Dearest Martha, Silas died in the night. The hip wound turned septic and he went quiet around the second watch, and the spectre that followed him everywhere just stood in the corner of the infirmary tent and flickered out. I don’t have time to mourn him properly. I’ll carry that loss.
Today we leave Fort Independence. Some of us won’t leave at all.
I’ve asked men to die for time, Martha. Not for victory, not for ground, not for a flag. For hours. For minutes. For the distance between here and the river. I hope that’s enough. I hope any of this is enough.
Yours in all things and whatever comes after,
Hughes.
* * *
Dawn comes my lieutenant's chair sits empty at the war table.
Nobody moved it. Nobody sat in it. The chair just sits there with his field glasses folded on the seat and his leather notebook beside them, and the room arranges itself around the absence. Phelps stands where he always stands, to my left, with the map spread flat. Mercy takes her corner with Mama Thunder propped beside her. Clementine leans against the fireplace with her surgery kit packed and her flask nowhere in sight for the first time since I’ve known her.
I don’t say anything about Vane. There isn’t time and he’d have been the first to tell me so.
“We’re leaving Fort Independence at eleven forty-five. Every soldier in this garrison walks out the south gate in column formation, double-time, heading for the Chestatee ford. We don’t stop moving until we’re across the river and Beauregard’s cavalry can’t follow.”
Phelps doesn’t flinch, which tells me he’s already been working the numbers in his head since I walked in. Mercy doesn’t move, which is her version of agreement. Clementine closes her eyes for a second and then opens them and nods once.
“The fort stays occupied,” I continue. “Or it looks occupied, which is all we need. The golems hold the walls on automated defense protocols. The volunteers man the parapets in uniform with loaded muskets. Every torch stays lit. Every flag stays up. When Beauregard looks at this fort at noon, he needs to see a garrison that’s digging in, not one that’s already gone.”
“The magazine,” Phelps says. He doesn’t phrase it as a question because he’s already worked out what I’m going to say.
“Decker rigs a fifteen-minute fuse. He lights it on my signal and runs for the south gate. When the magazine goes, it takes the north wall and everything within sixty yards of it. That’s our farewell letter to the General.”
I turn to the map and lay out the deployment with a piece of charcoal, drawing lines and unit positions on the worn paper while the fire pops and settles behind us.
[WALL GARRISON: Rearguard/Decoy]
[UNIT: GOLEM BATTERY] Operator: Cpl. Amos Decker. Assets: 4x Mark IV Sentinel War Golems. No. 1 “Old Faithful” (North Gate) / No. 2 “Temperance” (East Bastion) / No. 3 “Gospel” (West Bastion) / No. 4 “Big Greta” (Mobile Reserve, 60% power). Formation: Phalanx. Stance: Hold Until Destruction.
[UNIT: VOLUNTEER LINE] Leader: Harlan Creedy (Civilian). 11x Civilian Volunteers. Equipment: Borrowed muskets, 40 rounds each, no bayonets. Formation: Spread (maximize wall coverage). Stance: Fire at will / Hold position. Morale: Resolved (100/100).
[UNIT: MAMA THUNDER] Operator: Sgt. Major Mercy. Weapon: 「Mama Thunder」 (Legendary Hex-Cannon). Damage: 120-180 AoE. Effects: Stagger / Shockwave / Execute below 15% HP. Position: NE Bastion (overlooks main approach). Ammunition: 14 hex-shells. Stance: Suppressive fire, then fighting retreat.
[BREAKOUT FORCE: Main Body]
[UNIT: 1ST COMPANY] Leader: Lt. Josiah Phelps. 180x Regulars, 12x Sharpshooters. Formation: Arrow (fast movement). Stance: Aggressive. Power: 340.
[UNIT: 2ND COMPANY] Leader: Cpt. Hughes Granthem. 200x Regulars, 6x Chaplains. Formation: Column (march speed). Stance: Standard. Power: 380. Equipment: 「Freedom’s Edge」 (Legendary Sword), 「Lincoln’s Resolve」 (Legendary Rifle).
[UNIT: 3RD COMPANY] Leader: Sgt. Elijah Marsh. 200x Regulars, 10x Sharpshooters, 4x Field Surgeons. Formation: Skirmish (rearguard). Stance: Defensive. Power: 320.
[SPECIAL ASSETS: Magazine Fuse (15-min slow burn, Decker to light on signal). Lazarus chassis (stripped, core intact, unpowered). Federal flag (remains flying as decoy).]
“Phelps, you’ve got First Company. One hundred and eighty regulars and twelve sharpshooters in arrow formation. You’re the vanguard. You go through the south gate first and you don’t stop for anything short of a Confederate battle line across your path. Your job is to get to the ford and secure the crossing before the rest of us arrive.”
“Understood.”
“I’ll take Second Company through the center. Two hundred regulars and six chaplains in column. Standard march. We stay tight and we stay fast.”
“Third Company is the rearguard.” I look at the map where I’ve drawn the third line. “Sergeant Marsh. Two hundred regulars, ten sharpshooters, four field surgeons. Skirmish formation. They cover the retreat and they don’t engage unless they have to.”
“And me?” Mercy’s voice comes from the corner, low and level and carrying the weight of a woman who already knows the answer.
“You stay on the wall.”
The room gets very quiet.
“You fire Mama Thunder into the Confederate line at eleven forty-five. That’s our opening signal and our cover. You keep firing until the main body is clear of the fort, and then you keep firing until you can’t fire anymore, and then you run. South gate. South field. You catch up to the column or you don’t, but you give us every second you can.”
Mercy looks at me for a long moment. I can’t read her expression and I don’t try to, because what I’m asking her to do is stand alone on a wall with a cannon and hold the attention of twelve thousand dead soldiers while six hundred living ones run the other direction.
“How many shells have I got?” she asks.
“Fourteen.”
She nods. “I’ll make them count.”
“Clementine, you’re with Second Company. Pack light. We aren’t coming back for anything we leave behind.”
Clementine picks up Vane’s field glasses from the empty chair and puts them in her kit bag. Then she picks up his notebook and puts that in too. “He’d have wanted someone to carry these,” she says, and that’s the only eulogy Silas Vane gets this morning.
◇ ◆ ◇
The morning passes in controlled silence.
Six hundred and thirty-one soldiers pack their kits and check their weapons and fill their canteens from the well in the courtyard, and they do it without being told to keep quiet because every man and woman in this garrison can see the dead standing in the fields beyond the wall and they understand what noise means. Tents stay up. Cook fires stay lit. The flag of the Federal Remnant stays on the pole above the gatehouse, snapping in a wind that carries the smell of rain and old chemicals from the field.
Column status before march: Five days under siege. Sleep debt averaging four hours per soldier over the last ninety-six. Rations consumed at breakfast bring us down to seven days’ supply for eight hundred and forty-seven mouths, minus the two hundred and five we pushed through the tunnel, minus the eleven staying behind. Call it six hundred and thirty-one soldiers eating for nine days if nobody gets killed and the rations don’t spoil in the wet. Powder stores unchanged, six hours of sustained fire if we need it on the march, less if the rain keeps soaking through the cartridge paper. Fatigue: accumulating. Morale: Steady, but it’s the Steady of men who’ve been told they’re about to run from a fight, and running sits different in a soldier’s chest than standing, even when running is the right call. Combat effectiveness: seventy percent on a generous estimate, sixty-two if I’m honest with myself about what five days of sleep deprivation does to aim and reaction time.
