A note about names:

Storm Wind, Night Storm, Tornado Challenger, Star Astrologer, Blender Apothecary, etc, etc, are all English translations of their real names, just as on this planet many surnames and family names having meanings behind them. In this story when someone is addressed by their name what is really being said is the correct phonetic pronunciation of their name in that person’s native language. But both for my convenience (mostly mine) and the convenience of my readers, all extraterrestrial sentient beings are referred to and addressed, in this story, by the English translation of their names, even though that is not what is actually being said. I hope that all makes sense to you.

If you see any mistakes please point them out, thank you.

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Chapter 19: Along Came a Spider.

Lieutenant Night Storm was in command of the flights that were bombing the mandrills outside of the Stronghold’s walls. Her flyers had figured out that the best place to bomb the monkeys was on the land bridge, because that location naturally forced the creatures to bunch up, even so her Guard detachment was extremely lucky when they got six mandrills with one fire bomb and they were already nearly out of shells. According to her observations her flights had only killed a little over a hundred of the filthy beasts but the attacks made by her forces had delayed what looked liked almost four hundred of the creatures. She wished that the Holman projectors could get into the action but the bunker over the front gate and the two bunkers on walls to either side of it were literally covered by their screeching foes. She began sending her flyers back to the armory to reload.

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I had been hoping that the mandrills would allow me a chance to magically recover my strength but they hadn’t been so accommodating. Instead, whenever I felt I had enough power in me I was forced to patch my little dome or risk it being destroyed. I had been using the dirt that lay beneath me to repair my sanctuary of soil, as a result I had gotten a fairly large hole dug, which in turn gave me more room to move about, and I could actually stand upright now, if I so desired.

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Lady Faith was beyond frustrated, she was flat out pissed. Her Telekinesis ability would not work inside the little furry horrors as she had expected it to. She thought that she would be able to stop or even rip out the hearts of the little monsters but her magic wouldn’t work that way. She could use her power on the monkeys but she couldn’t use her abilities inside of them and according to the snatches of talk that she had overheard, other magic users were facing the same problem. Instead she had to be satisfied with knocking them off the fence and shooting them with her revolver. At least the mandrills were perfect targets for improving her gun slinging proficiency.

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Without machine guns or explosive shells, Captain Mesquida didn’t see a quick victory here; it was going to be a battle of extermination with each kill made almost one by one. Why the mandrills had come here, he didn’t know but from their behavior and the noises that they made, he could only guess that the beasts were insane with rage now.

He watched the Sherman and the Hellcat trundle around the outside corner of the fence. Less than ten minutes ago he had ordered Lieutenant Khan to take the two armored vehicles out through one of the back gates so that the tanks could engage the enemy. George had great hopes that the cannons on the two vehicles would drastically increase the rate at which the mandrills were being killed.

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Squire Melissa Kilmer had told Lady Knight Faith Harper that she was going to check on her parents, which she did. But unbeknownst to Lady Faith, her squire had returned and was standing quietly behind her; ready to aid her Knight if it proved necessary.

The sheer weight of the mandrills was starting to cause the chain link fence to deform and to be pulled away from the steel uprights. Just when it looked like a section of the fence might entirely give way, the Sherman tank came driving by, right next to the fence line. Acting almost like a garden tractor the tank mowed down the monkeys as if they were nothing more than tall weeds. Slightly behind and off to the Sherman’s side was the Hellcat performing a similar maneuver.

Most children would have been horrified at the sight of blood and squashed mandrills. Melissa Kilmer on the other hand wished she was driving one of the two tanks. Girls typically dream of nice clothes, learning to drive, a new smart phone or maybe a boyfriend. The new Squire wanted a shotgun, a rifle, a pistol, a sword, and body armor.

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Each of the eight curtain wall sections had eight Guards assigned to it at all times, meaning that there were sixty-four soldiers on the entire wall walk, at any time of the day or night. Only three of those sections were besieged, so the other five sections started sending reinforcements to those that needed help. Thirty troopers, forming two squads of fifteen Guardsmen, started fighting their way along both the eastern and western sides of the curtain wall walkway and to those wall sections that were swarming with mandrills.

