Agatha H and the Siege of Mechanicsburg

by Phil Foglio

  He was cut off by Dimo burying an elbow in his gut. “Qviet, hyu.”

  Higgs frowned. “What’s going on, now?” He glanced at Violetta, who looked away with a smile. Higgs sighed. “Ah. She’s out of bed again, running around fighting everything she sees.”

  “Hyu didn’t hear it from me,” Ognian moaned from the ground.

  Dimo smiled. “Goot ting she din’ see hyu, hey?” He shrugged. “But dot’s hokay, she’s a beeg gurl. Iffen she gets herself keeled, mebbe she’ll learn nots to do dot again, jah?”

  The only sign Higgs gave of being agitated was from the smoke coming from his pipe. “Yeah, you’d’ve thought,” he muttered. “It’s not like I care, but . . . but she’s supposed to be training the Heterodyne, so I don’t like it.”

  Violetta rubbed her nose. “I thought you worked for Wulfenbach.”

  Higgs stared at her, and his pipe moved back and forth from one side of his mouth to the other. “Yes. Well, Master Gil likes the Heterodyne girl, right? So he’ll be . . . he’ll be super upset if Miss Zeetha gets hurt and can’t train her.”

  Maxim slapped his back. “Ho! If dot’s all hyu’z vorried about, dere’s lotsa pipple dot ken train Miss Agatha!”

  Higgs was so annoyed that he took his pipe from his mouth. “No! Miss Zeetha is special!” Everyone looked at him encouragingly. “I mean . . . I . . . ”

  Ognian’s hand dropped heavily onto Higgs’s shoulder, cutting him off in mid-burble. For once the Jäger’s face was completely serious. “Hey, keed.” Higgs’s jaw shut with a snap. “Ve vaz havink fun tryink to wind hyu op. But now? Just shot op and go ketch her.” Higgs stared at him blankly, blew out a deep breath, nodded once, and took off at a quick amble.

  Maxim gave Ognian a punch on the arm. “Az alvays, hy iz in awe uf hyu mastery uf de art of de romance.”

  Ognian gave a nonchalant shrug. “Dot’s vhy hy gots descendants!”

  A half a block away, Zeetha dropped off of a roof, rolled to her feet, and then paused. “Hold on,” she addressed the air. “Why am I running away? I am Zeetha, daughter of Chump!148 Should I—a royal princess of Skifander—cower in my bed while my friends fight for their lives? Never!

  “And who does he think he is, anyway? I’m going to go back there—right now—and tell him what I think of his impertinent interference!” She glanced out of a shattered window and saw the object of her annoyance sauntering down the middle of an otherwise deserted street. The sight of him caused a wave of emotion to pass through her. “Oh, just look at him,” she muttered. “Coming after me like he has some kind of . . . of right to tell me—”

  From a pool of shadow, a large creature of indeterminate pedigree leapt towards the seemingly oblivious man. Just as it was about to strike, Higgs snagged it out of the air, slammed it to the pavement, and kicked it in the mouth hard enough to break several teeth. With a muttered apology, the creature slunk back into the shadows.

  Zeetha realized she was squealing quickly enough that she was able to drop from sight before Higgs’s head swung up towards the sound. Zeetha shivered in what she realized was delight, and then bit her knuckle. “But is he coming after me?” she wondered aloud.

  “Oh my, yes,” the Castle assured her. “I believe he rather likes you, actually. Astonishing.”

  “You again,” Zeetha said with a sigh.

  “Me again!” There was a note of dark amusement in the Castle’s voice that Zeetha found disturbing. “He doesn’t want to admit it, you know. He’s always been a stubborn one.”

  Zeetha frowned. “But how would you . . . ” An idea occurred to her. “Was he born here? In Mechanicsburg? Or is it stranger than that?”

  “Hm . . . Perhaps I should tell you. But first, let us establish what your interest is in the Lady Heterodyne.”

  “She is my friend. She saved me from despair, here in this strange land.”149

  “And you train her to fight. Why?”

  Zeetha stepped behind a wall as a wounded aeroape crashed to the ground. “You have to ask? Look at what’s already happened to her. She’s a spark and your Heterodyne. She’s going to need to be strong. She’ll need to know how to fight and when not to.”

  “So . . . you hope to make her into a fine . . . hero?”

