Dieselpunk: An Anthology (20 page)

“Hal, do you got it?” Dex repeated strongly.

Hal nodded. “Yeah, I got it!”

“And be careful. You’re bound to run into plenty of action, know what I mean?”

Hal nodded again. “What about you?”

Dex looked towards the giant beast as it lurched and growled over the land. “I’m going to enter at the top — through the command level. Got something needs to be done.”

Hal shrugged without argument and said, “You got it, boss.”

Dex spun around but Hal called, “Hey, Dex!”

He looked back.

“Good luck, brother.”

Dex nodded, sending a look into each of his Bloody Dogs and said, “I’ll see you boys on the ground.”

They watched their brother diminish to a speck in the distance before Hal turned and looked at them — Bloody Dogs, as Dex had called them, ripe for combat. He grumbled, “Shall we?” and hammered back on his rifle’s chamber, dipped into an attack vector and punched his boosters forward. They screamed headfirst towards the iron beast until it loomed over them. Already the west-side German turrets spotted them and began stitching the sky with bullets. The Bloody Dogs separated, gaining distance between their numbers, and streaked in with guns blaring, chewing into the gun emplacements. One-by-one, they followed Hal into a breakneck descent, watching the goliath’s lower platform come up at them.

Hal swung his feet down, blowing his reverse nozzles until he came down perfectly on his feet. The others followed, thudding down. The platform was a steel grate-work that spanned the tower’s entire length, and below they could feel the treads grumbling over the earth. Before them was a big steel mouth — the entrance to the foundry floor. Germans were everywhere.

“Fan out, boys!” Hal roared, his rifle spitting rounds in a half-arc. Soldiers dropped down as they rushed at them. Volleys echoed off iron structures. They hurled deeper towards its innards until they entered the cavernous expanse of the foundry.

A series of catwalks encircled above and the stench of burnt fuel met them like a fist. Soldiers were up there leaning over their safety railing raining fire down at them. More rounds spit and chewed against foundry surfaces as the men darted forward towards safety.

Hal crashed behind a steel girder, trained his weapon up high and committed an all-out thatch-work of deadly fire. Germans began dropping down to the foundry floor like morsels tumbling from the Dreadnought’s guts. Peeling his eyes forward he found what Dex had mentioned — a long, dark extrusion case spanning all the way back towards the dark end of the factory.

He whistled out, catching the attention of some of his boys, and screamed, “There! There!” They followed his direction, recognized the structure, and looked back. “I’ll cover for you, boys! Go! Go!” They were already on the move fading into the hot, dimness of the hellish space towards the aft…and towards the fuel-hopper.

Dex hovered in a circumferential pattern over the very top of the Dreadnought. He could see German sentries placed across the roof. There was a utility crane with an arm and cable. He nodded. It was time.

Dex came down like a rush of wind spit out from the clouds. The sentries were taken by surprise when his feet thudded down, and in one swift motion he released a full-arc of his gun laying a volley that sent most of them tumbling off the top. The lucky ones reacted, unleashing their own auto-rifles at him. But it was a panicked move. Surrounded and standing in a dozen lines of fire, Dex merely dropped, allowing their rounds to explode overhead. A number of them were taken off their feet by close-quartered, friendly fire. Popping back up, he found himself surrounded by more feasible numbers. There were five left standing. The others, scattered in dead heaps.

Dex attacked on the quick, unsheathing his bowie knife and sliding into the nearest one like a mastiff barreling forward on the attack. The sentry crashed down, rifle in hand, onto the knife. In the same motion, Dex snagged the body of one of the others and rolled it over on top of himself, absorbing a wave of incoming bullets. He threw the body off and hurled the bowie straight and true into the attacking guard. He grabbed the sentry’s rifle in his hands and was up on a knee, teeth clenched, waving his weapon with point-perfect accuracy. The others crumpled down, dead as doornails.