Amongst them was Benjamin Nord, he had been a computer technician and a software instructor in his old life. Ben had been among the human refugees that had come in with the craft-makers. Today he was carrying a Mauser rifle with, in his newly revised opinion, a bayonet which was far too short on the end of it. Recruit Nord was a past master of computer games and he didn’t see a screeching mass of monkeys, he saw a horde of hairy goblins whose stats were far too high for their race. If he lived, he planned on sending a scathing email to the developer of this game.

His group of fifteen Guardsmen; were advancing along the western side of the Stronghold’s wall walk. Their Sergeant ordered them to form two rows and to prepare for volley fire. Nord was one of those kneeling in front, he heard, “FRONT RANK AIM, FRONT RANK FUEGO!” A crash of shots went out, Ben cursed because he was pretty sure that he had missed. “RELOAD, SECOND RANK AIM, SECOND RANK FUEGO!”

Even with that dense group of monkeys as their targets, one in three shots missed its objective but the range was short and many of the bullets were going through one mandrill and striking another one or even two behind it. When it got close to the time where it looked like Benjamin Nord was going to have to use his dinky bayonet, slightly over fifty of the hairy goblins had already fallen dead. Too bad that there were still over seventy of them left and to Ben it looked like all of them were looking and charging directly towards him.

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Sergeant Derrick Miter would normally be commanding or driving the Priest but for the past few days it had been in the shop having its engine swapped out. Today he had been commanding the Watch on the most northern wall. Seeing the attack, he had proceeded along the western walls, gathering reinforcements for the beleaguered Guardsmen located on the southern most walls.

When he had his soldiers prepare for volley fire, he had been expecting them to be able to get off far more shots before the monkeys closed with them. While he had feared for the lives of those under attack as well as his ad hoc squad, he had also looked at this battle as an excellent opportunity to give the Rookie Guardsmen some much needed seasoning. He was especially concerned about Recruit Nord who was all the time talking about experience points and worrying about his stats.

Sergeant Miter grimaced as his plans fell apart because of the speed of the hairy beasts. He ordered his squad to retreat to the bunker that was four hundred feet behind them and then readied his own favorite weapon, a Remington 870 shotgun loaded with buck and ball. When he was a young man he had been well known for the speed of his reflexes, and since regaining his youth, all of that old speed had come back to him. But he had also been awakened by the Hermit King, and because of that, Derrick was much, much faster now. He watched his soldiers retreat and decided to buy them a little more time. Sergeant Miter smoothly racked the shotgun and fired off the shells to devastating effect. There were eight shells in his shotgun and they cut a swath through the charging monkeys.

The enraged mandrills hurled themselves at him. With his shotgun empty he drew his .357 revolver and fired off four more shots until the monkeys had gotten too close. Having no other way out and seeing that his soldiers were all safe, Sergeant Derrick Miter leaped off wall, because he didn’t want to die beneath the claws and fangs of the slavering mandrills.

The beasts stopped their own charge across the wall walk, as they watched their prey leap to his death or at least serious injury. But there was a strange problem, while their prey’s leap had carried him away from the wall, he wasn’t falling. The human looked back at them with an evil grin on his face as he calmly reloaded the shotgun.

Sergeant Miter yelled out. “Surprised assholes? I can fly!” With that he resumed shooting at the now terribly confused creatures. When Derrick had been awakened, one of the abilities he had received was Levitation which he had diligently practiced because of a childlike desire to be able to fly like Superman. While he couldn’t fly all that well, he could certainly float really good. Of course he had a problem with his gun’s recoil, which required him to reposition himself after every shot; but Derrick’s actions completely stalled the enemies attack on his squad.

The tactic worked beautifully but Derrick had one minor complaint, because he didn’t feel like he was properly dressed for this battle. The Officers had been talking about making or acquiring combat uniforms for the Guard, he now wondered if he could talk them into adding a cape?

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The battle started to wind down. The southern fence line had been severely damaged but it had held. The vast numbers of monkeys had been whittled down and now precision shooting was taking care of the rest. Outside of the Stronghold almost two hundred mandrills were retreating back into the woods, their natural camouflage let them blend into the trees and bushes like ghosts.

The Sherman Tank Commander, Sergeant Vargas, seeing one pile of living monkeys decided to fire a load of grapeshot into them and then crush them beneath his treads. The tank’s steam engine was far quieter than the old gasoline engine that had originally been installed in the tank. So when the Sergeant yelled out “Ramming Speed” to his driver, that woman heard him.

