Sgt. Golem: Royal Mech Hussar - Books 2 & 3

The night was black outside the windows of our contraption. The carrier aircraft above flew on, rattling the windows of our tiny box slung underneath. The drone of the bomber's engines was an incessant pressure on my ears. The pod was stuffed with myself and five much smaller Wraith troopers. Overstuffed packs of gear filled the available space.

One of the troopers fiddled with his automatic rifle again.

“Put that thing away, or I'll throw you out! No handling firearms inside of an aircraft.”

The man gave me a sour expression but set his gun back across his knees. Everyone I'd met since coming to this world had appalling muzzle discipline, but no one else seemed to care.

The Wraith troopers were clearly unfamiliar with their firearms. I had argued for us to bring the Fedorov Avtomat, though the troopers had disliked the idea. They were much too confident in their pathetic poison daggers.

The weapons were clever, fully automatic rifles with a banana magazine. I wondered if the Russians in my world had a such a gun in WW1.

Despite its cramped quarters, the box was a rather ingenious device, just big enough hold several fully-equipped troopers, mated with a desh engine and steering vanes. With no internal combustion engine, it was completely silent, a cross between an airborne assault glider from World War I and a bomb.

The concept was simple. We would be carried to the drop point, slung underneath one of the strange, large-wheeled bombers Frank had spotted when we arrived. At the drop zone, we would be released, and the desh engine would act as our parachute. It had stubby vanes that gave us minimal steering as we fell. When we got close to the ground, we were supposed to turn up the desh engine to slow our fall. In the dark, that was an iffy proposition. It was either a brilliant breakthrough in airborne assault or the stupidest suicide machine ever devised. I hadn't decided which.

A small light came on the panel before me, and a buzzer sounded. I leaned forward and strained my ears. The small speaker on the wall squealed. I only caught about every other word, but Frank was telling us we were nearing the drop zone. He said something about engines and quiet, which I remembered from our briefing meant he would be throttling back soon.

I adjusted my seat and faced the panel more directly. I turned on the desh engine, just a trickle. There was a telltale indicator to show me it was operating. I just hoped it was right. If the little light was lying, we were about to make a small crater on the side of a Transylvanian mountain.

I called over my shoulder. "Hold on to your asses, boys." The seats didn’t have safety belts. In this era, long before car seat belts were a thing and most aircraft only had the most basic of restraints, it was not surprising. That told me they hadn't tested this contraption. It was pretty obvious that when the bomber released us, everyone would float up out of their seats.

This had been a stupid idea. Initially, I had been skeptical about the General giving us so many interesting new toys and devices to use in our assault. It seemed like an excessive outpouring of generosity, but now I realized he was giving us untested and experimental hardware. We were guinea pigs.

The noise of the bomber's engines died away so suddenly it sounded as if they had failed. If I listened closely, I could still hear the faint murmur. They had just been throttled back to idle, where they produced very little sound.

"This is it. Get ready." Behind me, there was a rustle of movement as the troopers prepared themselves. From the briefing, we had another mile or two to go, but the wait seemed like an eternity. Modern paratroopers get a warning light before it's time to jump. We had none of that. One moment we were whispering along through the air, and the next we were falling.

The speaker squealed with what might have been Frank telling us good luck. And then we fell into the dark.

I shoved at the desh engine controls, almost turning it to full in panic before calming myself. Our plunge changed from complete free fall to merely a terrifying plunge. At least now we weren't floating out of our seats. Wind whistled past the cabin. Through the small windows ahead, I saw distant lights, but nothing that seemed to be our target. There was a glow over a ridge in front of us. Was that Frankenstein's valley? It couldn't be far, and the mountains beyond it were supposed to be uninhabited. That had to be it.

