Pirates dropped prone beneath the field of fire and returned salvos of their own. Despite the murderous efficiency of the chain guns, over half the initial landing party survived to take cover. Still and all, had that been the entirety of the invading force, and repelling them the Cygnarans’ primary objective, the battle would have already been decided.
It wasn’t.
Hundreds of yards offshore, pirate brigandines came ponderously about, turning broadside to the beach. Sails whipped and rippled while great paddlewheels belched steam and propelled the ships against the prevailing winds. Ports clacked open, heavy guns protruded at an almost obscene slither. Thunder roared, and Cygnaran soldiers flew or fled from erupting craters.
A second wave of landing craft bounced over the whitecaps, and this time not all of them were longboats. Several broad, flat-bottomed barges crunched against the shore, becoming mobile piers, and from them marched titans of iron and smoke.
Nearly ten feet in height, they were only vaguely humanoid. From an almost spherical torso protruded a narrow waist, piston-driven legs, and spindly arms, one grasping an oversized harpoon, the other a massive scattergun. From their backs, protruding smokestacks blackened the surrounding air. An almost demonic visage, wrought in the iron of the thing’s “chest,” glowed with the fury of internal fires.
Nor were these the only surprises the reavers had in store. From beneath the surf crawled another metallic monstrosity, taller and heavier by far than the others. A trio of chimneys belched sickening fumes, produced by engines that drove legs capable of crushing men flat. The maw of a cannon gaped at the end of the thing’s left arm, while it wielded a full-sized ship’s anchor in its right fist as readily as its human compatriots swung their cutlasses.
From the soldiers in the trenches the cry arose, though surely even those farthest from the line could see for themselves. “Warjacks!”
“Well,” Sergeant Bracewell muttered, “took them long enough.” She flinched, turning her head from the shrapnel as a cannonball detonated closer to her command position than she’d have preferred.
“Isn’t the navy supposed to be doing something about those?” someone asked in a voice that might have come from a pipe-smoking rock-crusher.
Bracewell shrugged at the man next to her. An older fellow, his sun-leathered face hidden behind a graying beard trimmed just short enough not to violate regulations, he wore an array of heavy tools on a belt around his waist, and a bandolier of pistols across his chest. Other than his eyes, protected by a pair of goggles, his face was smeared with the ambient ash and soot.
“You just stand ready to do your job, Master Sergeant,” she told him. “The boys know how to do theirs.”
Wendell Habbershant, chief field mechanik to Bracewell’s squad, replied with a disdainful snort that, she was sure, must have proved painful in the brackish sea air. “Always assume incompetence, Sergeant. You’ll be disappointed less often.”
And then, a moment later, “That Mariner’s getting awfully close, don’t you think?” He waved idly at the largest of the enemy machines, currently advancing on the first of the Cygnaran entrenched positions.
“It is,” she admitted. “I’m just waiting for—There!”
Again manmade thunder sounded over the gulf, but not from the enemy batteries. Barely visible from the command post, a steam-driven ironhull hove into view, accompanied by a small flotilla of more traditional galleons, all proudly flying the blue-and-gold. Their shells landed somewhat short of the pirate vessels—the Cygnaran ships weren’t quite in range—but it certainly got their attention. The brigandine crews instantly turned their efforts, and their guns, to the new and nearer threat, abandoning their bombardment of the beach.
Benwynne took a quick breath, allowing herself—as she always did—a single instant of personal regret before battle. No warcaster, she; never had been, for all her attempts, and never would be. Whatever talent for magic ran in the blood of those rare few was utterly lacking in hers. She would never experience the mental and emotional bond between those peculiar wizards and their not-quite-living companions.
But for all that, like other so-called ’jack-marshals, she was trained well enough, practiced enough, experienced enough, to know that she could make herself understood despite the distance and the apocalyptic cacophony of the battle.
“Wolfhound . . .” Her voice rang out over the battlefield, and she knew it would be heard, and obeyed, by more than merely human ears. “Target Mariner; all other priorities secondary. Deploy!”
