The landship needed constant attention just to keep it moving. Jacob shovelled coal with one hand and steered with the other. His feet worked the pedals frantically, while his gunner worked the sponson guns, switching back and forth between the right and left, slowing the pursuing enemy.
Then one of the mechanical men caught up, and it jumped on top of the roof of the landship and used the automatic saw it had for a hand to tear straight through the hull. Jacob ducked inside, and in that moment when he took his eyes off the road, he crashed into the side of a building, throwing the Iron Guard into the rubble. The landship was of little use now, but the gunner stayed inside, arming the guns. Jacob pushed open the hatch and climbed outside, and he grabbed his augmented gun just in time before the machine man broke free of the debris that pinned it in place. A single bullet, a diamond bullet, ended its life, if it had life, but Jacob could already hear the sound of more approaching.
“Come on!” he cried to the gunner, banging the chassis of the landship, but she ignored him. Perhaps she felt safer inside, but Jacob disagreed. That ruined vehicle was a beacon, and its hull offered no protection against the many contraptions that had been surgically attached to those mechanised beasts.
Jacob ran into the city streets, ducking low, searching for shadows to hide in, but finding that the sunlight was searching him out as much as the machine men were, like a spotlight from the sky. He stumbled upon an Iron Guard in his flight, and he missed the mark when he fired at first, but knocked it dead on the second try. He was running out of bullets now. He could not afford to miss again.
At last he found a crack in the side of an abandoned building. He squeezed through, and found the darkness comforting. Perhaps this was a Hope-house, a haven for the city's many drug addicts. Now it was his haven, granting him a brief respite from the growing chaos outside.
There was barely anywhere to move inside, and he dared not move too much, in case he stumbled into a table or chair, and caused a monumental ruckus that would attract attention. He clutched his gun tightly. The barrel only held four bullets. He had used three already. For what was outside those walls, one was not enough.
He heard a landship drive past, and he managed to catch a glimpse of it through the crack in the wall. It looked like Rommond's driving, leading his assailants in circles, and crushing them when he came back around again. But many of the Iron Guard followed, and they fired all kinds of weapons at the fleeing landship, getting closer with each and every shot.
Then one of the mechanical men halted and turned its head. It had one real eye, and one enhanced by machinery. Both of them now looked at Jacob. Both of them now saw him in his refuge, which offered him no hope at all.
28 – RALLYING CRY
In that moment, as the mechanical man approached, Jacob felt that the city had been all but lost. He did not know what happened in the other quarters, or what happened to the other landships, or what happened to the grounded Skyshaker. All he knew was that he was desperately reaching for his gun.
A hand broke through the wall and seized him, a hand of iron. The fingers worked like pistons, and its grip was tight. The mechanical man grabbed him by the throat, choking him, and hauled him outside, taking half of the wall with him. Jacob instinctively grabbed the metal gauntlet, though he might have been better off grabbing his gun. He felt the life slowly slip away from him, and then the Iron Guard cast him aside, as if it had mercy on him. It did not. It had a gatling gun strapped to its other arm, which it turned to face him.
Then something struck it, and Jacob heard a familiar voice.
“Duck!” Soasa shouted.
Jacob listened, but the Iron Guard did not. Jacob dived for cover just as the dynamite exploded between the mechanical man's feet, tearing it limb from limb, leaving little for a doctor to mend or a mechanic to fix.
“God am I glad to see you,” Jacob said as he dusted himself off. He was also glad his reactions were quick.
“Turns out dynamite is just as good as diamonds,” she replied.
“If you can get close enough.”
“Looks like you got pretty close.”
“Yeah, I think I'll stick with bullets.” He tapped the barrel. “Though I'm down to one.”
“Here,” she said, handing him one of her two diamond-loaded guns. “Have one of mine. Besides, I prefer my approach. At least this way we know they're really dead.”
She started to run off, but Jacob called her back. “Have you seen Whistler?”