Decker works in the magazine beneath the north wall. I find him kneeling between powder kegs with a length of slow match coiled beside him, measuring the distance between the fuse point and the door with a piece of knotted rope. His hands are steady. The prayer book sits in his breast pocket where it always sits.
“Walk me through it,” I tell him.
“Slow match, fifteen feet of it, treated with saltpeter.” He runs the cord through his fingers, testing for damp spots. “Burns at about a foot a minute, give or take. I light this end by the door, walk out, close the door, and fifteen minutes later the match reaches the kegs. Six hundred pounds of black powder in a confined stone space.” He looks up at me. “Everything within fifty yards of this room is going to have a very bad afternoon, Captain.”
“Can you set it and make the south gate in time?”
“If I run. I’m a fast runner when properly motivated, and I’d call six hundred pounds of black powder proper motivation.” He almost smiles. “I’ll make it.”
I look past him at the rows of powder kegs stacked against the far wall, and past those at the magazine’s stone ceiling, and past that in my mind to the north wall of the fort where Old Faithful will be standing in about four hours, holding the gate against an army that doesn’t tire and doesn’t stop.
“Decker.” I stop him before I leave. “Lazarus. Is there anything left in the core?”
He blinks. “The steam core? It’s still in the housing. Cracked, no pressure, but the housing’s intact. I never pulled it because the risk of fracturing the casing wasn’t worth what I’d get out of it.” He tilts his head. “Why?”
“No reason yet.” I look at the stripped chassis of the fifth golem leaning against the magazine wall, its chest cavity open and empty except for the dull iron housing of the core. No arms. No legs worth mentioning. Just a torso and a head and a core that still has charge left inside it. “Light the fuse when I give the signal. Don’t wait for anything else.”
He nods, and I leave him to his work and go up to the walls for the last time.
◇ ◆ ◇
The parapet gives me a view of everything I need to see and everything I don’t want to.
The dead are still standing in Creedy’s tobacco field, twelve thousand strong, motionless, faces turned up toward the walls. Behind them the living Confederate army is eating breakfast around their campfires, and I can smell bacon and coffee on the wind, which seems an insult the universe should’ve had the decency to skip.
I pull out Lincoln’s Resolve and glass the enemy positions through the scope, and then I open my eyes the other way.
「Liberator’s Gaze: Tactical overlay active. Threat assessment rendering.」
Color drains out of everything except the things that matter, and the things that matter light up in shades that ordinary eyes can’t process. The dead glow a uniform sickly amber, Chaotic alignment saturated with Bane affinity, pulsing with the faint rhythm of whatever necromantic heartbeat keeps them upright. The living Confederate soldiers behind them burn warmer, reds and oranges, a mix of Neutral and Chaotic with pockets of Lawful among the officers who still believe they’re fighting for a cause besides a dead man’s ambition.
The artillery battery glows hot, forty-two points of concentrated orange light arranged in a crescent behind the main line. The gun crews are Lawful alignment, professionals who take pride in their work, and their loyalty ratings cluster between sixty and seventy-five percent. Solid. Reliable. Not fanatics.
Beauregard’s command tent burns cold blue on the rise behind everything, and the two Death Knights flanking it are so saturated with Bane alignment that they leave afterimages when I blink. I don’t look at them long. Concentrated Bane through the Liberator’s Gaze feels like pressing a thumb against a bruise that goes all the way to the bone.
The gap I’m looking for is to the southwest, between the artillery crescent and the river. The Confederate line thins there because Beauregard assumed nobody would run toward the Chestatee with two hundred civilians in tow. He was right about that assumption. He doesn’t know the civilians are already gone.
I close the Gaze and walk the wall to where the volunteers are standing at their posts.
Harlan Creedy leans on the northeast parapet with his musket across his arms, watching the dead stand in his fields. He’s wearing a Federal uniform two sizes too big, cinched at the waist with a leather belt that still has a farmer’s knife on it instead of a bayonet. The Meigs brothers stand together at the next embrasure, sharing a pipe and a silence that feels like it’s been going on for forty years.
I open the Gaze one more time as I walk past them. I don’t want to, but I need to.
Harlan Creedy. Alignment: Lawful. Loyalty: one hundred percent. Horace Burnsides. Lawful. One hundred percent. Ephraim Suggs. Lawful. One hundred percent. Calvin Meigs. Lawful. One hundred percent. Porter Meigs. Lawful. One hundred percent.
Every single one of them. Full loyalty. No hesitation. No regret. Eleven men standing on a wall in borrowed uniforms with borrowed muskets, knowing exactly what noon brings, and not a flicker of doubt in any of them.
Combat value: negligible. The Gaze sees eleven untrained civilians with smoothbore muskets and forty rounds each, standing against twelve thousand dead and forty-two guns. It recommends reassignment to logistics. It doesn’t have a column for what these men are worth measured in something other than firepower.
Creedy catches me looking and gives me a nod. Nothing dramatic. Nothing final. Just an acknowledgment between two people who understand the situation and don’t need to dress it up.
I nod back and keep walking, and I don’t look at them through the Gaze again because some things you only need to see once.
◇ ◆ ◇
Eleven forty-five.
The three companies form up at the south gate in silence. Phelps at the front with First Company in arrow formation, bayonets fixed, packs tight. I take my position in Second Company’s column with Freedom’s Edge on my hip and Lincoln’s Resolve slung across my back. Sergeant Elijah Marsh brings Third Company up to the rear in skirmish order, his sharpshooters already scanning the southern tree line for Confederate scouts.
Six hundred and thirty-one soldiers standing in the courtyard of a fort they’re about to abandon, waiting for the sound of a cannon.
I close my eyes and reach for the warmth inside my chest that isn’t a muscle and isn’t a thought but sits somewhere between the two. It spreads outward from my sternum and I feel it connect, soldier by soldier, a thread running from me to every man and woman wearing Federal blue in this courtyard. Their heartbeats settle. Their breathing slows. A private in Third Company who’s been gripping his musket so hard his knuckles have gone white relaxes his fingers without knowing why.
「Rally Troops: Active. Morale +20 to all allied units within command radius. Duration: sustained.」
On the northeast bastion, Mercy stands up.
She’s been crouching behind the parapet for the last hour with Mama Thunder loaded and the first hex-shell seated in the breech. Now she rises to her full height, close to seven feet of half-giant muscle and bone, and she shoulders the hex-cannon. Five feet of sanctified iron and consecrated brass, a weapon most armies mount on carriages, braced against her shoulder and steadied with hands that could crush a man’s skull barehanded. Mama Thunder was forged in a Federal armory by an artificer who took one look at Mercy and decided that the biggest soldier in the Union deserved the biggest gun.
Every Confederate scout and picket who can see the northeast bastion sees her at the same moment. A figure on the wall, silhouetted against the gray sky, holding a weapon that shouldn’t be held by anything human.
She fires.
[ENGAGEMENT: MAMA THUNDER - OPENING BARRAGE] Operator: Sgt. Major Mercy. Weapon: 「Mama Thunder」 (Legendary Hex-Cannon). Damage: 120-180 AoE + Shrapnel + Green Hex-Fire (persistent burn). Target: Confederate Dead, Main Formation (North Field, ~12,000 units). Range: 400 yards. Terrain: Open field (no cover). Ammunition: 14 shells.
