Then why are they driving away? I thought they had a weapon?”

   “You saw the weapon they have. It's a missile launcher.”

   “Then this one must be more valuable. They're trying to escape.”

   “Not this time.”

   Leadman drove straight towards it, and it continued its backwards flight, until they met with a clash, and the bulldozer blade scooped up the carrier and pushed it back, until it toppled over completely onto its roof.

   The landships circled around it, even as some of Rommond's force broke off from the main battle further ahead and made for their location. Leadman and Ertalak got out.

   “Open it up,” Ertalak ordered.

   Several soldiers set dynamite around the huge hatch door at the back, which blew it open with a boom and clang. When the dust fell, it was like déjà vu: it was just another empty carrier.

   Ertalak was furious. “What sort of game are they playing?”

   They blasted open one of the cockpit doors, dragging Mudro and the driver outside, kneeling them down in the circle of vehicles, like a sacrificial pit. Rommond's forces still advanced towards them, but there was still a great distance between them.

   “What's the meaning of all this?” Ertalak asked, gesturing to the empty carrier.

   “I'm as surprised as you,” Mudro said.

   “I doubt it,” the Regime general said. “You're the magician, aren't you?”

   “That's right,” Leadman confirmed.

   “This another of your tricks?”

   “We call it Thimblerig,” Mudro said with a smile. “You picked the wrong cup.”

   “No,” Ertalak replied. “You were in the wrong one.”

   He fired his pistol, and Mudro collapsed, leaving a growing pool of blood around his head.

   “Run,” Ertalak told the driver.

   So the driver ran, and the general shot him in the back.

   “Now,” he said, pulling a comb out of his coat pocket to tidy up his hair. “If we're going to play games, I see that Rommond is approaching. Let's have a Game of Generals then.”

  30 – HUNTING PORTALS

  “Mind taking it easy?” Jacob begged, as the medical truck leapt down deep descents and shot up steep hills, rocking and shaking the entire way. He held his hand to his aching head and tried to ignore his motion sickness.

   “Maybe we should slow down,” Whistler suggested, biting his lip and surveying the smuggler with worried eyes.

   “Keep this speed,” Lorelai ordered. “We need to … rescue Brooklyn.” It was odd to hear her barking orders in this context. She usually only gave them in an infirmary. Jacob thought that the Regime's strictness must have rubbed off on her.

   “We've got a navigator to the the Rift,” Jacob said, “but we could do with one to Brooklyn. Do we even know where he's supposed to be? Or where he was last seen?”

   “I know,” Lorelai said, stretching over him to turn on the radio. She kept turning the dial until she rested on a strange Regime channel, which sounded like a very boring broadcast on Regime dress code.

   “Maybe something Rommond would enjoy,” Jacob quipped.

   She shushed him and listened closely.

   “I know where he is,” she said at last. “He's coming south along the Canyon Coast.”

   “How do you know that?”

   “It's a codemasters channel. Everything they say is in code.”

   “And you know that, how?”

   “It's standard Regime training.”

   Jacob glanced around for someone else to confirm, but they all shrugged.

   “Fair enough. So, where's this Canyon Coast?”

   “Here,” she said. “Let me drive.”

   She took the driver seat and turned them around, heading north-east. They continued on for several miles, until they finally caught sight of a vehicle speeding through the desert.

   “That's it! That's him!” Jacob cried. He recognised the design from Brooklyn's schematic. He was just glad he had been trusted with seeing it, or they might not have known at all.

   Initially, Brooklyn steered away. He must have thought it was another Regime vehicle chasing him. Then Jacob and Whistler hung out of the windows, waving frantically, and he eventually stopped.

   The truck pulled up beside it and everyone bar the other nurses got out. Lorelai told them to go ahead, that the dying needed them, so they bundled up their belongings and headed off again, seeking out war's leftovers.

   The door of the Hometaker creaked open.


   “Finally,” Jacob said, running his hand across the buckled hull. “What took you so long?”

   “Hurry! Get inside!” Brooklyn replied. He reached out and grabbed Whistler's arm, pulling him into the cockpit. Jacob, Lorelai and Alex squeezed in after. It was a tight fit. Most of the vehicle was made up of the firing mechanism.