  “A what? Don’t be stupid! She’ll have enough to do just keeping this place in line. All I’m trying to do is keep her alive!”

  “I see.” The Castle sounded disappointed. “Well then, I will not tell you about Mister Higgs, after all.”

  Zeetha pouted. “What? But . . . ”

  “Because if I did, he’d have to kill you, and he wouldn’t like that. No, it would be amusing, but I must consider the best interests of the family.”

  “Oh.”

  “Even worse,” the Castle muttered, “he would be annoyed with me.”

  The implications of what Zeetha was hearing caused her to shiver. “Couldn’t you just tell me something? I mean, maybe just enough so he’d only have to wound me a little?”

  A wave of bone-chilling laughter swirled around her. “Why, I’m beginning to like you too. You’re fun.” The Castle paused. “I know, would you like to see him fight? I mean, really fight?”

  Zeetha’s breath caught. “Oh! Oh yeah!”

  “Ha-ha, that a girl! Very well then, everything is in place and is finally in working order . . . You just find yourself a good seat and watch this!”

  Zeetha braced herself, but nothing happened. After several seconds, she sighed, and sat on a low parapet—and was knocked to the ground when the wall started shivering. She bounced to her feet and realized the ground was moving. A look around assured her the nearby buildings were vibrating as well, and the people she saw on the streets were either sprawled on the ground or clutching large objects for dear life. She turned to look at the Castle, and saw it erupt with colored lights and gouts of steam that vented hundreds of meters into the sky above.

  She stared, entranced, and then blinked. It almost appeared that . . . Another look and she saw she had not been mistaken. One of the toppled towers that had been leaning drunkenly against another, was slowly moving. She saw now that all of them were. The shattered walls were being repaired block by block. Towers were defying gravity and straightening back upright. Roof tiles were flowing back into place. The dust and the noise increased as everything seemed to move at once. And then, with a final clunk, Castle Heterodyne stood tall and seemingly undamaged before her.

  Zeetha’s breath caught and then she squinted. “The windows are still broken,” she observed.

  “Can’t do windows,” the Castle grated. It actually sounded like it was under stress.150 There was a sudden, rising keening noise known to many in the empire as the sound preceding a Wulfenbach aerial bombardment. It was followed by an explosion from atop one of the newly restored towers. Zeetha looked upwards. A Wulfenbach fleet soared overhead. More whistling, and more explosions hammered away at the Castle. All over the surface of the Castle, hundreds of doors and hatches flew open. Before Zeetha’s startled eyes, a dark cloud poured forth and angrily spiraled upwards. If she had been closer, she would have seen that this consisted of an innumerable swarm of winged clanks.

  Aboard the lead spotter craft, the forward watch was able to see—all too clearly—the clanks through his binoculars as the swarm rose towards them. “Com,” he roared, “send an urgent alert on all bands! All Wulfenbach ships! Prepare for an attack on your six! Prepare for impact! Repeat: Prepare for—!” Which was when the first wave hit his ship. They smashed through the relatively thin balloon hide and began wreaking havoc amidst the gas cells. The great observation window shattered as a squat clank burst through and raked the nearby instruments with its rusty steel claws. “Thank you for shopping in Mechanicsburg,” it cheerfully announced.151

  “Disengage,” the spotter shouted. “All airships are to disengage!”

  “Oh no,” the clank chuckled in what anyone below would have recognized as the voice of the Castle. “You had your chance.” It
ripped the radio free and tossed it out through the window. “Now you get to see why no one should attack the Heterodyne.” It snagged the spotter by his flight jacket and dragged him out into the sky. “You’re an observer, yes? Then I shall keep you alive, so you can relate exactly what it is you’ll see.”152

  And this is some of what he saw:

  Gunner First Class Lindar DuQuesne peered upwards. The flotilla of airships that hovered protectively overhead appeared to be under attack by swarms of midges. His unit of mobile artillery was positioned at the base of a small hillock, one of many that encircled the town. The hilltops had been requisitioned by the various commanders who were coordinating the hodge-podge of empire units attacking Mechanicsburg. His unit was on picket duty. He shaded his brow with a hand. “What in crackthunder is going on up there?” he muttered.

  “Hoy!” His captain bellowed from directly behind him. “You worry about your own gun!”