The report cracks the air. A concussive boom that splits the morning in half, punches through the parapet stone beneath Mercy’s boots, and hits my chest six hundred feet below in the courtyard hard enough that I feel it in my back teeth. The hex-shell crosses four hundred yards of open ground in less than a second and hits the front rank of the Confederate dead center mass.
The shell casing splits on impact and a hundred iron fragments blow outward through packed dead flesh at a speed that turns bodies into loose components. The first row doesn’t fall. The first row comes apart. Legs separate from hips at the joint, the dried connective tissue shearing clean under shrapnel velocity. Arms rip free at the shoulder with the dry pop of old gristle tearing loose from bone. A torso with no head and one arm takes two more steps on legs that don’t know they’re disconnected from anything above the waist before they buckle sideways into the mud. The green hex-fire catches half a second after the shrapnel hits, and it doesn’t flicker or gutter. It sticks. It pools in the wounds the iron opened. It crawls up through the cavities where organs used to be and climbs out of the neck stump of a headless corpse in a plume of green flame that burns two feet tall and doesn’t stop. The fire spreads body to body where the dead are pressed together at the shoulder and the hip, jumping contact points, and the dead that catch don’t try to drop or roll because they don’t have the capacity to care that they’re burning. They stand there and burn, and the ones behind them press forward through the fire and catch fire themselves, and the air fills with the sweet rotten stink of old meat cooking that makes my eyes water from six hundred feet away.
Forty feet of the front rank is gone. Not dead, because they were already dead. Gone. Scattered into parts too separated to stand and burning too hot to reassemble. The dead behind the gap close ranks over the wreckage without slowing, stepping on burning pieces of the men in front of them, and the silence that follows the detonation is worse than the blast itself because twelve thousand corpses just absorbed an artillery strike and didn’t make a sound.
Mercy reloads. The breech opens with a clank of iron and she seats the second shell and locks it home in a motion that takes her less than four seconds. She adjusts her aim deeper, past the dead, toward the Confederate gun positions.
Second shot. The hex-shell hits a limber wagon loaded with grape and canister. The shrapnel shreds the canvas cover and the green fire finds the powder charges stacked inside. The wagon erupts. Side panels blow outward and the iron hoops that held the barrel staves together whip through the air, and one of them catches a gunner across the stomach and opens him from hip to hip. He folds over the hoop with his intestines dropping through the gap and hangs there for a second before the weight of his own organs pulls him off and he hits the ground in a pile of himself. The powder catches a half-second later and the fireball swallows the wagon and the gun carriage beside it and the four men who were standing between them. One of them crawls out of the wreckage with both legs on fire from the knee down, dragging himself forward by his elbows, and the green hex-fire on his trousers doesn’t go out when he rolls through the mud because hex-fire doesn’t care about mud. It eats until there’s nothing left to eat, and the man stops crawling about fifteen feet from where he started. His elbows keep twitching for another ten seconds after the rest of him goes still.
Third shot. She puts this one into the infantry forming up behind the gun line, and the shrapnel fans out at chest height through men who are standing shoulder to shoulder trying to dress their ranks. Living men this time, not dead ones. Living men bleed. The screaming starts, sharp and raw and human, and it’s the first real sound the battlefield has made since the dead started standing in the field five days ago. A fragment punches through one man’s chest from front to back, exits between his shoulder blades, and buries itself in the thigh of the man behind him. Both go down. A horse takes a fragment through the neck and the green fire catches in the wound and the animal drops thrashing, pinning its rider’s leg beneath eight hundred pounds of burning horse. The rider screams and the horse screams and three men rush to help and one of them steps on a burning fragment in the grass and the hex-fire transfers to his boot leather and starts climbing up the stitching.
“South gate, open,” I say, and my voice doesn’t carry above a normal speaking tone because the men beside me don’t need volume. They need calm. “First Company, move.”
The gate swings wide. Phelps leads his people through at double-time, boots hitting packed dirt in a rhythm that sounds steady and controlled and nothing at all the way these soldiers feel inside. Second Company follows. Third Company after that. Six hundred and thirty-one soldiers flowing through a gate that’s twenty feet wide, moving south across the open ground toward the tree line and the river beyond it.
I’m in the middle of the column and moving with it, but I look back once. Just once.
Mercy is on the bastion, reloading. The golems stand at their posts on the north and east walls, iron shapes against the gray sky, steam venting from their joints in white plumes. The volunteers are at the parapets with their muskets, watching the field. Creedy is standing where I left him, leaning on the wall, looking at his tobacco field.
Fourth shot. Mama Thunder speaks again and another crater opens in the ranks of the dead, green fire spreading across the mud and catching on every piece of dead flesh it touches.
I turn my face south and keep moving. Looking back won’t change what’s coming and won’t honor what those men are giving, and the six hundred and thirty-one people behind me need a captain who’s looking at the road ahead, not the wall behind.
◇ ◆ ◇
The Confederate bugles sound at noon.
I hear them from eight hundred yards south, thin and clear in the cold air, playing the advance across the entire line. The sound carries the way bugle calls always carry, cutting through distance and wind and the noise of six hundred soldiers trying to move fast through rough ground. A ripple of hesitation flickers through the column, and I feel it through the Rally connection before I feel it in my own gut. The men know what that bugle means. They know what’s happening behind them.
「Iron Will: Active. Commander immune to Fear/Panic effects. Morale drain from retreat reduced by 50%.」
I push the skill outward, let it harden around the column, and the hesitation dies before it becomes a stumble. The men keep moving.
Then the dead begin to move.
All of them. At once. Twelve thousand corpses take their first step in five days, and the sound of it reaches me even at this distance. It isn’t drums or screams or war cries. It’s the wet, heavy slap of dead feet in mud, multiplied twelve thousand times until it becomes a continuous low roar of impact that doesn’t pause for breath because the things making it don’t breathe.
Behind me, the fort.
Behind me, the volunteers.
I keep moving.
◇ ◆ ◇
On the walls of Fort Independence, Harlan Creedy watches twelve thousand dead men walk toward him across the field where he grew tobacco for thirty-six years.
[BATTLE START: SIEGE OF FORT INDEPENDENCE] Allied: Wall Garrison (Combined Power: 1,052). Golem Battery (Power: 680) / Volunteer Line (Power: 22) / Mama Thunder (Power: 350). Enemy: Confederate Dead, 1st Wave (Power: 2,400) / Confederate Dead, 2nd Wave (Power: 2,400) / Confederate Living Reserve (Power: 1,800) / Confederate Artillery, 42 guns (Power: 900). Total Enemy Power: 7,500. Terrain: Fort walls (+40% Def). Open field approach (no cover for attackers). Weather: Overcast (no modifier). Time: Noon (Daylight: Lawful units +20%, Chaotic units -20%).
They come in a wave that stretches from the eastern tree line to the western ridge, a solid mass of gray and blue and brown, and the ground shakes under their combined weight. There’s no formation to it, no rank and file, just a tide of dead flesh moving at a walking pace with weapons held in hands that don’t tire and eyes that don’t blink.