He got to his feet and made his way to the edge of the Dreadnought and peeked over. The world was way down there and already he could see the land war ramping up, German soldiers moving alongside their undaunted creation in columns. The Dreadnought rocked to and fro with the motion of its lower treads as it gamboled over the landscape.

A noise behind Dex spun him around. A chain-driven lift rose up from the innards. It began to crank open. Trouble.

Dex snagged the crane’s utility cable, sent a burst of gunfire into its wench device, releasing slack, and dove overboard. The lift, once open, spilled a dozen German sentries out, each man poised for action. But their prey was no longer there.

Dex went plummeting earthward until the steel cord in his hand caught and swung him towards the mammoth body of the Dreadnought. Feet forward, he went slamming into a long window, his boots shattering out the pane into a thousand droplets of glass. Jerked by the snagging cord, he went tumbling into the Dreadnought’s head in a frenzy of motion. When he collected himself and looked up, he realized his calculated maneuver had gone off perfectly. He stood in the Dreadnought’s primary control deck — right where he wanted to be.

German officers went into action immediately…fleeing from the room and through the rear exit. But they were small potatoes. Moving forward towards Dex were eight towering guard droids, their bulbous bodies swinging on piston-driven knees, hydraulic motors whining under sudden motion, each bearing auto-cannons on big, iron wrists.

Dex knew these things.
Manosaurs.

More trouble.

A world away, across the French fields, the British Third Army had come marching forward, emerging from the grey landscape like an army of ants facing certain doom. They fanned out in battalions, the whole force spanning a one-mile-stretch of earth.

Col. Blathers led them with his military cabinet close. The iron
leviathan was perfectly visible grinding against the landscape, mak
ing its way towards them. He could sense the fear in his men. It was the same fear he possessed as he stood gawking forward.

The major at his side handed him an eyepiece with a grim look on his face. Blathers took it, brought it up to his eye. The Dreadnought appeared in perfect clarity, its thousand parts shifting and moving, the gun turrets directing their muzzles towards his men. He lowered the eyepiece and groaned, “They’ve spotted us.”

“Day of days, sir?” the major sighed.

“Day of days, lad.” Blathers took a big, nervous breath and said, “Prepare for an attack. We advance!”

Up in the primary control deck, Dex got to his feet as the manosaurs sent volleys of bullets snarling at him. Dodging them all, he tumbled over a control station as a hail of sparks collided around him like fiery rain. He rolled to his feet, hurled himself forward, staying low, and weaved his way deeper into the control room, staying behind control platforms and operation decks. The manosaurs swung in unison with his motion, but he remained one step ahead, kneading a circular path through the room until he approached the nearest one. Growling out, he went airborne, attached to its back, and swung it around with his momentum. The gunfire from the other manosaurs began depleting it down into spitting gears and exploding cogs. The firing stopped momentarily — just long enough for Dex to locate the fuel-line inside its whirring chest, reach in, rip the hose away, and spray the room down with petrol, as if the thing was squirting its lifeblood all over the control deck. In an action so swift it could hardly be registered, Dex unpocketed a Zippo, popped its casing open with a thumb, ran the flint across a pant leg igniting a finger of orange flame, and tossed it forward. Kicking like an angry bulldog away from the collapsing manosaur, he went smashing through the glass on the opposite side of the room, avoiding the plume of flame that erupted overhead.

He hung onto the window frame with his feet dangling in the air as the explosion seemed to halt the Dreadnought altogether, like a being that had suddenly experienced the strangest anomaly inside its brain. As the ball of flame died away, silence fell inside. Dex paused, catching his breath. Placing his feet on the side of the Dreadnought’s head, he began struggling back inside, but something stopped him cold.

Words. He heard words. And they were all too familiar.

“Hoffte ich, daß sie wieder zurückkehren würde . . .”

Dex looked up through wild, glistening eyes to see Commandant von Slitt staring down at him, his silver teeth bore open in a grin, that black glass eyeball twinkling and wet, a hand offering assistance. Yes. Dex knew those words all too well: “I hoped you vould return.”