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Star Astrologer screamed when the Sherman’s gun fired and almost immediately teleported herself in front of the charging tank. The driver was barely able to stop in time; even with Star moving back by several feet.

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I was sitting in the bottom of my hole, deciding if I should patch up my little dome once again. When it sort of came apart and disappeared. HOLY FUCK, I was dead now! I didn’t have enough magic to build myself new sanctuary or do much of anything else. I stood up and there were monkey parts all over the place but there were also two or three relatively intact mandrills that looked rather perturbed with me, for some reason. I had my bayonet in my right hand I wished I had a buckler for my left but I had nothing but an empty shotgun. I buried my knife into the chest of one monster which was leaping at me from my right but two more came at me from my left. One aimed for my neck but I swung up my arm and that limb got bit instead. A more seriously injured monkey sort of scooted itself across the ground and bit me just above my left knee. Their fangs were more like knives because of their size. I had been healing a lot of people for the last several months and while I had almost no energy to repair myself, I was touching those two mandrills, or at least they were touching me, and even though I didn’t have enough power to heal, it didn’t take very much energy to reach inside of them and stop their little monkey hearts, not very much energy at all, in fact.

The Sherman tank came clanking up and stopped just shy of my hole. It would have been a good time for me to faint dramatically, what with two monkeys hanging on to my limbs by their teeth, but instead Star Astrologer appeared and started bawling me out.

The Hellcat arrived a few minutes later and Clyde climbed out of the driver’s compartment.

“Hey Clyde, what are you doing driving a tank again?”

“You look like shit boss. Are mandrills a new fashion accessory this year? I hate to say it but they do actually improve your look.” Star was still trying to pry open the jaws of the dead monkeys; so she could remove them from my limbs. I was learning some new curse words from her.

“I didn’t know that being a fashion critic was part of your job, Sir Clyde.”

“That’s me, fashion critic, mechanic, Minister of Transport, healer and backup tank driver. Boris was short a trained driver so I volunteered for the job.”

“I need a medic Clyde, I’m out of magical gas and I don’t have anything left to heal myself.”

He got a concerned look on his face and hurried over. Star succeeded in prying off the one mandrill on my arm and then I fainted or is that swooned?

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George and Steve were trying to straighten out the mess that the attack had created. Tractors were already at work scraping up monkey corpses. It was decided that the most intact bodies would be harvested for their meat. Guards were already talking about making mandrill jerky out of them.

The Minister of Health, Denise Murphy and three of her healers were on the southern wall looking for survivors. Of course they had a very strong guard with them, one of whom was floating overhead.

When the mandrills had first attacked that wall section, four of the eight person detail had been in the bunker keeping warm while the four others had been out on the walkway, walking their posts. Miraculously, three of the four were still alive. They were badly chewed up and missing limbs but they were still alive! Two of them owed their survival to Vince’s little car and its enchanted aluminum body. They had taken shelter in the car just before their foes had completely overwhelmed them. Sadly the car was in equally bad shape now.

The only fatality was Private Quentin Lee a young man of thirty who was one of those picked up on the trip back from Kilmer’s estate. Quentin had no family but he had been well liked and had been fitting in admirably. He was the first fatality for the little community. Oh sure, the Guard had killed monsters and even humans but up until now they hadn’t lost a single sentient being. The recent group of refugees was quite astonished over this little piece of information.

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I woke up in the infirmary with several pissed off looking people staring at me. It was a dirty and tired looking Candace Murphy who began speaking first.

“Boss, have you always been an idiot?”

“Why yes, I thought that was obvious. What over hermit would invite people to live on his land with him? It kind of defeats the point of being a hermit, you know.” I hoped to shut her up, but I didn’t get my wish. She simply pretended like she hadn’t even heard me.

“Boss, when over a thousand carnivorous monkeys are charging down upon you, safety tip, run the other way. While you might have some recent combat experience, you are not a trained soldier. Your job is to lead from the rear and to support the Guard, not to get in front of everybody else and to run straight towards the hundreds of hungry monsters that want to eat you.

Can you imagine what those mandrills thought? Here they had dinner charging right at them. They must have been thrilled except for those that mistook you as just a larger version of one of their own species that is.”