The light dimmed and the ridge rose. I realized that meant we were falling below the level of the ridge in front of us. There was still absolutely no sign of the ground in the pitch black below. Now my panic was real. I shoved the desh lever all the way up. We slammed down into our seats from the sudden force. The whole craft groaned, and for a moment, I feared the desh engine was going to rip away. Then the pressure eased. I think we came to a halt in the air. There was a wobbly little gauge that was supposed to tell me whether we were ascending or descending, but it shook around so much it was impossible to be sure. We definitely weren't falling anymore. I eased off on the luff engine lever, and we started to drop again, slowly this time.

The faint lights of the gun emplacement rose above what I thought was level as we dropped below their altitude. There should be a valley below us. All around was pitch blackness. I pulled the lever and slowed our descent to almost a crawl. I debated flipping on the lights. I didn't want to alert Frankenstein's forces if I could help it, but I really needed to see how far down the ground was.

I peered at the control panel. A dim light bulb illuminated the row of switches, and I could just make out the downward lights. I put my hand on the switch and leaned forward, trying to get a good view out the window. I flicked them on and then off again a moment later. I hadn't been able to see much; the ground was still hundreds of feet below.

I glanced at the gauge that told our rate of descent: 400 feet per minute. That didn't seem so bad. I tried some mental arithmetic. I was no math whiz, but I was pretty sure that meant we were doing less than 10 feet per second. That still seemed a little high. I eased the engine up a hair more: 300 feet per minute. 5 feet per second didn't seem too bad.

After what seemed like an eternity, I leaned forward and gave the forward lights the quickest flick on and off again. The light lit up rolling hills and a few scattered trees. We were maybe a hundred feet up. I couldn't see directly below us, but it looked like we would touch down on a slope. I increased the lift on the luff machine and slowed our descent further.

My passengers stirred restlessly. I realized they hadn't been able to see out the windows. "Almost there," I said an instant before we hit. The back of the contraption hit first, pitching us forward. The front bumped the ground and then bounced up. It bobbed back down again and hung at a slight angle. I realized the luff engine was holding half of our craft off the ground, now that the other end was supported by the mountains.

I eased the luff engine control down, and we pitched forward slowly. As the lift went to zero, the nose of our craft settled onto the slope. There was a moment where no one spoke, then someone behind me unlatched the hatch. We were down.

The infiltration pod rocked and creaked as we disembarked. It occurred to me we could probably move the thing pretty easily by turning the luff engine to low and just dragging it along behind us, but for now, we needed speed and stealth. The squad of Wraith Troopers was already moving away when I exited the vehicle. I moved to follow.

It quickly became apparent that these troops had gotten used to using their cloaks for stealth and were not well trained for movement in the dark. I don't know where they had recruited their troopers from, but it was clearly not the Rangers, or the Imperial Russian equivalent of special forces.

We worked our way up the slope painfully slowly. Eventually, my eyes adjusted, and I was able to pick my way around rocks and trees. Moonlight came a few minutes later. We had gotten scattered moving up the slope in the dark, but once the moon was up, the Wraith troopers started drifting closer together. About halfway up the slope, Lieutenant Orlov used a bird call to call everyone in. There, he gave the assault team final orders in a low voice.

This group had trained together and knew their combat doctrine, so I didn't have much part in the initial assault. A stranger on a commando mission needed to stay out of the way.

With the briefing complete, the troopers spread out and activated the magic of their flowing cloaks. I wasn't sure how they did this; the time I had worn a cloak, Mikhail had turned it on for me at gunpoint. In brightly lit rooms or under streetlights, Wraith soldiers had been visible as a swirling shadow. Here in the dark, with only a sliver of moonlight, they were invisible.

I heard one shadow move close to me. Orlov spoke, "Hold still, sergeant, while I activate your cloak." Hands tugged at my cloak. It was disconcerting. I had to resist the urge to lash out. I felt a slight tingling as the cloak activated. Looking down, I couldn't see my own body.

The slope was steeper here. I crept along so as to not give my position away by panting. Plus, I wanted to hang back until the assault started.

When I arrived at the concrete bunker atop the ridge, there was no sign of the others. The snout of a machine gun poked out of a chest-high slit in the wall of cement.

