Chapter Forty-One - Charge

I knew the goblins had arrived when I heard a distant boom.

That was, as best I could tell, some sort of mortar shell hitting ground. There was a particular sort of rumble that accompanied that kind of hit, it was a distinct noise.

I shouldered my rifle and left the garage. Caroline was still working on Rusty, keeping herself busy, but she had a revolver strapped to her hips now, and a sawed-off shotgun tucked into a grease-stained belt-loop.

Clin was still out back, setting up cans again when I walked by. “Your aim improve any?” I asked.

He’d been at it for near-on two hours. I think he was pacing himself, had to be if he had any rounds left. “Where are you heading?” he asked.

I pointed to the wall. “I want to see.”

Clin looked around, then placed his new gun on the mecha arm where he was stacking cans and jogged after me. “Suppose I ought to look too.”

There weren’t any scaffolds or ladders leading to the top of the wall around Caroline’s place, but there were plenty of old mecha and the gantries for them near the wall. Mostly they were ancient things, utility mecha that had to be a hundred years old, others were clearly pre-war, and all of them were rusted through and through. I supposed they might be good for the rare part.

“You fire all your rounds?” I asked as I looked for a good spot to climb. I found one gantry with a ladder built into the side and started to make my way up.

Clin moved to the other side and was soon moving up and ahead of me. Long limbs and what I presumed was an elven predisposition to climbing things gave him a boost. “No,” he said. “I spent a good while just loading and unloading the gun. Figured that would be important in a fight.”

“Hmm,” I said. I had to jump up a little and swing my leg over onto the shoulder of a boxy old mech, but once I was on there it was easy to balance my way over to the wall. The stone that made up the wall jutted out here and there. Plenty of footholds to climb that last half-meter to the top.

Clin beat me to it and crouched atop the wall.

I moved up next to him, never touching the wall for longer than I had to. The sun was near its zenith still, and that meant everything was too hot to touch.

The view was nice. The sprawling hills to the west and south, growing smaller the further south they went. The Long Knife slipping through to the west and out towards the foot of the Shadow Heights.

I tugged my hat down lower and focused on what was closer.

It wasn’t hard to see the goblins.

I recalled the sheriff saying they expected some three hundred of them, split into three groups. Either they’d regrouped, or the folk the sheriff sent out to count hadn’t spent enough time in a classroom.

Instead of counting the tiny figures running towards Daggerwren in disorganized clumps, I counted the mecha in their midst. “Seven of them,” I said.

“That’s quite the number,” Clin said. “Those two near the back. Those are loaders.”

I nodded. “And that one in the middle, the big one? That’s got to be their leaders.” It was a mark of pride and prestige among goblins to have the biggest, ugliest mech.

The one leading the pack was a huge thing. Bipedal and wide, with two gantry cranes hanging off its shoulders. A construction mech? One crane was covered in bodies crudely stabbed onto the arm. The other had a chain dangling from it, leading to a basket where a goblin sat behind a machine gun. It was swinging and wobbling about with every step.

Stupid, but stupid and ostentatious, in a goblin sort of way.

The rest of the mechs weren’t anything too special. Two of them looked damned similar to the gnomish mech we’d fought, with two revolvers in each hand. The others were pure goblin machines, or as pure as they could be.

“How many do you figure there are?” I asked.

Clin paused to answer as an explosion kicked up dirt and debris some half-dozen meters next to the goblin army. Daggerwren probably didn’t have more than a couple of mortars, and their aim wasn’t spectacular. Still, if one shot landed, that would be a few goblins dead.

“Each little pocket has about ten, there are... eight of those. Plus the goblins on the mecha, and those within. And then there are those two bigger groups.”

One group had moved ahead of the rest, running all-out at a speed the mech’s couldn’t properly keep up with. Another was at the rear, the stragglers.

“Call it thirty in each bigger group and ten per mech? That’s about... I’ll be very inaccurate and say a hundred and fifty.”

“More than we have bullets,” I said.

I glanced over to the homes outside the town walls. People were streaming out of them, some of them taking wild pot-shots at the goblins. No chance any of those were landing. They still had some four hundred meters before the goblins reached the wall.

The guns atop the walls opened up, beams of cyan light streaking across the divide and sending dirt and sand bursting into the air. The first salvo hit the goblins. I saw one of those little groups break apart as a hit landed right next to them. They left a couple dead behind them. Barely a dent.

The guns took a good thirty seconds to reload. If I squinted I could see the folk manning them fumbling with the shells. No practice.

“This is going to be a shit show,” I said.

A dozen or so people climbed the walls near the gun emplacements, some of them with crank-fired guns. They opened fire as soon as the goblins were within two hundred meters of the wall. Flashing streaks were left in the air, marking the path of all the rounds being flung at the goblins.

The big guns fired again, but nearly every shot hit behind the goblins. They couldn’t depress enough.

A few goblins stumbled and fell, and I saw one fall off a mech. They were getting kills.

Then the goblins returned the favour.

The mecha in the lead raised an arm as big around as Rusty’s torso, with a cannon strapped to the end.

I saw a hammer the size of my arm crash into the back of the barrel. The ground skipped and I winced back from the searing golden beam connecting the gun to the wall.

Part of the wall exploded with stony shrapnel.

Folk started tugging the gates close even as a few stragglers tried to make it in.

That was the signal for the goblins to all open fire.

A rain of small shells smashed into the walls, followed by thousands of bullets from small arms.

“That wall won’t last an hour,” I said.

Those manning it were already running off, some braver fools taking some parting shots before ducking away. The gun emplacements became huge targets for the goblins below, and soon they were shredded from below.

“This isn’t going to end well,” I said.

“It doesn’t look like it,” Clin said. “Caroline said it would take a day to get Rusty working?”

“Yup.”

“We don’t have a day.”

“You’re right, we certainly don’t. The moment they breach the walls, they’ll be all over the town, like vultures picking at a fresh corpse.”

Clin looked back. “Do you think the town will survive?”

“Oh, yeah, probably,” I said. “Goblins are scavengers first. They’re attacking now, but once they’re done picking through the loot, they'll leave. There are enough people in town with guns and such to probably kill every last one. Problem is, that’ll mean a lot of nasty fighting in the streets and from home to home.”

“Is there anything we can do?”

I shrugged.

And that’s when I noticed some folk running into the yard.

“Guess so,” I said. “Let’s go see our new friends, make sure they’re not up to any trouble.

I glanced at the goblins one last time. There were a few more dead among their number, but not enough to make it matter. The wall was starting to crumble under their constant attacks, and some of the more dextrous goblins were scaling the wall.

I grit my teeth, then refocused. I had to do what I could about the problems I could actually do something about.

***