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

The glass of the windows along the front of the train station had been mostly gone before the walking ship ever smashed into the building. From the debris and dust left behind, they’d been destroyed years ago. The windows themselves were well above street level, so I had to jump and pull myself up, first brushing off the window ledge so I didn’t cut my palms open. I swung myself into the station. Shards crunched under my boots on the faded marble floors.

The halls had once been fancy stone, and probably could be again with a good cleaning pass, if not for the giant smashed and burning war machine embedded in the collapsed hall 20 meters away. If there were any survivors, they weren’t making themselves seen. Shattered masonry lay everywhere. The place was very slowly filling up with smoke.

I slung the sub-gun and briefly pulled the magical Geiger counter out of my bag. A few waves of the wand showed the ruined walking ship was giving off a strong reading, but the strongest reading was from deeper in the building. Here and there down the hall, motes of green light danced. I assumed they were magical workings that had either been broken or simply didn't have enough power to operate.

The main hall ran along the front of the building. I looked around and found a smaller passage headed deeper inside. A turnstile gate had been broken open and no longer blocked this hall. As I worked my way deeper into the building, I passed ticket booths and snack stands, dark and abandoned.

The first magic construct I came to, I almost jumped out of my skin and hosed it with submachine gun fire. Fortunately, I realized it was inert before I wasted my ammo. This one was not made of jammed-together bones the way the others had been. It looked like it was stitched out of a variety of corpses. It made me think Rasputin had stolen something originally built by Frankenstein. Did evil supergeniuses ever get together and swap minions and techniques? I imagined a conference where Rasputin and Frankenstein would sit down over a map, agreeing on who got which bits of Europe.

As I moved deeper, I passed two more of the flesh constructs and one of the bone monstrosities. All of them were crouched in corners or against the wall, silent and inert. I let them be and they didn't stir as I passed.

Soon, I came to the platforms themselves and the tracks, in a wide-open space covered by a roof overhead. Across the end of the platforms, another walkway connected them all together.

There was a train engine embedded in the walkway on the next track to my left. It had run down a track and crashed off the end of it, wedging itself halfway in the building. A line of passenger cars stretched down the track behind it, crumpled and tilted at crazy angles. It must not have been going very fast at the time because it hadn't penetrated deeper into the front of the station. There was a strange mechanical noise I couldn't place.

I climbed over a broken passenger car and saw what I was hearing. A massive armored behemoth of a train on the far end of the station was building up a head of steam. The engine was so covered in plates of steel it bore little resemblance to a steam locomotive. The cars reminded me of Admiral Morozov's armored train. Some were festooned with turrets, bristling gun barrels, or other devices I didn't understand. I looked close, but didn't see any of the lightning guns. So maybe Rasputin hadn’t done an evil lend-lease with Frankenstein after all.

The engine let out a whistle and the whole thing started crawling forward. The ground trembled but it wasn't the train, it was a colossal footstep. Natasha's fortress was somewhere nearby. I glanced in apprehension at the ceiling, half expecting a big metal foot to come plunging through the ceiling at any moment.

The train was gathering speed slowly, but I was separated from it by several platforms and stretches of open track. I gauged it all in an instant and decided jumping down onto the tracks and then climbing out again, several times, would be slower than going the long way. I didn’t think I’d be able to leap over the tracks to the next platform, not even with this body. Instead I turned left and took off down the platform, jumping broken benches and piles of debris and dodging around support pillars.

I turned, boots skidding on the broken tiled floor, and clattered up the stairs to the walkway over the tracks. By the time I reached the correct platform, the armored train was halfway down the track and gathering speed.

What happens next was one of those math problems you've seen, or maybe just heard about. A train moving 3 miles per hour is 75 meters down the track and headed east. A big dude starts at the beginning the track, also headed east. If the train is accelerating at x meters per second, and the big man can run Y kilometers per hour, how much track is left when he catches the train?

