Iron Drumbeat Chapter 12 (Patreon)

Holy hell, just when you couldn't hate landlords more. Our rent is paid fortnightly, but I am paid monthly. So now we're required to pay three rent payments this month. Almost certain this is on purpose, to squeeze more money out of us. Looks like it's ramen time and extra work for ashlyn. Late stage capitalism is hell. Please enjoy this chapter.

“Ready?” Tink signed, giving me a long, determined look.

“Yeah,” I nodded, mentally rehearsing my part in this little dance.

The engine room was cold— bare metal bulkheads weren't the best insulation, it turns out. Metal also had a habit of biting when you touched it, or at least it felt like being bitten when it leeched the warmth out of your flesh.

Tink’s little fingers flashed. “Three, two, one, go!”

I flicked a switch, then waited until I saw Tink turn a dial. As soon as they did, I yanked a large lever down. The whole room growled. The sound only lasted a moment, before Tink pulled a lever on their end. Now the engine room was hissing, like a running hose was spraying water everywhere.

Both of us watched the cracked hydraulic dial rise as pressure increased in the boiler. As soon as it reached the green-marked range, I pressed a button, and we held our breath.

I'd never even heard of the type of reactor that we were starting, but apparently Tink knew what it was. Well, I hoped she did, because she was the one who'd done most of the repair work. I just helped lift things in the mech.

Which, I guess, should've been a sign to have faith in the little engineering critter, because my mech used a smaller version of this thing.

Tink, their lips moving silently in a language I didn't recognise, waited for a heartbeat, then slammed a tiny fist down onto a matching button. The engine howled and my hair stood on end as a horrific feeling of wrongness invaded the room. The whole of Scarabass shuddered, as though it now housed some sort of caged demon that had suddenly decided it wanted out.

The alien feeling began to ease, as did the howling, and the reactor began to purr happily. All the dials and gauges were in the green, and a single green light blinked over the strange runed cylinder of metal that housed the reactor. After untold aeons lying dead and dormant in the scrapyards, our huge mech transport had a beating heart once more.

“We did it!” I exclaimed, pumping a fist in victory.

Tink's little face split into a grin, and she did a twirling dance. Her lips moved again in a silent imitation of my exclamation, and a second later her hands flashed, “Only took me a month!”

“You repaired the reactor in like, five days,” I snorted, waving away her bonkers attempt to diminish her own hard work. “Replacing the belly armour took us longer than that.”

“We had to do it slowly. Let the spirits settle back in,” she said, giving me a huffy stare. “No point rushing if we scare them away from the armour.”

She wasn't wrong. Half of the point in fixing this particular transport and the mech was because of their spirits. Both machines had seen countless battles in which they were wrecked and their crew killed, only to be salvaged and repaired. Each victory where emotions ran high, or death— they created an echo of the moment. Those echoes, those spirits, they became attached to the object and imbued it with their power.

That was the only way they knew how to make vehicles that could protect against the fog, back in the day— before the corpos realised they could get the same protection with… well, I didn't actually know what it was they did.

Anyway, point was, we fixed the big transport, replacing all its parts with new ones, but slowly. Just like that ship of theseus concept that Pix babbled about one night, we could only go so fast before the spirits decided that the machine wasn't their home anymore.

“Should we do the engaging thing? With the power conduits and the gears and stuff?” I asked, thumping a fist on the big reactor. “She's purring now. Maybe we can find some food that isn't… inedible.”

“So much for your lower-city-rat boasting,” Tink teased, hopping down from the stool they'd used to reach the controls. “Oh, look at me, I've lived it rough. I can handle some nutrient sludge.”

“Fuck off,” I groaned. “It's killing us and you know it.”

“Lucky thing we no stay dead,” Tink said, switching to the simpler one handed version of their sign language so they could sign over their shoulder.

“I would rather be ripped apart by consumed horrors than have all my organs fail because I didn't treat them right— didn't give them the right stuff,” I shot back.

I was real fuckin' sure about that one. In the last month, I'd died twice. Once, I was stupid and got squished under our long-legged beetle-looking transport when a jack failed. The second time, I decided to see if I could fist-fight a consumed. It did not end well. Tink accused me of being too cavalier with my powers of resurrection, after that one. When they explained what the word ‘cavalier’ meant, I was reluctantly forced to agree.