Again a slab of beach bulged and fell aside, but this was no array of entrenched soldiers who appeared from within the storm of grit. Behind and to the left of the advancing enemy rose a warjack all but dwarfed by the Mariner itself. Smaller even than the lighter ’jacks that had come across on the barges, it held the same hunched posture as the larger. Rather than the brass-and-iron of the pirate machine, this ’jack was matte-darkened steel. It boasted a single smokestack to the Mariner’s three; a broad-bladed axe in place of the anchor; and a cannon far narrower, but far longer, than the bulky weapon carried by the heavier warjack.
Wolfhound raised that barrel and fired. An alchemically hardened shell arced over the battlefield and plunged into the Mariner’s back just beneath the central stack, punching through the outer armor like it was plywood.
An enormous spent casing snapped from the breach to land with a faint whump beside Wolfhound’s steel feet.
The larger iron beast staggered to one knee, belching smoke, fire, and fluids from its brand new orifice. With pistons roaring and gears grinding it began to rise, leveraging itself up using the anchor as a crutch, and raised its own cannon in retort.
Benwynne didn’t plan on letting it engage.
“Shepherd! Bulldog! Deploy!”
Two more warjacks burst from pits in the beach, their boilers flaring from a bare simmer to a conflagration, smoke now belching skyward. Unlike Wolfhound, these were of more traditional Cygnaran design: Both displayed harsher lines and angles, chassis in blue and gold rather than dull steel, a pair of smoking chimneys and mechanical faces as sharp as a heavy plow or the cattle-catcher on a train.
Only in their armament did they differ: Bulldog sported a terrifyingly large warhammer in one hand, a double emplacement of light cannon in place of the other; Shepherd a chain gun and spiked, reinforced shield.
Raining grit, Shepherd opened up on the smaller ’jacks, some of whom were moving to reinforce the Mariner. Bulldog unloaded both barrels on the heavier warjack until the weapon’s magazine ran dry, the barrage punctuated by intermittent shots from Wolfhound’s long gun.
“Do you have any idea,” Wendell asked bitterly, “how hard it is to clean sand out of those joints?”
Even as it shuddered under the new impacts, the Mariner discharged its own cannon. Wolfhound, pounding across the shoreline far more swiftly and steadily than any other ’jack could manage on the shifting terrain, easily cleared the line of fire. Swerving as it charged, the Hunter-class warjack closed the distance and burst through a rank of enemy pirates, bring its axe around in a mighty arc.
Shaking, spitting embers and ever-filthier smoke, the heavy warjack finally collapsed.
Benwynne swept her spyglass across the battlefield one last time. Wendell’s cynicism notwithstanding, the other two squads fighting alongside hers had damn well better do their jobs, harrying the pirates from both flanks. Otherwise, this was never going to work.
“Master Sergeant, signal your team. I want Wolfhound and Bulldog reloaded. Bulldog, you’re shielding Wolfhound while he resupplies, then swap out! Shepherd, I need an open path from here to the shore.”
Raising her voice, shouting over the renewed roar of the chain guns—not merely Shepherd’s, but the entrenched positions’ as well—“Corporal Gaust! You’re up!”
“Finally!” Several figures moved from the rear of Benwynne’s post. “Thought you’d forgotten about us.”
“Just remember your assignment, Co
rporal. No showboating.”
“Have I ever lost track of an objective, Sergeant?”
“Do you mean so far this month,” Wendell muttered under his breath, “or . . . ?”
“Corporal, go.”
Half a dozen soldiers, shoulders hunched, pounded for the shoreline at a dead sprint. The bulk of them were clad in leathers reinforced with riveted plates, armored like most other soldiers on the field, but the man who led them sported a flowing coat and tricorne hat; they almost made him resemble a pirate captain himself, save that both displayed the official navy blue fabric and golden trim.
Even as they ran, Benwynne cursed under her breath. She’d much have preferred to station them closer to the waterline, hidden like the trenchers had been. Unfortunately, they’d had no way of knowing precisely where the cleanest path to the water would appear, or when, or whether they’d have been taken out by a stray shot from the ships before it was time to move. She hated making them run the length of the field, but . . .
