Ironshield Read online

  “You drunk bastard,” Salkirk snarled. “I’ll make sure your meddling is known. Mutton won’t be able to protect you this time.”

  “Godspeed,” Paulson said with a lazy salute. “I’ll be sure to omit nothing in my report, once I see him.”

  Salkirk seemed to reconsider his tact, his gaze flitting about to take in the nearby witnesses. He let out a booming laugh. “My friend, you should find somewhere to rest before you hurt yourself. It’s been a pleasure having your company.” Get off my land, his eyes said.

  Paulson nodded and turned to leave.

  “Be sure to give Mutton my regards when you reach the front.”

  “You’re mistaken, Senator,” Paulson replied, half turning. “Senator Mutton is at his office in Edinville, overseeing the war from his desk.”

  “But of course.” Salkirk’s eyes glinted. “My mistake.”

  Paulson walked off, feeling all eyes on him, but none so much as Elliot Salkirk’s. When he was a fair distance away, Paulson looked back.

  Yannick Mal swung from side to side like a pendulum, his face discolored and contorted. On his chest, the crimson traitor’s ‘T’ oozed. Radiance presided over the scene like a metallic god, its massive arms crossed before it, blades and guns which stood in place of hands pointed to the ground. Sunlight glittered off the golden filigree that failed to hide the brutal and ugly functionality of the machine. With no one inside, Paulson knew Radiance’s scope, jutting from an otherwise useless head, could not actually be watching. All the same, he felt the sightless gaze as the Warsuit too bore witness.

  Sorry, Ellen, Paulson thought.

  His retirement was a ways away yet.

  Chapter 1

  A shell blast blew a spray of dark soil across the shallow trench, its concussive force shaking the ground beneath the soldiers running to and fro within.

  Aldren Mal put his hand over the steaming mug of coffee he carried aloft like a live grenade, hissing as hot liquid lapped against his palm. He didn't care, so long as no dirt wound up in the beverage. General Renalds didn't need much motivation to hand out latrine duty.

  Aldren had two ways out of shoveling shit for the next several weeks. Deliver the general's coffee, or get killed. So he ran as best as he could, dodging around his comrades, assaulted by the ubiquitous boom of artillery fire neither his helmet nor the cotton wedged in his ears could soften.

  His boot snagged on something and Aldren had a terrifying moment of falling forward before he reached for the trench wall to catch himself. At least a third of the coffee sloshed out onto his other hand. Black and scalding hot, the way General Renalds liked it. Aldren bit his lip, holding back a scream.

  Wish I could trade places with you, Yanny, Aldren thought yet again. A lost leg and some war stories, in exchange for civilian life? Aldren would have made that trade in a heartbeat. His younger brother might have believed in this war, in sacrificing all for his country.

  But that was because Yannick was crazy.

  He'd have probably signed up on his own, if they didn’t draft him. Aldren was bewildered at the idea. To his incredulity, Yannick had been upset -actually upset!- that he couldn't return to this living hell. Having to leave active duty had been a worse blow to Aldren's brother than the lost limb.

  Aldren shambled through a hastily formed triage area, skirting past a pair of men trying to staunch their screaming comrade's spurting arm.

  Seeing so much blood, hearing the victim's high-pitched shrieking, reminded Aldren all too vividly of his own mortality. Any one of the projectiles pummeling the earth all around could obliterate him on impact, reduce him to a red smear in the mud. And there was nothing Aldren could do to stop it.

  'Died bringing coffee to some asshole' wasn't the most flattering epitaph he could imagine.

  The coffee continued to swish about, splashing up between Aldren's fingers as he traversed the rocky, mud-soaked trench, shaken every other moment by nearby artillery, flinching under the whistle of incoming mortar bombs and the boom of outgoing shells.

  General Isaac Renalds came into view, observing the no-man’s-land between their trench line and Flemmingwood Forest, scanning the trees with a pair of binoculars. The shadows beneath the treetops were briefly lit each time the unseen Northerners fired or received ordnance.

  The thin, hook-nosed general looked like an insect next to his kneeling Kaizer Warsuit, the Southern Storm.

  A shell blast shook the ground and nearly sent Aldren sprawling, but he managed to grab hold of the trench wall again. The mud was wet and warm, and when he looked at it Aldren shrank back with a strangled wail. His hand came squelching free of the mess of blood and liquified entrails, a sludge of human gore left over from where some poor soul had been splattered against the trench’s side.

  Aldren wiped his hand on his brown coat and tried not to vomit. He failed, only just managing to hold the half-empty cup out of the way as bitter bile surged up his throat. He retched three times, leaning over the horrid mess of human remains. A cascade of dirt showered down from a shell blast. Pieces of soil and rock plunked into what remained of General Renalds’ coffee.

  To hell with it. Aldren marched the rest of the way to Renalds without a thought for protecting the drink. “Your coffee, Gener-”

  “Blasted coward, where is he?!” Renalds didn’t look away from his binoculars. “He’s stalling, I know it.”

  “Your… Coffee?” Aldren repeated.

