He turned one of the knobs, and a compartment opened up in the guitar, releasing a thick smoke that spread out far around him. They continued to fire into the smoke, but he had already moved. By the time it cleared, they found him on the next level, driving a fist into a chin, whacking an ear with the side of another's gun, and kicking two of them through the rails.
He released the smoke again, and was gone, only to appear on the third level again, though this time they were waiting. They had their guns pointed at the stairwell, and he knew they would, so he did not go up that way. He climbed a ladder on the side, and yanked at people's ankles, dragging them down, before hauling himself up to finish the rest.
He cleared out the Behemoth, level by level, room by room, until it barely moved or fired on the battlefield. Then he busted through the cockpit door, spun his two pistols, and took out both drivers at the end of the spin.
“I'll drive,” he said, pushing one of the bodies out of its seat.
The controls looked complex, but he was a mechanic and a tinker. He knew how to make things, and if he could not make them, he could break them. With a few adjustments, he turned the Behemoth towards its twin, which still caused havoc for the dwindling Resistance forces below. Then he drove towards it, and watched as the two collided, and clung to his seat as the other Behemoth toppled over, rocking the earth and sending the sand fleeing.
Anyone might have thought this victory enough, but the Coilhunter knew his work was not over. He could still see the Iron Emperor on the overlook, and the Hometaker firing a missile at the Rift. The demon door was opening, and he thought all Hell might break loose.
He raced back out into the battle, leaping off a platform into the sand, tumbling in place, his guitar strumming off the grains. An Oxen clan biker drove slowly past, and Nox kicked him from his seat, before hopping on instead. It was not nice, he knew, but those bikers hated him anyway.
He drove on, until he passed by the toppled monowheel, and decided he would upgrade. He abandoned the bike and pulled the monowheel up. He had barely sat down when his eyes caught a mass forming at the top of the dunes.
To his great shock, these were not mere reinforcements for the Regime. They came without weapons, for these were not soldiers. They were citizens.
There were hundreds of them, and it seemed that there were hundreds more trekking across the desert to defend their Iron Empire. They were fanatics, walking with puppeteered feet, looking out with vacant eyes, never thinking, only casting themselves like bullets into the battle.
It was a desperate ploy, and Nox thought the Iron Emperor must have feared that victory was slipping from his grasp. But it was a dangerous ploy too, for there was an unwritten code of conduct in war that kept citizens relatively safe from it all. The Regime was breaking this, and as Nox watched the hordes of hapless people come down the dunes, he thought the Resistance might haver to break it too.
35 – SPRINT
The Coilhunter zipped across the sand in his monowheel, dodging debris, zig-zagging between people. It tilted down forty-five degrees, until he turned sharply again and it tilted towards the other side. At times it was almost enough for someone to reach out and grab him.
The hordes continued to flood the sandy plain, and it became more difficult to evade them, to worm up that dune like the sand snakes did. He could see the Iron Emperor's roofless warwagon cruising towards the portal, and he knew he had to stop him. That was one bounty worth more than all the others.
He accelerated, and now he started to clip people as he went. The hull tilted right into the path of the crowd, striking some of them, knocking some out, sending others tumbling. It was not intended, but it did not matter. A few bruises were worth this catch, this kill.
The screams of anger and hate from the crowd were deafening. The Iron Emperor had stirred them up real good. He had a way with people. He had a spell on them. It would be difficult to break. Nox thought he might have to break their leader's neck to do it.
He saw the warwagon sailing on. It almost seemed slow in comparison to his monowheel's dreadful dash, as if the Iron Emperor had slowed down deliberately, as if he knew he could not be caught. Nox knew that was just paranoia, a trick of the mind, but he was also starting to think that maybe the last part was true.
As he flew past, some of the maddened people clawed at him. It was like racing through a forest, with branches whipping at your face. Not that there were any forests left in Altadas. The Iron Emperor was to blame for that too. But the forest of hands and nails tore at the Coilhunter, until he found that he was swimming in people, all grabbing at him, hanging onto him, pulling out of him.
The monowheel slowed.
No, he thought. I need speed!
But it slowed again. The weight of all the people dragging out of his coat, tearing at his mask, hanging on to each other, climbing over one another, was too much for the vehicle. It coughed and sputtered steam and smoke, and even that was muffled as people scaled their bodies on the exhaust and engine.
Nox felt several hands grabbing his mask, and saw fingers entering his blurring vision, but through all of this he could see the Iron Emperor standing up in his warwagon and turning to look at the scene below. He was haloed by the portal, a black silhouette of majesty and might surveying the peasants in the golden fields, and smiling as he left them to it.
Then Nox saw the sky, and he realised he was tumbling from his seat. The people hauled him from his vessel, dragging him down the dune, pulling him into the melee of hands and fists and frenzied faces. He was buried beneath them, like Taberah was buried deep beneath the sand, and the monowheel teetered on slowly of its own accord, without driver or passenger, stuttering as the steam began to fizzle out.
