Called to Battle, Volume 1 Read online

  CALLED TO BATTLE

  VOLUME ONE

  A WARMACHINE COLLECTION

  LARRY CORREIA

  ERIK SCOTT DE BIE

  ORRIN GREY

  HOWARD TAYLER

  Cover and Illustrations by

  CARLOS CABRERA, MICHAEL KOMARCK, MAREK OKON, AND CHRIS WALTON

  CONTENTS

  MAP

  HEARTFIRE

  DESTINY OF A BULLET

  JUDGMENT

  UNDER THE SHADOW

  GLOSSARY

  HEARTFIRE

  BY HOWARD TAYLER

  Northern Thornwood, Cygnar, 605 AR

  Captain Arlan Strangewayes frowned as he watched the pair of Minuteman warjacks, Jagger and Hess, finish unloading the company’s wagons. It was a little distasteful to treat a fresh-off-the-line war machine as if it were a common laborjack, but these were more than just fresh off the line; they were fresh off the drawing board.

  Fresh off the drawing board and too complicated. Sure, they were working fine today, walking alongside the wagons and hauling box tents, but they remained completely unproven. Strangewayes’ frown deepened. This march from the foundry to the front was as strenuous a test as he could arrange, but it still wasn’t enough.

  “Thorne!” he called out to the lieutenant in charge of the trencher platoon. “I’ve been taken by the desire for another field test. Get your lollygaggers and greenhorns out of the middle of my camp!”

  Strangewayes allowed himself a small smile as trenchers scattered without waiting for direction from Lieutenant Thorne. Tons of metal would shortly be airborne, and even the greenhorns knew it was unwise to be under them. Also, they’d had two days to learn it was equally unwise to be underfoot when Captain Strangewayes used that tone of voice, even if he wasn’t wearing his steam armor.

  He turned to his own greenhorns, Corporals Tully and Merriweather. They were both freshly minted field mechaniks and had proven themselves adequate during this trip. Tully was stout and quick with a wrench, and Merriweather had the nimble fingers of a field surgeon. That worked out fine, because Cygnar’s Mechaniks Corps and their teams of gobber bodgers really were field surgeons and battlefield medics—for warjacks.

  “Tully, pace off the distances here, drop some stakes. Merriweather, start taking notes. I want the boiler pressures from Jagger and Hess recorded before and after, just like this morning. Only this time write so I can read them.”

  Both men snapped salutes and barked “sirs.” Tully was swift into action, spearing stakes into the loam with every second pace of his short legs. Merriweather scrambled back to his tent for a clipboard.

  Strangewayes turned to his gobber crew—a skeleton crew, really, as the junior members of the team were on loan to the foundry. All he had to work with were the twins, Privates First Class Mo and Rala, but they often did the work of a half-dozen.

  “You two, top off the fireboxes on Jagger and Hess, and try not to burn Merriweather while he’s reading things. Unless he gets clumsy.”

  “Yes, sir!” they said in unison. Mo grabbed fire tongs, and Rala headed for the wheelbarrow.

  Lieutenant Caspi Burrick stepped alongside Strangewayes, her warcaster steam armor hissing and clanking. She cleared her throat.

  “Captain,” she said hesitantly. “We jump-tested yesterday morning. Is something wrong?”

  “No, Lieutenant. But Jagger and Hess have been walking on guard all day. This morning’s jump-test was after a night of idling. It would be good to know the hydraulics in the legs are up to the task after eight hours on the march.”

  “I thought those nozzles next to the firebox did most of the work.”

  “It’s much more complicated than that.” Strangewayes rubbed his forehead, leaned on the armor he’d laid out on his workbench, and tried to come up with the shortest possible explanation.

  He gave up and decided to be accurate instead.

  “The Minuteman vents heartfire across an arcane turbine, banking power between that turbine and four compression chambers. When you add your own arcane energies and give the command, the power moves in three directions: down and out through the rocket nozzles for thrust and stabilization, up and across a pair of rune plates to momentarily reduce the ’jack’s mass, and deep into the hydraulics to boost the pressure available to the legs. If any of that goes wrong, even if the timing is just a little bit off, the ’jack doesn’t jump.”

