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

General Petrov waved to the crowd and to the troops marching below as they passed the grandstand. Company C of the 23rd Regiment saluted in unison. The display warmed his heart.

"General, we need to talk."

He turned his head only slightly to address the unwelcome intrusion. "Admiral. Or should I say, 'Your Grace'?" he sneered. “How nice of you to come to my little demonstration.”

Admiral Karpov stepped up to the railing beside him. Under his glare, a colonel and some other toadies made room. “Your little demonstration is gaudy and useless. I have important matters to discuss. Far more important than showing off your little toys."

“A problem for you, perhaps, which does not make it a problem for me," Petrov sneered. He looked at the Admiral out of the corner of his eye. The man always seemed thin and pale, but he seemed particularly ghost-like today.

General Petrov usually took the charade of Karpov at face value and ignored Rasputin’s presence. But something in the Admiral's voice today made him think the puppet master was closer to the surface than the puppet.

"A problem for me is a problem for all Russia," Admiral Karpov insisted. Now his voice held the Admiral's usual arrogance.

General Petrov sneered and resisted the urge to drive his white-gloved fist into the man's face. He was such a scrawny wisp of a man, it would probably break him in half. "You think too highly of yourself, as usual.”

The tanks were passing in front of him now. He wasn't very satisfied with the results of that effort, and he was glad he had had them removed from the exposition's itinerary. There was something clumsy and inelegant about machines with treads. Even wheels had more poetry in their motion than the vulgar clanking and thrashing of the tracks.

The Admiral glanced around at the nearest officers, who were all studiously ignoring them. "You have heard, no doubt, that the Tsar is—"

"Having a short rest, at a health spa by the seaside, not to be disturbed?" The General couldn't resist. He leaned slightly closer. "Or that your little puppet has escaped? Yes, I have heard the news." He smiled at the Admiral's glare. He couldn't wait to see the look on his face when he told him that the Tsar was now in Petrov's own clutches. But first, he wanted to draw this out a little bit more. As odious as it was to be in the man's presence, it always warmed his heart to see him incensed.

"Many reports of a disturbing nature have reached me," the Admiral said. He was taking a pompous tone, but he was being vague, probably because he knew almost nothing about what was going on. No doubt he was fishing for information.

"Yes, I too have heard many interesting rumors. Undesirable elements are afoot," Petrov waved a hand dismissively. "Nothing I do not have well under control." The Communists had made such useful tools. They were in an uproar now because someone had killed their leader, but Petrov had been preparing to replace Lenin – that old sentimentalist – with his own more capable ally anyway. This merely accelerated the timeline, as well as giving the Communists another reason to be angry.

"And what about,” the Admiral leaned closer and lowered his voice, "Baba Yaga?"

General Petrov felt a pang that was more annoyance than surprise. "The old witch is dead, or a rumor."

"Nonsense," the Admiral insisted. "She is very real and very dangerous."

"Yes, yes. The guards by the vault are always claiming she is there, skulking about. And peasants in the mountains tell their stories. Rumors, nothing more. You would do better to listen to them."

"No, you are the one who needs to listen. Have you checked on her house lately?"

General Petrov clapped politely at the next battalion marching past as he responded to the incensed Admiral. “Calm yourself, Admiral. That old woman is not important anymore. The little power she has left -- if any -- is irrelevant in our modern era. The old magics are dying, my friend." He emphasized the last word while turning a raised eyebrow to the Admiral, addressing creature behind those eyes. "The old ways are dead, and all who follow them are dying out."

The Admiral gritted his teeth and hissed in outrage. "If you don't take my warning seriously-”

Petrov had had enough. He whirled on the other man and stabbed a finger at his chest. The man was thin and bony under his uniform. The puppet seemed hardly more than a skeleton.

"Listen to me. You have failed, and I will not. This exposition will show all where the real power in Russia lies. Unlike you, I am not frightened by shadow and rumor. My based on more than the scraps of an aging fleet and a tenuous hold on a pointless figurehead. Now that you've lost that, soon all will see where the true future of Russia lies.”

He stepped back and took on a less menacing tone. "If you play along nicely, you may yet retain some scraps of your position. I shall need reliable allies." Then he hardened his voice and leaned in close again. "Don't make me destroy you, Your Grace." He put a sarcastic emphasis on those words. "Now come, let's enjoy this review." He waved cheerfully at the crowd, but when he looked back, Admiral Karpov was gone.

Colonel Todykov stepped up. “Sir? Orders?”

General Petrov considered. Perhaps there was something to what the old kook had been saying. “Send someone to check on vault 13.”

He paused for a moment. A wedge knocks out a wedge, after all. “And get a message to Comrade Stalin. Tell him to start Phase 3.”

Veronica was awakened by one of the Hungarian prisoners shaking her shoulder. What was her name? Lt Erzsébet. It was hard to tell the time in here, but she had spent most of the night directing the prisoners in some feeble efforts to prepare their mechs.