That last sentence sort of hurt, maybe I had been looking a little scruffy earlier, it was still a mean thing to say but there was one thing that I needed to know first. “Lieutenant how many people did we lose and how many were injured?”

She drew herself up, almost to attention or at least I think it was almost to attention, I’m not much for that military stuff. “I am sorry to report Your Majesty, that we lost Quentin Lee and we have nine wounded, three of those are seriously injured. They have lost limbs or other portions of their bodies.”

That was better than I had feared. In fact, it was a lot better but it still sucked. I took stock of my own body. I must have been out for at least an hour. Clyde or someone else had done a good job of patching me up, my energy reserves weren’t full but they were close to it. I tweaked my own body a little and started to sit up. To the best of my knowledge, I was the Stronghold’s expert on regenerating lost body parts and it was time for me to get back to work. Just then the steam whistle alarm sounded. The facial expressions on the people around me plummeted. It was going to be another one of those days; hopefully we would all survive it.

“Buck up folks, we fought the sky krakens and won. A short while ago we faced a horde of mangy mandrills and we beat them too. We’ll deal with whatever is coming our way this time as well.”

I cursed our lack of electricity once more. Without it we were forced to use crude audible alarms or messengers for all of our communications. Just then Star Astrologer, who had seemingly been meditating, bent down and spoke quietly into me ear. “Your Majesty, large things are coming from the North, many large things.”

I don’t know who prepared them, but there were some clean clothes sitting piled on a chair next to my infirmary bed, however most of those standing around my bed were female. “You had better turn your backs ladies, you are about to see a naked and ugly hermit.” I threw off the thin blanket that was covering me, swung my feet to the floor and started reaching for my clothes. I peripherally noticed that I seemed to be cleaner than I should have been; I guessed someone gave me a sponge bath while I was unconscious. Maybe they had to get me clean because of my wounds? I pulled on my boxers and then my socks, they even matched! Curses, I had been trying to start a new fashion trend. I pulled on a t-shirt and I was then handed a pair of pants by Star. I noticed two things, none of the women were turning their heads and the pants were made of leather, they looked like what the flyers have been wearing lately but the trousers Star gave me weren’t as puffy looking. Since when did I own a pair of leather pants? If I was going to wear leather pants then they should give me a whip too or at least a really cool hat, like a Stetson. I put the trousers on and then my Red Wing work boots. I stood up in all my hermit glory, the ladies gasped at my splendor or maybe yawned, who can really tell anything about women.

I put on my shoulder holster and checked the attached ammo pouch. While there were no .454 Casull cartridges in it, it had been refilled with .45 Colt and .410 shotgun ammunition. My revolver had been cleaned as well. How long had I been unconscious? Next, I was handed a long coat and it was also like what the flyers wore but mine had a solid back unlike theirs. I definitely needed a Stetson and maybe a Sam Browne belt. Disappointingly, I wasn’t given a cool hat; instead I was presented with a coal scuttle style WWII helmet that had some leather flaps to protect my ears from the cold. It totally spoiled my new look, it wasn’t even made by Gucci!

I limped my way out of the infirmary, and I was followed by Lady Knights Star Astrologer, Faith Harper and Candace Murphy. Candace looked more than a little worse for wear but she had such a fierce expression on her face that I didn’t dare tell her to go back inside the infirmary. At the back of our little group I noticed Squire Kilmer. We had a few more unarmored steam powered vehicles now; amongst those were two old pickup trucks, the old Ford dump truck from the quarry, and my old jeep. The Ford was passing by and we flagged it down to hitch a ride to the Northern wall which was almost six hundred yards away and much further than I wanted to walk, with the way that I was feeling. I was dreading the stairs that I would need to climb when we got there.

By the time I reached the top of the wall, over twenty minutes had passed since the alarm had first sounded. When I looked out over the parapet, I could barely make out some shiny silvery objects in the distance and through the tree line. George handed me a pair of binoculars and I lifted them to my eyes. I could now see what appeared to be several, metallic spider like shapes that seemed low to ground. I said “spider like” because I could see multiple legs. There were at least eight of them. I turned to George. “What are they and how far away do you think they are?”