“He's in the inn, the Royal Ribbon.”
“A bad time for a drink.”
“A bad time for a joke,” she said. “Mudro's there too. They're trying to convince the locals to fight. I don't think they're having much luck with that.”
“I'll see what I can do.”
“Sure,” she said, tossing an unlit stick of dynamite up and down in her hand. “I've already seen what I can do.”
* * *
Jacob followed his old smuggling routes through the city, avoiding the many roads, or the wide streets. He kept to the shadows, but part of him felt like that did not matter any more. The Iron Guard had augmented eyes. They could see in darkness and light.
He found his way to the Royal Ribbon without confronting anything at all. He sneaked in through the back door, and was almost shot by the nervous innkeeper. There were several people arguing there, including Mudro. Whistler sat despondently in the corner, but he perked up when he saw Jacob.
“Sorry to interrupt an argument, boys,” Jacob said, “but the real battle's outside.”
“Well, I'm not going out there!” the innkeeper cried.
“If we don't fight now,” one of the older patrons said, “we'll miss our opportunity.”
“The days of the trenches are over, Olly.”
“No,” Jacob said. “They're just beginning. If you let those creatures mow down the Resistance fighters out there, you'll be fighting at the threshold of your houses. You'll be fighting for each room. These are our trenches, and it's time we go out there and face the enemy, or we'll all be overrun.”
“I'm surprised you're banding in with those rebels,” the innkeeper said, pointing to his Regime uniform. Jacob had forgotten all about it. With the arrival of the Iron Guard, everyone was essentially wearing the same uniform, with a giant target painted on it.
“Given what we're facing, we've got to band together,” Jacob urged. “I don't care if you were born forty years ago or just yesterday. This is your city. This is your home. Those creatures are not your people. One time they might have been. Now they're some mutated, corrupted form. They're the real monsters, and the Iron Emperor doesn't care who they kill. We're all the Resistance now. All of us.”
The grumbles were less frequent than they were before, and the rallying cries were more fervent. Several dozen older men seemed primed and ready, even if they were far from their own prime. Perhaps it was because they had less time to live that they were so willing to give up their last days, or perhaps it was because they had families, children and grandchildren, whom they wanted to ensure would live on after them. Some had fought in the old wars, or in the early days of the Great Iron War, and many had a bitter memory of the advancing enemy, and some who manned the Iron Wall had a bitter memory of the Iron Guard.
What was most astonishing to Jacob was that there were demon patrons there too. He only knew it by Whistler's nods and glances. They looked like everyone else, and had differing opinions like everybody else. But many of them were heartened by his words, and many of them cursed the abominations outside, saying the Iron Emperor had gone too far, that he had abandoned sanity, and abandoned all of his people.
How they rallied. How they roared. The sound was stimulating. The feeling was contagious. Who would have thought that the march to death could be made so freely, and with so much feeling, so much vigour? If the battle was right, if the fight was good, then there was a part of every human that could be mustered, and it seemed that even demons had a part like that too.<
br />
If the thresholds were the trenches, then the city streets where the no man's land. Men did not walk them. Machine monsters did. Yet the majority of the patrons of the Royal Ribbon made their charge, and even the innkeeper reluctantly went with them, waving his sacred rifle in the air. They all cried out, and the cry passed to other buildings, from which emerged more inspired citizens, more of the home guard to face their iron equivalents.
People with no experience of battle charged with a frenzy at the machine men. They were gunned down by the dozen, but this only angered the crowd even more. The Iron Guard were the elite, but the people of Blackout were plentiful, and there was something that those mechanical soldiers could never replicate: anger.
The people dived at the iron warriors, some dying at their feet, but others knocking the machines from their unstable legs. Hammers and axes fell, breaking parts, bashing steel, cutting wire, and cutting whatever was left of flesh.
