“Maybe I won't bet my ass then,” Jacob mused.
“So when do we get the morale speech?” Whistler asked.
Rommond forced a smile. “I'm not sure there is one, Brogan.” He paused for a moment and then took out his revolver with its diamond-tipped bullets. “Well, maybe this is all the morale we need.”
“I hope you've got one of those for all of us,” Jacob said.
“It depends who 'us' is,” the general replied. “I've got Alakovi sending down crates right now. She's been working on them since I perfected the design.”
“I hope she had less trouble with them than you had.”
“So do I, Jacob. And I hope they work.”
“You mean you haven't tested them?”
“I've tested them on metal, on armour plating, on a salvaged piece of the Lifemaker's hull, which is about as thick as you can get. They work on those. But on machine men? Who knows?”
Jacob shuddered. “I guess we won't have long to find out.”
“We either learn that these guns really work, or we die.”
“I guess we won't be disappointed for long then. Unless, you know, there really is a Hell.”
“Oh, there is, Jacob,” Rommond said, and he span the barrel of his revolver, like the spinning doors of life and death. “We're already there.”
26 – THE BATTLE OF THE BLACK BARGE
The wait was nerve-wrecking. Some fled the city of Blackout, but others locked themselves in their homes. Rommond's depleted army had nowhere to run to, and no where to hide. Most of them hovered above the city in the Skyshaker, with no one daring to sleep, lest they find themselves waking in a nightmare. Rommond and his trio of smugglers stayed in the city below, where they converted the remaining smog guns into an anti-airship battery.
It was dawn before the Iron Guard reached the city, and the sun was hesitant to rise. The mechanical men travelled in an immense airship known only as the Black Barge, for it was a huge flattened rectangular vessel, featureless, like so many of the Regime's creations. This was not art; it was brute force.
The airship glided slowly towards them, less like a vessel of war and more like a barge of the dead. At times pale green lights flickered, like the deathly version of the living's candle flames, and many who saw them feared that they would board the ship and add a new pale flicker of their own.
The Iron Guard were the Regime's most elite force, a mixture of man and machine, the personal guard of the Iron Emperor himself. They were rarely seen away from his palace in Ironhold, and when they were, it showed that the Emperor had taken a personal interest—even a personal offence—in the Resistance's advancements.
The barge drifted towards them, barely standing out against the bleak sky, which might have tried to hide itself in clouds, so as not to be seen by those watchful mechanical eyes. It was not clear how it supported itself, how it floated, how it rose, fell, turned or drifted. Anything that might have shown this was hidden in the immense rectangular hull. There was no discernible movement of crew, and no noise. It sailed the sky in silence, which made it that much more imposing.
“If it's a ghost ship,” Jacob said, “then let us show some ghosts another way to die.”
“In faraway lands, they speak of a second death,” Rommond mused with a hint of dread. “But it is not ghosts that will haunt us this day. It will be the remnants of men, good men, and the shells of demons, foul demons, forged with our abandoned and broken technology, merged with cogs and welded with wires, running not on blood, but on steam. They do not tire like men. They do not die like men. We need to break them like machines.”
A siren rung in the Skyshaker, and everyone raced to their posts. A few had managed to doze off, but no one was rested. The crew charged up and down the corridors. And then the door of Taberah's room opened, and she stepped out. A few people paused when they saw her, but duty propelled them on. Her face was grim, almost as grim as that of the Iron Guard themselves. She marched through the airship and took her familiar place at the frontal gun. She was not in the mood to wait around, to do nothing. She was in the mood to kill.
“All set?” Rommond asked over the radio.
“All set,” she said, her voice strained, yet the general barely noticed. He still had not been informed of what happened, of her condition, of the actions of the Copper Vixens. She did not tell him. She knew that it was better that way.
All of the gun positions were manned, but the ammunition supplies were very low. They had to win this battle quick, or they would not win it at all. The decoy balloons were released into the wild, for they posed no threat to the Iron Guard. They did not care how many they were facing. Their target would still be the Skyshaker, which they would not merely shake, but would destroy.