  Renalds lowered the binoculars, looking at Aldren as though he were a member of some foreign, unknown species. “Ah, ‘bout time, boy,” the general growled after a moment, taking the mug. “Any sign of the Virtue from down our line?”

  “No Sir. No enemy Kaizers spotted.” Lots of our men getting killed while we wait, though. By the War Codes, they couldn’t pit a Warsuit against unarmored troops. Either the Northerners presented a Kaizer, or Renalds’ machine stayed behind while his army moved for the trees. Something they would have done two hours ago, were it not for Renalds’ need to redeem his honor.

  “Fucking curs.” The general raised the coffee to his lips.

  “Something large in the trees!” One of Renalds’ surveyors shouted.

  Renalds tossed his mug aside and brought his binoculars to his face once more. “Where?!”

  Everything else tuned out for a few seconds as Aldren stared at the shattered mug, its dark contents trailing the faintest tendrils of steam as they were sucked into the churned earth. Stinking of coffee and blood, half deaf, his hands burnt. All for nothing. “You cocksucker,” he said out loud. Court-martial be damned, he’d punch the bastard.

  But Renalds didn’t turn to face him. In fact, neither he nor anyone else seemed to have heard Aldren as they chattered to one another. On the other side of the field, the treetops shifted, moved by some unseen force.

  “Is it the Virtue?” Renalds asked aloud. “Is that bastard going to come out and face me after all?”

  The guns continued to boom, but there was something different to the explosive cadence that Aldren couldn’t quite place. He felt the change before he realized what it was, cluing in around the same time as one of the men down the line shouted.

  “They’ve stopped firing!”

  “Sir?” one of Renalds’ field scouts asked.

  The general snapped the binoculars closed with a savage grin. “Cease fire and get the Storm’s lift running.”

  The horn call went out, accompanied by the squawks of field radios down the line. One by one, the Southern guns stopped blasting.

  The battlefield descended into an unusual silence. In the sudden stillness, sounds of cracking branches and rustling leaves drifted across loud and clear, giving way to a louder crash now and then as entire trees were knocked down. Treetops moved more violently, as though each leaf had a mind and will of its own. They writhed like a mass of green insects scattering away from a heedless boot.

  Renalds climbed onto his lift, and the winch whirred to life, bringing him up toward the Storm’s op
ening cockpit, located under the Warsuit’s right arm. The hatch clanged fully open moments before Renalds reached it.

  At the same time, the enemy Kaizer emerged from the trees.

  The ‘Virtue’ as Renalds insisted on calling it to this day, had been one of Southern Arkenia’s flagship Warsuits before it was captured in the fight for the Northern capital at Gorrad, along with its pilot, Renalds himself.

  After the siege of Gorrad was repelled, Renalds was released as part of a prisoner exchange agreed upon between Northern president Connor Orvid and the South’s Nathaniel Davids. Orvid, however, refused outright to relinquish the captured Warsuit. Instead, they’d re-dubbed the machine and sent it to fight against its former masters. The Kaizer now stomping across the pockmarked field was christened Retribution by its new pilot, Industrialist general Theodore Kolms.

  Aldren knew that for Renalds, this fight was more of a personal vendetta than a conflict of war. And for this showdown he’d stripped his own army of what little advantage they could have had in the assault, had they been able to press the march. It didn’t take a master tactician to surmise that much.

  The shouts of the injured contested with the earth-trembling strides of mechanized feet and the roar of massive diesel engines. Aldren closed his eyes, already smelling the distinct smell of fumes on the spring air. After all the shit you made us go through, I really will punch you if you fuck this up. Rank or no rank. Aldren would have a better chance at staying alive in prison.

  The Storm’s massive gear joints rattled and clanked, its pistons pumping like muffled gunshots, steel screaming in ineffectual protest as thousands of tons of machinery rose to a full towering stance. The Storm stood. When it came to a Kaizer Warsuit, the word ‘stood’ didn’t do the action justice. Eighty feet of iron monstrosity reared into the sky like a slow volcanic event.

  Sunlight glinted off the Storm’s multiple periscope lenses, gleamed against the muted gray of the Warsuit’s carapace. Like Renalds himself, his machine was austere, without any of the pomp or flare others added to their Kaizers. Some said this was an example of the general’s commitment to the cause of disarmament, refusing to revel in his use of the very weapon the South fought to get rid of.

  As for Aldren, he thought the man was just an unimaginative bastard.

  One splash of color could be found in the red and blue Arkenian flag fluttering on a pole jutting between the Kaizer’s exhaust pipes. The red Arkenian star, sending out seven crimson rays, one for each province in the Arkenian nation. Three of those sunbeams represented Industrialist provinces, provinces who chose open rebellion over relinquishing their Warsuits.

  Many on both sides of the conflict wanted three red beams removed. President Nathaniel Davids refused, saying that would amount to acknowledging the secession of the Arkenian North and give legitimacy to Industrialist claims.

  If Arkenia -all of Arkenia- didn’t decommission its Warsuits and heavy naval destroyers, it would mean not only the continuation of war with Xang, but a new conflict with the Lytan Empire.

  No, Aldren thought as he watched the Storm take its first step into the shell-blasted no man’s land. So long as the Industrialists held their ground, there would be no peace. If Aldren was honest with himself, he wasn’t sure the bloodshed would ever truly stop, regardless of who won.

