Chapter Fifty-Two - The Sandpiercer

Daggerwren was recuperating. Not fast, but it was being fixed. Folk were out and about, some pushing wheelbarrows filled with broken stone, others on the backs of utility mechs with pallets of bricks before them.

I saw people on rooftops and others working on setting new glass into window frames.

So the place was cleaning itself up. Not that it would do a lot of good if they were hit again, or if the gnomes decided to take matters into their own hands.

I had an inkling that the sheriff and his people would have a lot more freedom to get a good guard up. Maybe fix those guns on the walls and spend some time actually training someone to use them.

If Daggerwren was given a bit of time, it might well be able to defend itself. At least a little.

The town wasn’t my concern, not at the moment. Rusty moved like the well-oiled machine he was, crossing streets and navigating around squads of men in blue-grey uniforms. More Dreggar militiamen?

“Lots of soldiers around,” I said as I noticed a small walking mech ahead. It was an ancient thing, six-legged and low, with an open back and a heavy gun sitting at the front like the needle on a mosquito.

“That’s hardly surprising,” Clin said. “They were invaded.”

“Hmm.” So they were bringing in more troops.

Well, more implied they had any to begin with. The sorry excuses I’d seen at that meeting with the sheriff didn’t exactly impress me, but I figured they only sent the cheapest, least-useful troops out this far from the capital.

The current lot looked young, too, and despite their uniforms looking fresh, their equipment was dated.

Was the entire army unprepared, or were they just sending the nobodies to Daggerwren?

I set that aside when we reached the train station. Not the yard where we’d fought, but the station proper. The building had a number of folk around it, some mechs waiting off to the side and a few containers looking like they were waiting to be shipped off.

No train though.

I sat Rusty by a line of other mechs, then disconnected and stepped out, leaving Clin behind to guard Rusty in case anyone tried to break into him. I doubted anyone would try. Of all the mechs in the line, Rusty was the heaviest, and one of the only ones that was armed.

Getting two tickets for a passenger carriage was easy. A couple of silver each, which meant a meal onboard and that was it. The man behind the booth was a chatty fella, and he explained that the Sandpiercer wasn’t heavily loaded on the way out of Daggerwren. Tickets to here were expensive, tickets out weren’t.

Figured.

Getting the permission to load Rusty aboard was a whole other mess. I had to meet an engineer who walked around Rusty a few times, then measured my mech up real fast. He’d fit, but only just.

The price had me balking. It was ten times what I’d pay for the cores just to walk over to Flatbluff.

I tried to haggle it down, but the guy in the booth was a stubborn fellow. He insisted that the West Cinder Railway Union set fair prices. I did get some extra meals for our tickets, and I managed to convince him to give us a room for cheap since we were paying customers, but that was it.

I didn’t curse him up a storm as I set a few good gold on the counter, but I was damned tempted to.

I was on my way back to Rusty when I heard a hubbub rising. More people had been arriving, normal folk, probably more than the station usually saw, judging by all the hastily packed bags. A few soldiers too, though not in any sort of formation.

Didn’t take a genius to follow everyone’s gaze out across the town. The walls were opening, two large doors set into them sliding apart with the slow shift of something heavy being moved by an engine that was too small for it.

Out past the still-grinding doors was open desert: leagues of nothing but sand with some bushes poking through and reddish stone where the wind had blasted the top-sand away. Cutting across that were two tracks, and on those, still way off in the distance, was a wall of smoke.

I glanced around until I found a bench next to a light pole. The couple sitting on it gasped as I jumped up and used the back of the bench as a place to stand, an arm wrapped around the pole.

The view wasn’t much better, but it let me see over the dozens of people waiting.

The Sandpiercer was a beast.

Even from what had to be two or so kilometers away, I could tell that it was massive. A huge engine, shaped roughly like a bullet and with a slit cut into the top of it where the crew were likely watching. A large pair of blades ran out before it, both of them wedge shaped and probably weighing more than Rusty did. They hovered over the rails, cutting apart sand-dunes and sending twin waves of sand shooting into the air around it.

I felt the ground starting to tremble.

Then they applied the brakes and I winced as a piercing squeal echoed across the desert.

What had to be thousands of tonnes of steel slowed down, smoke pouring off of braking pads that glowed such a bright red they made the entire underside of the train seem like it was aflame.

The Sandpiercer slid into the walls of Daggerwren, moving barely any faster than I could walk, and yet it still felt as if it was coming fast.

The engine was massive. Twice as wide as Rusty was tall and maybe three dozen metres long from sandcatcher to the rear.

It slowed down to a complete stop just within the gate, then, from its side, huge legs folded out while a few engineers jumped off the engine and ran to the back.

Seeing something so large stand up and scuttle forwards was, in a word, awesome.

Then it all turned rather mundane.

The engine moved to the side and started to turn around, each step from its many legs only turning it a fraction of a full rotation, like the minute hand of a clock ticking around.

A smaller engine moved out of the station and pulled the carriage forward, first the passenger carriages were brought to the station proper, then the cargo wagons were detached and rolled back to the trainyard.

I jumped off the bench and headed over to Rusty. I didn’t want to get involved in the controlled chaos of the station until it was Rusty’s turn to embark.

“Big thing, isn’t it?” Clin asked. He was leaning against the inside of Rusty’s control seat, eyes on the Sandpiercer.

“Yeah,” I said.

“We don’t have trains that large. Smaller, sleeker ones, sure, but nothing that imposing. I suppose it’s built to tackle a different set of circumstances.”

“I suppose so,” I agreed easily. At least the cabins at the back, while just a bit less wide than the train proper, weren’t anything too special. Boxes. Some boxes with windows, others just steel boxes on wheels.

Eventually the mechs ahead of us started moving, and with the help of some engineers that came out of the train, we were directed to the trainyard where they were dismounting some ancient warmechs from the train.

I watched the old things walk around and felt bad for the poor saps piloting them.

“Those are nearly pre-Calamity,” Clin noted.

“Don’t know what they’re thinking,” I said. The guns on them were small, maybe standard 18mm. Nothing that would stop a gnome warmech.

There were plenty of troops getting out of the train, but again, they looked like grunts, with decades old equipment, and barely any hair on their chins. If they were planning on stopping a gnomish invasion here, they’d need to step up their game.

A few hundred kids with 10mm bolt-action rifles that were made when their parents were still young wouldn’t fare well against a modern military.

Or maybe they just needed enough troops to make the gnomes think twice.

Politics was something best left out of my hands, I figured.

We were the last to load onto the carriage designed for mechs. Rusty fit, but it was tight, and a bit of a challenge of my skills as a pilot to squeeze him into the heavy frame without scraping off a layer of fresh paint. Still, I had a few folk guiding me, and there wasn’t any sort of immediate rush. I locked everything up, and soon Clin and I were out of Rusty and headed for the passenger cars while my mech was strapped in.

Now we just had to sit tight, and enjoy the peaceful ride all the way down to Flatbluff. It would be the easiest part of our entire trip, I figured.

***