   “Cosy,” Jacob said as he rubbed shoulders with Lorelai. He felt someone rubbing off the other shoulder and turned to see Alex there, beaming.

   “Quite!” the archaeologist said. “Reminds me of the t-t-tombs of the Treasury ancestors. You'd find maybe five bodies like this, crammed into the same g-g-grave. Marvellous stuff, really.”

   Jacob raised an eyebrow. “Yeah. Marvellous.”

   “Now then,” Alex said, unfolding a gigantic map, and banging off Jacob several times in the process. He extended it out, blocking much of their view. “We should be … hmm.”

   “Hmm? That doesn't sound good.”

   “Ah, there we go,” Alex replied, unfolding the map even further. He pointed to a series of markings in a straight line across the desert in the east, culminating in the Dune Burrows. “This is where the Rift, for want of a better word, travels.”

   “Pity it wouldn't come to us,” Jacob remarked.

   “And here,” Alex continued, gesturing to a large empty space on the map, “is where we are … more or less.”

   “More or less?”

   “M-m-maybe more or maybe less. It's not an exact science.”

   “Doesn't sound like a science at all.”

   “Well, we're roughly here, give or take a f-f-few miles, and the Rift is currently here at the Dune Burrows. We've got a couple of hours left, I'd wager, before it starts to move again.”

   “Dune Burrows,” Brooklyn mused aloud. “I know there.”

   Alex smiled broadly. “Yes, by chance. What luck!”

   “Not chance. Not luck, no.”

   “Maybe it's fate,” Lorelai said. There was something about her that was a little odd. She seemed more steely than before, more like a soldier on a mission. Jacob supposed that saving people's lives was a mission of its own, and she was clearly dedicated to it.

   The Hometaker travelled along the quickest route to the Dune Burrows, forgoing the dusty concrete roads and dustier dirt tracks for the empty expanse of the desert, where the miles could not be counted by anyone who still had their sanity.

   “I see it,” Brooklyn said. “I see Rift in sky above.”

   Jacob peered out, glancing left and right until he caught the swirling mass of cloud and colour, of flashes of light and sudden outpourings of dust. It hung above the gigantic dunes with their immense constructions, and even from this vantage point it looked like it was too far up in the sky to pass through.

   “Let's hope these missiles work then,” Jacob said.

   “Yes,” Brooklyn replied. “Let us hope.”

   Jacob scrunched up his mouth. “I was kind of hoping you'd be a bit more certain than that.”

   “There is nothing certain now,” the tribesman said. “Except maybe death. Yes, big battle ahead. Death is certain.”

  31 – PRISON BREAK

  “What can you see?” Gregan asked.

   Tardo strained on the tips of his toes, but still could not quite reach the small barred window in his cell.

   “You're taller than me,” he replied.

   “Yeah, but I'm not the one with the window view.” Gregan rapped his knuckles off the wall.

   Tardo had to resort to jumping, and even then his eyes barely reached above the sill.

   “There's some kind of … commotion.”

   “We know that,” Gregan complained. “We can bloody hear the commotion!”

   “Something to do with the clock tower.”

   “Must be Rommond's doing. I heard some of the guards talking about odd supplies going back and forth there.”

   “They don't look like Rommond's people.”

   “What do they look like?”

   “Well … one of them is wearing an Iron Empire—uh, I mean Regime—uniform.”

   “Your pals, eh?”

   “No, definitely not. I'd be shot if I ever went back.”

   “Maybe you should go back then.”

   Tardo rolled his eyes. He sat down, cross-legged, and sighed. “Guess there's nothing we can do. The city's being overrun, and we're stuck in here.”

   “Well,” Gregan said, drawing out the word, and seeming like he was on two minds whether he should say anything else.

   “Well what?”

   “There might be a way out.”

   “There might be a way out?”

   “Yeah. But if I tell you this, you need to come back here and free me.”

   “Eh, okay.”

   “Dig around there in the corner.”

   “In the corner?”

   “Of your cell.”

   “There's nothing there.”

   “Trust me. Dig around a bit.”