“All right, ladies and gentlemen! Let’s give them some cover!” Hefting her carbine, Sergeant Bracewell broke from her position and opened fire, her escort following behind.
***
Atherton Gaust, corporal in the Second Cygnaran Army, scarcely felt the stinging grit in the air, the briny aura of the sea, even the shells and bullets pounding the world around him. No, as he ran, coat and untraditionally long blond hair trailing behind him, the only thing the wiry soldier felt was eager.
It’d been a long time since they’d thrown him a battle like this one.
Which did not mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that he wasn’t paying attention.
“‘Jack, left flank!”
Like three parts of a single clockwork mechanism, a trio of the commandos produced metal spheres from their belts, and hurled them underhand. Two of the grenades landed at the feet of the harpoon-wielding warjack; the third bounced off its shoulder and had fallen halfway to the ground when all three detonated.
Atherton didn’t stop to see if the warjack was out of action. It was down, and his team was past; that’s what counted.
He knew the whole race wouldn’t be that easy, though.
A high-pitched whistle was their only warning. Atherton and his soldiers dived to the sand as a shell carved a crater in their path. When Atherton raised his head—absently reaching out to retrieve his hat and cram it back on his head—he spotted a cluster of pirates charging his way.
By this point, many of the enemy had won past the trenches and come too close for most of the soldiers to waste any more time reloading. Pistols and carbines, then, made way for fighting daggers, bayonets, and Caspian battleblades—heavy, cleaving swords with rounded and weighted tips. These clashed against pirate blades, accompanied by only the occasional blast of a repeating rifle or burst of a chain gun.
Atherton’s own men, of course, hadn’t discharged their weapons yet, lurking in reserve as they’d been. Five carbines fired, five freebooters dropped, but over thrice that number still stood. That his commandos could take the lot of them, Atherton didn’t doubt, but they had more important uses for their time.
That and, frankly, he wanted his own piece of the action.
“Keep moving! I’ll catch up.”
A quick chorus of “Yes, sir!” and they scattered, each making for the waterline by a slightly different course.
Atherton stepped calmly into the path of the oncoming pirates, flipped back his coat, and drew his pistols.
Not the traditional single-shot weapons still carried by many infantrymen, these, nor the far more advanced carbines wielded by his commandos, but so-called “pepperboxes.” The antiquated gun’s quartet of barrels rotated via clockwork gears, allowing for four rapid shots before reloading. An effective weapon, certainly, if uncomfortably weighty and an absolute bear to reload.
Or such was true, anyway, of normal pepperbox pistols. But these were no more normal pistols than Atherton was a normal marksman.
The Cygnaran’s lips twitched in a low mutter, and the air surrounding his weapons began to ripple with a shimmering, electric blue, highlighting the ornate knotwork of runes carved deep into every barrel. It pulsed, that aura, shifting and flickering. From precisely the right angle, at exactly the right moment, observers might have seen recognizable glyphs and runes in the blinking patterns.
“Gunmage!”
By the time the lead pirate had called his warning, it was already too late. Hammers fell, pistols spoke, and when the bullets flew, they carried as heavy a load of sorcery as they did of lead.
The first shot struck the man who’d shouted. Rather than punching through him, the bullet flattened against his chest, instantly bestowing an impossible inertia. The pirate hurtled backward, not markedly slower than the bullet itself had been, bowling over two of his companions with force enough to shatter half the bones in all three bodies.
The bullet from the second weapon struck with an impact more appropriate to an artillery shell, punching straight through not only its first target, but three additional pirates besides. That it actually curved to hit the final man was a detail utterly lost amidst the larger chaos.
The recoil didn’t shift Atherton’s guns so much as a fraction of an inch. Instead, in utter contempt for the laws of physics, that recoil pressed sideways into the cylinders, causing the barrels to click over without need for clockwork gears at all—gears which, in fact, were absent from these custom weapons.
It was, the lot of it, impossible. But it was what Atherton wanted, and where he commanded, firearms obeyed.