The Confederate artillery opens first. Forty guns firing in a ragged sequence that takes about ten seconds to roll from the left flank to the right. The first ball hits the north parapet and blows a six-foot section of stonework into the courtyard. Masonry and mortar dust spray inward and catch two volunteers who were crouching behind it. One goes down clutching his face where a stone chip opened his cheek to the bone, the white of his jaw visible through the gap in the skin. The other sits down hard with blood running from both ears, stunned, hands opening and closing on nothing. A second ball skips off the top of the east wall and tears through a tent in the courtyard that nobody’s using anymore. A third hits the base of the west bastion and the whole structure shudders and cracks run up the stonework in jagged lines.
Creedy’s bad hip flares when the concussion wave rolls over him and he goes to one knee behind the parapet, tasting blood and dust and formaldehyde residue. Stone splinters hiss past his head. A cannonball smacks into the wall below his position and he feels the stone jump under his palms. He gets back up because staying down isn’t what he volunteered for, and when he presses his eye to the embrasure he sees the dead fifty yards out and closing.
The Meigs brothers are already firing. Calvin seats the stock against his shoulder and puts a ball through the eye socket of a dead man at forty yards. The back of the skull blows out in a spray of old bone and gray matter that spatters the corpse behind it, and the corpse behind it doesn’t flinch or wipe its face. Porter is reloading before the sound of Calvin’s shot finishes echoing, his fingers moving through the sequence their father drilled into them when they were boys hunting deer on the ridge above their farm. Powder, patch, ball, rod, cap. Four seconds. He fires and hits a dead woman in the chest. The ball punches through her sternum and exits between her shoulder blades and she folds forward at the waist and keeps walking for three more steps bent double before her legs tangle in her own hanging viscera and she goes down.
Ephraim Suggs, sixty-eight years old and blind in one eye, presses his musket against the embrasure and fires into the mass below the wall. He can’t see well enough to aim at individuals. He doesn’t need to. The dead are packed so tight at the base of the wall that every ball he fires hits dead flesh, and what it hits goes down or staggers or loses an arm or a jaw and keeps pressing forward because the dead don’t need arms or jaws to climb.
Golem Number One, Old Faithful, stands in the north gate archway with its iron fists raised and its steam core screaming at a pitch that makes Creedy’s fillings vibrate. The first wave of dead hits the gate at a walk, pressing against the golem’s iron body with the mindless pressure of water against a dam. Old Faithful swings. The first blow catches a dead man across the chest. The iron fist goes through the ribcage and out the back trailing a streamer of spine and lung tissue, and the legs stand upright for a full second before they fold. The second blow comes down overhead on a dead soldier trying to climb the golem’s leg, and it drives the corpse into the flagstones hard enough that the skull compresses flat against the stone and brain matter sprays across the gate threshold in a fan pattern. The wet crunch of it carries up to the parapet where Creedy can hear it over the gunfire.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
But the third rank steps over the wreckage of the first two and presses forward, and the fourth rank pushes the third, and the fifth pushes the fourth, and the sheer weight of dead flesh pressing into the gate archway starts to compress the front rank against the golem’s legs. Bones snap under the pressure. Torsos compress and split along old suture lines where the necromancers stitched them together. A dead man’s arm gets pinned between Old Faithful’s knee joint and the gate pillar and the iron closes on it and the arm separates at the shoulder with a wet tearing sound and the body it belonged to gets pushed backward into the mass by the pressure of the bodies behind it.
[UNIT STATUS: Old Faithful. HP: 94%. Steam Pressure: Nominal. Kills: 14. Stance: Hold Until Destruction.]
They don’t use ladders. They use each other.
The dead at the base of the wall turn their faces against the stone and flatten themselves, arms at their sides, and the dead behind them step onto their shoulders and press against the wall and flatten themselves too. Third rank onto the second. Fourth onto the third. They build themselves into a ramp of bodies, silent and cooperative, stacking flesh and bone against stone with a patience that nothing living possesses. The ones on the bottom get crushed under the accumulating weight. Creedy hears it from the parapet, a continuous wet grinding sound as ribcages compress and pelvises crack and spines fold under loads they weren’t built to carry. A dead man on the bottom tier gets pressed so flat between the wall and the weight above him that his torso splits lengthwise and his insides squeeze out both sides, and the dead standing on top of him don’t shift or adjust. They stand on what’s left and the ones behind them keep climbing.
The first dead hand crests the north parapet at fourteen minutes past noon. Gray fingers, two of them missing, curl over the edge of the stone and pull, and a face follows. A man’s face, still mostly intact, with a Confederate kepi sitting crooked on a skull that’s missing most of its scalp. Creedy puts his musket against the face and fires. The ball goes in under the chin and takes the top of the head off and the body slumps backward off the wall and falls twenty feet into the mass below and gets stepped on before it hits the ground.
More hands. More faces. They’re cresting the wall in five places now, pulling themselves over the parapet with the slow relentless strength of things that don’t get tired and don’t feel pain and don’t stop.
Golem Number Three, Gospel, stands on the west bastion and grabs the dead as they crest the wall. Its iron hands close around the first one’s torso and the ribcage collapses inward, wet and structural, the sound of load-bearing bone giving way under twelve hundred pounds of grip pressure. Organs and black fluid squeeze between the iron fingers in ropes of tissue that hang and swing as Gospel lifts the remains overhead and throws them thirty yards into the field. The body separates mid-throw because the spine gives way and the legs go one direction and the chest goes another, and both pieces land among the ranks of the advancing dead and get walked over without acknowledgment.
Six. Twelve. Twenty. Gospel grabs and crushes and throws with the mechanical rhythm of a machine doing the only job it was built for. A dead man crests the wall with a bayonet still fixed to his musket and drives it into Gospel’s forearm joint. The blade snaps against the iron. The dead man’s arm keeps pushing forward until the broken stump of the bayonet punches back through his own wrist. Gospel grabs him by the head and squeezes and the skull crumples and what comes out of it runs down the golem’s iron forearm in a gray-pink stream that steams where it hits the hot metal. The wall is slick now, coated in a film of old blood and preservative fluid and the paste of crushed dead flesh that makes the stone look indistinguishable from a slaughterhouse floor. Gospel’s iron hands are so caked with the residue that each grab slides before it catches, and the dead are coming faster than the golem can throw them back.
[UNIT STATUS: Gospel. HP: 88%. Steam Pressure: High. Shoulder Joint: Damaged (steam leak, -15% left arm torque). Kills: 23. Stance: Hold Until Destruction.]
Golem Number Two, Temperance, holds the east bastion where the fighting is worst. The artillery has knocked two holes in the parapet and the rubble has created natural ramps that the dead use to reach the top three times faster than on the intact sections. They’re pouring over the east wall in a stream, and Temperance is standing in the middle of it. Both arms swing. An overhand right catches a dead man on the crown of the skull and drives him straight down into the bastion floor with force enough to crack the stone underneath. The body doesn’t fall so much as compress, flattening from head to hip into a shape that’s four inches tall and five feet wide, leaking from every edge. A backhand sends three dead soldiers off the wall in a tumbling cluster, arms and legs tangled together, and they hit the ramp of dead bodies below the wall and roll down it and get climbed over by the ones coming up behind them.
