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

Some of the men were only slightly injured. I dashed to the front of the truck and slid behind the driver's seat. Fortunately, the key was already in the ignition. I didn't have this particular model truck loaded in my mind, but I had enough others that it wasn't particularly difficult to figure out. I put it in gear and let off the clutch as I gave it some gas. My luck held and nobody shot at me as I drove the truck down the long alleyway and emerged onto the street beyond. The place was deserted other than a few men standing around a burn barrel a half a block away. They didn't give me more than a glance as I pulled out on the road and drove away.

It took me a few blocks and one wrong turn to get my bearings. I gave the area I had been in before a wide berth as I navigated around out of the industrial district and made my way back toward the safe house.

I parked the truck a couple of blocks away in an inconspicuous alleyway. Then, I got out and proceeded on foot. A large truck parked along a residential street seemed like it would draw attention, and I didn't want that.

The road that led to our apartment building was a quiet street of three- and four-story buildings, all seemingly multi-unit apartments. There weren't many cars along the street, so the group of large black sedans and a box truck parked in front of our safe house was pretty conspicuous. I stopped as soon as I saw them.

There was a bum nearby, warming his hands over a barrel, and I moved to join him. I held out my hands to complete the illusion and realized there wasn't a fire in the barrel. I looked down at the bum with surprise.

He grinned back at me. It was Hiroshi. It took me a moment or two of staring to realize it. He didn't look anything like a golem. His face was dirty and smudged, and his ragged outfit completed the illusion of a vagrant.

"They showed up a few minutes ago. If you look over my shoulder, you'll see they're loading your friends now."

Sure enough, a mob of policemen were herding a group out of that building. I could make out three men and a woman who looked like Angelica.

"You couldn't have done something to warn them?" I asked.

Hiroshi the bum shrugged. "How could I? I was with you."

I looked back at him. "Then how did you know they arrived a few minutes ago?"

He shrugged again and grinned. "I can't be everywhere at once. Only almost everywhere."

I stared at him.

He shook his head. "Fine. I jumped off the truck two blocks back and ran on ahead. That thing's slow, you know."

I looked back at the commotion down the street as I talked. I still couldn't see Veronica. We had left Hannah, Tamara and Eva back at the gunship, and hopefully they were still there. I needed to worry about the ones being dragged off by the secret police right now.

Some of the police were looking around. I hunched my shoulders and tilted my head so it wouldn't be obvious I was looking.

"How do you appear and disappear so easily?"

"I don't. People just only see what they expect to see."

I wasn't buying it, really. I glanced back to see him flashing a grin at me.

"Come on, everyone knows true invisibility is impossible."

"Fine, keep your secrets," I said.

"As we have for a thousand years," he said in a tone that was more serious, almost melancholy.

They had finished loading my allies back up, and two of the cars and the truck drove away. I looked back at the commotion down the street as I talked. I still didn’t see Veronica. I straightened up.

"I'm gonna go in and check it out."

"I'll come with you." As I started forward, Hiroshi threw an arm around me. I couldn't quite get it up to my shoulders. He staggered drunkenly against me and then held out a brown paper bag. “Here, take a swig.”

I looked at him in confusion and then looked back at the apartment. Two policemen had been left behind. I hadn’t seen them from the fake burn barrel because of some shrubbery. How had he known they were there?

I took his bottle and took a swig. It was water. He chuckled drunkenly as I handed it back, and we staggered our way up the street towards the policemen.

When we got close, Hiroshi broke away.

"Morning, officers," he said, slurring his words. "What seems to be the problem?"

"Move along, citizen," one of them said in a voice more bored than annoyed.

"Say," the other one was peering at me. "Weren’t we were told to watch for a golem?"

He grunted and fell over. How had Hiroshi gotten behind him? The other one stood and gaped at me. He continued standing there with his mouth open until Hiroshi finished choking him from behind, and then he fell over.

I made my way up the front steps before looking back. “Should we really just leave them here?"

"Everyone in Russia studiously looks the other way when police are about."

"How do you know? You've been in this country, what, a day?"

"I pay attention to things." He opened the door. "Lead the way."

I stepped through and made my way up the stairs. When I got to the door of our apartment, Hiroshi tapped me from behind. "Let me go first."

The door was cracked open, and there was some motion inside. Hiroshi stepped past me, and I realized with a shock that he was wearing a policeman's uniform.

"What the hell?" I muttered. How did he change so quickly? Had he been wearing that under his outfit, or did he just take one off one of those unconscious officers in front of the building?

"Hey, come give us a hand with this," a voice farther in the apartment said.

I followed Hiroshi through the door. There were two men in plain clothes working on the locked closet with a pry bar. We had left most of our weapons behind, locked in the closet-sized pantry before we had gone to see the communists. I wanted to get in there and get my hardware while I had the chance.

The two men were focused on their task as we approached. One of them grunted, "I almost got it."

The door bowed and the lock splintered, then popped open. One went inside while the other one peered around the broken door.

The one inside whistled. "Would you look at this? Jackpot!"

I stepped up behind the one still outside the closet and put my hand around his neck. He let out a single stifled gasp, struggling against my inexorable grip.

"Hey, what?" the one inside asked. I couldn't see him, but I heard the muffled thump as the body hit the floor.

I stepped in and gathered up my guns, stepping over the body on the floor as best I could. "I'm glad we came back for these," I said as I holstered my 1911.

Hiroshi held up two sheathed swords. "We had to. I left these."

I gaped at him. "When did you leave those? And why?"

He smiled. "What? They're hard to conceal."

"For you?"

"Okay, not really." He pulled open his jacket and showed me the lining. “I was just carrying a lot of extra shuriken, and I didn't want them to clink."

The inside of his coat was festooned with throwing stars, all neatly arranged in rows, apparently sewn onto the lining.