“I wish we had an optical range finder but we don’t. Storm Wind wanted to overfly them but I told him not to, we have no idea what kind of magic or technology they might have. The U.S. Army certainly used to have a lot of weapons that could shoot twenty miles or more. So to play it safe, I had Sir Wind fly high over the Stronghold and report what he could observe from there. According to Storm, those silver objects are huge mechanical metal spiders that look to be over a hundred feet tall and at least that long. He counted twenty-four of them and by looking at a map and comparing landmarks; we’ve determined that the closest spider machine appears to be about twelve miles away. Thankfully they seem to move extremely slowly. Lieutenant Wind also said that they are quite clumsy and he’s seen many of them almost fall down after stumbling. In addition, he has seen what he thinks to be smoke or steam coming out of them, so they might be steam powered.

Their rate of travel seems to be a little over two miles per hour, according to our best estimate. Storm said that the central body looks like a large cylinder with its length parallel to the ground. On the top of the cylinder is what looks like two tank turrets and the underside has one as well. Lieutenant Wind said that the front of each cylinder looks like a mirror. I suspect that the vehicle’s cockpit or bridge is behind that mirrored surface.”

George took a deep breath before continuing to speak. “Vince, I think that after this next battle that I should resign as Captain and Boris should take over. If I had only kept all of our combat vehicles at the ready our fight against those mandrills would have been over in half the time. As for why our lookouts didn’t spot them earlier…..”

I interrupted him. “Stop George, I will not accept your resignation or anyone else’s. The Hermit’s Guard only has 232 soldiers in it. Every one of them, in fact every one of us has been working nonstop for months. We are lucky to get a full night’s sleep and one relaxing meal a day. We’ve stopped keeping track of the lesser monster attacks that we face every day because your forces defeat them so easily. There are three guard shifts on the wall, each shift requires sixty four Guardsmen; that is a total of 192 soldiers, who still have to train and maintain their equipment. Leaving you with only forty soldiers for everything else and that includes manning our armored vehicles, which takes another twenty-five Guardsmen, and that is without even counting the crew requirements for the Priest and the C500.

Of course you stood down two of your vehicles after the wall was built. You informed the Council and we all agreed with your decision too. So don’t worry about it. As for those hairy horrors getting so close to us, I could barely make them out when they were coming over the parapet. They must be able to blend into the woods around this compound like white on rice. We’ve been planning to cut more of those trees down but you already know how busy Mack and his people have been and we sort of thought that those woods would help hide the Stronghold too, so it hasn’t been something that we’ve been too concerned about, until now. I guess we have no choice now, our walls are not impregnable and those trees have to go, so that we can see anything that is sneaking up on us.

I know one thing though; we definitely have to replace that land bridge with a drawbridge and as quickly as possible. Candace told me how those monkeys just streamed across that tiny isthmus; the moat might have stopped them. Maybe those former employees of the County Road Commission can help us out with our new bridge, at least I hope so.

There was only one person who screwed up and that was me, I let myself get too exhausted and I wasn’t able to contribute magically to the battle. So don’t blame yourself or any others for that matter.

As for whatever is coming towards us now; how do you think we should fight them, if they are hostile?”

George closed his eyes for a few minutes as if deep in thought, he then opened them and began speaking. “If it wasn’t for our new dungeon, I would say that we should send out our armor to fight them outside our walls. We don’t know how strong their armor is but I’m afraid it might be too tough for our guns and those things are too tall for our walls to stop them. Our first line of defense will be here on the battlements, with our 20mm sharpshooters and the Holman projectors. Flyers will be operating the projectors since they can get away far quicker if a retreat is called for. As for the sharpshooters, if their weapons have no effect, then they will immediately withdraw. The tanks with solid enchanted shells will be standing by inside the Stronghold, ready to either fight from inside or sortie outside the gate if necessary. Four flights of flyers will be standing by in the bunker on the Southern Wall. They went through a fourth of our available IROD shells fighting those mandrills, which was kind of a waste but they could only use what we had.

Grace is working on a design for a steam bomb, powered by an IROD, however it’s not even at the prototype stage but we definitely need a munition of some kind that can scatter shrapnel and has a wide kill radius without using any of our available gunpowder.

If the twenty millimeters and the IROD shells don’t stop those things then we’ll go underground and fight them with magic.