A dead officer with half a jaw comes over the parapet behind Temperance and gets both arms around the golem’s right knee joint. Temperance reaches down and pulls him off. The dead man’s arms come off at the elbows because his grip doesn’t release when the rest of his body does, and two gray forearms stay locked around the golem’s knee with the fingers still clutching while Temperance throws the armless torso into the courtyard hard enough to crack the flagstones where it lands. The steam core is running so hot that the vents on Temperance’s shoulders glow cherry red and the raindrops that hit the iron sizzle and pop into steam. The dead that press against the golem’s legs get scorched where they touch, and the preservative chemicals in their flesh catch, and thin lines of smoke rise from every contact point.
[UNIT STATUS: Temperance. HP: 71%. Steam Pressure: CRITICAL (overheating). Core Temperature: Red. Kills: 31. Time to core failure at current output: ~90 minutes. Stance: Hold Until Destruction.]
Mercy fires. Shot five. Six. Seven. Each hex-shell tears into the advancing mass and the shrapnel fans out through densely packed bodies standing shoulder to shoulder, and one fragment punches through four dead men in a line before the green fire catches and starts to burn. The fire climbs from body to body where they’re pressed together, spreading along the contact points, eating into dried leather and old wool and the preservative-soaked flesh beneath. The dead don’t try to put it out. They don’t try to avoid it. They walk through their own burning and keep coming, and the ones that burn down to nothing get stepped over by the ones behind them.
[MAMA THUNDER: Ammunition 7/14. Estimated kills: 340+. Enemy formation integrity: 91% (regenerating through reinforcement).]
She isn’t stopping the assault. She’s thinning it. Buying the minutes that Hughes needs to reach the river.
A hex-shell hits a cluster of dead near the east wall and the shrapnel tears through blue uniforms. Federal blue. Boys who fought for the Union once, pulled from their graves and stitched back together with necromancy and put in a line to march against the people they used to serve beside. Green fire catches on a dead corporal’s coat and crawls up toward a face that’s missing its lower jaw, and Mercy sees the Federal insignia on the shoulder as the body burns. She seats the eighth shell and fires anyway, because whatever those men were, they aren’t anymore, and the soldiers running south need every second she can buy them.
The weakened dead in the outer ring of each explosion take the shrapnel and come apart where they stand. Green fire finds the holes the iron punched through them and eats inward, and they fold and drop and burn and the ones behind them walk through the flames without slowing.
Temperance takes a direct hit from Confederate artillery at twelve minutes past noon.
The solid shot hits the golem’s chest plate on the left side and the iron buckles inward with a sound that punches through every other noise on the battlefield, a deep metallic boom that vibrates in the fillings of every man on the wall. The steam housing beneath cracks along a seam that was forged in a Federal armory four years ago by an artificer who never imagined his work would end here. Pressurized steam vents from the crack in a white plume that screams at a pitch that makes Creedy’s jaw ache from thirty yards away, and Temperance staggers sideways on the bastion with its right arm still swinging at the dead climbing the wall. The golem’s left arm drops to its side, the shoulder joint seized, the pistons that drive it starved of pressure.
The second artillery shot hits the same shoulder. The ball punches through the weakened joint and tears the arm free in a shower of iron fragments and steam and the black lubricant that the Federals use in their golem joints. The arm falls off the bastion and crashes into the dead below, and a corpse that was climbing the wall gets pinned under twelve hundred pounds of iron limb and disappears into the mass.
Temperance fights with one arm. The right fist keeps swinging, grabbing dead by the skull and the shoulder and the belt and throwing them, crushing them, driving them into the stone. Ninety seconds. The steam pressure drops with every swing. Each blow comes slower than the last. The piston in the right shoulder extends and doesn’t fully retract and extends again and the reach gets shorter and shorter. The dead press closer. They’re climbing the golem now, not just the wall, scaling the iron body hand over hand, and Temperance can’t shake them off fast enough with one arm. The knees lock. The right arm freezes mid-swing. And twelve feet of iron topples forward off the east bastion with a dead man still clinging to its back and hits the ramp of corpses below the wall with an impact that Creedy feels through the soles of his boots.
「Unit Destroyed: Temperance (Mark IV Sentinel War Golem). Cause: Confederate artillery, direct hit x2. Final Status: HP 0%. Steam Core: Ruptured. Total Kills: 47. Status: DESTROYED.」
The dead swarm over the fallen golem and keep climbing. The east wall is breached.
Horace Burnsides, the blacksmith with the bad leg, steps into the gap where Temperance stood. The first dead man that comes over the parapet takes a musket ball through the bridge of its nose at a range of four feet and the back of its skull opens in a spray of bone and dried brain that hits the corpse climbing behind it in the face. Burnsides reloads. Fires again. The second ball hits a dead woman in the throat and she goes down gargling black fluid. The third shot misses because his hands are shaking so hard the barrel wobbles. The fourth hits. The fifth hits. The sixth is his last round, and he puts it through a dead man’s knee and the leg folds sideways and the body pitches over the parapet and falls.
Then he’s empty. He grabs the musket by the hot barrel, ignoring the burn across his palm, and swings it with thirty years of forge work behind the blow. The stock connects with a dead man’s temple and the wood splinters and the corpse’s head snaps sideways and it staggers into the one beside it and they both go over the edge. He swings again, and the musket breaks at the wrist and he’s left holding a barrel and nothing else, and the dead keep coming over the wall.
◇ ◆ ◇
In the magazine beneath the north wall, Corporal Amos Decker strikes the match.
The slow fuse catches on the first try, which is a small mercy in a morning that’s been short on them. The treated cord glows orange at the tip and begins to eat its way toward six hundred pounds of black powder at roughly a foot per minute, and Decker stands there watching it for exactly one second to make sure the burn is steady before he turns and runs.
He passes Lazarus on the way out. The stripped golem chassis leans against the magazine wall in the same position it’s been in for weeks, chest open, limbs gone, the cracked steam core sitting dark and cold in its iron housing. Decker’s hand brushes the core housing as he passes, just his fingertips across the cold iron, and then he’s through the door and up the stairs and sprinting across the courtyard toward the south gate.
Behind him, the fuse burns.
On the north wall, Old Faithful is dying. The dead have packed the gate thirty deep now and the golem is fighting in a space that’s too tight to swing properly, its iron fists rising and falling in shortened arcs that crush whatever they hit but can’t clear the bodies fast enough. The dead are packed so tight against the golem’s legs that the pressure is bending the knee joints inward, and Old Faithful’s feet are sliding backward on the flagstones through six inches of pulped dead flesh. The steam core is redlining. Decker can hear it from across the courtyard, a rising whistle that climbs in pitch and doesn’t stop climbing, and he runs faster because that sound means the pressure seals are about to give and when they give the core goes cold and the golem stops and nothing in this fort is going to start it again.
[UNIT STATUS: Old Faithful. HP: 12%. Steam Pressure: FAILING. Core Temperature: Critical. Kills: 93. Stance: Hold Until Destruction.]
Mercy fires shot eleven from the bastion. The tube of Mama Thunder is hot enough to scorch the leather of her gloves black, and the recoil has opened a cut on her cheekbone from shot nine where the cannon’s stock kicked sideways into her face. Blood runs down her jaw and drips off her chin onto the iron breech every time she loads and the drops sizzle on the hot metal. She doesn’t wipe it. She doesn’t have time. She seats shot twelve and fires and the hex-shell hits a cluster of dead at the base of the north wall and the shrapnel cuts through them at knee height and legs separate from bodies in a ragged line and the green fire catches on everything the iron touched and the wall of corpses pressed against the stone becomes a wall of burning corpses pressed against the stone, and the ones behind them climb through the fire without slowing.