A scarred, hairy giant of a pirate appeared from outside Atherton’s line of fire. He lunged, screaming, axe raised overhead in a stance more appropriate for chopping through an offending log than an offending man.
Atherton lifted one pistol in a skillful parry, turning the thick blade aside; the axe left no mark on the ensorcelled steel barrel. The second pistol he drove into his attacker’s face like a punch-dagger, splitting skin and breaking bone. Whether or not that injury would have proved fatal became a moot point when the gunmage fired a shot through that sorely cracked and battered skull, dropping a second charging foe in the process.
Runic bullets flew and men died—pierced, broken, or tossed like canoes in a tidal wave. Finally, however, both guns had cycled their allotment of four, and only empty chambers waited for the falling hammers.
One pirate—tall, lanky, with a cruel sneer and a saw-toothed, piston-driven cutlass—survived. He offered Atherton a reeking, gap-toothed grin.
“Been countin’. Ya had yer eight, ya bastard!”
“Nine,” the Cygnaran corrected him politely.
“Huh? Can’t ya even count, ya—?”
Atherton flipped his right-hand pistol high, sending it spiraling into the air far above his head. In that same motion he twisted, his now empty hand flying under his coat.
By the time the pirate had torn his gaze from the tumbling pepperbox, Atherton held the grip of a standard-issue forgelock. And by the time the pirate had advanced a second running step, the gunmage had whipped that pistol forward and shot his enemy cleanly between the eyes.
The forgelock was stowed once more in its holster at the small of his back, and his hand was open and waiting, when the falling pepperbox slapped back into his palm.
“Nine,” Atherton declared firmly. Then he was off, racing to rejoin his team.
***
“Shepherd’s down! Shepherd’s down!”
Benwynne came around, cursing, just in time to see the warjack fall beneath a barrage of scattershot from a trio of enemy ’jacks. Bits of steel lay nearby, curled like slices of warm cheese; tendrils of smoke wound skyward from spots on the blue-and-gold chassis that were most assuredly not meant to function as exhaust ports.
Even as the pirate machines moved in to ensure their job was done, however, Wolfhound appeared behind them. Looming like an angry god, it slammed one of the ’jacks aside with its great axe, jabbed a second i
n the chest with the long-cannon and blew it apart from point blank range. Pistons seized, fuels ignited, and the warjack went away from the waist up.
Wolfhound promptly kicked one of the still standing legs directly into the path of the third warjack, knocking it back a pace while the Hunter pursued the enemy it had damaged but not dropped with the axe. The shriek of rending metal and the rapid firing of pistons sent nearby soldiers of both sides running for quieter and more peaceful quarters of the battlefield.
Forgotten, then, Shepherd sprawled alone near the edges of the lapping tide.
“Habbershant!” Benwynne called out.
“On it!” Indeed, he already was, for his answering cry came from several paces nearer the shore. Growling such that only every third syllable was audible, the sergeant followed, waving several of her men to accompany her.
Most mechaniks of the Cygnaran army worked in tandem with a team of assistants, some human, some otherwise. Habbershant, however, disdained such aid, refusing to put more lives in danger. His team were all skilled mechaniks in their own rights, ready to handle tasks that didn’t require his level of expertise, or emergencies he couldn’t reach. But when Master Sergeant Habbershant stepped into the field of fire, he did so alone.
Benwynne had once asked him, “How do you know you won’t need a part or tool you don’t have on you?”
“Because,” he’d answered, “if you can’t tell from a glance what you’re likely to need, you’ve no business leading a team of mechaniks.”
She’d thought it braggadocio at the time, but in all their battles, she’d never seen him mistaken. Even now he skidded to Shepherd’s side in a spray of grit and seawater and was instantly reaching into the first of the jagged rents with a five-pronged, asymmetrical wrench. A moment later and Wolfhound was back beside him, turning the fallen ’jack so Habbershant could more easily reach the damage.
Benwynne vaulted the trench, took over a chain gun from an exhausted crew, and prepared to shred any pirate who so much as looked askance at the mechanik while he worked.