  The previous quivers of artillery fire were nothing compared to the earth-shaking tremors these behemoths created as they stomped toward one another.

  Whereas the Storm was designed to look more or less humanoid, the much older Retribution resembled a large cylinder with legs and arms. Bristling with cannons and machineguns, Retribution came equipped with a massive serrated bayonet beneath its main gun on the left arm, hooked at the end for tearing away enemy armor.

  A soldier nudged Aldren, motioning for him to move. Uniformed men all around scrambled to get out of the way of the impending battle.

  Aldren evacuated the immediate area with the others and watched from down the trench line as the Warsuits faced off.

  From Retribution’s back fluttered the Industrialist flag, a white gearwork sword on a black field.

  The Northern Warsuit stopped halfway across the field and waited for the Storm to meet it. With each booming step Renalds’ machine made, black fumes spurted from its twin exhaust pipes, the smoke gathering about its head in acrid clouds. More noxious smoke billowed downward from secondary pipes set along the machine’s body, wreathing the trenches in a bitter smog.

  Aldren coughed and covered his mouth, as even from this distance he tasted the sting. His eyes watered, but he didn’t have it in him to move for higher ground like the others. Something between terror and awe kept him rooted in place, hiding beneath ground level like a hare in its burrow. He’d never seen a Warsuit in combat before. And, despite his fear, despite his reticence about the war and his place in it, this was something Aldren knew he had to witness.

  The Kaizer Engines, and the Warsuits they powered, were the great marvel of modern science, wonders of human engineering. But something about the gargantuan shape blocking the afternoon sun bespoke of the distant past, its booming steps taking Aldren back to a time of oversized beasts wandering free in a world untouched by man. It also made him think of something else. Wreathed in smoke which refracted the red fury of engine flares, its carapace catching the fire and sunlight as though the machine were alive with flame, the Warsuit made Aldren think of the Demons of Scripture. Here was a being of dark myth. Mankind had tamed the Demon and made it their own.

  Did that mean this was hell?

  Lost in the closest thing to a religious experience he’d ever had, Aldren didn’t hear the other soldiers calling his name until one of them, Aldren’s friend Wellend, shook him by the shoulders. “Al, we’ve got to get out of the trench!”

  Aldren looked around, blinking to dispel his daze. His comrades had all moved up out of the trench as the smoke grew thicker. The area behind the Storm was completely cleared of personnel, to prevent casualties when the Kaizers began their duel.

  Renalds’ Warsuit kept up its stomping approach. Even from here, Aldren could feel the ground shiver. Retribution waited, its Gearsword flag fluttering with the machine’s exhaust discharge.

  Wellend pushed Aldren from behind to keep him moving. Aldren shambled along until he was helped up a wooden ladder by the others. All around, men unfolded wooden chairs and laid out coats and blankets to sit on. A few passed around flasks and placed bets. Near Aldren, a pair of soldiers struggled to get a field radio working. Finally, after several curses and slaps, the device blared to life. A moment later, Renalds brought his Warsuit to a stop in front of his opponent.

  The voices of the two pilots crackled from the small radio.

  *

  Hearing the first artillery volley come to a stop, Striker Crimson, commander of the Southern army, strapped on his leather mask, adjusted his saber, and pulled his tent flap aside to look out beyond his camp. No damage to their lines yet. No smoking shell holes within a hundred meters of the Southern fortifications.

  When the Industrialist gunners finished calibrating, and the firing began anew, it would be a different story. Striker knew he couldn’t stop the battle from taking its inevitable course any more than he could stop the war itself by will alone. But he could make the bloodshed to come worth it. And he would. With God as his witness, today he would capture the Ironshield. Arkenia’s future depended on it.

  As though to replace the drum of artillery, another sound drifted from the rocky hills marking the Industrialist lines.

  Cheering.

  Civilians dotted the farthest gray slopes to the east and west like multicolored ants. They climbed hand in hand, or sat in the sun on blankets and chairs, those who hadn’t come prepared with parasols to shade them. Beyond Graytop Hills was the main Industrialist war camp of Quarrystone, by all reports a veritable city comprised of not only soldiers, but their wives, children, and servants as well. That wasn’t taking into account the assorted
cooks, prostitutes, and other camp followers who traveled in the wake of almost any large army.

  Thousands of civilians made Quarrystone camp their home. And, in a tradition dating back to the Revolution, when Arkenia threw off the Lytan Empire, hundreds had flocked into harm’s way to watch history unfold. Today, Striker didn’t blame them one bit. Because today, for the first time since the two Warsuits fought side by side in the Xang War, both Ironshield and Redstripe would be on the same battlefield. This time, as opponents.

  As far as the Industrialists were concerned this was a battle, not only for the honor of their nation, but for the honor and good name of their fallen hero, Heinrich Edstein. His son, the young commander James Edstein, inherited not only the Ironshield title, but the title’s namesake. To the Northerners this was a personal fight, a son defending his father’s name against an unknown usurper, a masked stranger taking the reins of the legendary Redstripe to wield against its former comrade.