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

The aluminum deck flexed under my feet, and I tried not to think about the thousands of feet of empty air below me. Somehow, I had expected the inside of a zeppelin to be quiet as it floated through the air, but the walls were thin. Even though the motor pylons were much farther aft, the big unmuffled engines made their presence known with a steady drone anywhere you were on board.

I opened the door to the officer's lounge and stepped inside. The interior spaces on this ship were an eclectic mix of incredibly cramped and surprisingly spacious. Crew quarters and gangways were cramped little passages and cabins, but the space intended for Hussar officers was downright opulent.

One whole wall of the briefing room was windows separated by little metal frames. Outside the windows, trees drifted past alarmingly close. We were sailing down a narrow valley, little more than a canyon through the mountains. The tree-clad slopes loomed over the airship on both sides. We were near our altitude limit and had no choice but to weave through the mountains.

"How was everything looking, Sergeant?" Angelica was standing in front of the room while the others sat in fancy chairs about the place. The design of the room was like someone had taken a fancy smoking lounge from a mansion and rebuilt it in the lightest materials available. The seats were leather-upholstered, but had flimsy aluminum legs. The table looked like mahogany but was only a thin veneer over a skeletal frame. All the Hussars were seated around the room, as well as well as Captain Lewis and Sergeant Wysocki.

I shrugged. "As ready as we can be." I went around to the back of the room and eyed one of the chairs suspiciously before deciding not to sit in it. Instead I took up an at-ease stance along the back wall. Every time I stepped down on the floor, it flexed alarmingly. The room was well-constructed, but it just wasn't really designed for someone with my bulk.

There wasn't much maintenance I could do in the cramped hangar bay. Besides, we’d done all we could before we left. The mechs were crouched and packed tightly in a space with barely enough room five mechs. All the remaining space was filled with spare cannons and ammunition crates.

Angelica had apparently been waiting for me to arrive. She addressed the gathering. "We've received orders to move forward to Bicaz and reinforce the forces already deployed there." Angelica unrolled a map onto the table, and the others slid their chairs closer. The map wasn't very detailed.

“This is the best map they had available, and as you can see, it isn't great." She ran a finger along a narrow valley through the mountains. "The Russians are coming up the Bicaz river; the last report we had put them by the town of Bicaz itself. We have to assume they are farther than that now."

Frank stood and leaned over the table. "I have been talking with the crew,” he said. “They don’t think we can make a field mech drop with this ship."

Angelica was nodding. "We have been trained in Mech deployment from airships, and so has the Hungarian crew, but not with this airship. The captain isn’t confident in the crew’s mastery of the gas release system. They want to take it slow until they get more experience with this ship.”

"What makes it so complex?" I didn't like sounding stupid, but nobody would expect someone from another world to know how a zeppelin would work anyway. So, I figured it was better to look dumb and learn, than to pretend to know and stay ignorant.

Frank straightened up and puffed his chest a little. It always made people happy when you gave them an opportunity to show off their knowledge. "When a mech gets off the airship, there's a sudden loss of over a ton of ballast. Instantly, you have two thousand pounds more lift than you need. That means the airship wants to go up."

Tamara snorted, “Really fast.”

"Right,” Frank continued. “There's various ways to counter it. Some airships just rapidly dump lift gas, even faster than a typical airship. If we're at a landing field, they can also just anchor it firmly down and then recover the buoyancy gas as they're unloading."

Tamara interrupted. “But the usual way is to balance the lift of the desh powered luf-machine.’

Frank glared. “I was getting to that. If you balance the lift you get from the luf-machine and trim your gas bags to match the rest of the ship’s weight, then you can just step down the luf-machine as each of your mechs walk off the ramp.”

That all made perfect sense to me, except everything to do with a “luf-machine”. I decided for now to assume that meant “magic airship device that lets us ignore physics for a while” Maybe if it seemed important I’d ask more questions later.

Angelica took over again. "None of this matters, since we have orders to rendezvous the regiment in Joseni.” She pointed to a several-mile-wide valley in the mountains between the shorter range we were crossing now and the bulk of the Carpathian Mountains. “The headquarters hopefully will have the latest intelligence. We can unload there and proceed up the pass on foot. Sergeant Golem, you'll need to commandeer vehicles for the support contingent."

The airship was too small for us to have brought our own trucks. Typically a Hussar group was followed by a support vehicle, or three, usually carrying a radio, desh reserves, and ammunition for the mechs.

The information I had been loaded with also implied a Hussar unit commander was usually a man and would ride in the support vehicle. That seemed funny to me, but was just the sort of sexist crap I would expect out of this era. Hopefully, my information was out of date and they didn’t do that anymore. Aside from the sexism, it was stupid to have someone in a dissimilar vehicle trying to lead the group, especially someone who had no real idea what it was like to control a mech with magic.

“Once we land, check in, get vehicles, and mount up, we will head up the pass.”

“How far are we going?”

“I don’t know,” Angelica answered. “It all depends on how far the Russians have pushed up the pass.”

"And how long will we be on the ground?" I asked.

"I don't know that either.”

“So we'll need extra reserves of desh and all the equipment to bivouac."

Angelica nodded. "Captain Lewis, can you see what else they have found in stores as far as tents or blankets? Sergeant Wysocki, do you have a list of what was provided to us?"