I eased closer and stood just to the side of the opening, straining my ears to listen. Silence. Very carefully, I peeked around the edge. It was dark inside, with a faint light coming from a wall-mounted red dome.

A golem sat two feet away, staring straight at me. I started to jerk backwards but stifled it as every muscle in my body went tense. My heart hammered in my chest. There was a second golem on the other side of the machine gun, also looking out, unmoving. My breath sounded loud in my own ears as I tried to calm down. Inch by inch, I eased myself away from the opening.

The Wraith troopers weren't here yet. Should I go through and attack the guards? There almost certainly was an alarm button somewhere in the room. I couldn't just walk through the walls; this was a reinforced concrete bunker, and the cement walls would be full of iron rebar. The Wraith troopers were issued a single-shot silenced firearm. I had my 1911 and a pair of Steyr machine pistols, all carefully wrapped in cloth and secured under my cloak.

I held perfectly still, trying to think of what to do. The faintest whisper of movement slid past me. I strained my eyes into the near darkness and thought I saw the movement of one, maybe two Wraith troopers. There were two sharp sounds in the dark, one after the other, like a pair of coughs. Inside the bunker, I heard something heavy fall. There was a Russian curse, and then a scramble of movement.

I stepped forward and looked around the opening. One of the golems still stood, dragging himself across the room, hanging on to the side of the machine gun as he took a staggering step towards the door. I could see a large switch on the wall. A flurry of blurred movement rushed across the room. One of the troopers had climbed through the window, but his cloak was now disrupted by touching rebar.

Bunkers, like castles of old, were designed to prevent people from having easy access. Even wearing a suit that allowed me to pass through walls was no use when the walls concealed a latticework of iron rebar. The metal rods gave strength to the concrete but also formed an impenetrable barrier to wraith troopers. They would disrupt the magic with my body partway through the wall. Getting inside had to be done the old-fashioned way, but the entire point of bunkers was to keep people out.

Our secret weapon for this next phase was the same weapon the besiegers had used throughout all of history: patience. The wraith troopers next to me appeared suddenly as they removed their cloaks. I followed suit, taking off my own. The two smallest Wraiths were boosted up and slipped through the machine gun slit.

The other troopers pulled out cloth bags. Out came grappling hooks and rope, and soon we were scaling up the side of the concrete edifice. Before I went up, I carefully folded my cloak and stuffed it into my small pack. Then I unwrapped my cloth bundle, revealing my shotgun and pouch of ammo. These I strapped on before I went up the rope.

The top of the bunker was a flat expanse of concrete, with a two-story lookout tower jutting up from the center. It was high enough over our heads that we could stand on the top of the main bunker and not be seen unless the golems inside stuck their heads right up to the observation slits and looked down. The sky was starting to lighten as dawn approached. We made our way to the base of the observation tower and waited.

There was a hatch at the base of the tower that allowed access to the roof of the bunker. Four of us waited outside it, feeling terribly exposed. The valley beyond was dark, the ridge itself hard to make out in the pre-dawn hours, but I was able to see the shape of another bunker complex to the north, perhaps half a mile away. Hopefully, no one over there was keeping a close eye on their neighbor's roof.

The door to the bunker squeaked. The handle lifted, and the door squealed open. One of the Russian troopers stood inside. It was Lieutenant Orlov. "Both the gun emplacements are closed."

"Can't we open them from the inside?" I asked.

"It's much safer if we blow them up. You two, take your charges and drop them in from the roof holes." He pointed down the length of the complex to where the gun emplacement's dark snout was poking up through a hole in the ceiling.

"Wait," I said. "What about the emplacement to the north?" I pointed down the ridge. “It’s close to the line of assault. Are we taking it next?”

"Our orders were just to take this one." Orlov was looking south. “What do you suppose that is?”

I turned to look where he was pointing. A kilometer to the south rose a strange collection of antennas, three of them in a triangular pattern around the top of the promontory. Each had a coil of metal surmounted by a shiny sphere. A line of power poles trailed down the mountainside from them and into the valley below.

"I have no idea," I said.