Vince, we desperately need more black powder and bigger cannons as well. We don’t have enough powder for adequate training and our cannons just aren’t that great. Right now we have metal spiders marching towards us that are the size of a ship and I don’t know if the weapons we do have will even touch them. I don’t know what the local National Guard Armory has but even if we can only get a supply of fifty caliber brass or some rugged militarized vehicles, I still think that it will be worth the forty mile trip. Ideally, I am hoping for some artillery; mortars or howitzers. I would love it if they had an old M60 tank or two. I think we could successfully convert one of them but it’s my understanding that all of those tanks are in some bone yard out in California. I’m not sure if a Stryker would be any of use to us, I’ve kind of grown partial to the T800 but you never know, an old M113 would certainly be nice, though. If that armory has nothing that we want, then there are other ones within a hundred or two hundred miles of us. Of course there is the Anniston Depot but that is over five hundred miles away and if any place is keeping it together it should be them. So they might not want to give us anything or want to trade either, even if we made such a long and dangerous trip.

If the government acted in a timely fashion and truly believed the warning messages, then Anniston should have been able to convert their machine shops and many of their armored vehicles over to steam power just like you did.”

He was rattling on. I had to stop him. “I get it George; I will approve a trip to the nearest Armory if we survive this and I might go along as well, since we might need to negotiate like I did at the County Building.” Why did he wince, I thought I had done a great job at negotiating. “But we might both be forgetting something, that armory is to the north of us and that is in the direction those spiders are coming from, there might not be anything there anymore for us to take.” George’s wince turned into a grimace.

If those spiders were only traveling at two miles per hour it would be well past dark by the time they got here. It turns out that we didn’t have to worry about that, because when it got dark, they simply stopped moving, wasn’t that convenient. Several of our flyers had true sight and they kept watch on the metal beasts throughout the night but the armored arachnids never moved.

During the night, I spent a few hours at the infirmary, helping out with our wounded. Three of them had been seriously messed up and it amazed all of us that they were even alive. It was going to take months, to get them back to the way that they were, before we met the mandrills.

The spiders didn’t start to move our way again until all of their stragglers rejoined the forward most group. There were twenty-eight of the metal beasts now and they were definitely aiming for the Stronghold. When they were about three miles away Steve was able to perform an Appraisal on them. He told us what he saw.

Arachnid Dominator Class Mobile Unit, Mark XXII

The central cylindrical body is forty-five meters in length and has a diameter of fifteen meters. The body’s shell is made up of three layers. The outer and inner most layers are made of a smashed aluminum alloy and each aluminum layer is thirty-seven millimeters thick. The middle layer is a cavity that is seventy-four millimeters wide and that cavity is filled with a ballistic gelatin made of long chain molecules.

The Mark XXII’s six legs are hydraulically activated and powered. The computer control and stabilization system for the Mark XXII and its legs; is no longer operational. Movement is now under manual control. The legs have a designed range of extension from 6.1 to 35.1 meters.

Power was supplied by a 35,030 hp steam turbine and an MHD generator. The MHD generator is no longer functional. Steam was previously supplied by a Series 97 thorium reactor, which is also no longer functional. Steam is now being supplied to the turbine by alternate and less efficient means; as a result total power has been greatly reduced.

Primary weapons were three Pulsar Series 148 mm coilguns; these weapons have been crudely converted into steam cannons. Secondary weapons, which included lasers and smaller coilguns, are non-operational.

Defensive electromagnetic shields are no longer operational.

HOLY CRAP! H. G. Wells and Jules Verne would have loved to have seen something like those mechanical monstrosities.

We all turned to look at Steve who wouldn’t meet our gazes; he finally spoke. “What can I say, ever since Vince knighted me, my Appraisal ability has been doing crazy shit like that.”

I muttered under my breath. Somebody at the DDS must like him. When it comes to me, the DDS schmucks place bets on the date of my death, Steve on the other hand gets to be Super Appraiser.

For laughs, I tried appraising the arachnids myself.

Large, steam powered, mechanical spider made of aluminum.

Which was slightly better than what I had been expecting, I thought I would get something like “Hi, I’m a shiny giant spider,” which now that I really think about it, that description is really not any better than what I got through Appraisal. What we needed to know; was what kind of beings, were operating those metal beasts? George spoke up, interrupting my thoughts.

“Does anyone know what smashed aluminum is and anything about the ballistic gelatin that Steve just mentioned?”