"I do, but I don't know how accurate it is. The loading was pretty rushed."

"Alright, see what you can find. At a minimum, we're going to need blankets, rations, and mess kits.

I grinned. “I will find the local regimental quartermaster and see what we can pry loose from them.”

Fortunately, the wind was low that day, and the airship made it through without incident. We were right at the edge of our maximum altitude as we crossed over the pass. And then, we slipped out of the peaks and into a wide valley.

Ahead, the bulk of the Carpathian mountain range loomed. In the middle of the valley, a small town lay perched across a crossroads, surrounded by farmland. We circled, establishing contact with a Hungarian regiment by shutter light and then wireless, before finally setting the airship down on the outskirts of town. A detachment met us to help us secure the ship. Since a bunch of raw army conscripts weren't exactly experts in airship handling, they mostly served to piss off the captain.

Eventually, we unloaded enough of our own crew members to go explain to them how they were supposed to do the job. It was messy, but eventually the airship was secure, staked down to dozens of guide lines. They were attached to all manner of places like trees and fence posts, and I wasn't confident they would hold up if a serious wind came. But the airship captain seemed satisfied, so who was I to second guess?

The town was small, and we were right on the outskirts of it, so a group of us walked in to find the regimental headquarters. Angelica and Frank went to go talk to their commandant, while Sergeant Wysocki and I went to find the man who really mattered – the quartermaster.

We asked around and were directed to the outskirts. The regiment quartermaster had ensconced himself in someone's barn at the edge of town. As we approached, I noticed he had several golems working for him. They were currently busy stacking crates to one side, against the side of the barn. The quartermaster himself had set up shop inside the barn. He eyed us suspiciously as we approached. While we talked to him, I noticed the golems had all stopped working and were staring at us. It was incredibly creepy. They just stood there with blank looks, staring at me and Sergeant Wysocki.

There was an impressive little fleet of motor cars and trucks out front, They were a mixed bag of commandeered vehicles and army trucks. When we eventually convinced him of our need and our orders, he stalled and made excuses as to why he couldn't be parted with any of them. Eventually, I had to loom over him and point out in slow, firm tones that we were there to save his boys up in the mountains, and if we didn't do our job, the Russians were likely to be right down in this town, taking all of his precious trucks in a day or two. Once we convinced him, he tried to pawn off some ancient jalopies on us.

I insisted he have someone start them. One of the cars took several minutes to get started. The other one wouldn't run at all.

After that, I gave him an earful. He spluttered and insisted he would not be lectured to by a golem. I shut him down by getting creative. I told him all about how we were a crack team of the best of the Polish Hussars, sent personally by the King of Poland to assist his Hungarian allies, and that due to our heroism in the dastardly attack in Budapest, we had been given a captured Russian airship by personal gift of the Regent of Hungary, and that we were accompanied into battle by the Regent’s own daughter.

Then I explained that I was prepared to go back to my airship and radio Budapest to tell them about his personal lack of cooperation with their orders, which had come directly from the highest levels. That deflated the man effectively, and I was able to pry one of his precious modern army trucks out of his grasp.

The other vehicle we got was a well-used but well-maintained sedan. While we had the quartermaster off-balanced, I collared his assistant and raided the supply stacks for blankets, stoves, a selection of food suitable for camping out, as well as some cold-weather cloaks. I was unsure what size greatcoat would fit the girls, but I grabbed a half-dozen of the smallest ones they had. Their own coats weren’t likely to be enough up in the mountains and an ankle length wool coat was a great multipurpose piece of gear.

None of the gear they had on hand was my size, which was odd since the unit had golems working outside. I asked about that and it turned out they were civilian-owned golems commandeered locally. Wasn’t really sure how I felt about golems being slaves, or equipment. My team saw me as more than that, but having to start every new conversation by convincing the guy I was talking to I was a person was getting old.

Soon we had a nice load in the army truck. We got out of there before the quartermaster changed his attitude again. As we drove away with our ill-gotten gains, I saw the golems standing, watching us leave. A Hungarian assistant quartermaster was yelling at them to get back to work, but they just stood and stared, at least until we were out of sight.

Back at the airship, we started loading and securing the gear. Even with a copious amount of rope, we were hard-pressed to get everything arranged and stowed on the two vehicles. Soon we had the car so festooned with parcels, it was difficult to see what was underneath.

The first officer of the airship came down to ask if we were going to unload the mechs yet. I told him I wasn’t sure. He didn't like that answer, but I distracted him by saying we were going to unload ammunition and spare weapons to put in our truck. This would necessitate the airship ballasting up. The first officer hurried off to start the process. I didn’t know how all that worked, but he left he was mumbling about water pumps and bags of dirt.

They opened the hangar door of the airship. A swarm of crewmen came out. They prevented us from unloading anything until they set up a pair of heavy-duty scales and commenced a weighing operation. Everything coming off the airship was stopped at the top of the ramp and weighed to match it up with sacks of dirt being hauled in. These were weighed on another scale at the bottom of the ramp, and crewmen constantly scurried back and forth comparing numbers on clipboards to get everything balanced out.

With all of that in place, we could finally get to the task of unloading. Crates of ammunition and autocannon racks came off the airship in a steady flow. Soon we had that truck stuffed to the gills, its suspension sagging precariously.

Well, at least we’d have supplies when we got where we were going.