by Edward Nile
Paulson approached Samuel, flanked by a pair of guards. Together, Samuel and his secretary watched Elliot Salkirk's entourage leave with Meskal Karov in tow.
"Well, you were right, Edmund," Samuel said. "About flushing out Karov's client. It seems we have our answer."
Chapter 20
You might be pushing things too far, this time, James thought to himself as he shivered in the trees across from the Warsuit graveyard. Matt's been giving you chances as it is. You sure you want to burn that bridge? His list of friends had grown short since he'd gone into hiding. Matthew might be the only person James could count on to help him survive the manhunt that was sure to have started by now. Savior's name, it was a miracle he hadn't been turned over to the military after the last time he was caught here. So, what on earth was he doing now?
Father's saber. I'll be damned before I let some sneak thieves have it. So what if Matthew cast him out, or if he was captured? James didn't have an army, he didn't have a wife. Hell, he didn't even have a name anymore. But that sword, that was a piece of his family's legacy, a surviving link to his parents, to a time when the Edstein name shone bright. His mother's Warsuit, Iron Wrath, had been lost, and Ironshield was nothing more than a hollow wreck.
No home, no wife, no name. Only that blade. If Matthew Kaizer couldn't understand why James needed it back, then damn him.
For the past three nights, James had crouched behind these bushes and waited, watching the freshly patched fence. Watching for when the thieves returned. If they returned. So far, he'd seen nobody except the guard and his dog on their rounds. The man tugged on the new patch of fence on each pass, scanning the buildings and treeline on the other side of the road with narrowed eyes. So far, he hadn't seen James.
James wondered, if they came back, whether the thieves would even try entering from the same side of the fence. It seemed like a long shot, but this was the best vantage he could find to observe the place unseen.
He'd brought extra sweaters, and even the thin blanket from his hotel room. What James should have packed, however, was some coffee.
James shrugged deeper into the blanket with a steaming yawn. The air stung his cheeks, but only above his thick beard. He'd grown it out of a need to disguise himself, but James had to admit he was starting to like it. Could say it grew on me, he thought, uttering a dry chuckle at his own bad joke. These solitary all-nighters were taking their toll.
He replayed the scene in Ironshield's decaying cockpit again in his mind, trying to see through his assailants' masks in his memory. That girl, she'd been a tiny thing, but she'd hit like a hammer. What kind of thief fought like that?
Not just thieves, James amended. They'd been prepared to capture him, to take him with them, all to find out where he'd come by the Ironshield saber. Why would they care how he'd gotten it? Maybe, if their goal was to sell the thing, they thought they'd need some proof of authenticity. It was a poor grasp at an explanation. The ignition saber for a Kaizer Engine was no easy thing to replicate. No, they'd wanted something else from James. Which made the question of who they were and what they were after all the more compelling. What more could they want with the blade, besides to sell it? The key to a long dead machine, one that sat gutted, rusting away in a junk heap. It was of no use to anyone and a huge risk to even own.
James needed to find out what was going on, no matter how many nights in these shrubs it took. They'll come back, he told himself. They'll have to...
Coffee. He needed coffee...
A gunshot woke him.
Dogs barked somewhere within the fence. James was on his feet by the time someone returned fire with an automatic weapon. He saw muzzle flashes play against the mottled sides of metal carapaces in the darkness of the scrapyard.
James drew his machine pistol - he'd remembered to bring it, this time- and ran toward the fence. The patch job was still intact. The intruders had to have broken through from somewhere else.
Shouts, barks, and more gunfire, moving north.
James ran alongside the fence toward the opposite corner and peered around. A black truck sat in front of a mangled bit of chain-link fence.
Shots came closer as the thieves drew near their vehicle.
The driver leaned toward his passenger side, a rifle held across his chest as he waited for his partners in crime.
James sprinted to the adjacent tree line and made his way closer to the truck through the shadows. He looked to his right again and again while he came alongside the truck, but the driver didn't turn from the scrapyard.
Well, I've been stupid enough so far, why stop now? James dashed over until he was directly behind the vehicle. Weapon held tight, he pulled aside the canvas flap. A couple crates, assorted ammo boxes. No one in the truck bed. Only a small window was built into the front end of the box, and at a glance, James couldn’t see the driver through it.
With slow, deliberate movements, James hoisted himself inside and let the flap fall. Every muscle in his body tense, he crawled deeper, inching his way between the crates and the back of the driver's seat.
"Start the truck!" A young woman's voice shouted from outside.
James panicked and looked around, feeling all too visible. He lay flat, found a tarp, and yanked it over himself just as someone pulled the truck bed's flap aside and leapt in.
The vehicle's weight shifted as someone climbed into the passenger seat. The truck roared to life.
"Where's Derrick?" The driver asked.
"He didn't make it," the girl answered. She was in the truck bed with James. "Drive, hurry up!"
With the whine of a starting engine, the truck lurched into motion and roared off.
"What a steaming clusterfuck," the driver growled. "We get anything for our trouble?"