The Black Barge sailed above the city. If it had not been made of iron, it would still have been black, for the soot fell upon its frame in thick layers, and though it pumped smoke into the heavens, it pumped soot upon the land below, leaving a dark trail on the red sands, and turning the city's streets from grey to black.
Then the battle began. The Skyshaker dived towards the Black Barge in crusader mode, and Taberah unleashed a hail of gunfire. The bullets bashed off the hull, some bouncing, some buckling, and one or two making tiny punctures, but not enough to cause any real damage. Cantro turned the ship sharply, almost grazing the surface of the Black Barge, and then the Iron Guard answered, with hatches opening and turrets emerging, giving the vessel its much-needed features, but the kind of features that the Resistance did not want it to have. The bullets streamed after the Skyshaker, less chaotically than the Treasury's gunfire was, which made it difficult for Cantro to evade. Yet he evaded most of them, and the crew fired back with a frenzy, and Alakovi sent missiles, which rocked the Black Barge, but did not down it.
On the ground, Rommond manned one of the newly-converted anti-airship guns, while Soasa took the second, and Jacob and Whistler took the third. They were spread out over the city, but the Black Barge was so large that it was in the sight of all. They fired at it, striking it with force, but still it seemed immovable; still it seemed like it could not be taken down at all.
The battle raged like this for half an hour, with neither side seeming to get anywhere, a stalemate of the skies. Yet the Iron Guard had not depleted its ammunition in a recent battle. They could afford to wait it out. The Resistance could not.
Then Rommond saw dark shapes approaching the city from the south, their silhouettes standing out against the emerging sun. They flew fast in the sky.
We have no allies, Rommond thought. That only meant one thing. They must be enemies.
And so they were, for in time it was clear that it was El Abra and his pirates, darting towards the city with haste—there to pillage and steal, to take what they could as the two opposing forces were engaged.
“Damn it!” Rommond cried. “As if we need another enemy.”
Rommond turned his gun towards them, and prepared to fire. But something told him to wait.
The Red Serpent and its supporting galleons flew straight past the Skyshaker, without a single bullet fired, and then they turned their cannons on the Black Barge. They broke formation, giving the Iron Guard more than one thing to focus on, splitting its fire. They weaved and dodged, showing as much aerial acrobatic skill as Cantro himself.
Rommond was in shock. What made the pirates join the battle was anyone's guess. The general guessed that it was Jacob, that El Abra's reminder of their childhood past had softened him a little, or hardened him against a common foe. Rommond was surprised that El Abra was even still alive, but with his spyglass he could see the pirate prancing above deck, yet prancing less lithely than before, for he was bandaged up around the waist.
The Black Barge had guns enough for all of its assailants, however, and it fired them all in unison. What a terrifying thing it was to hear those guns roar as one, for the boom rocked the sky like thunder. It caught one of El Abra's galleons, which plunged to the ground in flames, but
still the others fought on.
What Cantro, Taberah and the rest of the crew had faced against the Treasury now seemed like child's play. They had fought an enemy of numbers, but now they fought just a single target, and they knew what the Treasury felt when it went up against the Skyshaker, but they knew it with an even greater fear.
Bullets tore through the hull of the Skyshaker, piercing the envelope, bursting some of the balloons inside. Boulder was not there to patch them up, and though the Copper Vixens raced to plug those holes, the airship was already losing height, and Cantro struggled with the wheel.
In time the remaining galleons were downed, and El Abra's ship, the Red Serpent, was the only pirate vessel left in flight, joining the Skyshaker in a two-pronged attack. But the Black Barge fired in every direction. It was the Behemoth of the sky, casting jets of flame from both sides, which illuminated the heavens in a terrifying display. No wonder the people of Blackout pledged allegiance to the Iron Emperor. If that devil was over anyone else's city, they would too.