Creedy is out of ammunition. He’s standing at the northeast parapet with an empty musket and his farmer’s knife, the one he uses to cut tobacco stalks at harvest, and he watches the dead crest the wall to his left where Temperance used to stand. Burnsides is on his back behind him, the bad leg twisted under him when he swung the broken musket barrel at a dead man who grabbed it and pulled. Burnsides is trying to get up and his leg isn’t cooperating and there’s blood on his hands from the barrel burn and blood on his face from a cut he doesn’t remember getting.
Ephraim Suggs is still firing from his embrasure with the slow deliberation of a schoolteacher who intends to use every round he’s got before the end. He puts a ball through a dead man’s pelvis and the hip joint shatters and the body folds sideways, and Suggs sets his musket down against the parapet with the care of a man putting a book back on a shelf. He folds his hands in front of him and his lips move. Creedy can’t hear what he’s saying over the artillery and the steam whistles and the wet grinding sound of twelve thousand dead men pressing against stone, but he knows what it is because Suggs has been saying it every Sunday morning for sixty-eight years.
Big Greta, Number Four, crashes through a knot of dead that made it into the courtyard. The golem is running on the last dregs of power in her overheated core, and each step comes slower and harder, and her right leg drags a half-second behind the left. She catches a dead soldier by the face and drives him into the courtyard wall hard enough to leave a body-shaped dent in the mortar, and the skull comes apart inside her iron palm and wet fragments spray between her fingers. She turns and swings at two more and the blow takes both of them off their feet and sends them cartwheeling across the flagstones in a tangle of arms and legs and rusted equipment.
Decker makes the south gate. He’s through. He’s running south across open ground and he doesn’t look back because looking back won’t change what’s happening to the men on the wall behind him.
Mercy fires shot thirteen. The hex-shell hits a mass of dead climbing the east wall ramp and the shrapnel punches through seven bodies in a line and the green fire catches on all of them at once and they burn where they stand, a pillar of green flame on the wall, and the dead behind them climb through the fire and catch fire and keep climbing and the ones behind those catch fire too and the entire east wall ramp is burning now, a ramp of fire made of bodies, and the dead still come.
Shot fourteen. The last shell. She puts it into the densest knot of dead near the north gate, right where Old Faithful is fighting its last fight, and the shrapnel cuts through them at waist height and the green fire catches and bodies come apart and the dead pressing against Old Faithful catch fire and the flames lick at the golem’s iron legs and the preservative chemicals produce a smoke so thick and black that the north gate disappears behind a curtain of it.
Mama Thunder is empty. Mercy shoulders the cannon, two hundred and forty pounds of hot iron, and runs.
[MAMA THUNDER: Ammunition DEPLETED. 0/14. Total shells fired: 14. Estimated total kills: 800+. Weapon status: Operational (no ammunition).]
She comes off the bastion at a sprint, taking the stairs four at a time because her legs are long enough to manage it, and she crosses the courtyard past the smoldering remains of the cookfire and the still-standing tents and the flag of the Federal Remnant that nobody bothered to take down. A dead man lurches at her from behind a supply wagon. Mercy doesn’t slow down. She swings Mama Thunder from the shoulder and two hundred and forty pounds of empty hex-cannon catches the corpse across the chest. The ribcage collapses around the barrel and the body folds and flies sideways and hits the courtyard wall and comes apart on impact, torso going one direction, legs the other. Big Greta turns from the breach she’s holding and follows, her damaged legs eating ground in lurching strides that crack the flagstones.
[UNIT STATUS: Big Greta. HP: 31%. Steam Pressure: LOW (emergency reserve). Core Temperature: Critical. Estimated operational time: 8 minutes.]
Gospel, on the west bastion, receives the automated fallback order that Decker programmed before the battle. The golem turns and a dead man clinging to its back gets scraped off against the parapet edge and the body peels away and drops. Gospel steps backward off the bastion with a twelve-foot drop that would kill a man but only dents an iron knee, and it lumbers toward the south gate trailing steam from its damaged shoulder joint, and three dead soldiers who try to get between it and the gate get walked through. Not around. Through. Gospel doesn’t deviate from its path and the dead who are in that path get knocked aside or stepped on or pushed into the walls hard enough to leave wet marks on the stone.
[UNIT STATUS: Gospel. HP: 52%. Steam Pressure: Moderate. Shoulder Joint: Compromised. Kills: 67. New Stance: Fighting Retreat.]
The south gate. Mercy through. Gospel through. Big Greta through, barely, scraping both door frames as she squeezes her bulk between them, and a dead man’s arm that was reaching for her back gets caught between the golem’s hip and the door frame and tears off at the elbow and falls twitching to the flagstones.
On the north wall, Old Faithful’s steam core fails. The whistle cuts out. The pressure drops. The golem freezes mid-swing with one iron fist raised and its knuckles coated in a paste of bone and old blood and dried brain matter, and twelve thousand dead press against its locked body with a pressure that would crush a wooden wall but can’t bend iron. Old Faithful becomes a statue in the gateway, a barricade of dead iron, and the dead begin to climb over it, pulling themselves up the golem’s frozen arms and cresting the iron shoulders and dropping into the courtyard on the other side.
[UNIT DESTROYED: Old Faithful (Mark IV Sentinel War Golem). Cause: Steam core failure (overpressure). Final Status: HP 3%. Steam Core: Depleted. Total Kills: 108. Status: DESTROYED (structural integrity intact, serving as barricade).]
On the parapet, Harlan Creedy watches the south gate close behind the last golem. He looks at the courtyard filling with the dead who are pouring over Old Faithful’s frozen body and through the gap where Temperance fell, and he looks at Burnsides trying to stand on a leg that won’t hold him, and he looks at Calvin and Porter Meigs standing shoulder to shoulder with empty muskets and the same expression on their faces, and he looks at Ephraim Suggs with his hands folded and his lips moving.
He looks at his tobacco field one more time. The dead are standing in it, thousands of them, and they’ve trampled the last rows flat under their feet and the soil he worked for thirty-six years is churned into a slurry of mud and old blood and boot prints.
Then he turns to face what’s climbing the wall and he stands there with a six-inch tobacco knife in his right hand and nothing left to lose and no intention of losing it quietly.
[UNIT STATUS: Volunteer Line. 5 of 11 remaining. Ammunition: Depleted. Morale: Resolved (100/100). Stance: Hold Until Destruction.]
◇ ◆ ◇
I hear the fuse reach the magazine from eight hundred yards south.
The ground kicks under my boots. A sound so deep and so heavy that it bypasses my ears entirely and goes straight into my chest, a pressure wave that I feel in my ribs and my teeth and the soles of my feet. The column staggers. Men stumble. Someone behind me swears in a voice that cracks on the second syllable.
I turn and look.
A column of fire and black smoke punches through the roof of the north magazine and keeps climbing, two hundred feet straight up into the gray sky, carrying stone and timber and iron fragments with it. The north quarter of Fort Independence ceases to exist. The wall, the gate, the bastion, Old Faithful’s frozen remains, and sixty yards of ground in every direction vanish into a thunderclap of black powder and shattered stone that I can feel in my fillings from half a mile away.