"A pair of old regulators and a firing pin for an eighty-eight mil," the passenger answered.
"So that's a no," the driver concluded.
"Yeah, I'd say."
The girl spat out a curse, and the crate in front of James shook as though struck. He guessed her unusually strong kick was the culprit.
"Easy, lass," the passenger said. "There was nothing else we could do. Derrick knew what he was getting into."
"Right. Hey, Byron. Take us to the clearing first. The guys should be at their posts."
"I'm sure they are, but why stop?" The driver sounded confused. "Should head straight back with the goods, shouldn't we? The score might not be fantastic, but those regulators'll still come in handy."
"We've got another issue to deal with first. There, pull over."
The truck crunched to a halt. As the other occupants of the vehicle piled out, James held his breath.
He continued to lie still, not sure when, or if, they'd come back. What problem had the girl referred to? Was the truck being followed? James pictured authorities finding him here, in the back of a truck with freshly stolen Warsuit parts. All the diplomacy and lies Matthew could conjure wouldn't be enough to save James then.
Time passed, until it became clear that whatever these thieves had stopped to do was no short affair. If the lack of noise from outside was any indication, they'd abandoned their vehicle altogether.
James removed the tarp enough to peak up at the driver's seat. Empty.
He pushed the covering off him entirely and crawled to the flap at the end of the truck bed, passing chunks of partially corroded machinery, the Warsuit components these people had lost a man to steal.
Listening first to ensure himself the coast was clear, James pulled the flap aside.
A pair of leather-gloved hands grabbed him by the collar and yanked him out of the truck.
James was sent sprawling onto the cold dirt. He scrambled to his feet, drawing his machine pistol and aiming it toward the burly man who'd grabbed him.
From James' right, a boot kicked his hand hard enough to make him drop the gun with a shout.
The girl followed up with a sweeping kick to the chest, striking a spot already bruised from their last enc
ounter. James stumbled back, wheezing for breath.
She hit harder than anyone of her size had a right to.
James managed to get his hands up in time to parry a series of quick jabs from her gloved fists. Only then was James aware they had an audience besides the man who'd grabbed him. Several others stood in a loose circle, watching the fight.
The girl had known he was in the truck all along and set a trap for him. Whether he beat her or not, James wasn't getting out of this one. But he'd be damned if he didn't fight back, girl or no girl.
She kept coming, forcing James to cede ground as he blocked. Noting a pattern in her strikes, he let one left hook through, taking it on the chin. James used the brief opening to deliver a right-handed blow to his opponent's cheek, knocking her aside. James followed through with a kick to the side of her leg, hooking his foot behind her knee and sweeping her onto her back.
The girl delivered a heel kick to James' shin even as she fell, and as he grunted in pain, she twirled about, catching his leg between both of hers.
James' assailant put all her weight and strength into it and yanked his leg out from under him.
The next thing James saw was the edge of a knife glinting in the moonlight, poised over his eye.
Above her mask, the girl's blue eyes narrowed.
"Tess, that's enough," one of the men said. "We want him alive, for now."
James' thought he recognized the voice. "Ivan?" he called. "Is that..." then, what the man said registered. The name he'd spoken. Tess.
James ignored the knife and looked again at the girl. "Tessa?"
Those blue eyes bulged in surprise. She scrambled off him and tugged her mask down. "James?"
It was her. The young woman was leaner, with hard muscles clearly defined beneath the tight black fabric of her outfit. She’d cut her hair, too, the once long tresses that used to hang to her rear end now barely shoulder-length. But it was Tessa Kolms. The same Tessa Kolms James was convinced he'd seen inside Ironshield, standing up to Redstripe during the Quarrystone ambush.
It was Tessa, and she was alive.
They stared at each other in silence. As the moments dragged by, James was tempted to slap himself, just to prove this was real. Then again, the aches and bruises served to convince him she wasn't a hallucination, that this wasn't a dream.
A pointed cough broke the silence.
Ivan Kolms, Tessa's uncle, pulled down his mask and stepped forward, inspecting James. Someone in their group shined a flashlight, making James blink.
"Savior be praised, it is you," Ivan breathed.
The same hands which had thrown James to the ground minutes ago now lifted him to his feet. "Damn it, Jim," Ivan said. "Haven't you ever heard of a razor? We could have killed you."
"Wasn't like you were easy to recognize, either." James tugged at the mask hanging around Ivan's neck. He was still jittery with pent-up adrenaline.
Ivan looked the same as always, except that the silver streaks in his hair were more pronounced. If James didn't know better, he'd think several years, rather than one, had passed since he last saw the man.
James couldn't stay focused on Ivan for more than a few seconds at a time. He kept looking at Tessa, at the friend he thought he'd lost forever. The girl he'd blamed himself for getting killed. And Tessa looked right back, seeming to weigh him with her eyes.
"Ivan," James said, prying his eyes away from the black-haired woman and interrupting her uncle's deep-voiced banter. "What the hell is going on?"