But the battle was getting the Resistance nowhere. What little damage they had done to the Black Barge was magnified on the Red Serpent and the Skyshaker, the former ignited in flame, and the latter struggling to stay afloat. It seemed that both of them would sink to join the galleons that had crashed into the buildings far below.
Then El Abra made his most daring move yet. He climbed up onto the burning deck, and gave a twirl and a kiss to anyone who would see. Then he turned the gigantic wheel, and steered his ship straight into the side of the Black Barge. There it burned anew, but the fire spread, and the Barge itself was ignited. Explosions rocked the hull, and guns and mechanical men were thrown out from the sides. Then the vessel's nose dipped, and it hurtled down into the city. It struck the old library, and it took out several fortifications, even the Treasury's clock tower. It continued through several streets, tearing down buildings in its way, until it finally halted just before the Treasury's own headquarters, as if to announce, in the most costly manner possible, We have arrived!
27 – THE MECHANICAL MEN
The Skyshaker fell slowly into Blackout's streets, landing on top of one of the city's oldest hotels, its remaining buoyancy keeping it from crushing the building. The surviving crew raced outside, clambering onto the roof, climbing down ropes.
Rommond abandoned his anti-airship gun and raced towards the Skyshaker, which was visible from almost any street.
“We need to ground this ship,” he called up to his crew, who struggled on the rooftop. “Pull it down, soldiers. Pull it down!”
And they pulled, but it would barely budge. If the Skyshaker could no longer fly, could barely float, it could not truly fight. The battle of the sky was over. The ground had still to be won.
Rommond kicked down the hotel door and raced past many patrons, who shrieked and cowered. He took the stairs several steps at a time, until he emerged on the roof, where the tiles glimmered as the sun dared to rise a little higher in the sky.
“How many landships do we have left?” he asked Alakovi.
“Four,” she said.
“Is that all?”
“That's all that are functioning. We had to take some parts to repair the ship.”
“Then that'll have to do,” the general grumbled.
As they struggled with the Skyshaker, and the wind that tried to seize it, they saw the city burn where the Black Barge had crashed. And in those fires they saw emerging shapes, little black silhouettes that were not so little when viewed up close. Figures that could withstand fire, that could withstand gunfire, that could perhaps withstand death itself.
“The Iron Guard,” Rommond whispered, as if even he feared to say their name, to summon them from that realm of nightmare from which they had come. The Black Barge became a barracks, from which issued the Iron Emperor's most terrible and elite soldiers.
“We've no more time for this,” the general said, before climbing inside the Skyshaker, and then driving through the hull in one of the remaining landships. He drove over the roof, pulling up tiles, and dived to the ground, falling three stories, and severely denting the front of the vehicle. He was lucky it did not explode. He had attached two ropes to the rear, which pulled the airship with it as he drove, and helped dislodge it from the old hotel.
The crew pulled it down more easily, and Alakovi abandoned her engineering duty to drive one of the other landships. Cantro took the second. Jacob took the third. Rommond cut the ropes tying the airship to his vehicle, and he turned to his remaining soldiers.
“The Skyshaker's still a vessel to reckon with,” he said. “It may not fly, but by God will it fire. We'll lure those machine monsters here, and you better have the airship's guns primed and ready. They'll have theirs.”
He did not wait for a response. He dived back inside, taking a gunner with him, and drove straight for the bonfire that consumed the centre of the city. The other landships followed, and the battle for Blackout continued.
* * *
Jacob was not keen to be back inside the metal box of a landship, that claustrophobic vessel, that roving coffin. It was dark inside, but the sunlight pierced the city's smog, and so he could easily see where Rommond roamed. Not that it was necessary. The target was pretty obvious. The target of the Iron Guard was pretty obvious too; it was everybody else.
