by Andrew Post
“Annie?” Kylie-Nae called. She was in the road below, hood up, shivering. “Coffee’s ready.”
Anoushka skied into the ditch on her heels and joined Kylie-Nae on the road. As they returned to the watchtower base, their open-roof shelter, Anoushka asked if Zuther had apologized.
“Yeah. He did.” She sighed a little steam cloud. “He cried, I cried. Felt like a fucking idiot, but I guess that’s how shit goes—even when we’re the ones holding the knife, the woman still somehow ends up cut.”
Not knowing what to say, how words could really make it any better, as they walked back to the cindered watchtower shelter, Anoushka put her arm over her friend’s shoulder, pulled her close.
They boiled some oats borrowed from Ruprecht’s horses and had a pot of flavorless porridge for breakfast. It’d been served steaming, but before anyone could take a first spoonful, it’d congealed to the viscosity of wood glue. They forced it down. After throwing brown slashes of the coffee’s dregs across the snow, they boarded, cranked up, and set off. The rope twanged, and the caravan followed.
Anoushka put the treads to her best guess of where the road was. “Forward, full speed.”
She checked the periscope, rear view. Keeping time as they skidded along the snow-swept road, Ruprecht sat atop his caravan, getting covered with heavy flakes. He’d brush them off, but within minutes, they’d steadily reclaim him.
With no guardrails out there, Anoushka watched him skid and slip all over the road, lashing side to side, the rope keeping him fastened to Joan. She thought about giving the yoke a thrash just to send him tumbling into the killing cold of the gulf. But she didn’t. She wouldn’t before she heard from the man himself that he was a traitor. She let herself grow mad at the thought of finding the truth, sprayed from his bloodied mouth. It kept her warm. It kept her going.
She triggered the lens to front view. With Teetee at his side, making a dotted line of paw prints in the snow, Peter canted along, one hand always resting on the scattergun’s stock.
They carried on. Asshole ahead, asshole behind.
* * *
They didn’t stop when they crossed where Matthew Coonan had been killed. Anoushka watched Kylie-Nae, forward, momentarily bow her head. Then Russell, and Zuther as well. Ruprecht’s ever-listening spiralphone didn’t get to hear any of their prayers for their fallen squaddie. But they were made, nonetheless.
* * *
Early the next morning, only an hour after they’d set out, Russell’s pedaling momentarily slowed. “Ye hear that?”
Zuther cleared his throat—he hadn’t spoken in days. “Hear what?”
“Tootin’.”
Moving as they were, Anoushka knew they wouldn’t be able to hear. “Braking,” she called out and began slowing them in careful pulses. It was a sloppy halt with the ice on the road and the brake plates cold.
Calling from behind with chattering teeth, Ruprecht shouted, “Why’d we stop?”
Anoushka had to pound a fist to break away the ice before the side slat would open. “Sir Gunnar, with luck.”
Ahead, Peter and Teetee turned around and came back.
They waited.
With a pointy ear held to the cold world outside Joan, she listened. Russell was right; past the howling winds, a locomotive’s steam whistle was sounding somewhere out there. Faint but unmistakable. The general atmosphere within Joan brightened as the others heard it too. They were on their way after all!
“Full speed ahead,” Anoushka shouted and released the brake.
They rumbled forward as the terrain sloped their path into winding switchbacks down to the cliff side. New Kambleburg came into sight as they descended under the worst of the clouds, protected by the high cliffs flanking either side of the road. The town awaited across the river, through the island’s forests, on the south side of the island. A haze of carrion birds circled.
The tank rumbled along the path, teetering near the long fall to the river dividing them from their destination. From this far away, not much of the town could be made out in detail. But the pillar of dark smoke rising from its square stood stark against the snowfall, marking it as boldly as a polished obsidian map pin.
Ahead, Peter hooked his charger into a tight turn onto the bridge. Right behind, with a quick tug on the steering yoke, Joan followed.