  “You make it sound like this model should be breaking down all the time, sir.”

  Strangewayes leaned even more heavily on his table and looked across the camp to where Jagger stood. Mo was perched atop the wheelbarrow, peering into the warjack’s firebox, while Rala chucked coal hand-over-hand past her brother’s head.

  “Frankly, I’m amazed it doesn’t. So let’s test it yet again and hope I keep on being amazed.”

  Burrick nodded and strode over to Jagger, her armor pulsing with arcane energies as she went. Like the Minuteman, her armor had rune plates and arcane turbines to make her fast and fearsome in combat despite the addition of nearly a quarter ton of machinery. The sound of steam and hydraulics were the only noises she made, however; Burrick did not need to shout commands at Jagger and Hess to get the ’jacks to do her bidding. Both Minutemen strode, hissing, clanking, chuffing, and thumping, into the center of camp. Merriweather followed them, scribbling furiously as he checked gauges—the report was going to be illegible again, Strangewayes was sure—and then he backpedaled out of the test area.

  Burrick scanned the area around her. All was clear except for Mo and Rala, who stood a few paces behind her. Mo met her gaze and shrugged. Burrick turned back to Strangewayes.

  “Ready, Captain.”

  “Start with Jagger. Leap like you mean it.”

  Burrick took a step toward Jagger and narrowed her gaze a bit. Then she furrowed her brow and grimaced.

  Had the girl forgotten how this worked? Perhaps fatigue had lessened her—

  Mo and Rala hit the ground, and then Jagger’s firebox exploded with far more force than any natural pressure could have provided.

  The explosion rocked Strangewayes. He felt the heat of it on his face and hands, but the real fire, the dangerous heat, was the anger that instantly flared inside him.

  The gobber twins were both flat on their faces, and Lieutenant Burrick had been thrown fifteen feet back by the blast. Jagger had gone the other direction, staggering forward a pace and then toppling over.

  Strangewayes had shrugged out of his steam armor earlier in hopes of curing the faint buzzing his voltaic gauntlet had begun to make, so it was his good fortune he hadn’t been any closer to Jagger when its firebox blew. He needed to be a lot closer now, though. He grabbed a long wrench and a bucket of sand and charged straight toward Jagger’s fallen, flaming chassis. Hopefully he could save it.

  The firebox had exploded, splitting the exchanger and throwing burning coal in several directions, including all up and down the lubricated hydraulics. The burning lubricant wouldn’t permanently damage the arms or legs, but the cortex wasn’t quite as tolerant of extreme heat. Shifting his grip to the rim of the bucket, Strangewayes threw sand across the flaming hydraulics and then used the wrench to pry the split exchanger away from the boiler. This was a lot harder to do without the strength of his steam armor and the longer moment arm of Fixer, his good wrench, but it was the sort of thing any mechanik worth his singed skin learned to do in a hurry.

  The boiler hadn’t burst, thank the gods, but the release valve was in the dirt and that wouldn’t do. Strangewayes drove his wrench under the boiler, lifted, and was rewarded with a hissing jet of steam. The boiler was venting safely. At least one system had worked the way it was meant to. Good old dependable st
eam.

  If this had happened on the battlefield, this light warjack would now be no more than two-and-a-half tons of something to hide behind. And at the moment, that’s exactly how Strangewayes expected most Minuteman ’jacks to end up.

  They weren’t in battle right now, however. They had time, tools, and parts, so Jagger was instead a significant repair project. At first glance Strangewayes could see the firebox was a complete loss, the exchanger would have to be patched and bent back to true, and of course the hydraulics were fouled with the sand he’d used to put out the flames. Strangewayes began listing tasks in his head. The arm-mounted slug guns had gone muzzle-first into the ground and would need stripping and cleaning, and the boiler required a pressure test. The real trick would be that propulsion system. Strangewayes had six replacement turbines, eight spare compression chambers, and a long dozen fire nozzles—not to mention an entire wagonload of spares for other warjacks in Major Brisbane’s brigade—so parts weren’t the problem. No, the problem was the design itself. Figuring out what had gone wrong with that patch of overcomplicated, Cyriss-damned chicanery was going to give Strangewayes a sore forehead just from all the scowling.