The streets were eerily silent. Few dared take on this mythic foe. They cowered in their houses. Perhaps those who opposed the Resistance hoped that the Iron Guard would liberate the city, restore some order, and then the people could emerge again without fear. But from what Rommond had told him, Jacob knew that the Iron Guard were indiscriminate. If they had been sent to Blackout, it was not to liberate; it was to annihilate.
“What a mess we're in,” Jacob said to the gunner who had joined him.
She did not reply. He did not even know her name. She kept her focus on the gun, on the enemy. The silence got to Jacob. He needed something to distract him from his thoughts, from his mounting fears. A little joke might have meant nothing to some, but it meant everything to him.
Then he saw the mechanical men for the first time. They had a human shape, but it was augmented with machinery, with cogs and pistons, with pumps and pulleys, with wires and tubes. Natural anatomy was replicated and replaced with an artificial equivalent, and so the creatures were “enhanced.” The humanity was drained from them, and all that was left was a cold-hearted killer, with guns for arms, and a crosshair for eyes.
Jacob shuddered as he saw them, but his gunner did not shudder; she rattled off her gunfire, which knocked down some of the iron monsters, but did not appear to kill them. Jacob felt the gun that Rommond had given him resting in its holster on his belt, augmented with its own machinery. He could not use it from here, and he did not have many diamond-coated bullets to use.
So he drove into the mechanical men, knocking them down, crushing them beneath the heavy treads of the landship. Yet still they seemed to survive all this, and many sat or stood up and began to repair what damage had been caused. Others fired at the four landships, which whizzed through the streets, drawing the attention of the hundreds of machine men who emerged from the Black Barge.
Rommond drew much of their gunfire. It seemed they somehow knew which of the landships he was in. Perhaps it was how he drove, or the tactics he used to weave in and out of them, inviting them to fire on their fellow men, to kill their own as they tried desperately to kill him. He could not turn as sharply in the Menacer Mark II landship as he could in the Hopebreaker, and the hull was not as thick, so it was soon riddled with bullet holes, which were clearly visible to the drivers of the other vehicles.
Rommond led them back towards the Skyshaker, luring out the machine men, who marched in mechanical rhythm, with the percussion of gunfire enhancing their methodical beats. When they approached the Skyshaker, Taberah was ready for them. She still sat in her glass bubble, but she looked as grim and determined as ever, and her fingers were itching on the triggers.
Dozens of the enemy were gunned down, but they did not yet die. They struggled on the ground, with parts blown away, with wires disconnected, with their steam pumps no longer generating any steam. The Copper Vixens raced over to the wounded and aimed the guns that Rommond had designed, and put those poor creatures, or those poor machines, out of their mechanical misery.
The first wave had been defeated, and the landship drivers regrouped beside the Skyshaker, where they witnessed the pile of bodies, and the pile of parts, that they had left in their wake. Jacob popped his head outside and wiped his brow; the heat inside was killing him, but it was better than what the Iron Guard would do.
The Resistance savoured this moment of reprieve, this temporary delay of their iron punishment, but their rest was brief. A second and a third flood of figures emerged from the Black Barge, much larger than the first.
“They've brought more men!” Alakovi shouted.
“So be it,” Rommond said. “When you bring more wood, you make a bigger fire.”
But his confidence was overstated, for that bigger fire was quickly spreading, and it darted towards the Skyshaker in such numbers that the airship would quickly be overwhelmed. So the general led many of the mechanical men away farther into the city, and the drivers of the other landships did the same. All four split up, which forced their assailants to split up too. Some still went for the Skyshaker, but in smaller numbers, and yet Taberah and the remaining crew there still struggled against them.
Jacob found that he was less luring them away and more fleeing from them. Some of them simply walked, but others ran, and their speed was enhanced by piston-powered legs. Trails of smoke and steam were left in their wake, and some of them turned to look in dark alleys not illuminated by the sun, and these were then lit up by gaslit torches on their shoulders, or, in one or two cases, in their eyes.
Skyshaker: A Steampunk Dystopian Adventure (The Great Iron War, Book 3) Page 13