As the crowd ran out and overwhelmed the enemy, more people swelled its ranks. Those who watched from their windows could not help but be inspired. They could either fight now when their numbers were many, or they could let the Iron Guard whittle them down, and fight and die when they were few.
Blackout burned anew. As the sun rose further in the sky, the city lit up like a bonfire, the kind the tribes often lit to ward off the spirits of the dead. How many new spirits were created that day, no one knew for sure. All that was known was that humans and demons screamed the same.
Hundreds of civilians died that day, but the Iron Guard had been given orders to put down the Resistance at any costs. They had already ploughed through the people in their way, but they found that more came out to stand there, that more came out to reclaim their city, to fight for freedom, to die that one day their children, human or demon, might live free.
Jacob joined them, killing four of the mechanical men, bringing him back down to a single bullet, a bullet he was reluctant to spend. He kept that gun holstered, and picked up fallen rifles, and here and there a bayonet, which he drove through the heart of a wounded Iron Guard. He severed the wires and broke as much of the machinery as possible, but it always seemed like there was more to break.
The battle raged, and the city burned. As the day wore on, and the sun began to slip from its peak, it seemed to the few remaining Resistance fighters that even if they won this fight, even if they drove back the Iron Guard, they had not really won back the city, for the devastation meant there was little left for them to reclaim.
* * *
Rommond was forced to abandon his landship when it ran out of fuel. The furnace gave a final cough, and the steam engine stuttered. The treads ground to a halt, and the general and his gunner quickly vacated it, knowing that the Iron Guard would flock to it, and would finish it off once and for all.
The general joined the growing numbers of civilians, gunning down the machine men, like they had gunned down so many. The angry mob moved from street to street, but Rommond did not follow. He tracked the Iron Guard alone, hoping to take them down one by one, to thin their numbers, until there were no numbers left to thin.
He killed three on his way to the central plaza, where he expected to find the Iron Guard converging. It was eerily quiet. He was not so sure they had been defeated. Perhaps the battle raged elsewhere.
Then he saw a figure stepping around the corner, marching into view, like a contestant entering an arena. The mechanical man, the machine monster, turned on the spot like a turret. The shadows hid its human features, if they were human, but the pipes and wires, the bolts and nuts, were all visible, gleaming in the sunlight.
It had a mask over its mouth, which was tubed to a tank upon its back to let it breathe. Rommond was not entirely sure what gas it inhaled, but he knew it was not just oxygen. His scientists had theorised that it might be some kind of mixture to numb the mind, and numb the pain. It was a man underneath, but the will of the man was pushed so far down that only the monster, only the machine, operated above.
Rommond raised his gun and prepared to fire. He knew how quick they were, how their limbs did not tire like a human's might. Their strength was neither human nor demonic, and it was Brooklyn who once suggested that in the future those two opposing peoples might unite in fear, and see the true iron demons that they had created from their war.
But something held back Rommond's finger on the trigger, like a ghostly hand, urging him to put the gun away. There was no ghost there. He did not believe in them, not like Taberah did, even though he had felt haunted by one for years.
The mechanical man stepped forward, its limbs creaking as it did. The sunlight shone before it like a spotlight positioned by the gods. Rommond did not believe in them either, and yet somehow he felt himself thinking of them, as if he might soon join them wherever they now dwelt, whether it was Heaven or Hell.
Another step, and Rommond still could not fire. The anger leaked out from him, and without that anger, it was as if there was no bullet in the gun. The shadows still veiled the figure, showing only the twisted sculpture the mechanics had made, the augmentations, the “enhancements,” everything that any sane civilian would decry as an abomination.
The final step. Rommond knew he had to fire now. It was too close. Its arm was almost raised. What weapons it had, he did not know, but he knew they would be terrible all the same. The mechanical man entered that circle of light upon the ground, that sanctuary from the shadow, and the rays filled every crease and recess, until through the mesh of machinery the man beneath could be gleaned.
