Chapter Five - Gunfight

Rusty and I stomped into the entrance of the valley. Not down the centre, where the path had been cleared by centuries of cutting winds, but down the side where I had to split my attention in order to step over and around rocky outcrops and large boulders.

Mecha were decent over rough terrain, but I’d seen what happened when a five-ton machine tripped over a rock, and it wasn’t always pretty. There weren’t any cranes out in the wastes, and rolling back onto your feet was easier said than done.

As I moved in, I could make out banners hung over the rocky walls. Scrawled across them were slashing scribbles, the mark of the local goblin clan. Goblin tongue was barely a language at all, and their written squiggles were no better.

I squinted through a periscope at one banner. It was just a long strip of cloth, the cheap kind of tarp made from the sea-cotton plants that washed up on the shores of the Fast Depths. Probably taken from one of the caravans this clan had waylaid.

Deeper into the valley, I came across the first warning post.

A piece of steel jutting out from a pile of stones, atop it a skull. Either a child’s or maybe a gnome’s. It was hard to tell without being closer. The sun-bleached bone was picked clean of any flesh, its half-grin warning any intruders that there was trouble ahead.

I crossed a dozen more of those as I moved in deeper.

It was only a little ways into the valley that I saw the first goblins.

They were poking their heads out from above, in little alcoves along the top of the valley. Ropes strung from the ground to the top of their hidey-holes gave them away.

Maybe my estimate on the number of them had been a little too conservative.

In the end, it didn’t matter. My job was to kill the whole lot of them. It would only be a problem if I ran out of ammo mid-way through.

I heard some scampering from above and slowed Rusty down to a stop. There were, from what I could tell through Rusty’s eye, three groups of goblins up above.

Groups was maybe too strong a word. One looked to be alone in their little nook.

Three of them were busy planting a long metal rod under a boulder.

Did they intend to let it roll down and crush me?

If I wasn’t paying any attention, and was completely moronic, then maybe that would have worked. I was sure they’d used similar tricks on caravans before. Merchants liked skirting along any rocky outcrops. It meant harder footing, and sometimes a bit of shade and a reprieve from the wind. There were entire routes that moved from cliff to cliff, using them as landmarks so as to not get lost in the Vastness.

The problem for the goblins was that I wasn’t a caravan.

I brought Rusty’s rifle up and around, and with a spin of a dial, started to overfeed the round in the chamber. The magic circle that formed in the gun buzzed and hummed with unreleased eldritch potential.

Too much of it. It was dangerous to overfeed too many rounds. On a lesser gun, it might mean having a cartridge explode in the chamber. But my gun wasn’t some cheap piece of crap.

I shifted Rusty’s hips and leaned into the rifle even as I settled the butt of its stock against a pad on Rusty’s chest.

The goblins behind the rock were impatient, poking their heads out to see what was going on.

I placed the chevron in the middle of my sights over them, and pulled the trigger in my control gauntlet.

Rusty shifted back, a violent tug that had me gripping onto my controls not to slip off my seat.

I had to blink a few times to make out the results of the shot.

An overloaded round carried a lot of punch to it, but that punch tended to be volatile. It was nearly useless to overload a shot meant to pierce into something, since it would likely explode on impact.

There was a wrist-thick beam of red connecting the end of my barrel and a cloud of sparking dust on the side of the valley. Bits of rock were tumbling down, having been thrown up into the air by the explosion.

I couldn’t see any goblins, but I doubted any had survived the blast. If they did, they weren’t in any shape to be a problem.

Turning, I zeroed in on a goblin that was scampering down the cliff-face.

Rusty’s hand opened, pushing the lever down on the rifle.

A spent shell was expelled from the chamber, cartwheeling through the air leaving a trail of red-tinged smoke. I could imagine the acrid tang it left in the air before the brass clunked to the ground.

The lever came back up, chambering another round.

I dialed down the magic on this one, back to just shy of standard. Rusty only had so much juice in the tank, and I didn’t feel like crushing magic cores out in the desert, not if I could avoid it.

Pushing those worries aside, I fired again, and cursed as the goblin ducked at the very last moment.

The stones behind it burst apart, and sent the little monster rolling for a bit, but it was soon on its feet and scrambling again.

I loaded another round. This time, my aim was a little better, and the goblin’s upper-body vanished as a hole the size of an orc’s head chopped through it.

I grinned, then felt that smile turning sour as Rusty’s cabin shivered and a noise like a gong being punched by a god rang in my ears.

Growling, I looked through Rusty’s eyes until I spotted a black form against the red heat of the desert. A goblin, the third one stationed above, with an old rifle.

He fired again, the bullet whizzing by. It missed.

My return shot didn’t.

Too bad about the lost loot there, but I wasn’t likely to climb up to fetch an old rifle anyway.

I started moving again while tipping the rifle to the side. Rusty had a pouch on the left where I had my rifle bullets. It was a bit tricky to grab one and slot it into the loading gate on the gun’s side, but it wasn’t my first rodeo.

The gun could only take four rounds. One in chamber, three in the tube magazine. It didn’t compare to some other, more fancy mechas’ rate of fire, and it wasn’t the most accurate gun out there. But I always figured that I was saving some good coins by making every shot count.

Rounding a bit of a bend in the valley, I came onto the main goblin camp.

The little monsters were scurrying around like rock rats on sensing a sand wyrm. They ducked in and out of tents, some squealing others barking orders. I saw clubs being passed around and goblins scrambling to load rickety old guns in a hurry.

They saw and heard me coming.

I took it all in at a glance, then side-stepped over behind a large boulder. It would cover most of Rusty’s body. Our head and shoulders would poke out a bit, but there was only so much I could do.

Goblins started to fire at me, and when I felt the first clink of a round bouncing off armour, I ducked down a little lower until only Rusty’s head remained.

Where was their mech?

I recalled it being in a tent near the back of the camp. From where I was, there were too many things in the way to see it. But I couldn’t hear the rumble of another machine, so it had to be inactive for now.

Goblins were forming up. If you used the term loosely.

The amount of fire coming my way increased as they started to shoot from behind cover, the more brazen of them not even bothering to hide as they waved guns my way and filled the air with so much lead.

Rainbow beams of glimmering magic traced through the air from every which way, each one creating enough wind to shatter the lines that came before.

I picked out the direction where the most fire was coming from and twisted to aim that way.

They were awful shots, but the numbers were on their side. They’d ping off some hydraulic line at some point, or hit something vital and hard to repair.

I barely had to aim at the first group of goblins. Four, maybe five of them, clumped together behind a half-wall made of scrap.

My first round punched through two of them. The next took half the head off of another.

The goblin’s feral screams turned to panic, and the amount of gunfire actually increased, though their aim only worsened.

I ducked down to one knee and slid two rounds into my rifle, keeping it topped off. This was like hunting varmints back home.

I rose up and took four quick shots, picking out those who were either running straight at me, or who seemed to have an idea of how to handle their guns.

That’s when I heard the mechanical roar of something big at the back of the camp.

The goblins cheered.

I swore.

***