Called to Battle, Volume 1 Page 3

  Hess’ firebox exploded in a blossom of heartfire closely followed by an eruption of steam. Hess staggered forward and toppled onto Strangewayes, who realized a particularly daring saboteur might wedge a grenade behind the firebox and hope to be clear by the time it went off.

  A whistle blew nearby, and an answering whistle blew somewhere to the west.

  With a surge of power he shoved the toppling Minuteman to the side and looked around, his vision obscured by smoke and steam. Merriweather was gone. Tully was on the ground crawling away, obviously burned. But first aid would have to wait.

  “To arms!” he shouted. “Burrick!”

  Thorne’s trenchers were already out of their tents in full kit, bayonets up, looking for the enemy. A volley of gunfire erupted from the west of camp, and two trenchers went down. The rest of them hit the ground and returned fire. Strangewayes couldn’t see who or what they were shooting at, and he suspected they couldn’t, either.

  It didn’t matter. If Captain Arlan Strangewayes was the target of this attack, if an unseen enemy meant to capture him, then he needed to play this according to plan.

  “Here, Captain!” Burrick was alongside him, runes spinning around her feet.

  “Lieutenant, you’re on the wrong side of that trencher line. I’m the one who’s supposed to be out in front.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m losing Hess. Pressure’s low, and fire’s lower.”

  “You form up on Thorne and pull Jagger back to you. Don’t jump until they spring their trap.” He pointed at Hess. “If we’re right, this damaged ’jack is where they expect to find me, and it’s where they’re going to expect to take me down.”

  Burrick ran across the camp, sparks flying from the arcane shield she wore. She’d be safe once she got there with Thorne providing cover.

  Strangewayes turned back to Hess and crouched, putting as much of the ’jack as he could between him and whoever was out there shooting. The ’jack was down on its side, its boiler quietly hissing and its firebox in ruins. The boiler pressure was low enough he could safely vent it before patching. Engaging his armor, he twisted the heavy cap clear, gritted his teeth against the last gasp of hot steam, and then spun the cap back into place. He swung Fixer at the split and pounded it closed before slapping a tar-and-canvas patch over it. Hopefully there was still enough water in there for a fight.

  Mo and Rala shouted in unison from somewhere behind him. “Firebox coming fast! Ready for hot swap!”

  He turned and saw the twins dashing toward him through the camp, ducking and weaving in perfect step as they carried a replacement firebox between them.

  Bolts and bile! It was already lit. Rare form, indeed.

  He spun back to Hess and ripped the shattered firebox clear. The propulsion assembly behind it was in ruins. Nothing could be done about that, but the new firebox should still fit. One of the mounting brackets was twisted out of true, so he gave it a pull with his gauntlet and bent it back into shape. He pulled his hand clear, and a heartbeat later the twins were on top of him, screaming like they were on fire.

  “Hot swaaaap!” They slid the firebox into the brackets. Four gloves poured smoke as four nimble hands spun nuts down. Strangewayes couldn’t tell whether the smoke was from the hot firebox or from the speed with which they were working. Hess’ half-empty boiler began to hiss, and the patch began to bulge. It would have to do.

  “You two take cover with Thorne.”

  “You gonna fight next to ’jack, you gonna need extra wrenches, Captain,” said Rala.

  “Not this time, you two. No questions. Go.”

  “Sir!” Mo and Rala sped away, crouched low to the ground.

  A cascading hiss announced the repressurization of Hess’ steam lines, and then with clanking and chuffing the ’jack got back to its feet. Hess turned to face Strangewayes and snapped a nod. Burrick was in control, commanding the ’jack and sensing the battlefield as if standing where the ’jack stood.

  Gunfire erupted from the trees to the northwest, a new position. Strangewayes slipped behind Hess as he heard rounds pinging the ’jack’s armor. Without a clear target the ’jack couldn’t fire back.

  “Let’s find something to shoot at, Burrick! You first.”

  Hess belched smoke from its stack and lumbered forward, a multi-ton killing machine. The Minuteman wasn’t equipped with hand weapons, but even just a backhanded slap from a warjack could wreck a man. Whoever was hiding in those trees was going to need to reconsider their position shortly. Strangewayes hefted Fixer, charged up his voltaic gauntlet, and followed Hess toward the trees.