Rommond then knew why he could not shoot, and why he would then die that day. He knew that man. He knew those features. He knew that face.
The word fell from his mouth like a bullet casing from a gun.
“Brooklyn.”
29 – THE IRON HAND
Rommond stood in horror, his eyes wide, his jaw loose. His hands and knees trembled, and his mind raced, and his heart hammered, and his stomach fluttered. For a moment he lost all sense of self, all sense of his surroundings, and he forget his training, and buried his instincts, until all that seemed to be there, all that seemed to matter, was that mangled figure that stood before him.
Brooklyn. The name repeated in his mind, exploding in his brain, like the bullet some part of him knew he should be firing. It quelled every urge, conquered every thought, until it seemed that it was the only word he knew, the only word he recognised.
Attached to Brooklyn's back was a pack with pistons and pumps, generating a cloud of steam above and around him, but not enough to hide his face, not enough to mask his tanned skin, nor to shroud his faded eyes.
His hair was cut tight, perhaps the greatest offence to the Ootana tribe. At the base of his neck there was a metal plate, in which a tube fed through. It seemed that it might even connect in some way to his brain.
His body was a mix of leather and steel. Most of him was still intact, still more man than machine, but his right hand, the one that Rommond had received in a puzzle box, was replaced with a metal gauntlet. A gatling gun was strapped to his left arm, attached by wires and tubes to the backpack, and clearly as automated as any other part of him.
His eyes were real, but it seemed his spirit was trapped deep inside. To look into them was as if to stare into a mirror. Nothing but the viewer stared back.
“What have they done to you?” Rommond asked, and he felt as if he needed to ask the gods, because surely no human, no angel, no demon could make something like this.
Brooklyn looked at him as if he did not recognise him at all, or, indeed, as if he only recognised him as a target. He slowly raised his left arm, until the gatling gun pointed straight at him. Rommond glared at it, as if he could stare down those bullets, but his glower was more because it was a foreign object, a contraption that made Brooklyn less of who he was.
The general heard a click, and his instincts resurfaced. He dived just in time as a round of bullets blazed in his direction. He rolled into cover, and held on firmly to
his gun.
“Stand down!” he shouted. It was an order he had given to his own soldiers, and one he had given to the enemy troops his forces had outnumbered, but never did he think he would have to give it to Brooklyn. For so many years he thought he could never give him anything at all, not even his love.
“Edward Albert Rommond,” Brooklyn said, but it was not just his voice. There was a pang of metal to it, as if the machinery had gained the ability to speak. “Target 001. Surrender.”
“Never!” Rommond shouted back. At this point he would normally have fired a shot at his assailants. There was nothing like a bullet to show that he would fight until the end. But he found he could not fire. He held the gun close, like he had held Brooklyn's severed hand.
He was still in shock. If that was Brooklyn out there, than what was it that he had buried? He was not able to open the last puzzle box the Regime sent. The devices on it were too hard to crack, and even if he could, he could not bear to see any more of Brooklyn's dismembered body parts. They said it was his head, and he believed them. He had no reason not to. They had proven how low they would stoop. Perhaps they knew he would never open the box. Perhaps they knew that it would break him just the same.
“Surrender to the Iron Guard,” Brooklyn spoke. “Bow down to the Iron Emperor.”
“I'd rather die!” the general boomed.
Brooklyn responded with a sweeping arc of gunfire, which obliterated the surrounding walls, leaving less cover for Rommond to duck behind. He scrambled to a better position, crouching down, ducking out of sight. His gun was still at the ready, but he was not.
Then the bullets stopped, and he heard the iron feet crushing wood and rock, and he knew that if he had been out there, they would have crushed bone as well. The sound frightened him, but whatever it was about them that frightened his heart and mind, it was Brooklyn that frightened his soul, that made him worry that maybe even one day he too would serve the Regime.
Skyshaker: A Steampunk Dystopian Adventure (The Great Iron War, Book 3) Page 14