He might have been consumed by the crowd, were it not for the Iron Guard, for these new allies came to his rescue, dragging the frantic citizens one by one, casting them aside, and repeating it all again when they came back. Yet there were many fanatics on the dune, and the Coilhunter could not get away from them to pursue the Iron Emperor through the Rift.
* * *
Jacob saw the battle of bodies on the dune, and the empty monowheel, and Lorelai driving the Hometaker through the portal after the Iron Emperor. He charged towards the vehicle, leaping over a fallen zealot who tried to grab him, and hurled himself into the driving seat. He pushed down hard on the accelerator, and that dying steam came back to life.
The monowheel jolted forward, and then, to Jacob's surprise, a figure leapt at him, landing in the bucket behind him. He thought it was another manic servant of the Regime, ready to claw at him and send him tumbling just like Nox, until he heard the voice that went with it.
“Quick!” Whistler said. “They're getting away!”
Jacob stomped harder, steered faster, and ducked lower. The monowheel belched out a black cloud of smoke from the exhaust and spurred on quicker than before, as if willpower, not diesel, was its fuel.
The dune was steep, and the climb was hard, but the monowheel was gaining steam by the second. The more Jacob pushed the engine, the more it seemed to give. He did not know how Nox had made it, but he knew how to drive it, and he darted through the obstacles that sprang up periodically to halt his progress towards the Rift.
First there were stragglers from the crowd, who leapt from the top of the dune towards the approaching vehicle, rolling down towards it like boulders. Many of these were easy to dodge, but a few leapt directly at the monowheel, forcing Jacob to turn sharply left or right. What happened to these poor souls was left for Whistler to see, and he did not look behind.
Then the landships pulled out onto the dune. They parked in place, everything but their turrets, which slowly creaked around, following the fleeting black wheel that climbed the steep ascent. Jacob dived between those vehicles, skidding on sharp turns, jumping a little as they fired, smiling a lot as the shells struck the other landships across the way.
“It's closing!” Whistler shrieked.
Jacob shook his head.
Not today, he thought. You don't get away that easily.
He gave it all he had, and it seemed the monowheel gave a little more. It span up the last stretch of sand, and, just as the portal seemed to flicker as it threatened to sputter out, he saw the edge of his vessel passing through. He gasped and held his breath.
There was a moment where it felt like everything froze, and even his thinking slowed. All he saw was the purple haze of the portal. He wondered for a moment if that was it, if that was where the marans lived, in some magenta void.
Then he felt a sudden jolt, and he opened his eyes, and gasped again, from both the sight and the bitter cold. It was another world all right, completely covered in ice and snow.
36 – THE COLD BLANKET
Mes Marana. They were told it was like Hell. After all, that was where the demons came from. But if this was Hell, it had frozen over.
The cold was like nothing else, and it was heightened by them coming from the immense heat of Altadas. In an older time, before the Harvest, before the invasion, this world had all but dried up. Its cracked, dusty remains had blown through the Rift into Altadas, littering its once lush soil with that now too familiar red sand. By contrast, Mes Marana was a paradise. A winter paradise.
“Here, put this on,” Jacob said, taking the coat from the Coilhunter's box of second-hand goods.
“I'm not wearing that,” Whistler protested. “Those are dead people's clothes.”
“If you don't wear this, you'll be joining them. You could ask their permission then, but I don't think it'd be much use.”
Whistler would have kept up his petulance if the cold was not so persistent. Between every word and thought, it reminded them that it was there, slowly killing them. It seemed that the evil sun had a twin, and it was just as evil.
They tried to get the monowheel to work in the snow, but the engine would not start. What little sputters it gave only propelled the vehicle a metre or two, before it gave up the ghost again. Jacob found he was expending more effort trying to get it working than he would if they just walked instead. He did not like the idea of walking, but he did not like the idea of freezing here instead.
They journeyed for what was likely an hour, maybe two. The lack of features in this barren white landscape made it difficult to get a sense of time. There was an odd sensation in the air, and it was not just the frosty breeze.
In time, they had to rest, and found a small outcropping to nestle under, shielding them from the worst of the wind. Jacob managed to start a fire in one of the drier spots, and they huddled around, shivering. What little warmth the flames gave to part of them only seemed to highlight the cold in the other parts.
“And I thought the heat was bad,” Whistler complained, his teeth chattering.
“Yeah, I kind of forgot harsh winters,” Jacob replied. “You wonder how they adapted.”
“What do you mean?”
“How they went from this to our world.”
“But wasn't ours, like … normal then?”
Jacob raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, I suppose it was.”
“The sand came through the portal,” Whistler said, looking away wistfully like he might have done when he was told about all of this. “So maybe this world was hot at first, until they abandoned it. The heat came with them, with the sand.”
Jacob shrugged.
“You were there!” Whistler cried.
“Yeah, I wasn't that interested. Kind of just seemed like a big sandstorm to me. We always had sand near Blackout. I was kind of used to the desert. It was pretty much life as usual for me.”
“With them invading?”