"Ma'am, they'll be coming for us soon," the lieutenant said.

Veronica sat up. "Thank you, lieutenant. We must be ready."

The woman, the other girl, didn't immediately move away. "They said any who hadn't bonded a mech would be shot."

Veronica's mouth went drier than it already had been. "Is there someone..."

The lieutenant nodded. "Yes, Jolanka. Some of us tried to talk to her, but she refuses."

Veronica stood and straightened her tunic as best she could. It was a bland outfit, devoid of national markings and not so different from what the other prisoners had been given. No doubt the Russians didn't want the rumor getting around that they had executed prisoners of war. They were willing to commit war crimes, but they would prefer to have a bit of deniability.

"Where is she?"

The lieutenant pointed. The girl in question sat by herself on one side of the room, hunched over and hugging her knees. Veronica went over.

"Are you all right?" Veronica asked.

The girl looked up. Her eyes were red, and dried tear tracks stained her face, but no moisture flowed.

"Yeah." The girl looked down. "I'm fine. I'm fine." She rocked back and forth a little as she spoke.

"You need to bond with a mech before they come here," Veronica said gently.

The girl's expression crumpled. "I can't," she breathed. "I just can't. I can still feel when mine-" her voice caught. "In our chest, it just tore apart." She was starting to hyperventilate.

Veronica knelt down and laid her hands on the girl's shoulders. "Just breathe. It's alright. Just breathe."

Jolanka’s face was swollen. "I'm fine.”

“They're coming. You have to..."

The girl shook her head vigorously. "I can't. I just can't."

"They'll kill you," Veronica insisted.

Jolanka pushed her hands away and jerked back. "I don't care. They've already killed me. You said so yourself."

Veronica frowned. "That's not what I meant.”

Others were starting to take notice. A few girls had moved closer and were listening.

"Come,” Veronica said. “I'll help you."

Her face fell again, the defiance vanished. "You don't understand. I don't mean I won't, I mean I can't. I tried and I can't."

Veronica's heart tightened. She had been worried about this and was surprised it hadn't happened to more of the girls. Severe trauma could cause the desh bond to be broken permanently. There likely wasn’t anything she could do to help, but she had to try.

"Come, let me help you. We can try one more time, can't we? I haven't bonded my mech either. I was going to do it now. Will you come with me?"

She got to her feet and held a hand out for the other girl. Tentatively, Jolanka took it. Veronica led her over to where a mech she had had her eye on lay sitting. One of its arms was damaged, but it was otherwise in reasonable shape. It was an older model, which was why no one had taken it, but Veronica knew this series to be a sound design. She would just have to find another one for herself.

"Come, let me walk you through it."

She laid Jolanka’s hand on the mech. Most of the other prisoners had drifted over to watch the proceedings, curiously.

"Close your eyes and reach for the river."

"The what?" The girl's eyes flew open.

"Deep inside, down deep where the magic lives. Can you hear a roaring?"

She shook her head. "That's not how I learned. My instructor said not to look too deep inside. She said, you either hear it or you can't."

Veronica smiled. "But that's not true, is it? Some days it's hard to reach for your mech and other days you can reach for it easily. The river of magic is always there, but sometimes you have to reach for it."

The girl's eyes were wide; she was hanging on every word Veronica said.

"Close your eyes and look deep inside. Picture a flowing river inside your soul. Your heart is a bobbing boat on that river."

The girl was still looking at her.

"Close your eyes," Veronica snapped.

There was a giggle from somewhere nearby and Veronica threw a glare over her shoulder. The women crowded around her, some looking back at her wide-eyed. A few had their eyes closed.

"Come on, all of you. You'll need every scrap of magic you can get. Close your eyes and reach for the river."

"But your highness," someone started to protest.

"I'm not a princess," Veronica snapped.

"But your father's a prince."

"My father's a regent, not a prince."

She glared but didn't answer. The regent sometimes did use that title, but felt like an honorarium. It's not like he was the son of a king. Regardless, she wanted them to think of her as one of them, not an outsider.

"There was a girl in my class," the protester continued. "She reached deeply for the magic and she went mad. That's what the instructors told us."

"Nonsense," Veronica snapped. "I've done it many times." There were gasps around.

Veronica threw up her hands. She was tired of protests. They didn't have time for this.

"Of course it's hard. Of course it's dangerous. What important thing in life isn't dangerous? Just look at how many women die in childbirth. If danger bothered you, you wouldn't be here with me in a Russian prison."

There were a few laughs at that, which broke the tension.

"Now close your eyes, that's an order."

Around her, eyes dropped shut and the murmuring stopped. This time her voice was sharp, like a drill instructor and not like a reassuring big sister.

