S. Stirling - Dies The Fire

"Give up!" he shouted. "Give up, or your ass is grass!"

The reply came back thin across the distance: "Fuck you!" and the three men waved their swords and shook fists.

"You guys called it," Havel said with a shrug, pulling out an arrow. "Geeup, Gustav."

The horse was tired, but not worn out. He could feel it gathering itself as he leg-signaled it; it was getting so he was as comfortable riding with the reins knotted on the saddlebow as with them in his hands. And the Devil Dogs hadn't tried to skewer him with a crossbow bolt, which meant they probably didn't have an intact weapon between the three of them.

The horse went trot-canter-gallop. He went close this time, watching carefully and picking his target. The two shieldless men tried to duck under the cover of the dead horse:

"I don't fucking believe it," Ken Larsson said, staring at the steam engine.

Randy Sacket darted a triumphant glance at his father, who was about Ken's age; the younger man was in his twenties, with dark hair slicked back into a ponytail and tattoos on his forearms. His hands were big and battered as he traced the water and steam lines on the miniature traction engine-it stood about four feet high at the top of its boiler, with a disproportionately large seat.

"You're sure it's not some sort of mechanical failure?" Pete Sacket said.

The older Sacket ran a garage-cum-machine-shop on the edge of Craigswood, or had before the Change-it wasn't far from the spot the Bearkillers had picked to camp. Now he and his son and daughter-in-law cultivated a big truck garden and helped improvise plows and cultivators that could be drawn by horses or newly broken oxen. The steam engine stood in the dirt parking lot behind the sheet-metal buildings, along with a good deal of other abandoned equipment: much of it valuable for the heavy springs it contained.

You could throw things with springs and gears; he'd fired up the steam engine for curiosity's sake, and to keep his mind off the fact that his children were out fighting, and him not there.

Its boiler was hissing merrily, and wisps of steam escaped as more and more fuel oil was fed to the boilers-the machine was meant for tourists, and shoveling in coal would have been more authenticity than most at the county fair wanted.

What's happening is that the goddamned pressure isn't going up like it should, Larsson thought, wiping his hands on an oily rag.

He looked up at the setting sun, feeling a little guilty; there was a working day gone.

"No, it's in perfect working order," he said. "It's just that no matter how much fuel you put through, the pressure doesn't get high enough to do more than-"

He pointed to the flywheel, which spun-very, very slowly-in its mount on the top right of the boiler. Suddenly he threw the rag down and stamped on it, startling both of them; he wasn't a demonstrative man, and they'd both picked up on that even on short acquaintance.

"I told you, Dad," Randy said. "It's something to do with the Change!"

All three of them glared at the big toy. "How the hell could anything make steam engines stop?" the older mechanic said.

"How the hell could anything make radios and gasoline engines stop? All we can do is guess," Larsson said bitterly. "We're like King Arthur trying to make sense of a cell phone. This tears it, though-I'm morally certain it's some intelligent action. Alien Space Bats are stealing our toys. Someone or some-thing's sucking energy out of anything that meets certain parameters. And they're doing it selectively-just on the surface of the earth."

He shook a fist at the sky. "If we ever get a chance at payback, you sick sadistic bastards, you'll regret this!"

"I regret it already," Randy Sacket said mournfully. He pulled a package of cigarettes from the pocket of his denim vest. "These are my last smokes. And man, I miss my Harley real bad."

All three men sighed. Peter Sacket snapped off the feed to the little engine's firebox, and the hissing died. The flywheel took another few turns and stopped, and the pressure gauge dropped down from its pathetic figure towards zero.

"You know," Ken said thoughtfully, "you could build a steam engine to operate at the pressures we got here."

"You could?" both the mechanics said.

"Yeah. Sort of like the first ones ever built, we studied them in our history of engineering courses. The problem is that they'd weigh about half a ton per horsepower with cylinders ten feet long and they'd gobble fuel so fast you could only use them where it was pretty well free-that's why the first ones were used to pump out coal mines. For doing any useful work, and particularly for pushing a locomotive or a boat or a road vehicle. forget it. You'd be better off with an exercise wheel full of gerbils."

He nearly asked for one of the younger man's cigarettes, but restrained himself. Getting readdicted to a drug about to disappear for good from this part of the world would be extremely stupid.

"So much for the Chinese being better off than the rest of us," he said.

"Why should the Chinese be better off?"

"They still use a lot of coal-fired steam locomotives: or did, before the Change. Apparently whoever did this to the human race was quite thorough."

He sighed and turned back to the weapons he and the mechanics had been working on; gas cutting and welding sets still worked, and would as long as the acetylene held out. They'd already done the frames, wheels and parts to his specifications.

"This is the catapult," he said, pointing to the first. One of the Sackets lit a gasoline lantern and hung it on a pole. "It'll shoot great big steel spears. This is going to be the tre-buchet."

"Tree bucket?" Peter Sacket asked.

"Tray-boo-shet. It's just a big lever with a weight on the short end and a throwing sling on the long one," Larsson said. "It'll throw rocks; rocks weighing hundreds of pounds, and throw them half a mile, hard. Then this thing is going to be a covered ram, with a sloping steel roof and a big I-beam for the ram. Last but not least, this'll be a pump with a long nozzle controlled by the gantry I showed you the drawings for."

"Might be useful for firefighting," Sacket said.

Behind him, his son rolled his eyes.

Larsson grinned. "No, what'll be pumping is a mixture of chopped up tires dissolved in gasoline, then thickened further with detergent-soap flakes."

"Napalm!" the older Sacket cried in delight. "Christ, I was an armorer's mate in 'Nam and we loaded that stuff all the time. Those sorry-ass bikers will get out of town fast when that comes calling!"

"Yup," Larsson said. Guess I'd better not mention being an antiwar protester back then. "Then there are these metal shields on wheels, to push up to the wall-"

He stopped. Neither of the other men were listening to him anymore. Both were staring over his shoulder. He wheeled himself:

"That's torn it," Havel said grimly.

"What?" Luanne Hutton looked up; she'd been scrubbing blood from the foot-long steel head of her lance with a handful of grass.

Everyone else was doing the chores; piling up enemy weapons and armor, getting the wounded onto their horse-drawn ambulance and headed back to camp with Astrid and her teenagers; the battle had looped around quite close to Craigswood in the course of pursuit and maneuver; And making sure the enemy dead really were. Piling up the bodies and taking tally, too-the Bearkillers were being paid a per-confirmed-kill bonus.

They had taken a couple of prisoners, both wounded, and Pam was patching those up too. The sun was low in the west now, making Cottonwood Butte a black outline across the rolling prairie.

"Signe!" Havel called, cursing himself behind an impassive face. "Signe!"

The girl was a few yards away, helping with the captured horses and not looking at the gruesome clean-up work.