“Well, it didn't seem like an invasion, not in Blackout. It was quite a while before the war erupted properly in the east, and even then Blackout was largely immune for the first few years.”
“Then it fell to them.”
“Then it fell,” Jacob said, “and hell, I got used to that too.”
“You'd get good work in the Treasury, you know.”
Jacob smiled. “Cheeky.”
There was a moment where they shared smiles, meek smiles that were punctured by the probing cold.
“Thanks for not leaving me behind back there,” Jacob said, rubbing a knuckle across the gash on his forehead. The cold helped a lot with the pain, but he knew it would only help for so long.
“No problem,” Whistler replied, beaming.
“I mean, not just back there, but … you know, from the start. When I got thrown into the Hold, it was just another day for me, just another job gone wrong. The worst of it, I thought, was that I wasn't going to get paid. Then I met you, and hey, my life changed a lot, and you know, I think it changed for the better.”
Whistler blushed.
“I mean it though,” Jacob said. “Everything was life as usual for me, even when the world changed, even when the war started. Because I guess nothing really meant anything to me. You got a way of changing people, kid. So, I guess, yeah … thanks, friend.”
He laughed it off, feeling quite embarrassed by it all. Maybe he could blame the weather. He usually needed a full bottle of whiskey for this kind of thing, and even then he did not think he would be this mushy. He hated to think it, but he wondered if part of it was because he did not expect they would both see it through to the end. He knew he could not say goodbye, but at least he could be grateful for the time they had.
Whistler clearly did not know how to respond. He seemed just as embarrassed by it all as he was, but at least he was the one getting all the praise.
“I think we're probably even,” he said eventually.
“Even?”
“Well, you save me, and I save you.”
Jacob chuckled. “Hey, that's a good arrangement. I won't knock it.”
“Will it continue after this is all over?” the boy asked. He had asked that, in various ways, before. Jacob always gave him reassuring words, but he seemed he always doubted them. Everyone else left. Why would he stay?
“If there's an after,” Jacob said. “Hey, I'm sure I'll always need saving.”
Whistler smiled.
Then the cold set in again, and they almost hugged the fire. They faded off into a fitful sleep, woken periodically by the probing fingers of the storm. After a few hours, the fire faded completely, and Jacob could no longer get back asleep. Whistler dozed still, and Jacob did not want to wake him, but he knew they only had so long to live there, and he was damned if he was going to let the Iron Emperor escape. He just hoped he was not damned either way.
37 – THE BATTLE OF FLESH AND BLOOD
In the clock tower of Blackout, the Regime forces began their siege. The doors were well-sealed, but Camholt, who had gone by the identity of an apprentice logger for the last number of years, brought a self-made battering ram with an iron tip, and handles for four people to hold it.
The main door went down with ease. It was an old, wooden one, badly weathered, and the Resistance did not replace it to avoid drawing too much attention to the building. They did not expect the attention it was getting now.
* * *
Inside the highest room, Codex Carter continued to work on the radio equipment. He knew a bit about this, but did not have Tardo's expertise. He was not entirely sure it would be ready in time. He hated the idea that he would be blamed for it.
Then he heard the battering downstairs, and he began to think that maybe he would not have to worry for long. He checked the reinforced door leading to the main room. It was locked, but he knew it could not stand forever. He already heard the straining of the other doors downstairs.
* * *
Gus crouched behind a trader's cart within range of the clock tower. He had to pull t
he hat off Porridge, because it stood up over
“My armour!” Porridge half-whispered, half-shrieked.
“Your armour? You'll get yourself killed with that!”
He glanced over to where Tardo and Gregan prepared for their assault. It was all about timing. Gus just was not sure he had the right people with him for that. He tried to signal, but they looked dumbfounded. He felt increasingly like he should have poured himself a drink before all this began.
Then Gregan leapt out of his cover and fired at the two Regime soldiers guarding the battered and broken door of the clock tower. Tardo poked his head out to fire, but both of them missed. Gregan would have been riddled with bullets were it not for Gus and Porridge, who raced out just in time to blast the guards.
“That was a close one,” Gregan said.
“It was only close because you rushed out.”
“We can't wait around here forever.”
“Guys,” Tardo whispered, “someone's coming.”
They heard the thunder of footsteps down the spiral staircase that wound its way inside the clock tower. Gus and his newfound team stood by the door, guns at the ready, and waited for the enemy to walk right into the barrels of their guns.
But they did not come.
Gus was about to speak when he heard a clang, and saw a grenade bouncing out to greet them. He ran and dived, and the others fled as well, before the ground quaked, and whatever was left of the door was obliterated into even smaller splinters.
The cloud of dust hid the soldier that emerged, and Gus could not hear his footsteps with the ringing in his ears. But he saw them approach, and he saw that his shotgun was out of reach. He turned to face his attacker, vowing he would not die with his back turned, and he saw the barrel, and the Regime uniform, and what he thought looked like the face of Hamhart, the rival innkeeper.
Hometaker: A Steampunk Dystopian Action Adventure (The Great Iron War, Book 6) Page 15