On our way past the galley— which was supposedly what you called the mess hall on a ship— I caught sight of myself in the mirror. My cheeks were sunken, and my ragged clothes hung off my withering frame like one of those blankets they throw over dead people. I wasn't particularly happy with the look, to be honest. We really needed to leave and find food.

Food wasn't our only urgent concern, either. The scrapyard safe zone was beginning to collapse. It'd been slow at first. From one day to the next, a single mound of trash would be gone. Then, one of the outlying sectors would be swallowed— all the valuable scrap that'd been there just poof, eaten by the eld-fog. Now, over a third of the scrapyard had vanished. Some spirit-protected relics would remain for a time, but even if they might not cease to exist, they'd still vanish into the fog.

The cockpit of the behemoth sat in the vaguely lozenge-shaped forward facing head. The actuators and neck passage were protected by thick armour plates on the outside.

Inside the head, three seats had been stuffed. It would've been cosy except for all the dials and switches and levers and shit— they made you afraid to spread out and take full advantage of the space. Instead, it was just cramped. Luckily, my engineer was about two fifths the size of me.

They swung nimbly up into the pilot's chair—the one with the best view out of the thick glass viewport—and pulled a lever. There were actual status lights on the dashboard now, and overhead too. No more relying on Tink's little LED lamps.

A small shudder went through the massive transport, and another light flickered on. Main drive conduits engaged. All across a central panel in the cockpit, LEDs began to flicker to life. The engines for each leg were receiving power. Predictably, engines two and five began to flash red. Tink glared at them, and after a moment, pulled out a little electric screw driver and faster than I could've made a lift, had the panel off.

Their little hands grasped the wires that connected to the indicator lights for those two engines and ripped them out. Impromptu surgery complete, they shoved the wires back into the dashboard and fixed the panel back in place. Now, the lights for engines two and five were dead.

Despite how it appeared, it wasn’t random vandalism fuelled by frustration. After a few discussions and a lot of thought, we’d decided to remove two of the six legs. As far as we could tell, the Schain Class Heavy Transport had been built to walk directly into enemy fire, with its own guns blazing in support of its mechs. So, it had six legs for added stability if one or two failed. Problem was, with a crew of two, we weren’t going to be fighting any big battles in this thing. We needed speed more than stability, so the legs on our new home had been replaced. Now, she had four much longer legs, with more powerful motors and tougher supports that would be capable of carrying her far faster than she’d ever gone before.

Engine four never switched to green, instead sticking on yellow, so Tink cut the power and then immediately reengaged it. That time, all were green, and I got a grin of triumph from my small friend as they sought my approval. I nodded and flashed a thumbs up.

So finally, after a month of hard work, Tink reverently took the yoke in both hands and pulled it level. Under us, the beast bucked and shifted, while all down her superstructure, there were groans and pops. We held our breath.

Now upright, the transport’s weight was settling, once more being held by a frame that hadn’t had to do any real work in a century or more. More than that, actually— with only two legs, the weight was being divided among fewer points, which meant that our new reinforcements were being tested too.

Five seconds, then ten, then a minute passed while we listened to the creaking and groaning of the transport, but she didn’t crack. She was sound and whole. We’d fucking done it.

Tentatively, Tink pushed the yoke forward, and the transport took a step. Then another, and another. We were moving. We were going to get out of this place after all.

Tink’s hand shot up. “We have everything? Nothing else to fix? Just leave?”

“Yeah, pretty sure we packed everything,” I agreed after taking a second to do mental inventory. “The hold is full of all that random junk you wanted to keep, Drums is on board, the armour is obviously corroded to hell, but we can replace it later, and of course the main guns are wrecked— All stuff we’ll have better luck fixing when we get back to civilisation and start making money. I think we’re fine— wait, did we end up fixing the hip guns?”

The hip guns were little ball-mounted machine gun turrets that were used primarily to keep infantry and other small threats away from the transport. It wouldn’t be a good idea to go out into the eld-fog without some form of anti-personnel guns we could use for defence.

“Replaced them early, remember?” Tink signed. “I use to help with consumed. Even have ammo.”

“We’ll need to automate those at some point,” I sighed, adding it to the mental list of shit we needed to buy when we got out of here.

Tink didn’t reply, and after I was quiet for a minute, they pushed the yoke forward and turned it. Scarabass moved easily on well-oiled joints. We were actually getting the hell out of this rusted, rotting garbage pile. Finally.