Iron Drumbeat Chapter 7 (Patreon)

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Tink sighed and made the motion with her fingers again. This time, I paid special attention, absorbing every detail as her tiny hands moved.

"Okay… so that's how you sign for tired, right?" I asked.

She gave me a flick of one of her long ears and nodded.

It'd been a week since I woke up from my surgery, and together we were working on my understanding of her sign language. In between getting ordered around by the looney robot, that is.

"We … good progress!" Tink signed happily.

"Yeah!" I agreed, offering a fist bump. "I didn't get that second sign though."

Her tail swished in mild frustration and she set about trying to tell me what the second word of her sentence was. It was taking time, but I'd always been bloody quick. Didn't matter if it was dodging a spitball from one of the older kids or thinkin' up some bull to feed the coppers when they were giving us the side eye.

Several minutes later, as we took a break, I murmured a question. "Tink, you know what I am, right?"

She looked up at me and quirked a fluffy eyebrow in question.

"We call them neons," I explained. "Cos sometimes they've got these shiny tattoos on them. Biggest thing is that neons can't stay dead, not even if they want to. Most've got some sort of crazy power too. It comes from dying in the fog."

Slowly, the little critter nodded their head. "Fog … people."

"Mark that second word," I said automatically, before actually continuing the conversation. "So… when we die, only the shit that's claimed by the fog comes with us when we come back."

Tink nodded once more.

"This collar ain't claimed."

Comprehension dawned behind their intelligent gaze, and a fang poked out to nibble at their thin lip. "You die and … stay?"

"I'm guessing the fourth word is collar?"

More nodding.

"Then yeah, it gets left behind when my body goes poof."

"You can escape," Tink signed hesitantly.

Leaning down to whisper very quietly, I replied, "Or… I can escape, find a weapon, and then free you too."

Hopeful inhuman eyes gazed up at me, and I nodded confirmation. She hugged me. It was just a tiny, quick embrace, but it conveyed her desperate gratitude nevertheless.

A thought occurred to me, and I gave the little creature a look. “What do you think our chances are of fixing a mech carrier? I reckon those things must have enough spirit shielding to get us out of this scrap land.”

Tink shrugged their shoulders and their hands flashed in reply, “Depends on how damaged it is and if … are others we can take parts from.”

“I’ll keep an eye out then.”

My plan couldn't happen soon enough, either. Mi-DOS was not a kind overlord. The next day after my breakfast of nutrient paste, Mi-DOS decided I did something wrong and I was again subjected to the shock collar. I had no idea what it was I did wrong, but one moment I was just minding my own business prepping for another day of boring-ass surveying when he flew off the handle.

When he was finished torturing me and I could think again, my resolve had solidified. It was time to find something to kill Mi-DOS with. I couldn’t take much more of his abuse. I set out towards that day’s survey area with a grim sense of purpose.

Walking back after my job was done, I was passing through what I was beginning to call the mech graveyard, when I spotted something. Just a glimpse of colour through a hole in the armour of a mech carrier, nothing more.

My fingers grew restless, though, and I stopped in my tracks. Whatever I saw through that hole was throwing my finely honed thievery senses into a riot.

The carrier I saw the red glimpse inside was up a mound of rubble where it was half buried by a collapsed building. Interestingly, the building had English signage on it. Something about a palace? Caesar's Palace? Anyway, the garish building had definitely seen better days.

My footing was all over the place while I climbed the rubble. Damned concrete chunks kept shifting, trying to eat me n' shit. It reminded me of a stuck up rich old woman who'd just been told no by someone much less important than her. That is to say, the rubble was real fucking unstable.

It gave me a chance to really appreciate my new legs. For one, the way the rubble moved would've ground meat-toes up into a bloody paste. Instead, the composite and steel of the three toes on each foot were merely scratched up. The strength and power behind my movements were jaw dropping too. At one point, I was able to leap three metres to clear a nascent landslide.

When I finally reached the carrier I came to a halt and laid a palm on the metal armour of the huge vehicle to catch my breath. Damn, my fingers were pretty. Most feminine thing about my otherwise plain appearance to be honest. They were so slender, and the tips tapered in such a delicate way. Behind that dainty facade, though, they had some real strength to them. I wouldn't've been able to make it up here without a solid grip.

Still puffing from the exertion of the climb, I said, "Alright, let's see what you're hiding, huh?"

I paused. "Right… after I find a door."

The actual mech bay doors were shut tight, but after a minute of searching, I found the hatch made for people. It was, of course, rusted shut. Unlike the last transport though, a solid kick loosened it and I was able to drag it open.

I was dismayed to see that directly beyond the hatch was an airlock and another closed door. If only I could just… magic the door open. I hadn't even had time to process what happened with the first transport, and it hadn't happened again with anything else. Maybe it was something to do with the other vehicle rather than me? Could this one do it too?