  “I’m okay, Captain!” came the voices of both Mo and Rala simultaneously.

  Strangewayes turned to look at them, and they scampered away, looking at each other and then back at their captain. The twins appeared uninjured. Amazing. And odd. He looked around and saw the rest of the camp rushing toward the smoking, steaming wreck. Lieutenant Thorne’s platoon of trenchers—even the greenhorns—had weapons at the ready, and Thorne’s shiny new Grenadier warjack, Pappy, was stoked and ready for a fight. Corporal Tully had slung on his tool apron, and Merriweather clutched a long crowbar in his delicate hands. They both wore very concerned looks.

  Lieutenant Burrick stood and brushed herself off. Strangewayes felt a little sorry for her. He’d just explained how sensitive this system was, and now it had exploded in her face. Like any warcaster, she could top off fluids and turn bolts, but she would be helpless when confronted with serious damage. Her life depended on machinery she didn’t know how to put back together—but that was why a team of mechaniks was part of the support structure of any Cygnaran force that marched with ’jacks in the mix.

  Strangewayes looked back down at Mo and Rala, who had been the last ones to touch Jagger. Now that there was a proper audience, the dressing-down could begin. Using full names, of course. He cleared his throat.

  “Ralagamunumanakenkam! Mogamunumanakenkam!”

  Gobber names were a mouthful, but it paid to learn them and the double meanings in their concatenated syllables for moments like these.

  “Sir!” they replied in unison.

  “‘Aken kam’ to be sure!” he said, emphasizing the last three syllables from the twins’ names. “The words for both ‘tough’ and ‘dexterous’ are dangling right there at the end, protecting you from your own idiocy, no doubt. Ordinarily I’d be thrilled to see you going unscathed in tribute to those three syllables, but incompetence on this scale merits at least some measure of injury.”

  Strangewayes rested the head of the massive wrench on his boot, planted a forearm across the handle, and stooped a bit to properly glower at the twins. “But before I start administering future scar tissue, perhaps by tattooing ‘kan arak’ somewhere only your mother has seen, why don’t you two tell me what happened?”

  The twins stared up at him with wide-eyed dismay. Kan arak could mean “sly and powerful” or it could mean “unreliable and stinky.” He’d never had to lay a disaster like this at their feet. He needed to drive this point home.

  “One of you needs to go first,” he growled.

  “Not me!” they said simultaneously. Then Mo poked Rala, and she poked him back and shook her head. Mo turned to Strangewayes.

  “We topped up Jagger’s firebox just so, Captain. You watched! We didn’t ding them special valves, not a touch on the turbine, all just so. I got a good look. Spinning idle like it was s’posed to, not too hot, not too cold. Looked just right.”

  “I saw you stare into the firebox, Mo,” said Strangewayes. “And you both seemed appropriately fastidious throughout that operation. What I missed—and this was because I was waiting most eagerly for Lieutenant Burrick to send Jagger skyward—was the part where I believe—and do correct me if I’m wrong—the two of you hit the deck before the explosion.”

  Mo pointed at Rala. “She pulled me down.”

  Rala shrugged. “It sounded bad, Captain. Whiney. Real high-whiney. Last time Burrick test-jumped, Jagger didn’t make that noise.”

  “What noise?” asked Strangewayes. He hadn’t heard anything.

  “Teeny-loud whistle, but angry like a hornet, pulsing, getting higher. If you didn’t hear, maybe you were too far away?” Rala reached up, flicked her long, pointed ear, and shrugged again. “Maybe your ears are too small?”

  Or maybe, Strangewayes thought, there hadn’t been any noise at all, and Rala had deliberately sabotaged this very new, very expensive piece of equipment. Of course the twins did everything together, and he couldn’t imagine just one of them as a turncoat. But then again, he couldn’t imagine any of his crew as a turncoat. Gobbers had keen hearing, so maybe there really was a noise he couldn’t hear. Maybe—and this seemed more and more likely as he thought about it, with a sense of foreboding bordering on despair—maybe the Minuteman design was just too wrench-bent complicated, and this little catastrophe would be repeated everywhere the jumping ’jacks were deployed.