The Bloody Dogs had ducked and weaved their way to the aft end of the foundry and now stood at the mammoth extruder’s back end. Above their heads was the fuel-hopper — a sheer iron silo filled with petrol. At the control deck, a German operator spun around, hands up, eyes big.

“Move it! Move it!” one of the Bloody Dogs barked, and the German disappeared in a frenzy of flying knees and elbows. The Bloody Dog was at the control station inspecting levers, guessing over knobs, pontificating over how to dump the fuel.

Another one moved to him, pointed out a red lever, and said, “Try that one!”

He shrugged, “Why not?” and yanked it.

Something happened. The hiss of vacuum sounded off and the great rubber throat connecting hopper and crankshaft began shimmying. Fuel was being dumped from one apparatus into the other. The Bloody Dogs looked at each other impressed, and then got the hell out of there.

Towards the entrance, Hal was still holding the Germans at bay, but only barely. Ducking behind his iron-girder support, he could feel the slice of bullets pepper down around him. He swung out, unleashed a few rounds, then ducked back. In moments, he found himself trapped, unable to flee to the right or left. He needed help. Through desperate eyes he glanced towards the foundry’s aft for signs of his crew returning from the extruder’s crank casing. Only shadows and iron.

“Oh hell,” he muttered. Then, holding his breath, clenching his teeth, and squinting his eyes, he popped out again, sent off a few rounds in a blind frenzy, and popped back.

Still hanging outside the window, staring up into that grotesque face, contemplating the hand reaching for him, Dex sneered, “I’ve only come back to put an end to this.”

Von Slitt grinned like the Devil and said, “You betray de
Vaterland
, ent now you betray your own tongue, I see.”

“I’m not one of you.”

“Oh, but you are. Come. Let me help you as I have so many times before.”

Dex grimaced but capitulated, taking von Slitt’s hand and being pulled back inside. Once on his feet, Dex moved away from von Slitt who went to a communication trumpet and called down in German, “Hptm. Heffenschlaug, you may activate the secondary bridge ent continue vith the attack.” He switched it off and gleamed back at Dex.

Dex felt the Dreadnought lurch back into motion, its cantankerous infrastructure suddenly rocking to and fro. They were moving forward again — would reach the Somme in minutes.

Von Slitt’s glare was insinuating. He muttered, “You are the von they call
Geister des Krieges
?”

Spirits of War.

Dex replied, “Yeah, that’s me. But not so much as you, Commandant.”

Von Slitt regarded the wreckage of the manosaurs — his personal guard — strewn through the shredded space and grumbled with humility. “You vill not convince my manosaurs of dat. Impressive handivork, you have. Makes me proud, actually. But who better than their creator to understand so effectively how to destroy them? I vould almost believe you designed them vith a fault, for you knew von day you vould return to face them.”

“It was simple. A little fuel, a little fire. Destroys anything. You taught me that. Even your precious Dreadnought.”

Von Slitt shook a finger at him. “I think it vill not be so easy. You especially must agree, no?”

Dex chuckled without humor.

“Not even the
Geister des Krieges
could destroy Dreadnought,” von Slitt said, his words edged with a twist of threat.

Dex lowered his brow as if accepting the challenge and muttered, “We’ll see.”

Hal was getting desperate. His attackers were beginning to get the angle on him from their position above and across the foundry. They were being cautious, spitting rounds in his direction, waiting, then spitting more rounds. Collecting the courage to die, he held his breath and charged away from his hideout. Bullets stitched the metal floor at his feet, hot air coursing just beyond his flesh. He went crashing headfirst behind a secondary motor, a long, diesel-driven collection of exposed pistons all pumping and wailing. Bullets struck it, sending steaming oil through the air like a mist. Hal screamed against the blistering effect of the sticky fluid, but stayed low, knowing he wouldn’t be able to stay here for very long. His eyes searched for signs of his Bloody Dogs.