Experimentally, I slapped my hand on the bulkhead and closed my eyes. A minute passed, then another, and still nothing happened.

"Aw, fuck it," I sighed.

Approaching the inner airlock door, I tried to push it open. Obviously, that didn't work. Maybe there was a latch somewhere?

A quick search revealed no latches. There was a weird wheel thing off to the side, plus a big lever. I tried messing with the lever, but pulling it only produced a hideous groaning noise.

"Sounds like a giant stubbing his toe," I muttered, and tried the wheel. That too refused to function as anything other than a tortured musical instrument.

Frustrated, I kicked the door and yelled, "Bitch, if you don't open I'm coming back with an angle grinder and explosives!"

I'd like to think my threats were what got it to budge, but it was probably the kick from my immensely strong cyborg legs. As it was, the wheel shifted slightly while the whole door gave a crack and moved half an inch.

"Thank you," I said sweetly to the door. Damn, the way I said that sounded so cute. I shivered internally and pushed the flutters back into a dark corner of my heart.

To avoid addressing the frankly alarming number of funny feelings my new body was giving me, I moved back to the wheel and gave it a spin. To my surprise, it worked. Squealed louder than a snitching bystander, but it did the job and the door swung open.

I tried to enter the transport on my tiptoes, but I no longer had toes that could tip. All it ended up achieving was almost tipping me over. As it was, my feet were far from stealthy. Even if I was careful, they still made a clicking sound when they touched the bare metal flooring.

The interior of the transport was cramped, but not so much that two people couldn’t’ve squeezed past each other. Aesthetically, the interior reminded me of an extremely old propeller aeroplane I found in another part of the junkyard. Something called a B-52 stratofortress. There were all sorts of exposed wires neatly corralled into whatever nook was at hand, of which there were plenty. It appeared as though the entire interior was built as a bare minimum afterthought. Form definitely followed function, like the way the interior bulkheads had unadorned structural ridges and crap. There were also obvious places where the previous crew used whatever tools were at hand to make the interior a little less dangerous to someone who might be jostled into the various hard edges. In one place, the fabric arm of a chair was bolted to a sharp corner.

I had a vague idea of what direction the mech hangar was in, so I pushed in that direction, only stopping every so often to glance through open doorways. I saw crew quarters, a small mess hall, and a storage room, all of which were barebones even before the ravages of time entered the picture.

When I finally found my way to the hangar, I came to a stop and gazed out at the mech bays. There were four slots where mechs could’ve been housed, along with a small workshop at the far wall. Each mech bay sported a door that would allow the large warmachines to exit directly out into the open with no need to manoeuvre through the hangar itself. Of the four bays in the hangar, three held spare parts obviously harvested from broken mechs. The last bay, though, held the owner of the red paint I’d spotted through the punctured armour.

The mech was vaguely humanoid in shape, although the hips and legs were at least fifty percent chunkier than they would’ve been on a person. The shoulders still stretched out to meet the width of the hips, but the intervening torso was extremely thin, appearing almost delicate in its construction. The arms were similarly dainty in comparison to the legs, except for the chunky plates of aerodynamic armour strapped to the outward-facing areas. At the top of the mech was a long, flat head that reminded me of a sports car, except more oval-shaped.

All-in-all, the mech looked like it was breaking the sound barrier even while it sat rusting and decrepit in its bay. Despite that rust, I found myself drawn to it. Whoever had painted the fifteen metre weapon of war had unintentionally protected it from the elements far more than almost everything else in the scrap yard.

When I reached the foot of the huge mech, I reached out and placed a hand on its knee. “You’re gorgeous…”

Staring up at it, I found myself fervently hoping that Tink could repair it. I wanted to pilot her. I mean, spirits, I could only imagine how she’d feel moving under my fingers. Dodging bullets, firing guns, crushing enemies underfoot—

It happened just like it did before, my mind already empty and ready to jump the gap into the machine, until I was both myself and the robot.

My joints ached. F-fuck, they ached, and I felt so stiff. It was so wrong. I was meant to move, I was meant to fight! I was meant to defeat my enemy in brutal, visceral combat that would only end in the death of myself or my enemy. It seemed fitting that the enemy that finally bested me was time itself.

The merge lasted for only a moment, and I stumbled away, staring up at the warmachine in confused awe. I just… I just communed with a chunk of inert machinery. It was exactly as the mechanomancers described it on the forums. Which meant that, unless I was way-way wrong, the power I gained when I became a neon was mechanomancy. The power to push my mind into a machine and take control, or in the case of the mech, merge my sapience and sentience with its raw sense of mechanical purpose.

I couldn’t help myself, I giggled with glee. Oh bo— oh girl? Oh girl, I had my weapon, and Mi-DOS was going to fuckin’ learn! Now… Now I just needed to figure out how to do it again, and for longer.