The truck rumbled over dirt paths that could barely be called roads, weaving its way deeper into the woodland that dotted the outskirts of Helmsburg.
Every now and then James peered out between the two front seats, but all he could see was the other truck ahead of them and the dark woods that lined the path just beyond the glow of their headlights.
It seemed Ivan's people kept a crew waiting in the clearing whenever members of their group were out on one of their missions, a rendezvous plan in case something went awry.
"I dunno, Tess," said a red-haired man named Roy sitting across from her in the truck bed behind James. "Maybe now that we have the Ironshield, Matt and the others will listen. Right, Commander Edstein? You and him were friends, after all."
"If James is in Helmsburg, it's because Matthew Kaizer invited him," Tessa replied, not looking at either of them as she polished one of the regulators they'd snagged with an oiled cloth. "And since we haven't heard from him, I'm guessing Matt is still out of the fight. Him and the rest of those fence-sitting cowards."
"That true, Commander?"
The title grated at James. Considering the life he'd been leading of late, being referred to as a 'commander' of anything made him feel like an impostor, but he didn't see the point quibbling about honorifics just then.
Tessa was looking at him now, her icy stare seeming to gather a luminescence all its own in the truck's shadowy interior.
"I guess it is," James answered. "He wanted me stay away from all of you. But I don't know what fight you're talking about."
Tessa snorted. "Yes, you do." She turned back to her work and didn't say another word the rest of the drive.
During the Civil War, several structures had been built in strategically significant areas of rural Arkenia. Pillboxes, bunkers, supply caches, erected all along the borders of Northern territory in an effort to strengthen the undermanned Industrialist lines.
Some of these were larger than others, great concrete blocks with foundations running deep underground, made for the housing and repair of Warsuits.
From outside, the building the two trucks rode up toward looked like nothing but a moss-grown stone slab, perhaps the exposed foundation of a destroyed or unfinished building.
James, of course, recognized it for what it was.
"Thought the state had them all demolished," he said.
"Folk miss things," said Roy. "Especially when those things get erased from the maps. Ivan had the records of this place and a few others burned before the Appeasers had a chance to come snooping. Then again," he continued, more somber. "The bastards burned plenty themselves, at Quarrystone."
A tall garage door at the bottom of a concrete ramp rose halfway to allow the trucks through. Inside was a warehouse-sized space lit by yellow electric lamps hung from the high ceiling.
Sitting beyond the parked vehicles, in various stages of construction, were six Warsuits.
Once they’d climbed out of the trucks, James broke from the group and walked forward, transfixed by the strange machines. All of them were of the smaller Krieger class, depending on far less fuel and engine power than a Kaizer. These machines varied in design, from the tracked propulsion favored by the Industrialists during the late stage of the Civil War to stranger builds, like one whose two wheels extended above its main body similar to the styles of some Xangese landships, and a pair of squat Warsuits built to crawl on four legs, the open cockpits atop their bases fronted by rotary machineguns built into circular pivots. One machine looked like a miniature version of Ironshield, although it was clear they'd had to cannibalize the parts from non-military contraptions. One of its arms retained the bright red shell of a tractor, heated and hammered in a crude attempt to fit it around the limb's works.
Much in these amalgamations, however, was built from the remnants of old combat machines. The four-legged Warsuits' main bodies looked like the re-purposed forearms of old Kaizers, and the armored cockpit of the two-wheeled machine was the hollowed-out head of a much larger Warsuit.
These welded-together monstrosities were, to put it bluntly, hideous, which said a lot considering how few aesthetic touches had gone into Warsuits to begin with.
"Yeah, they aren't much," Ivan said, coming to stand beside James and crossing his arms. "But these buckets of bolts are coming along. And we'll build more."
"For what, though?" James asked. Mechanics moved to and fro between machines even at this late hour, their torches and saws filling the air with sparks.
A few took notice of the newcomer and lifted their welding masks, though not with any particular interest. No one seemed to know who he was. James himself could only pick out a few faces he recognized, and even fewer he could match names to.
One person recognized him; the second-to-last person James had expected to meet tonight.
"Holy James!" Na’Tet pulled off a pair of thick welding gloves and ran toward him. He slid to his knees and bowed low. "Na’Tet thought you were lost, Sacred One. He is happy to see you in the living realm."
"'Tet…" The last time James had seen the copper-skinned tribesman, Na’Tet had been running into a roiling cloud of smoke and rubble as Quarrystone was set upon by two Kaizers. After watching the man disappear into the dust, consumed by wreckage, James had never considered the possibility that Na’Tet might have survived.
Tessa, Ivan, 'Tet. Friends James had been sure were lost, people he'd mourned. Here, alive.
"Get up, you idiot," James managed to say. He took Na’Tet by the arm, lifted him to his feet, and hugged him. "I thought you were dead. Thought I'd gotten you ki—"
"It was not this one's time," Na’Tet said, awkwardly returning the embrace. "There is still work to be done. Na’Tet is honored to be allowed to work on the Sacred Iron of the Gods."