  The gunfire let up, and Strangewayes briefly considered the possibility that Merriweather’s trap was already fouled. Then a half-dozen cloaked figures swept out of the darkness to his left and right, falling in behind him to cut him and Hess off from the camp. The Minuteman spun to face them just as a firing line of uniformed Steelhead mercenaries emerged from the trees, rifles to their shoulders.

  Hess fired at the cloaked thugs, and the heavy reports of its slug cannons were drowned out by a volley of fire from the Steelheads. One of the mercenaries crumpled and dropped, but then an explosion and a cloud of steam erupted from Hess. The rear of the ’jack, and its patched boiler, were facing that rifle line.

  “Morrow’s mirth, I just fixed that!” Strangewayes shouted. The steam lines were still under pressure, but Hess wasn’t going to be moving around much for this fight.

  “Drop the wrench, Captain,” said a clean-shaven Khard wearing the insignia of a Steelhead sergeant. “You’ll be coming with us. Better for you that no bones are broken.”

  “I know what you’re here for, boys. But I’m not going to go down easy.” Strangewayes hefted his voltaic gauntlet and aimed at a concentration of grey and green uniforms while they hastily broke breeches and reloaded.

  His gauntlet buzzed loudly, clicked, and then spat a few weak sparks.

  Bolts and bile. Merriweather had shorted the gauntlet, probably yesterday evening. Strangewayes should have expected that instead of blaming the noise on General Nemo’s design.

  “You might not go down easy,” said the sergeant with a wicked grin as he snapped his own breech closed, “but you’ll go down eventually.” He raised his rifle to his shoulder, and the Steelhead firing line whipped their own weapons back up.

  With a hiss, Hess spun to face them, and both slug guns fired. Two Steelheads tumbled backward into the trees, but the rest returned fire, and this volley tore through steam lines. The sell-swords had decent aim and knew what to aim at. Hess staggered and dropped into a heap.

  The cloaked thugs took that as their cue to charge.

  Burrick, now would be a great time to—

  He heard a heavy hydraulic chuff from farther back in camp.

  In daylight, the Minuteman’s arrival might have been heralded by a shadow. In the darkness of late evening the ’jack was invisible. Strangewayes stood very still, assuming Burrick had his position and planned to land Jagger somewhere besides directly atop him.

  With a heavy thump, Jagger landed right next to him. Knowing what was supposed to follow, Strangewayes dove for cover behind Hess. Not that it would help much. The Minuteman’s flak guns were close-range weapons, designed to airburst antipersonnel grenades indiscriminately all around the ’jack.

  Everyone else dove for cover as well.

  Jagger did nothing.

  Strangewayes peered around Hess’ stack and saw the flickering light of arcane blowback in Jagger’s eyes. The Minuteman’s arms dropped to its sides. Burrick had lost control of Jagger, was herself out of the fight. This was very bad, not least because Strangewayes needed Jagger’s fire support right this instant.

  The flickering eyes and the slouch could be read by everyone. This ’jack was stalled, useless until someone reactivated it, someone who knew where to find the reset switches, the sequence they required, and the ’jack’s passphrase. Someone like Strangewayes.

  Anybody who knew enough to want to capture Strang
ewayes would know enough to not let him take control of that ’jack. Their most prudent course of action would be to charge Jagger and get between it and Strangewayes, completely cutting him off from any measure of fire support.

  “Rush it, Steelheads!” The shouted order and the rising, running mercenaries confirmed them as prudent.

  It also confirmed their ignorance.

  Strangewayes heaved Hess halfway up and thrust his hand up behind the head into one of several slots. He felt four switches, one for each finger, and each with three detents. Out of a total of eighty-one possible combinations, only six did anything. Strangewayes knew all six of them, and he had Hess reset in a single motion.

  “Six-oh-five henny-penny! Hess, flak gun, fire!”

  Hess had no steam pressure, but its cortex was still active, and the flak guns could be fired without steam. Not reloaded, but fired.