It was the stone-and-mortar type, intended for wheeled vehicles and horseback travelers, centuries old. It flanked a second, newer structure—a train trestle, with sturdy steel struts in a series of perfect metal arches. It’d be quite a sight to see the train coming across, where they’d terminate their long, harrowing journey from Yarnigrad—one that likely required workers to plod ahead, douse blowtorch flames across the tracks, and take picks to the bigger pieces of ice. Nevertheless, Anoushka was elated they’d made the effort, just as much as she was excited to get cracking on a plan with Sir Gunnar. If they had to be here, at least the charge would be shared.
The train, off in the blinding whiteness, squealed three long peals. Anoushka heard it as Here we come.
The waterfall that stood as the break in the gulf had frozen, like the cooled, hardening drippings of a colorless candle. Before it had been locked still, though, its misting had coated the stone bridge. In the warmer seasons, it would’ve been slick with mold, but now, it was an impenetrable sleeve of thick ice.
Peter’s horse skidded, and he reined back to a cautious trot. Anoushka, behind, decreased their speed accordingly—they’d tiptoe across. Slowed this way, at least, they could allow the train to catch up, and both teams could cross over onto the island at the same time—a terrifying sight for any orcs watching hidden in the bramble on the other side, for sure.
A yard, another. Anoushka tried ignoring the cracking sounds under Joan, telling herself it was only the ice and not the bridge itself threatening to give way. But, again, these bridges were mostly built a few Ages ago, long before anyone would think something as heavy as a tank would ever try crossing them . . .
Kylie-Nae, at the forward viewport, shot to her feet. “Red flag!”
Anoushka didn’t bother checking the periscope—if she hesitated in braking this close behind Peter, she might run him over. Momentarily forgetting her disdain for the man, she crushed the brake squeezer. On locked treads, they fishtailed. Joan’s flank bashed into the side of the bridge, killing their momentum.
Immediately behind, wood impacted metal. Ruprecht apparently hadn’t been as ready with the brake lever. Enduring his whining about his scuffed caravan would have to wait; Anoushka lowered the periscope, triggered the short-range lens. Ahead, nearly onto the other side, Peter wagged a red flag over his head with one arm, pointing with the other.
Spinning a finger wheel, Anoushka tried following his gauntleted finger. At first, she had no idea what had alarmed the berserker. But then she saw—on the trestle’s far side, inside a patch of small trees where the tracks met with the island proper—a group. Humans, elves, orcs—she couldn’t tell—camouflaged in white cloaks in the snow.
Three. Crouched around something. One was pointing ahead—toward the oncoming train, waving at the other two manning a wooden box. It had a T-shaped handle on top, and wires ran out of its side that connected to a bundle stuffed between the trestle’s joists and struts.
“Load, now!”
Train in Vain
The steam whistle sounded again—closer. Anoushka could only watch as it began over the trestle. The group waiting on the far end squatted together, ready to shove down the detonator’s plunger.
A scattergun cracked outside Joan. Anoushka, staring into the periscope, saw the group flinch. But they didn’t flee—Peter’s targets were too far out of range, and they knew it. They remained, dedicated to making this happen.
Kylie-Nae clanged the breach shut. “Primed!”
With no time to pack her ears with cotton balls, Anoushka squeezed the trigger, Joan’s riotous thunder freed. With ringing ears, she watched the cannonball plunge across the gap betwe
en the bridges, drawing a long corkscrewing path . . . only to bang against the tracks, ricocheting with a resounding clang to merge with the snow clouds.
Kylie-Nae shouted to Zuther, “Load us,” and snatched a rifle off the inside armor’s wall. Scrambling up the ladder, she opened fire, still halfway inside the tank.
Anoushka watched as one of the bombers’ heads lashed back, a pink asterisk appearing behind him. The two others, though startled, remained. They tried dragging the heavy detonator back into the brush to obscure themselves—but if they went too far, they’d break their connection to the bomb. Kylie-Nae’s next shot only rustled some railroad gravel.
The train chugged on—oblivious to what doom they were racing toward.
Peter boomed his scattergun again, this time overhead. With no time to reload, he snatched flags from his saddle quiver, one in each hand. Anything to signal the conductor.
