Steam and Iron

He kept low, using the shadows of the abandoned water barrels to close the thirty paces between the ramp mouth and the crane gantry. His boots made no sound in the deep, powdery dust that drifted across the platform.

The guards were shouting at each other, four of them trying to heave a five-hundred-pound crate of salted provisions off the rig's rear deck to make room for their own water kegs. The two men at the crane were arguing over the release winch, their backs turned to the platform.

István reached the crane support in five strides. He unhooked a heavy iron crowbar from the tool rack beside the stoker’s bench, jammed the wedge end directly into the jammed relief lever of the steam bypass, and hauled his full weight down.

The iron crust sheared with a sharp crack.

A screaming jet of superheated, four-hundred-degree steam blasted out of the release pipe with the screech of a dying beast. The white plume struck the two guards at the crane square in the face and chest.

Their screams were cut short as the scalding vapor blistered their lungs and stripped the skin from their cheeks. They tumbled backward off the staging platform, falling forty feet into the collapsing sinkhole below.

The sudden blast of white vapor billowed across the loading platform, swirling in dense, blinding drafts that obscured the lamps and swallowed the guards in confusion.

"Cartel attack!" one of the guards at the axle shouted, panicked by the sudden roar and the steam cloud. "Syndicate hounds on the ramp!"

István came out of the white mist like a cleaver through suet.

He closed on the nearest spearman before the man could bring his weapon level. István caught the spear shaft with his left palm, redirected the point into the hard dirt, and drove his heavy belt knife upward under the guard’s leather breastplate, right beneath the sternum. The steel bit through diaphragm and heart. István ripped the blade free with a brutal downward twist and kicked the falling body into the second guard's legs.

The second man went down in the dust, cursing, his crossbow clattering against the stones. Before he could roll, István stepped over him, planted his heel on the man’s throat, and drove the heavy iron pommel of his knife into the bridge of his nose with the precise, methodical force of a mason seating a brick.

Bone gave way. The man stopped kicking.

From the fog, the remaining guards around the cab began shouting, firing blind crossbow bolts into the steam. One iron bolt struck the sheet-metal siding of the crawler with an ear-splitting crack, ricocheting away into the canyon, while another punched clean through the canvas cover over the forward cargo bulkhead.

"Zoltán! The ladder!" István roared.

Through the drifting vapor, a thin, salt-robed figure came sprinting across the yard, clutching his chest with both hands, stumbling through the dust toward the rear wheel-hub.

The guard who held the brass manifest handle lunged out from behind the driver's cage, thrusting his boar-spear across the ladder just as Zoltán twisted to climb. "Get off the rig, you academy dog!"

István did not have time to close the distance. He grabbed the dropped crossbow at his feet, cocked the stirrup with one violent jerk of his boot, set the quarrel that lay loose on the dirt into the groove, and fired from the hip.

The iron quarrel caught the spearguard in the right shoulder, throwing the thrust wide; instead of piercing Zoltán through the spine, the spearhead glanced off the crawler's sheet plating and raked violently across the scholar's exposed flank.

Zoltán scrambled up the iron rungs of the boarding ladder like a terrified monkey, his salt-encrusted boots slipping twice before he tumbled over the lip of the cargo bay.

The last two guards at the cab took one look at István standing in the red twilight with the empty crossbow, then at their three dead companions in the dust. One of them spat a curse, turned, and bolted for the canyon trail on foot. The other hesitated half a second too long. István hurled the empty crossbow frame into the man’s face, closed the two paces in a single leap, and slashed his throat from ear to jaw before the man’s hands could reach his daggers.

Blood hissed as it hit the hot copper plating of the crawler's boiler cover.

István swung himself up into the open driver’s cab.

The control box was a maze of brass levers, iron petcocks, and grease-streaked sight glasses. He did not waste time looking for the formal ignition key; he jammed the tip of his knife into the ignition bypass cylinder, struck the hilt with his palm to shatter the safety seal, and yanked the primary steam throttle wide.

The crawler shuddered violently. Beneath the floorboards, the heavy iron drive-chains caught the teeth of the axle sprockets with a metallic crunch. The six massive wooden wheels bit into the shale, spinning once, throwing a shower of red grit twenty paces into the air, and then gripped.

The ten-ton machine surged forward, smashing through the wooden gate-timbers of the Halász depot.

·  ·  ·

Behind them, the world fell into the earth.

The entire southern shelf of the Halász deep-well gave way in a single, catastrophic implosion. As the crawler crested the first rolling dune of the Aszály desert, István checked the rear-view mirror mounted on the iron frame.