  He stared down at the twins and then looked around at the rest of the camp. They needed to move out tomorrow if they were going to reach Deepwood Tower on schedule, and now one of their Minutemen was flat on its back. They could haul it in the parts wagon, of course, but half the point of this delivery run was to field-test the Minutemen before letting Major Brisbane deploy them.

  Well, part of a warjack field test was quick repair.

  It might prove to be a long night.

  “Mo and Rala, move my armor from the big table and top off the lanterns, then see to cleaning these hydraulics. Merriweather and Tully, help me collect the pieces of the propulsion assembly. Lieutenant Burrick . . .” He looked at the journeyman warcaster, behind whom stood Hess, their second Minuteman, its fires low. “Let’s cancel that second jump test.”

  Fifteen minutes later Strangewayes, Tully, and Merriweather had the ruined parts collected and arranged on the table. The rest of the camp had settled back into its evening rhythm, with the exception of Mo and Rala, who were up to their wiry little shoulders in hydraulics.

  “I can clean these pieces up so you can get a better look at them,” said Corporal Merriweather. The young man looked eager to help.

  “I want ’em dirty. You and Tully get that boiler checked out.” He waved his hand in dismissal, and the two mechaniks walked away.

  He quickly sorted the remains of the propulsion assembly, arranging them in order according to the schematic. The array was now a puzzle, one with missing pieces. Long before he could take a wrench to anything, Strangewayes was going to have to concentr—

  “Is the turbine what broke?” Lieutenant Burrick stood at the corner of the table, pointing at the deformed, rune-inscribed cylinder.

  Strangewayes bit back his first response, which would have been profane to at least three religious orders. He exhaled and shook his head.

  “If you mean to ask whether it was the first thing that broke, Lieutenant, it was not. But it is certainly broken now.” He pointed to three shards of blackened, torn steel in a mostly empty spot on the table. “That is what broke just before the turbine did.”

  “What are—no, what were those?”

  “They’re shrapnel from what used to be the number three compression chamber. The explosion was amplified by stored arcane power, and that’s what did all the damage. The only other bit we could find was this nozzle embedded in the turbine.” He gestured at the scorched component, which was about half the size of his
fist.

  “Could the chamber have been defective?”

  “The whole design borders on defective. It’s too complicated by far, too sensitive by half. But the compression chambers checked out this morning, just before we left. Only significant overpressure could have caused this.”

  “Maybe Mo or Rala dented it?”

  Strangewayes was ready to be done humoring Lieutenant Burrick for the evening.

  “Maybe you should put a fat rubber stopper in that, Lieutenant. If my people did something wrong, I’ll handle it. Besides, anybody with half a brain can see that a dent would prevent the piston from moving. That’s the opposite of overpressure.”

  Burrick said nothing, which suited Strangewayes just fine. He picked up the blackened nozzle and turned it around in his hand, then examined it more closely.

  In and of itself it was a simple piece, identical to the others surrounding the turbine. Or it had been before the chamber behind it had exploded, driving it into the spinning runes. It was smoke stained and scuffed now. He held it up to his eye and peered through it. A bit of the compression chamber had been blown into it and it was badly blackened, but there were no foreign obstructions.

  “Captain, is it possible this was my fault?”

  Oh. She was going to keep talking after all. Strangewayes looked back up at Burrick. She was irritating, but at least she wasn’t arrogant. She might even be teachable.

  “Not likely,” he said. “You could concentrate on this until you pass out. You’d have a hangover, but the ’jack would be fine. Excess arcane energies bleed off the turbine and the cortex. The Khadorans may be desperate enough to field unstable cortexes that explode when fed some magic, but Jagger’s cortex is a proven piece of Cygnaran engineering. Solid.” He looked down at the array of blackened, twisted parts on the table. “And that’s why Jagger’s cortex isn’t what failed here.”

  “Are we going to be able to walk this ’jack out in the morning? In his last communiqué, Major Brisbane seemed pretty eager for the new ’jacks and your stamp of approval.”