  Lindar snapped to attention so fast that he almost dislocated his shoulders. “Yessir, Captain, sir!”

  The captain clapped a hand on his shoulder and joined him in looking upwards. “But I gotta say,” he confided to Lindar, “I been watchin’ them cloud jockeys sail clean over the real fighting for twenty years. Now they’re doin’ the fightin’, and we’re untouched. Can’t say I mind that.” He looked at Lindar, who had the reputation amongst the men of being a bit of an intellectual. “Say, ain’t there some kind of fancy-pants word for that? You know, for somebody else doin’ worse’n us?”

  Behind the sergeant, the hillock rumbled and a door opened, revealing a tall, moss-encrusted clank reminiscent of a man in armor. Its eyes began to glow, and with a hiss, it drew forth a shining steel blade easily three meters long and strode towards them. Lindar frantically tried to bring his cannonette to bear on the advancing figure. The word you want, he thought, is “unnatural.”

  Everywhere buried giants were clawing their way to the surface. The great wall that encircled the town shivered. All along its length, enormous metal doors swung aside and armored colossi lurched forward. The first thing they did was to stride up to the dropwalls that girt the town and, with a coordinated effort, begin pushing them back, snowplowing the empire troops and ordinance clustered about their foundations.

  One of the imperial generals watching the scene lowered his spyglass and snarled in confusion, “By Janus, what are those things doing? Whose side are they on?” By this time, the giants had pushed the dropwalls easily a hundred meters away from the walls of the city.

  The attacking forces accepted this gift with indifference and began to flow into the ever-widening gaps.

  “Don’t attack the giants until they attack you,” the general ordered. He snapped the spyglass closed. “Mechanics,”153 he said with a sneer. “Bunch of loonies. Always have been.” A series of thundering booms had him swinging the glass back up to his eye. On the plain before him, he saw the colossi tipping the last of the dropwalls forward. As they crashed to the ground, he shook his head. “First they use our own dropwalls against us, then they knock them down? Overconfident fools. This place may have been an impregnable fortress back in the old days, but times have changed. Still, all the better for us . . . ”

  Then the ground began to shudder. With surprising speed, the colossi pivoted in place, and strode quickly back to their wall niches, settling back just as the first spikes broke through the soil. Hundreds of troops and associated armaments danced about, trying to avoid the sharp spines appearing around them.

  The general saw there was now a ring almost completely surrounding the town, out to almost fifty meters. He snorted. “Do they think we’re still just using horses and infantry?” He frowned as he saw several units attempting to retreat from the prickly ground. He pointed them out to his adjunct. “Get those soldier’s names,” he growled.

  Then the retreating soldiers were blocked as the spikes shot upwards, elongating into thick, spike-encrusted branches that trapped men and machinery alike. The branches began to hoist the entrapped figures into the air along with their weapons, clanks, animals, and tanks. Still, the great thorns grew upwards, their bases were now over two meters thick and they began to weave an impenetrable wall of thorns around the town. No one within the thicket managed to escape.

  Aboard Castle Wulfenbach, explosions rocked the great airship as, for the second time, it desperately tried to escape the range of Mechanicsburg’s defenses. We should not have come back here, Klaus swore to himself. Again I have underestimated her. “Status,” he roared.

  “At least one third of the fleet is lost or too damaged to fight, Herr Baron!”

  “The smoke is getting worse and there is something weird about it. It appears to be interfering with our instruments! The ships we still have aloft are flying blind!”

  “Aye, the town has awakened the Fog Merchants! I hadst thought them but a tale to frighten children,154 but real they be, and our projectiles shall prove useless!”

  “The screamer guns panicked the remainders of our cavalry and mounted units. The Oliphants are still running.”

  “The Mechanized Cavalry was swallowed by some kind of quicksand. They couldn’t avoid it—it was like it was following them!”

  Klaus ran a hand through his hair. “The Subterranean Fleet?”

  “According to their radio traffic, they’re in the middle of a battle with giant ants.”

  Klaus sighed. Shrinker mines. “Very well then, it appears there is only one thing left to do.” He took a deep breath and when he swung back, was once again in control. “Send a first priority message to all units in the field. I want a full retreat. Abandon the town. Disengage from all Mechanicsburg forces.”