The blast wave flattens the first eight ranks of Confederate dead advancing through the north breach. Flattens isn’t the right word. Erases. The concussion scatters them into fragments too small and too separated for any necromancer to reassemble, and the ranks behind them stagger backward in a wave of disrupted momentum that ripples through the entire formation.
「Fort Independence: North Wall DESTROYED. Magazine detonation successful. Structural integrity: 0%. Garrison status: ABANDONED. Remaining Wall Garrison: 2 Golems (Gospel, Big Greta - retreating), 5 Volunteers (status unknown, presumed KIA). Confirmed destroyed: Old Faithful, Temperance.」
The assault stalls. The dead stop moving for the first time since noon, standing in the debris field with their vacant faces turned toward the column of smoke, waiting for new orders from officers who are currently trying to figure out what just happened to their forward line.
Fort Independence is burning. Black smoke pours from the wreckage in a column that’s visible for twenty miles in every direction, and the flames inside the ruins cast the fog in shades of orange and red. The flag of the Federal Remnant is gone. The walls are gone. The war table where I stood this morning and laid out the plan that killed eleven good men is gone.
Somewhere in that smoke, or under it, Harlan Creedy is gone too.
I watch for five seconds. I count them in my head because five seconds is all I can afford and all I can justify, and then I turn south and keep moving.
“Double-time,” I say to the column, and my voice comes out flat and steady because that’s what command requires right now, not grief, not rage, just the next order and the one after that. “We’ve got maybe twenty minutes before they reorganize. Move.”
◇ ◆ ◇
We reach the Chestatee at a dead run.
Phelps has First Company across the ford already, spread out on the south bank in a skirmish line with the sharpshooters picking positions among the willows. The ford is waist-deep and moving fast, cold enough to make a man gasp when it hits his belt line, and the rocks on the bottom are slick with algae that’s been growing since before this war started.
Column status at the ford: Five days under siege, forced march at double-time for the last hour, men running on empty canteens and half-rations and adrenaline that burns out fast once the running stops. Morale: Shaken. The explosion bought us breathing room but it also showed every soldier in this column exactly what we left behind, and the men who are crossing this river aren’t the same men who crossed the courtyard at eleven forty-five. Combat effectiveness: fifty-five percent and dropping with every minute they spend in cold water. Fatigue: critical. Powder: wet. Most of Third Company’s cartridge paper soaked through during the ford crossing, which means their muskets are decorative until the paper dries. Chaplains: functional but depleted, two of six showing the pale exhaustion that comes from channeling divine power too many times in too short a span.
Second Company hits the water at a run and the cold takes their breath and slows them to a stagger. For a long ugly minute the ford is a press of men and equipment struggling against a current that doesn’t care about timelines or tactics. A soldier goes down in the middle of the ford when his boot catches on a submerged rock and the current rolls him sideways and his pack drags him under and two men from his squad grab his arms and haul him up coughing and spitting brown water. I’m in the middle of it with water up to my ribs, holding Lincoln’s Resolve above my head with one hand and pushing a private who lost his footing back upright with the other. The cold is a physical force, a compression around my chest, and I can feel the current pulling at my legs with a steady insistence that wants me sitting down and gone.
Third Company reaches the north bank and Sergeant Marsh turns his rearguard to face north. The sharpshooters drop prone on the bank and sight their rifles toward the tree line. The chaplains plant their feet in the mud and open their prayer books and the air around them hums with a vibration in the Faith register that makes the hair on my arms stand up from forty yards away.
The first Confederate cavalry scouts break through the tree line at a gallop. Living men on living horses, not dead, because dead cavalry is too slow for pursuit. They’re Breckinridge’s outriders, fast and professional, and the first one is already raising his carbine when a chaplain on the north bank finishes a verse from the Book of Common Prayer and a column of white light descends from the overcast sky and hits the ground between the cavalry scouts and the ford.
「Holy Light: Cast. Element: Light. Damage: 200% vs Undead. Effect vs Living: Blinding flash, morale shock.」
The horses scream and rear. The lead scout’s mount throws him and he hits the ground rolling and comes up with his carbine still in his hands, blinking against the afterimage. The Holy Light didn’t hurt him. Living men don’t burn under the Light. The dead do. But the flash and the sound and the crackling ozone smell of divine power hitting dirt is enough to make cavalry horses refuse to advance, and that’s all Marsh needs.
His sharpshooters fire. Three scouts drop. The rest pull back to the tree line and regroup, and by the time Breckinridge arrives with the main body of the pursuit cavalry, Second Company is across the ford and Third Company is crossing with their rifles held above the water.
They come. Eight hundred riders spreading out along the north side of the Chestatee in a line that says they can cross but they’d rather not. Breckinridge sits his horse and surveys the ford through a spyglass and sees what’s waiting for him on the other side.
They’d rather not because Mercy is standing on the south bank with Mama Thunder on her shoulder. The cannon is empty and every Confederate scout in the army watched her fire all fourteen shells from the bastion, so Breckinridge knows she’s got nothing left to shoot. But the gun is five feet long and the woman holding it is seven feet tall and the cut on her face is still bleeding and her gloves are burned black and she looks like she just walked out of a war, which she did, and the combination is enough to make professional cavalry reconsider charging a defended ford.
And because Gospel is standing in the middle of the river.
The last operational golem plants its iron feet in the riverbed and faces north, twelve feet of battered war machine blocking the ford. Its chest plate is dented and scored with claw marks from the dead that climbed it. Its shoulder joint leaks steam in a thin white thread. One arm hangs at a bad angle where a hinge pin has partially sheared. But the other arm works and the legs are locked solid against the current, and any cavalryman who wants to cross the Chestatee is going to have to go through or around an obstacle that can punch a horse in half with its working hand.
Breckinridge’s troopers exchange fire across the water. A ball cracks past my ear close enough to feel the wind of it and buries itself in the mud of the south bank. One of Marsh’s sharpshooters fires back and a Confederate cavalry horse goes down at the waterline and the rider pitches over its neck into the shallows and comes up crawling. Another ball hits a private in Third Company who’s still crossing. The ball enters through the front of his left shoulder and exits below the scapula and he goes down into the water with a red bloom spreading from the wound and two men grab him and drag him to the south bank and Clementine is already there with her scissors and her pressure bandage before they get him out of the water.
I unsling Lincoln’s Resolve and sight across the ford. The scope picks up Breckinridge on the far bank, his cavalry mustache dripping with river spray, his eyes scanning the ford. I don’t aim at him. I put the crosshairs on the trooper beside him who’s sighting a carbine at my chaplains, and I squeeze the trigger.
The ball takes the trooper in the chest and knocks him backward off his horse and he hits the ground and doesn’t move. Breckinridge’s head snaps toward the fallen man and then toward the south bank and through the scope I can see him making the same calculation I would make. Defended ford. A golem in the water. Sharpshooters on the bank. Chaplains channeling divine power. A woman with a cannon who’s already proven she knows how to use it. And a captain with a scoped rifle who just put a man down at two hundred yards.
The cost isn’t worth the crossing.
Big Greta makes it to the south bank. She’s running on whatever dregs of steam pressure are left in her overheated core, and each step is slower than the last, and the grinding of her joints sounds wrong, metal on metal without lubrication, a noise that makes Decker wince from fifty yards away. She makes it ten feet past the waterline before the core gives its last gasp and the legs lock and she sinks to her knees in the mud of the south bank with a hiss of escaping steam.