The team of sooty-faced coal shovelers on their platform behind the engine leaned out around to fire six-guns up the track. Another bomber dropped—but the last stood his ground, hands on the plunger.
The conductor threw the brake, the wheels locked, throwing sparks over the sides of the trestle.
As each car in sequence passed by her view, Anoushka saw the soldiers within rushing around, crushing together, climbing over the man ahead, frantic, trying to move to the caboose, thinking they might jump to safety.
“Primed!” Zuther called.
Anoushka further deafened them all, but the cannonball went under the trestle this time, out over the icy gulf, skipping its glistening surface like a flung stone. This wasn’t Joan’s type of battlefield; she was best at medium range. Despite that, Anoushka shouted a curse and told Zuther to reload.
The train had nearly come to a stop—much later than the conductor wanted. The cars behind slammed together and the wheels began to reverse, the support arms battling the lingering velocity. But they’d ended their skid directly over the bomb.
Anoushka triggered a lens on her yoke, throwing her view close to the bomber—behind a snow-dappled branch of a cedar. Face obscured by a scarf, wearing dark-tinted goggles to protect against snow blindness and harsh wind, he raised his hands high—making a show of it—and slammed them down onto the detonator’s handle.
Snow was shaken from the trees.
Birds took flight.
A flash of red and black engulfed the train.
Rent girders began to bend, shrieking.
The train tipped. The men within the cars slammed against the glass—a few breaking free and falling ahead of the train.
Framed in one window, Anoushka saw a middle-aged soldier, silver hair with a perfect part. Sir Gunnar. He was looking right at her. Empty of fear, he began to raise his hand in what may’ve been a salute . . .
The line of cars drooped over the broken trestle’s edge. The engine began to list, teetering off the tracks and leading the long line of cars to plummet. They snapped from one another, slamming to the cold water in sequence. Those that’d remained fastened snarled together, squashing the ones below deeper into the swallowing river.
All lay still for a beat before a sharp squealing began—low, then rising into an ear-splitting skeeee before the steam engine’s tank ruptured.
Metal shards and bodies were sent higher than where the trestle had stood. The spinning barrage of things—dead soldiers, shards of the train, lumber and steel and glass—all hung there weightless, defying gravity for a breath, before returning to the river, raining hard.
“Might be another,” Russell shouted. “We need to get off this thing.”
Anoushka didn’t wait for Peter to move out of the way, for Kylie-Nae to drop back down, or to ask if Ruprecht’s caravan was still tied on behind them. She threw the brake free and rumbled them ahead, twisting the yoke left, then right, as they slid side to side, Joan’s flanks banging against the ice-coated bridge bulwarks, cracking the stone. Peter got onto the island. She checked the rear view: Ruprecht’s caravan was down a wheel, but it limped over.
Another blast came—flagstones and chunks of iron-hard ice went high, propelled by a fist of fire and leaping golden sparks. The stumps of the bridge on either end tore free of the island’s moorings, then from those of the mainland, and joined the shattered trestle and train in crashing down.
Anoushka threw the brake. Before Joan was at a complete halt, she cranked open the side armor, dropped into the crunchy snow, and ran to the cliff’s edge.
Through the steam of the exploded engine and the hanging oily smoke of the bombs—sulfur and gunpowder still thick in the air—she saw most of the cars above the water. If anyone had survived the fall, though, the engine getting pierced had finished what the bombers had started. Bodies flung away in the engine’s explosion lay on the frozen river several yards downstream, broken things. In pieces, most of them.
The river’s ice splintered and gave. The restarted deluge washed little of the mess away, apart from some of the bodies and burning debris. The cars were stirred, one rolled onto its side, spilling further dead from its broken windows. Beyond the river’s new rushing, it was silent. No screams for help, no agonized bawling of the maimed. As much as Anoushka was compelled, she knew there was little point in risking the descent to look for survivors. Still, she bellowed down into the ravine, asking if anyone could hear her.
No answer, save for the occasional thud of settling wreckage.