  There were six thumps in close succession and then a roar of multiple explosions. The air became a wall of noise, fire, and shrapnel. Strangewayes felt a sharp pain in his hip, but praise Morrow his armor had done its job pretty well otherwise.

  He grunted as he slipped out from under Hess’ front end. Four Steelheads lay motionless, and four more were staggering back. Their sergeant was shouting something, but Strangewayes couldn’t hear him over the ringing in his ears. Three of the cloaked figures also lay motionless.

  He reached Jagger in three running steps, thrust his hand behind the Minuteman’s head, and reset the four switches.

  “Four-eleven, haggle-dagger! Jagger, slug-guns!” He pointed at the rallying Steelheads while shouting the passphrase and the command, and the Steelhead sergeant spun to face him, raising his rifle. Then Jagger’s slug-guns fired, and the man’s head vanished. Another Steelhead doubled over screaming and hit the ground before the headless sergeant finished toppling forward.

  The Steelheads were largely neutralized, but they weren’t the only threat here. Strangewayes spun, instinctively swinging Fixer in a wide arc as he did. The massive wrench slammed into a cloaked thug, throwing the man to one side. Two more were close behind him, but they stopped in their tracks, turned heel, and dashed back into the darkness before Strangewayes could swing at them.

  Strangewayes was rattled and deafened, but he was still alive.

  “On me, Jagger,” said Strangewayes, turning to where the original gunfire had come from, west of camp. He could see telltale flashes as hidden riflemen kept Thorne’s trencher platoon pinned. Thorne would certainly send a squad south and around to flank, but Strangewayes was feeling very impatient. He ran toward the flashes, and Jagger chuffed and steamed along behind him, keeping pace easily.

  “Two targets north!” someone barked an order from among the flashes. Strangewayes could make out a bit of a clear patch amid the forested scrub. He took a deep breath and reached inside himself, into the imagined firebox he pictured as the source of the magic he possessed. It wasn’t the right kind of arcane heartfire to get him into the warcaster program, and he’d never felt a gun mage’s affinity for firearms, but he could pour this power into an arcane turbine.

  “Jagger! Jump!” He dispensed that power into Jagger as he shouted, and for just an instant he could feel the turbine spin as if under his hand, white-hot flames running across runes.

  With a heavy chuff of hydraulics and a belch of black smoke from its stack, Jagger jumped.

  Strangewayes saw more flashes of weapons fire, short and bright, aimed directly at him. The bullets pounded against his armor, and something bit his shoulder. Amid the gunfire he heard soldiers shouting.

  “One target, sir!”

  “You dropped that ’jack already?”

  “Didn’t see no ’jack!”

  Oh, you’ll see it soon enough, Strangewayes thought. A mite too close for your liking, I suspect.

  Jagger landed with a thump, and the shouting was lost to the explosions of the great machine’s flak cannons. Then came the screams, and in the hot, shifting glow of Jagger’s firebox Strangewayes could almost make out the desperate melee. Hydraulics hissed, metal clanked, and bones crunched.

  He arrived a moment later. Half a dozen Steelhead mercenaries lay dead, radiating away from Jagger like petals on a flower. Another Steelhead hung a few feet from the ground farther away, bent and broken in the low branches of a tree. In the distance Strangewayes could hear men running through the brush, a panicked retreat instead of an orderly withdrawal under covering fire.

  Maybe the Minuteman would change trench fighting after all.

  “Back to camp, Jagger.” Strangewayes took it at a slow run. The plan had worked, but he still had a bad feeling about it. He shouldn’t have been marshalling Jagger; Burrick should have been in control. There were few things that could break a warcaster’s connection to a ’jack, and none of them were pleasant. His worry deepened as he ran, Jagger’s heavy steps landing like thunder punctuating some of his darkest thoughts.

  Thorne stood five paces in front of his tent, a solemn look on his face. A squad of trenchers stood behind him, looking down at the ground next to the tent.

  “Lieutenant?”

  “Three-pronged assault, Captain,” Thorne said. “You took care of the two noisy prongs.”

  The trencher squad stepped aside for Strangewayes.