The great sandstone towers did not topple; they simply sank straight down, swallowed by the subterranean void where forty million gallons of water had once held up the mountain's spine. A cloud of fine, gray alkali dust erupted from the crater, rising two thousand feet into the darkening purple sky, blotting out the first stars like a vast, bruised thumbprint against the heavens.

The Halász aquifer was gone. Not damaged. Not polluted. Obliterated.

István eased the steam throttle back two notches to keep the boiler from foaming over. He locked the steering bar with the iron dog-pin, setting the crawler on a north-northwest heading toward the salt flats, where the bedrock sat shallow enough to bear the rig's weight.

The silence of the open desert rushed into the cab, broken only by the steady, rhythmic clanking of the drive-chains and the dry hiss of the sand against the chassis.

István wiped his knife blade clean on the hem of his leather jerkin, sheathed it at his belt, and turned toward the cargo hatch behind the driver's bench.

"Zoltán," István called out, his voice returning to its steady, mechanical rasp. "Secure the lashing on the fuel casks. If we hit an alkali vent at thirty miles an hour and a cask rolls into the burner, we will burn before we reach the second ridge."

No answer came from the cargo bay.

István frowned. He unhooked the brass storm lantern from the bulkhead, stepped through the narrow iron companionway, and pushed the grating aside.

The scholar was sitting huddled against the heavy timber wall between two rows of sealed cedar boxes. His knees were pulled to his chin, his salt-stained robes wrapped tightly around his torso. In the amber glow of the lantern, his face was the color of curdled goat’s milk.

"I told you to lash the casks," István said, stepping into the compartment. "We have eight hours of darkness before the sun comes up. If the sand cools enough, the crust will hold our weight, but we need every drop of oil to stay ahead of whatever Syndicate patrols are riding the northern perimeter."

Zoltán did not move. He slowly let his left hand fall away from his ribs.

His fingers were soaked in dark, thick crimson.

Beneath the scholar’s robe, the wool was shredded and matted with blood. The spearguard's thrust at the platform had not missed entirely; the broad iron leaf of the boar-spear had glanced off the crawler’s sheet plating and driven two inches into Zoltán's right side, right below the ribs.

"It did not hurt at first," Zoltán whispered, his voice thin as dry husk. "It just felt... cold. Like well-water."

István knelt instantly. He did not curse. He did not show panic. He set the lantern on the deck, pulled his shears from his belt, and sliced Zoltán’s robe open from hip to collarbone.

The wound was jagged, three inches wide, bubbling slightly with pink foam at the corner.

"Punctured pleura," István muttered, his fingers probing the edges of the torn muscle with clinical detachment. "The spear tip caught the lower lobe. You are bleeding into the chest cavity."

"Am I... am I going to die?" Zoltán asked, his brown eyes wide, looking up at István with the desperate, helpless terror of a child who had never seen an open cut in an academy library.

"Not if you stop talking and keep your lungs still," István said. He pulled a tin of sulfur grease and a roll of coarse linen bandage from his waist kit. "Every breath you waste talking costs you half an ounce of blood. Shut your mouth."

As István pressed the greased linen hard against the bubbling wound, a distinct sound caught his ear over the thrum of the drive-chains.

It was not the wind. It was not the grinding of the wooden wheels.

It was a light, steady splashing.

István froze. His eyes left Zoltán’s torn side and tracked the sound across the dark floorboards of the cargo bay.

Mounted against the forward bulkhead, right behind the driver’s bench, sat the crawler's auxiliary freshwater tank: a sixty-gallon barrel of white oak bound with iron hoops, the primary supply for the crew on long desert crossings.

Near the base of the barrel, three inches above the deck, an iron crossbow bolt stuck out of the wood at a forty-five-degree angle. The bolt had punched clean through the oak stave.

From the splintered crack around the iron shaft, a clear, crystalline stream of sweet water was arcing out, splashing against the iron grating, and draining directly through the floorboards into the burning sand below.

The puddle on the timber deck was already three feet wide.

István reached out and caught three drops of the falling stream on his fingertips. He brought them to his tongue. It was pure, sweet water from the deep Halász well, cold and untainted by alkali.

Half the tank was already gone.

István stared at the draining barrel, then down at Zoltán, whose breathing was growing shallower with every turn of the six massive wheels.

Ahead of them lay seventy miles of dead dunes, three hostile Syndicate outposts, and eight days of sun.

István reached down, gripped the handle of his heavy cleaver-knife, and pulled the lacing on his forearm tight around the copper schematic.

"Hold the cloth," István said quietly, forcing Zoltán's bloody fingers down against the wound. "We have work to do."