Фил Фоглио - Agatha H. and the Siege of Mechanicsburg

Zeetha’s breath caught and then she squinted. “The windows are still broken,” she observed.

“Can’t do windows,” the Castle grated. It actually sounded like it was under stress.150 There was a sudden, rising keening noise known to many in the empire as the sound preceding a Wulfenbach aerial bombardment. It was followed by an explosion from atop one of the newly restored towers. Zeetha looked upwards. A Wulfenbach fleet soared overhead. More whistling, and more explosions hammered away at the Castle. All over the surface of the Castle, hundreds of doors and hatches flew open. Before Zeetha’s startled eyes, a dark cloud poured forth and angrily spiraled upwards. If she had been closer, she would have seen that this consisted of an innumerable swarm of winged clanks.

Aboard the lead spotter craft, the forward watch was able to see—all too clearly—the clanks through his binoculars as the swarm rose towards them. “Com,” he roared, “send an urgent alert on all bands! All Wulfenbach ships! Prepare for an attack on your six! Prepare for impact! Repeat: Prepare for—!” Which was when the first wave hit his ship. They smashed through the relatively thin balloon hide and began wreaking havoc amidst the gas cells. The great observation window shattered as a squat clank burst through and raked the nearby instruments with its rusty steel claws. “Thank you for shopping in Mechanicsburg,” it cheerfully announced.151

“Disengage,” the spotter shouted. “All airships are to disengage!”

“Oh no,” the clank chuckled in what anyone below would have recognized as the voice of the Castle. “You had your chance.” It

ripped the radio free and tossed it out through the window. “Now you get to see why no one should attack the Heterodyne.” It snagged the spotter by his flight jacket and dragged him out into the sky. “You’re an observer, yes? Then I shall keep you alive, so you can relate exactly what it is you’ll see.”152

And this is some of what he saw:

Gunner First Class Lindar DuQuesne peered upwards. The flotilla of airships that hovered protectively overhead appeared to be under attack by swarms of midges. His unit of mobile artillery was positioned at the base of a small hillock, one of many that encircled the town. The hilltops had been requisitioned by the various commanders who were coordinating the hodge-podge of empire units attacking Mechanicsburg. His unit was on picket duty. He shaded his brow with a hand. “What in crackthunder is going on up there?” he muttered.

“Hoy!” His captain bellowed from directly behind him. “You worry about your own gun!”

Lindar snapped to attention so fast that he almost dislocated his shoulders. “Yessir, Captain, sir!”

The captain clapped a hand on his shoulder and joined him in looking upwards. “But I gotta say,” he confided to Lindar, “I been watchin’ them cloud jockeys sail clean over the real fighting for twenty years. Now they’re doin’ the fightin’, and we’re untouched. Can’t say I mind that.” He looked at Lindar, who had the reputation amongst the men of being a bit of an intellectual. “Say, ain’t there some kind of fancy-pants word for that? You know, for somebody else doin’ worse’n us?”

Behind the sergeant, the hillock rumbled and a door opened, revealing a tall, moss-encrusted clank reminiscent of a man in armor. Its eyes began to glow, and with a hiss, it drew forth a shining steel blade easily three meters long and strode towards them. Lindar frantically tried to bring his cannonette to bear on the advancing figure. The word you want, he thought, is “unnatural.”

Everywhere buried giants were clawing their way to the surface. The great wall that encircled the town shivered. All along its length, enormous metal doors swung aside and armored colossi lurched forward. The first thing they did was to stride up to the dropwalls that girt the town and, with a coordinated effort, begin pushing them back, snowplowing the empire troops and ordinance clustered about their foundations.

One of the imperial generals watching the scene lowered his spyglass and snarled in confusion, “By Janus, what are those things doing? Whose side are they on?” By this time, the giants had pushed the dropwalls easily a hundred meters away from the walls of the city.

The attacking forces accepted this gift with indifference and began to flow into the ever-widening gaps.

“Don’t attack the giants until they attack you,” the general ordered. He snapped the spyglass closed. “Mechanics,”153 he said with a sneer. “Bunch of loonies. Always have been.” A series of thundering booms had him swinging the glass back up to his eye. On the plain before him, he saw the colossi tipping the last of the dropwalls forward. As they crashed to the ground, he shook his head. “First they use our own dropwalls against us, then they knock them down? Overconfident fools. This place may have been an impregnable fortress back in the old days, but times have changed. Still, all the better for us . . . ”

Then the ground began to shudder. With surprising speed, the colossi pivoted in place, and strode quickly back to their wall niches, settling back just as the first spikes broke through the soil. Hundreds of troops and associated armaments danced about, trying to avoid the sharp spines appearing around them.

The general saw there was now a ring almost completely surrounding the town, out to almost fifty meters. He snorted. “Do they think we’re still just using horses and infantry?” He frowned as he saw several units attempting to retreat from the prickly ground. He pointed them out to his adjunct. “Get those soldier’s names,” he growled.

Then the retreating soldiers were blocked as the spikes shot upwards, elongating into thick, spike-encrusted branches that trapped men and machinery alike. The branches began to hoist the entrapped figures into the air along with their weapons, clanks, animals, and tanks. Still, the great thorns grew upwards, their bases were now over two meters thick and they began to weave an impenetrable wall of thorns around the town. No one within the thicket managed to escape.

Aboard Castle Wulfenbach, explosions rocked the great airship as, for the second time, it desperately tried to escape the range of Mechanicsburg’s defenses. We should not have come back here, Klaus swore to himself. Again I have underestimated her. “Status,” he roared.

“At least one third of the fleet is lost or too damaged to fight, Herr Baron!”

“The smoke is getting worse and there is something weird about it. It appears to be interfering with our instruments! The ships we still have aloft are flying blind!”

“Aye, the town has awakened the Fog Merchants! I hadst thought them but a tale to frighten children,154 but real they be, and our projectiles shall prove useless!”

“The screamer guns panicked the remainders of our cavalry and mounted units. The Oliphants are still running.”

“The Mechanized Cavalry was swallowed by some kind of quicksand. They couldn’t avoid it—it was like it was following them!”

Klaus ran a hand through his hair. “The Subterranean Fleet?”

“According to their radio traffic, they’re in the middle of a battle with giant ants.”

Klaus sighed. Shrinker mines. “Very well then, it appears there is only one thing left to do.” He took a deep breath and when he swung back, was once again in control. “Send a first priority message to all units in the field. I want a full retreat. Abandon the town. Disengage from all Mechanicsburg forces.”

“What? Craven, ignoble retreat?”

“All the way back to Balen’s Gap.”

“We’re abandoning the Valley of the Heterodynes? But this is madness, Herr Baron! Madness, I say!”