  “What? Craven, ignoble retreat?”

  “All the way back to Balen’s Gap.”

  “We’re abandoning the Valley of the Heterodynes? But this is madness, Herr Baron! Madness, I say!”

  “It is only temporary. Boris, I will want a list of all of the units still trapped inside Mechanicsburg.”

  “Oh, that’s easy, Herr Baron, soon there shouldn’t be any.”

  Klaus stopped. “What? But the thorn wall . . . ”

  “There is still an open gap before the southern gates, and it appears that all of our troops still in the city are being herded towards them. The ones already leaving are doing so unmolested.”

  “AND SHE COULD HAVE CRUSHED THEM ALL,” Doktor Chouté cried. “TRULY WE ARE WITNESSING THE BIZARRE, TWISTED KINDNESS OF THE NEWLY FLEDGED DARK PRINCESS OF DOOM!”

  “Ah, it is possible they are setting the stage for future diplomacy.”

  “No.” Klaus dismissed this possibility. “This is Mechanicsburg. Nothing is ever as it seems, and everything is a sick joke!” He paused, and a look of frustration crossed his face. “Still . . . I must admit that the point of this particular joke eludes me.”

  Meanwhile, down in Mechanicsburg, Airshipman Third Class Axel Higgs shuffled to a stop and stared as the thorn hedge appeared over the top of the encircling wall, the occasional bit of ordinance or soldier lodged within. “Been a while.” He made a slow circle in place and realized— “Huh. They left a gap in it. Wonder why?”

  At that moment, a mob of retreating Wulfenbach troops roared around several corners and headed his way. A tall general standing atop a mechanical water buffalo waved his staff frantically. “Retreat,” he roared, his voice artificially amplified so that it boomed loud enough to be heard over the tumult. “Retreat towards the gap!” Without pause, Higgs pivoted smoothly and began running towards the aforementioned gap as well.

  “Helllooo ‘Mister Higgs’ ”, the Castle called from a recessed drain.

  “Ah,” Higgs grunted. “Should’ve known.”

  “Oh, don’t be like that,” a drain spout whispered. “Look what I’ve brought you.”

  The shouts of the crowd behind him grew louder. “Nice.”

  “Indeed it is. Now go ahead and fight them. Fight them!”

  “Don’t be stupid. Why would I
do that? I’m one of them, remember? Just another Wulfenbach man joining in the retreat.”

  “Tch. You are nothing of the sort. Go on, toss a few of them around.”

  “As if I’d blow my cover just so that you could have some pointless mischief.” A thought hit him and he stumbled and caught himself. “No. Wait . . . There’s always a point, isn’t there? What are you up to, you malevolent shed?”

  “Why, I have a desire to see you fight! It’s always so inspiring!”

  “Why would you . . . ” Higgs sighed. “Oh. She’s watching, isn’t she?”

  “Hee-hee . . . Maybe!”

  “Knew she wouldn’t stay in bed.”

  “Why should a wild young lady like her listen to you? Ah, but if you showed her something that she respected . . . if you fought . . . even just a few of them, why, I believe she’d see a completely new and intriguing side of you.”

  “Not listening!”

  By now the Castle had to actually shout to be heard over the sounds of the approaching mob. “You’ll be trampled if you don’t.”

  Higgs shrugged. “Been trampled before.” Indeed, he heard the sound of some large mechanical creature growing louder from directly behind him. He realized the shadow he saw enveloping his own meant it was directly upon him. He braced himself . . . but was still shocked when a hand shot down, snagged the back of his jacket and hauled him up and aboard the charging mechanism. “Whoo-hoo,” Zeetha sang out. “Come on, flyboy! Time to leave Crazy Town!”

  Even dazed, Higgs noted how effortlessly she pulled him atop the shuddering automaton’s broad back. The only other thing there was a snug metal howdah-like structure. Its metal door swinging wildly as the machine galloped along. “Sorry about all this,” Zeetha said, as she deposited him by her side.

  Higgs looked out at the mass of escaping military. “These guys? How is this your fault?”

  “Well, the Castle asked if I wanted to see you fight.”

  A large reptile adorned with a Wulfenbach captain’s hat clambered up the side of the running machine. “Mammals! General Siclee is requisitioning this mount! Depart! At once!”