The real answer is a bunch of math which high schoolers hate. The Hollywood answer is exactly two meters more than the length of the track, which requires the hero to make a flying leap off the end of the platform to catch the back of the train one-handed, then dangle from the rear car for several seconds, scrabbling to climb aboard, before swinging onto the car, possibly losing his gun in the process.

Fortunately, I didn't have to work the math or deal with the Hollywood solution. I ran up alongside the last car on the train and jumped aboard, grabbing a handhold along the side.

It wasn't much of a handhold, and of course, Rasputin hadn't left the back door unlocked. I scrambled up the armored side and onto the top of the train. I lay pressed flat against the swaying top of the car for a minute, catching my breath, before rolling over and starting my search for a way in.

The bag slung over my shoulder tangled up with my body as I rolled, and I realized belatedly that I wasn't absolutely sure Rasputin was on this train. I dug the magical Geiger counter out of the bag and waved the wand around. Yep, as expected, the source of strongest magic in the area was somewhere towards the front of the train.

It made sense, really. Rasputin had turned Moscow into a dead city, not just out of spite, but to make it his own private citadel, with his defenses being several miles of zombie-infested wasteland. This was a guess on my part. Maybe he had done it just to be an evil bastard. Or maybe it had been an experiment of his gone wrong. Either way, he had been hiding out in the city.

And now, that fortress of solitude was breached. Like any proper evil villain, he had a getaway plan in the form of this armored train. But Sam, you might say, an armored train is a terrible getaway vehicle. Everyone knows where they're going. Sure, that's right. But only if they know you have a train and are planning on getting away on one. My guess is Rasputin had a few mind-controlled minions somewhere along this route to make sure the switches were set the way he wanted them to. He could get away on a train because of the element of surprise. No one would have thought to block his path, since no one would expect a bunch of zombies to figure out how to operate a train and try to escape from Moscow on it.

This all made sense in retrospect, but at the time, I was just determined to move up the train, find the villain, and smash his face in.

Now, I knew jumping onto a moving train was on the seriously-don't-do-this-shit end of the spectrum of bad ideas. I quickly discovered it was much worse than that. I levered myself up to my knees and looked around for a hatch. There had to be one. It was in the rules. Climb onto a moving train, and there’d be a way to get inside.

Boom!

Something off to my right exploded. I looked over and instantly realized what a colossal screw-up I had made. A walking, armored, and heavily-armed fortress loomed over the city two blocks away, stomping along parallel to the railroad tracks. Natasha had not been fooled by his getaway, and she was here to finish the job.

A shell whistled overhead and slammed into a building on the far side of the tracks. The brick building exploded. Chunks of masonry clanged off the armored plates of the train and bounced away. I ducked my head and cursed my foolish actions. I should have just left this villain to Natasha. Why had she sent me in, anyway, if she was planning to come herself? Just as a distraction?

She was keeping pace for now, but this train was picking up speed. Would she be able to catch him, or put a disabling shot into the engine before he pulled out of range? Maybe, but the thick armored plate I knelt on, told me it might not be that easy. I didn't relish being in a train wreck, or even riding on top of one being shot at by a crazed old witch. Still, I had set out to end the threat of Rasputin to this world, and I intended to see it through.

I had always been a stubborn son of a bitch, and somehow being transported into a golem body had made me even more so. Emotions like fear, and affection, and even anger all felt muted. Stubbornness seemed to be about the same, and had less to distract it.

There was a hatch in front of me on the top of the train. It had an access wheel to unlatch it. I crawled on my hands and knees over to it and grabbed the wheel.

I set myself, took a deep breath, and threw my weight into turning the wheel as hard as I could. I damn near wrenched my back when it rotated with almost no resistance. Either this hatch didn't have a lock, because they never expected anyone hostile to be on top of the train, or no one had actually locked it.

Either way, the wheel spun freely and the hatch swung open with no resistance.

Now to see what lay below.