She doesn’t fall over. She kneels there, facing north, still and silent, with the blue light in her eyes flickering twice before it goes out.
[UNIT DISABLED: Big Greta (Mark IV Sentinel War Golem). Cause: Steam core exhaustion. Final Status: HP 11%. Steam Core: Depleted (housing intact, repairable). Total Kills: 29. Status: DISABLED (south bank, recoverable).]
Decker is beside her in seconds, his hands on the chest plate, his ear pressed against the iron. “Core’s intact,” he says, and his voice carries the breathless quality of a man who just received news he didn’t expect. “The housing held. She’s dead but she’s not broken. If I can find a replacement core, or enough parts to rebuild this one, she’ll walk again.”
I don’t have time to think about that right now. I turn back to the river.
Breckinridge turns his horse and rides back toward the column of smoke that used to be Fort Independence, and his cavalry follows him, and the sound of hoofbeats fades until there’s nothing left but the river and the wind and the ragged breathing of soldiers who just ran for their lives and fought for them at the water’s edge.
◇ ◆ ◇
Sergeant Marsh calls the roll on the south bank of the Chestatee River.
He does it the way sergeants have called rolls since the first army put two men in a line and gave them spears. Name by name, in alphabetical order, from a list that was accurate this morning and isn’t accurate anymore. He calls each name in a steady voice that doesn’t change pitch or tempo, and he waits two seconds for a response, and if the response doesn’t come he marks the name in Phelps’s leather notebook with a small, precise X.
I stand at the edge of the tree line and listen.
“Alcott, Thomas.” Here. “Ash, William.” Here. “Ballou, Sullivan.” Here. “Barrett, Jonas.” Silence. X. “Beckwith, Henry.” Here. “Bledsoe, Francis.” Silence. X. “Carver, Amos.” Silence. X.
It goes on. Name after name. Here and silence, here and silence, the rhythm of it settling into a pattern that repeats until it stops meaning individual words and becomes a sound, a pulse, a heartbeat slowing down. The Xs accumulate in Phelps’s notebook, each one a life that was standing in the courtyard this morning and isn’t standing anywhere now.
Clementine is working the wounded in the tree line, stitching and binding and doing the work that keeps the living on the living side of the line. She’s using Vane’s field glasses to check the north bank for Confederate scouts between patients, and her hands are steady and her flask is still nowhere in sight.
Mercy sits on a fallen log with Mama Thunder across her knees, cleaning the barrel with a rag that’s already black with carbon residue and the dried blood from her gloves. The cut on her cheekbone has crusted over in a line that runs from the bone below her left eye to the corner of her jaw, and the skin around it has swollen and purpled. She’ll carry that scar for the rest of her life, a thin ridge on the left side of her face from the recoil of her own cannon, earned on a wall where she stood alone and fired fourteen shots into twelve thousand dead and then used the empty weapon as a bludgeon on her way out the door.
Gospel stands in the ford, facing north, still and silent and patient. It’ll stand there until its core runs dry or someone gives it a new order, whichever comes first.
Big Greta kneels on the south bank with dead eyes and an intact core, waiting for a resurrection that may or may not come.
Somewhere north of us, Fort Independence burns.
Marsh finishes the roll. He closes the notebook and brings it to me and doesn’t say anything because the number is in the book and I can read it myself.
I open the notebook to the last page and count the Xs.
Four hundred and eighty-seven soldiers answered the roll. One hundred and forty-four didn’t. Silas Vane is in that number, and all eleven of the volunteers, and a hundred and thirty-two soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, Garryowen, who were alive when the sun came up this morning.
I write the volunteer names on a separate page. Harlan Creedy. Horace Burnsides. Ephraim Suggs. Calvin Meigs. Porter Meigs. The six others whose names I wrote in my field book when they stood up in the courtyard. Eleven names on a page that I fold twice and put in my breast pocket, next to the letter from Martha that I haven’t had time to answer.
「BATTLE COMPLETE: Siege of Fort Independence. Result: Strategic Withdrawal (Fort Destroyed). Allied Casualties: 144 KIA/MIA (22.8%). Enemy Casualties: ~2,000 destroyed (16.7%). Golem Battery: 2 destroyed, 1 disabled, 1 operational. Volunteer Line: 11 of 11 KIA. Magazine detonation: Successful. Objective: COMPLETE (Army preserved, civilians evacuated, fort denied to enemy).」
「Virtue & Reputation: +5 (Sacrifice acknowledged). New Total: Honored 65/100.」
I close the notebook and hand it back to Marsh and look south, toward the river road and Sutter’s Ford and whatever comes after this.
“Get them on their feet,” I say. “We’ve got a long walk ahead of us.”
* * *
=== CAMPAIGN STATE: YEAR 3, DAY 2 (AFTERNOON) ===
Location: South bank of the Chestatee River
Virtue & Reputation: Honored (65/100) [+10 Fort Defense, +5 Protect Civilians, -5 Volunteer Sacrifice, +5 Sacrifice Acknowledged]
Treasury: 280 Dollars (supplies lost in fort)
Army: 487 soldiers (2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry “Garryowen”) - 1st Company (Phelps): ~165 effectives - 2nd Company (Hughes): ~180 effectives - 3rd Company (Marsh): ~142 effectives - Support: 6 Chaplains (2 depleted), 4 Field Surgeons, 1 Artificer (Decker)
Golems: - 1 War Golem operational: Gospel (damaged, ~52%, holding ford) - 1 War Golem salvageable: Big Greta (core intact, no power, south bank) - 1 War Golem unknown: Lazarus (stripped chassis in fort ruins, core cracked but housed) - 2 War Golems destroyed: Old Faithful (magazine blast), Temperance (artillery)
Equipment: 1 Hex-Cannon: Mama Thunder (0 shells remaining, operational)
Morale: Shaken (38/100) [Heavy losses, fort destroyed, retreat, adrenaline crash pending]
Supplies: Critical (2 days rations, limited powder, most of 3rd Company’s cartridge paper soaked) - Weather: Overcast, cold, intermittent rain - Fatigue: Critical (5 days siege + forced march + river crossing) - Water: Canteens refilled at Chestatee - Wounded: 12 walking wounded, 3 stretcher cases
Civilians: 205 (ahead of column, en route to Sutter’s Ford, ~6 hour head start)
Key Intel: Fort Independence destroyed. Beauregard holds ruins. Breckinridge’s cavalry probed south bank, withdrew after taking casualties. Confederate main force needs 12-24 hours to reorganize after magazine detonation. Gospel holding ford (temporary).
Notable Casualties This Chapter: 144 total. - Lt. Silas Vane (KIA, sepsis, died in the night) - 132 soldiers KIA/MIA - ALL 11 civilian volunteers KIA (confirmed): Harlan Creedy, Horace Burnsides, Ephraim Suggs, Calvin Meigs, Porter Meigs, and 6 others who held the walls
Recent Political Impact: Fort Independence destroyed rather than surrendered. Beauregard’s army delayed but not broken. The story of the eleven volunteers will spread. The 2/7th Cavalry still exists.
Tactical Assessment: Army preserved but degraded. Immediate needs: rest, resupply, dry powder. Next objective: link up with evacuated civilians at Sutter’s Ford. Confederate pursuit expected within 24 hours. Window for recovery: narrow.
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