Fifteen cars. Fifteen packed cars.
So many lives.
All that potential help, gone. And now they were entirely cut off from the mainland as well. Trapped here, exactly where she didn’t want to go. With the tracks falling, so did the telegraph lines—their only way of summoning help.
She turned her back to the river, to the dead. Her squad was at Joan’s open side. Kylie-Nae had a hand over her chest. Russell shook his head. Zuther had his mouth open, apparently trying to make words that wouldn’t come. Ruprecht had dropped off his caravan’s high seat and stood, up to his knees in the snow, hat in his hands. Even Peter, after turning his horse around, had his helm’s grille open—his expression dire.
“Wait here,” she told Ruprecht, ducking midstep to get out her boot knife. With a slash, she cut free the rope between the tank and his caravan.
“Wait! What are you going to do? What’s the plan?”
Anoushka remained under the metal canopy of the tank’s raised flank, half in. “We kill all the orcs and reclaim NK in the name of the Ma’am.”
“Yes, but how? Not everything can be solved by banging your head against it.”
“Oh, no?” Anoushka said and drew the armor flank down between them. Taking her seat, she sat, buckled herself in, and had to attempt twice to get the words unhitched from her throat. To her pedalers, she shouted, “Get us cranked.”
“But . . .” Zuther started, turning in his seat, “maybe Ruprecht has a point. Maybe we should, you know, stop and think up some tactics, a plan of some kind.”
Kylie-Nae, forward, and Russell, turning around too, both gave Anoushka the same worried look.
Anoushka, brake in hand ready to release, listened to Ruprecht beyond the mithril plating shouting that running at the city’s gates was a bad idea.
“Crank up,” she said and, once they’d begun, added, “Joan doesn’t take turns well, and neither do I. There is only forward.”
The bell tolled. Anoushka released the brakes, all the way off. “Miss Browne, load the cannon—and when you get a moment, turn on our radio.”
They rumbled down the dirt path. Anoushka hoped when DJ Cliffy Cohen dropped the needle on his selection, it’d fit this occasion. A rallying ballad, full of drums and electric lute screams worthy of this moment.
As the woods deepened, it became too dark to see through the periscope. Kylie-Nae, continually running the rubber wipers from the forward glass, had to be Anoushka’s eyes. “A little left,” she’d say, then, “A little right.”
They passed dead Kambleburgians hanging from t
rees. City watch, townsfolk. Men, women. Row after row, stirring in the wind, shoulders dusted with snow and icicles reaching from their dangling feet.
The orcs hadn’t dispatched anyone from behind the city’s gates—they knew they had the advantage. Just as well. A full-on attack, as haphazardly headlong as possible, would be something tough to mount an organized defense against. “Who, on occasion, will prove to be the best fighter?” Anoushka’s former captain once asked. “The flailing, out-of-control drunkard dervish. Why? Because they have absolutely no tells, no discernible tactics. And a disciplined, practiced fighter who’s taken decades of their life to master reading an opponent won’t know what to do. Sure, the master will undoubtedly get in easy hits—but probably not without receiving at least a couple from the twirling, mad idiot first.”
Russell and Zuther kept them moving. Kylie-Nae lugged a cannonball to the breach, slotted it, threw in the powder sachet, and made the ball shiny with oil. Spinning the hatch’s lock wheel, she announced they were primed.
Their noise echoed about the woods.
Heads on pikes flanked the road.
“Gates, hundred yards,” Kylie-Nae called out.
Anoushka checked the periscope. There was enough light from a few braziers to either side of the reinforced doors that she could make out Peter and Teetee, standing to the side. The berserker, scattergun ready, scanned above for anyone on the crenellations. He’d come in after, using Joan as a shield.
“Full draw,” she shouted and Zuther and Russell wound the tension engine until it dinged. It rang again and again, with Anoushka having drawn the brake all the way off. “Keep on. We’re gonna go ramming speed.”
The treads beneath them rumbled and screeched as they tore at the ground. While probably rivaling only that of an old horse, Joan’s maximum speed was still damn impressive for something her size.