"There's a river inside you. It flows from your soul and your soul floats on top of it. Picture it, reach for it, feel for it. Can you hear it murmur? Can you feel the tug of its waters buffeting against you? That is what we need. Desh isn't what's important. Mechs aren't what's important. The only thing important is you and the river. Reach into its power and none will stand against us. We will go out there and show the Russians that no matter how many fancy, shiny mechs they bring, the real power of a Hussar is the magic inside its pilot, not the strength of its pathetic metal arms."

There was a murmur of laughter and she knew she had them.

"I feel it, I feel it, it's got me," one of the girls cried out. Her voice filled with terror. "It's taking me away!”

Veronica turned and pushed through the crowd. She grabbed the girl by the arms. The young woman was shaking like a leaf. "It has me!"

"No! You are a boat, you ride above the flow. You are a rock, the waves splash against you and they break. You are a lighthouse, the storm cannot touch you. Listen to me."

She gave the girl a small shake. The girl’s breathing steadied. She was so young. How old had Veronica been when she first heard the river? She couldn’t remember.

"All of you," Veronica called, "that's enough. You know what it feels like now. It'll be ready when you need it. Pull back."

Veronica turned back to Jolanka. Her hand was pressed against the mech looming over her and she was beaming. "I did it! I bonded."

The mech's good arm moved slightly. Its hand opened and closed. The girl looked as happy as a junior trainee who had just bonded for the first time and not a pathetic prisoner deep in a dungeon.

Veronica reached out and gave the girl's shoulder a squeeze. "Good job.”

There was a clang. Someone over by the door whispered, "They're coming."

Oh, shit. Veronica felt a surge of panic. She hadn't bonded with a mech of her own. She had been so intent on helping the others that she had lost track of the time.

She ducked behind the mech the girl had just bonded. Then she quickly sat on the floor and closed her eyes. She needed to focus. She had just given up the mech she had been planning to bond and she needed to find another. There wasn't time to run around the room and feel all of them. She could do it just as quickly with the river, she was sure.

The waters of magic came roaring up to meet her and she bobbed on their surface. In this room filled with broken mechs and almost equally broken mech riders, the river tumbled and flowed in chaotic whirlpools. Veronica's spirit glided along it and she felt where it was going.

Distantly she heard the clang of metal doors and stamping feet, shouted orders and shuffling bodies. But she was carried away by the flow. She could see the mechs now all around her, the bonded ones glowing bright and the dead useless ones, dim and gray. Only a few even had the potential to bond. All looked so dim and weak that she hesitated. Was this really all that was left?

Then she saw something else. It was at the bottom of the pile of mechs, dim and gray and obscured by the others. It was completely dead with no desh at all, butit was intact, possibly in the best shape of them all. But she couldn't bond it if it had no desh, could she?

Veronica felt the tendrils of power all around her. There were five, six, no, eight mechs nearby still unbonded with the tiniest trickles of desh still in them. They were so broken and hopeless, she had dismissed them. But their power was there, begging to be taken.

She reached out through the river and grasped. It was like projecting a complexed force wave, only instead of pushing it away, she was calling it towards her, twisting it, pulling the dash from each mech.

Nearby, she heard Lieutenant Erzsébet gasp "What are you doing?"

Veronica gritted her teeth and didn't respond. She needed to concentrate. She wove the desh stream down through the pile of wrecks to get it to the one she wanted, avoiding the others. The gray dead bodies were hungry for desh.

It was like wrestling an impossibly large snake to keep the stream of energy flowing where she wanted it to go. At last, the first tendrils of power reached her target The sparks of energy in the broken mechs flickered out one by one, going from the palest of blues to a dead gray as she siphoned the last of their desh from them and fed it into her new mech.

As the power filled its core, it called to her. Her bond took hold. She kept her eyes closed and continued to focus. Even as rough hands grabbed her and pulled her to her feet, she stayed in the river, pulling the last few strands of desh into her new machine. When the last of it had vanished inside, she opened her eyes and gasped.

Russian troops were dragging her forward. An officer stood in the front of the room.

"You there, what are you doing? Where is your mech?"

Veronica was panting and trying to catch her breath.

There was a rumble and a crash from the back of the room. She didn't look over her shoulder, but she could feel through her bond what was happening. Her mech crawled from the pile of wrecks and stood. She met the officer's gaze.

Now, the officer in front of her was gaping over her shoulder. He looked back at her and she met his gaze steadily.

"That is my mech."

His mouth opened and closed. His surprise turned into a frown and then a glare.

"Good," he called to the guards. "They're all ready, let's get them moving."

There were dozens of them with guns leveled. They carried submachine guns with big drum magazines. The girls could fight back now, ordering their mechs to injure or maybe kill all the guards in this room. But some of them would be hit, some of them would die. And no doubt there are more guards outside.

No, that would not be the end of this lost squadron of Hungarian Hussars.

Veronica lifted her head and strode forward.

"You heard him, girls. It's time for our big show."