William Dietrich - Getting back

Inspired by the towers used to assault castle walls, this one used as its foundation the bottom frame of four automobiles, two side by side in the front and two in the rear to create a square platform with sixteen rusting steel wheels, stripped of their flattened rubber. An aluminum electrical transmission tower, shorn of its arms, had been lashed to this foundation using some dead electrical cable, producing a tower one hundred feet high. Car hoods and trunk lids had been bolted to it like scales, giving it a protective covering of light armor on three sides. At the top was the flatbed of a light truck, mounted on rails, that could be slid forward when the tower reached Daniel's office building. If the tower worked as planned, attacking convicts would swarm up ladders to its summit and charge across the flatbed, smashing through the windows of the ninth floor at the same time another group stormed the lobby. The creaking contraption would give the convicts attacking on the ground some cover by blocking fire from the plaza wall of windows.

"We've advanced from the Stone Age to the Medieval in half a day," Ethan marveled. "What happens in the next round? A nuclear exchange?"

"Let's get through this round first," said Daniel. "Can you hold the lobby again?"

"If you can keep that moving junkyard away."

A skirmishing fire from the office tower windows and the surrounding streets began immediately, the convicts trying to provide cover for their approaching siege engine with sling-launched rocks. The women under Amaya replied with slingshots and bows. It was impossible to be accurate in the darkness but the whiz and swap of stone and bolt and arrow created a weird pinging music, some of the shots bouncing off the armor of the approaching siege tower with a punctuating clang. Those on both sides jerked in apprehension at the sound. One of the convicts howled as an arrow struck home, and a woman in the offices screamed as a rock broke her hand.

"Fire!" Daniel shouted. With no powder to ignite the word didn't really fit a catapult, he found himself thinking randomly: ancient artillery captains must have yelled something more appropriate to their technology such as "shoot," or "throw." No matter, his trebuchet operators knew exactly what he meant. A ratchet gear was released, the old, now powerless elevator made a brief plunge down its shaft, and the steel beam sprang forward. With ponderous grace a metal desk was launched into flight with a whoosh, arcing toward the approaching siege tower.

It missed to the right by twenty feet, plunging down to explode into shrapnel, its panels clattering as they bounced in all directions. The impact got the convicts to jerk to a startled halt but otherwise didn't hurt a thing.

"What the hell was that?" one of them cried.

"They're trying to hit us!" Rugard's voice roared. "Hurry, hurry! Get against the building and they can't reach us!" The convicts leaned against the rear of the tower platform again and it began lumbering forward once more, groaning and swaying. Some convicts darted forward to pull debris out of its way. At the tower's top, a couple of the Warden's men began trying to lob stones at Daniel's trebuchet squad on the roof of the office tower.

The trebuchet had been reloaded. "Release!" Daniel cried this time.

"What?" his befuddled crew asked.

"I mean fire. Fire, fire!"

"Oh."

Another desk was hurled into the night, again arcing down at the approaching tower. This time it clipped the contraption with a loud bang, jerking the top so violently that the convicts there were nearly thrown off. One of the protective auto hoods was torn away and came down with the desk. The tower stopped again.

"No, no!" Rugard shouted. "Go faster! Get in under their reach!"

His men were hesitating. The source of these meteoric desks was unknown and the escalating war was beginning to rattle them. They wanted the transmitter, but not at the cost of their lives.

"Move! Move if you want to live! If you don't move, by God I'll kill you!"

The tower had just started trundling forward again when it was hit broadside, a desk hitting it like a gong and making the entire structure reverberate. Then the missile slid harmlessly down the steel scales, crashing onto the pavement below. Two men ran forward and dragged it out of the way before the defenders could hit them with missiles.

"They can't break it!" Rugard roared. "It's stronger than their fire! Now, now, move across and let's end this thing!"

Up on the roof of the office tower, Daniel's men were desperate. "That was our best shot," Peter said grimly. "The thing hardly even rocked. What are we going to do?"

Daniel looked wildly around. "We need something heavier." He pointed. "That rusted-out air-conditioning unit, maybe!"

Peter looked dubious. "That elephant? I don't know if the elevator is heavy enough to counterweight it."

"It might be if we climb onto the elevator!"

"Are you crazy! The cable might snap!"

"Then we'll use the automatic brakes! Come on, help me pry this sucker loose!"

The air conditioner was not much bigger than a hurled desk, but twice as heavy. They rolled it on the trebuchet arm and balanced it between holding prongs. It seemed too ponderous to throw. Daniel ran to the lip of the building. The siege tower was rolling closer.

What other chance did they have?

"Okay, we've got one shot at this thing!" He jumped onto the top of the elevator. "Peter, you aim and fire!"

The others looked down the elevator well dubiously at where he was standing, eight feet below them. A loose steel cable led from the elevator to the trebuchet arm. "Come on, get down here with me! We need your weight!"

They jumped aboard. Peter had disappeared. Then they heard his voice: "Launch!" With the jerk of a lever the elevator began to fall. The cable went taut, the counterweight arm came down, and the ponderously heavy air-conditioning unit soared up.

Then there was a jerk, a bang, and the counterweight elevator cable snapped. Instead of stopping after a one-floor drop, the box with three men on top started plunging toward the basement of the building.

"Brakes!" one of them screeched.

The emergency brakes had been pried open with a steel bar. Now Daniel lunged at it. "I can't get the damn bar out!" he shouted.

The elevator was accelerating. Angus lurched over, grabbed, and jerked. Suddenly the bar was out, whipping so violently that it slapped them against the concrete of the elevator shaft and scraping them as they tumbled, falling with the box. Then the brakes designed to halt such falls snapped outward in a shower of sparks. There was a long howl of metal. Then the elevator abruptly stopped, rocking slightly.

The three men were in a stunned heap on the elevator roof. "I hear cheering," Angus grunted.

"Which side?" Daniel gasped.

"We stopped near a door." The third man, named Royce, pointed. They used the brake bar to lever it open and crawled onto the sixth floor, then ran to the window.

The siege tower was gone.

No, not gone, but toppled, broken, its transmission tower framework crumpled and the hurled air-conditioning unit wedged where it had creased the tower in two. The women, three floors below, were cheering.

The men ran down to them. "What happened?"

"You hit them dead center and it went over like a tree," Amaya reported excitedly. "They ran like cockroaches from light. Some are pretty badly hurt and I think the fight went out of them. They'd started to rush the lobby but ran back out!"

"Casualties?"

"Henry's dead and three more are seriously wounded. Almost everyone is a little banged up, and everyone's shaken. The convicts are hurting even worse."

Peter came down. "The trebuchet arm broke when we fired," he reported. "Maybe we can repair it but we've lost our counterweight, and we have to drag up more ammunition."