I quickly started grabbing my gear off the pantry shelves. "I still wouldn't have expected you to leave your swords behind. Isn't that dishonorable or something?"

Hiroshi chuckled. "I don't know where you get your knowledge of ninjutsu, but mine was put through a blender and reconstructed with a bunch of bullshit. So my mind tells me a bunch of stupid crap is dishonorable, and I'm having to wade through that. I think it's pretty much all made-up crap by someone that didn't understand the culture I came from originally."

I slipped my 1911 into its holster and stuffed my pockets with magazines. "Fair enough," I conceded. "Now let's get out of here."

There was a satchel of other odds and ends we had brought along, and I scooped it up. The others had left sidearms in here as well. Who the heck leaves their sidearms when they're hanging around a building? Your gun should stay loaded and as close to your skin as possible. Otherwise, it's just a useless hunk of metal for someone else to take.

We emerged on the deserted street. The two cops we disabled still lay where they had fallen.

“Should we steal their car?" I wondered aloud.

Hiroshi disagreed. "No, it just screams 'government official'. Have you seen any other vehicles around that are so black and shiny?" I conceded his point. He was the master at not being noticed, after all.

We grabbed the bodies from the front stoop and took them upstairs. We had just dropped them off when Hiroshi stiffened. He moved to the door of the apartment in a flash and drew his sword.

A moment later, Angelica burst through the door. She froze as Hiroshi's blade came up just short of her neck.

"Ah, ma'am, my pardon," he said and put the sword away in a flash of steel.

"What? Sam! You're free! Who is this? Never mind, we have to get out of here. They're right behind me."

I opened my mouth to ask for an explanation but then closed it again. There was clearly no time to waste.

"Quick, out the back door!"

We dashed down the stairs and then, instead of going out the front, we turned and went down the short hall to the back of the building. As we exited, I heard vehicles pulling up in front of the building. We closed the door behind us and took off down the block.

"This way," I said. I led off to the right, headed for the alley where we had stowed the truck.

When we reached the truck Hiroshi was nowhere to be seen, but that didn't worry me. Angelica caught her breath as she looked around. "Where did the other man go?"

"I'll explain later."

The truck rumbled to life, and I headed out, aiming only to put distance between us and the apartment. There was a good chance we had been seen, so we needed to find a place to lay low and maybe ditch the truck.

"What happened? How did you get away?" I asked.

Angelica kept glancing nervously behind us. "They didn't realize I was a Hussar. I waited till their guard was down and then blasted open the door and made a break for it."

"Did the colonel follow you?"

She shook her head. "I don't think so. I didn't look back."

"Ah." I didn't ask about the Tsar. I couldn't picture him diving out of the back of the police wagon.

"Now what?" I asked.

"We need to get back to the gunship," she said. "We have to assume they'll make them talk, and it's imperative we get it to a new hiding place tonight."

It was well into late afternoon, and by the time we reached the gunship, it would be nearly dark, which just gave us a few hours to come up with a hiding place.

I made my way out of the city and onto the back roads towards the gunship's hiding place. I worked from memory and only made a few wrong turns. We had entered the deep woods when we came around a bend and ran straight into a Russian army checkpoint.

As we pulled to a stop, Angelica tucked her hair up under a cap and straightened her tunic to look less feminine. I tried to act casual as I thought of an excuse for our presence. The soldiers meant business, and several rifles were leveled on us before we'd even come to a stop.

I cranked down the window.

"State your business," a no nonsense NCO demanded.

"We were told to bring demolition charges."

The Russian NCO in charge sneered. " Get down from there," he demanded.

Half a dozen rifles were pointed our way, and unlike in the movies, rifle bullets would go straight through the cab of a truck, hardly slowing down. We climbed out.

"You, golem, where is your work authorization?" the sergeant in charge demanded.

I tried to think of a stalling tactic and not worry about the five rifles pointed at me. Five? Hadn't it been? No, now it was only four. I caught the tiniest flicker of movement as the Russian soldier in the back toppled from sight and was pulled into the shadows of the trees around us.

"Work order. Yes. Is here. Wait. I find.” I made an elaborate ritual of reaching into my tunic to pull out nothing.

"Wait. Papers missing. Where are they?” I took one step to the side as I patted at my pockets.

"Stay where you are," the sergeant snapped.

He didn't notice that my move had shifted his field of view away from the last remaining soldier, who even now was being yanked back into the woods.

I quit my act and straightened up. "Now sergeant, you will tell us what your detail is doing here."

"What? You don’t sound like a -- I'll do nothing of the kind."

I stepped forward. He tried to step away from me but discovered there was someone behind him with a blade to his throat.

Angelica was still standing by the front bumper of the truck, with her eyes wide on Hiroshi. I suppressed a grin. She was the best commanding officer I’d ever had, and just because she sometimes had a little trouble keeping up with the opinionated golem and his madness was no reason to laugh at her. A good lieutenant – that is, one who does what she’s told and doesn’t ask too many questions – is worth gold to a sergeant like me.

I questioned the Russian sergeant and found out his company had been detailed to capture some dissidents. They had arrived to find nothing, and now the rest of the company was combing the area, while his checkpoint had orders to detain anyone approaching.

I glanced at Angelica. Her expression was hopeful. "That means they weren't found. They must have relocated after we left."

"That's good, but it doesn't help us find them. Is there a backup rendezvous site?"

She shook her head. "If there was one, only the colonel knew it."

"So," Hiroshi said, "we have to go and get your colonel back. And maybe this tsar character."

Angelica and I just stared at him. "You mean break into police headquarters," she said, her voice full of disbelief. “In the middle of Saint Peterburg.”

Hiroshi shrugged. "Do you have a better plan?"