   Tardo complied, feeling around the floor. “There's nothing—oh. Oh, wait.” He felt the edge of something. At any other time he would thought it an uneven tile on the floor, but if he dug his nails in he could feel it move. With some careful pushing and pressing, he managed to lift the edge of the secret hatch door.

   “Wow,” he said. Then he paused and looked at Gregan. “You knew this was here the whole time?”

   “Yeah.”

   “And you didn't tell me?”

   “I don't exactly like you, Tar.”

   “Tardo.”

   “Yeah, I just dug you a tunnel out of here. I'll call you what I want.”

   “Fair enough. Do you know where it leads?”

   “No,” Gregan said, “but the boy came through it, so presumably somewhere safe.”

   “Taberah's boy?”

   “The half-breed one.”

   “That's the one. Well, I mean—k”

   “Are you going to stay here yammering or are you going to escape?”

   “Oh, yes.”

   “Well, go then. And remember, you promised to come back for me.”

   “I will.”

   “You better.”

   “I will.”

   And then he disappeared into the tunnel, racing about in the dark frantically, feeling the walls as he went, and eventually ending up in the old butcher's shop. As he pushed open the hatch door, he heard voices in the other room.

   “I'll only be a minute,” one of them said. It sounded like Royce the butcher.

   There was a muffled response which Tardo could not make out, but it was clear they were annoyed.

   “Go on without me, you maggot, and I'll follow you down!” Royce barked back.

   Tardo clambered through the hatch as quickly and quietly as he could, only to find Royce wandering into the room.

   “Now where did I—” He halted, blinked at Tardo, then reached for a cleaver on the wall.

   Tardo glanced around, pulling the lid off a crate just in time to use it as a shield when Royce charged forward and sliced down at him with a shout. The cleaver embedded in the wood, and cut through just enough for Tardo to see the sharpened blade on the other side and shriek in response.

   “I've seen great big rats crawl out of there before,” Royce roared as he tried to pull the cleaver out, “and you're the biggest of them all!”

   He slammed his other hand on the back of the cleaver, as he often did for particularly tough cuts of meat, and the wood snapped in two. Tardo cast the parts away and reached out for anything at everything, firing everything at the butcher as he swung and swiped like crazy.

   “I, uh, I ...” was all Tardo could manage to utter as he pushed a crate out in front of him and danced around it with his cleaver-swinging partner.

   “I know who you are, Tardo,” Royce replied, “you traitorous little ra
t. There's posters of you. Wanted to start your own little resistance, eh? Wanted to be taken under the Hawk's wing?”

   Tardo made a dash for the door into the main room, and Royce hobbled after him. Tardo reached the front entrance and pulled at the knob, and twisted it, and pushed, and fiddled, but it was jammed.

   “It's locked, you idiot.”

   Royce's cleaver came down hard on the door, and Tardo dodged it just in time, but lost his footing in the process, landing on his back. He scurried away backwards, banging his head off the counter. He looked around, but saw nothing he could use as a weapon or a shield.

   Royce reefed his cleaver free of the door, pulling a large splinter of wood with it.

   “You know there's a shortage,” he said with a hint of glee. “Not many farms left in this world. The pigs and cattle are hard to come by.” He yanked the wood from his cleaver. “Sometimes I've got to use the rats.”

   Tardo closed his eyes and held his arms up above his face, bracing for the end.

   Then he heard a loud blast, Royce's winded grunt, the thud of his body off the floor, and the clatter of the cleaver that followed. Tardo sat up and prepared for his turn next. Then a head popped through the large hole left in the door, and it was Porridge with his golden curls and outrageous bonnet.

   “I got him!” Porridge cried ecstatically. “Oh, my word!”

   His head popped back out, and then the door burst open, and in strolled Gus, shotgun in hand. He stood over Royce's body. “Never did like the chap,” he said. “Used to overcharge me, he did.”

   He helped Tardo up. “Glad to find you here. We need the reinforcements.”

   “There's one more,” Tardo said, “back at the prison.”

   “We'll be passing that way.”

   “On our way to where?”

   “Where the action is!” Porridge exclaimed, waving his own shotgun around. “I'm locked and loaded, and I'm up for anything!”

    “And you?” Gus asked. “This is a do or die moment, this.”