  Burrick lay with her feet under her, her back bent awkwardly over the bulk of her steam armor’s furnace and boiler. Her throat had been slit, opened wide from ear to ear, and the blue and white of her breastplate was spattered with blood. Hisses and sizzling spits rose from her armor as the last of her blood dripped onto the hot furnace.

  Crumpled behind her, powder burns on his face radiating outward from a dark, wet hole above his left eye, was Merriweather.

  Tully sat on a trencher’s camp stool, a bulky repeating pistol hanging loose from his hand. He looked up at Strangewayes. His face was a mess of burns, from both fire and scalding steam.

  “I figured it out, sir. I figured it out about half a second before that grenade went off. I’m Thamar’s own fool, though. I spent too much time wondering why Merriweather kept stepping farther and farther away while you checked Hess. Once I figured it out I knew what his target had to be.” He waved his free hand at Burrick. “But I got here too late.”

  Strangewayes opened his mouth to speak but immediately closed it again. There was nothing to say.

  Captain Arlan Strangewayes stood ill at ease in the afternoon sun in front of Major Markus “Siege” Brisbane’s command tent. The news of the captain’s arrival had preceded him here, as had the report he’d prepared regarding Merriweather’s sabotage and the loss of Lieutenant Burrick and Privates Mannsel and Rodro, trenchers under Thorne’s command.

  Strangewayes didn’t mind writing reports, but preparing that one had pained him. The deaths weighed heavily on him, and the pleasure he usually took in describing warjack design and maintenance issues was nowhere to be found in his words.

  Thorne, Tully, the gobber twins, and one of Thorne’s sergeants stood behind Strangewayes. Brisbane finally emerged from his tent accompanied by his adjutant and a pair of cavalry captains. The man’s dark skin contrasted starkly with the whites of his eyes, and those eyes met Strangewayes’ and bore deep inside him. They did not appear pleased with what they saw. He held the report in one hand and waved it before slapping it to his left, against the adjutant’s chest. She caught it and stepped back.

  “Captain Strangewayes, before I consider punitive measures in an attempt to reshape your thoughts with regard to tactics, please tell me in your own words, what you were thinking.”

  “It’s in the report, Major.”

  “Your thoughts are not, Captain.”

  “I wanted to set a trap, not be caught in one, sir. We had a saboteur. I didn’t know who it was, but I was pretty sure I knew who it wasn’t. I confided in Lieutenant Burrick, and she suggested the saboteur was seeking to capture certain Cygnaran personnel. She pointed out an assassination could have been carried out without going
to the trouble of—”

  “An assassination was carried out, Captain. Continue.”

  “Morrow’s mercy, Siege! Don’t you think I know that?”

  “I think you need to never forget it, Captain Strangewayes. And I think you need to remember that you’re not nearly unique enough to get away with cursing at me while I’m actively tearing you a new smokestack. Now secure that insubordination and continue.”

  Strangewayes stared at the senior officer. He’d never seen the man this angry, and for the first time in a long time he found himself concerned about what Cygnar might do to him rather than what Cygnar’s enemies might do.

  “I’m waiting, Captain.”

  “Lieutenant Burrick said the most likely asset to be targeted for capture was me. After some discussion, she and I agreed to a plan using me as bait. We kept Burrick in back, where she should have been safe.”

  “Captain, when you say ‘in back,’ did you have a secure rear approach? Fortified, heavily defended? Because ‘in back’ is the first place that gets sacked, pounded, shelled, and slashed when the enemy has the opportunity to approach from behind.”

  Or, Strangewayes thought, when he’s already among you. He should have told Thorne more, maybe given him instructions to fire on anybody approaching Burrick.

  “The rear approach was not secure, Major. Lieutenant Burrick’s death was my fault, not Thorne’s, sir.”

  “Captain, I know this may come as a surprise to you, but for all your brilliance, for all your engineering expertise, you are not as valuable to Cygnar as is a future magus warcaster. Those have to be born, bred, and discovered before we can even begin to train them, and that takes years. Our foundries can bang out a new warjack in a month. History teaches us that training a warcaster can take longer than a war itself does. Are we clear on this?”