I reluctantly spoke up since I might have the answer. “I could be wrong but the smashed aluminum that he mentioned is probably similar to titanium. As for the ballistic gelatin, we normally use that stuff for testing bullets, from what Steve said I think that the spider’s gelatin is formulated to stop projectiles. So at a guess, the arachnids have more armor than the Sherman but less than an M1 tank. Their aluminum armor should be more susceptible to our explosive-fire munitions than our steel armor but I don’t know what else that gelatin might do, it’s probably not flammable, so don’t get your hopes up in that regard. In fact, since they had laser weapons I would expect that gelatin to have cooling properties and to be heat resistant.

My next observation is probably no longer relevant but depending on how those spider’s electromagnetic shields worked and how strong they were, those machines were probably able to fly in the electromagnetic field of their former planet. So those legs might not have been those mechanical monsters’ primary form of locomotion as they are now.”

Captain Mesquida paused before speaking again. “Okay, I still think my plan is the best way to go, if they are hostile. I’ll have our gunners try and concentrate on one spot on their armor. If we can break off enough of that outer armor, then the gelatin just might fall off, exposing the inner layer to our weapons. Though, we might want to concentrate on their legs, if we can knock out two on the same side that should render them immobile. For now we’ll estimate the maximum range of their steam cannons as being no more than two thousand feet which is twice the range of our Holman projectors. But we also have to take into account that they probably have magic too. It is likely that the ‘alternate means of making steam’ might very well be something like our own firestones.”

“George, only let one of those metal contraptions approach within a half mile of this Stronghold. While they might not be fully functional now, they were at one time far more powerful than our own tanks, and as such I view them as dedicated war machines. If twenty-eight of those things attempt to get too close to here, put them down anyway you can. They are the ones coming to us and it’s up to them to make the peaceful overtures. Our only job is to make sure that we live through whatever happens.”

“I’ll fire some warning shots with our mortars; they can put out an impressive amount of smoke and that should make them hesitate. If not, our 20mm rifles can reach out to over a half a mile and with targets that big, our sharpshooters shouldn’t miss.”

I didn’t like the sight of those silvery beasties at all, especially since we could now hear their giant footsteps. They looked to be following the county road, maybe they would just pass us by, but I somehow doubted it.

After a short while it became certain that they were following the road even though the road was really too narrow for them but I guess any kind of path is better than none at all. If they are coming to the Stronghold then I would expect them to turn off the county road and onto the gravel road that leads to my place and it’s a little less than a half mile from the county road to the Stronghold.

We had to reposition our forces along the fortress’s walls as the location of the machines changed. We had fifty-two sharpshooters on the northern and western walls. Each marksman had a designated target within their range. I spoke with George about a change in plans that I had just come up with.

“Captain, I expect them to turn onto the gravel road and to come here. I think I should go out and meet them in the Scorpion when they do, so they don’t get too close and we don’t start fighting prematurely. Being as how the Scorpion has aluminum armor, they might recognize that and that small piece of information might just elevate our status in their eyes since aluminum smelting requires electricity to the best of my knowledge. That will tell them that we too, once had electricity. Additionally, I have the Translation ability, so I can negotiate with them.”

“Boss, are you nuts? Even with your enchantment on the Scorpion’s armor, that tank is not that tough and they’ve got those big ass steam cannons.”

Why do people keeping doubting my insanity? For gosh sakes, I’m living in a fantasy, where I won the lottery and the world lost electricity but gained magic. I hate to think where I might really be at this very moment but for now I’ll keep on chugging along. For some reason Star just gave me a frustrated look. It’s possible that she was just inside my head. Poor girl, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

“George, we’ll crew the vehicle with those people who have the ability to teleport. I know that no one as of yet, can teleport very far but they just need enough skill to escape the Scorpion if needed. As for myself, though I haven’t used it all that much I do have the ability to sort of fly with my Air Magic and I’ll be standing in the commander’s hatch. If necessary I’ll fly myself out and back to the Stronghold.”

It took a lot of arguing but with the addition of a shield made of transparent aluminum, they finally agreed with my decision. Mack was going to drive, however Sergeant Miter who was a better tank driver but possessed inferior Teleportation skills was selected instead. Star insisted on being the other crew member.

We watched, as the arachnids marched by on the county road. Four metal beasts passed our gravel road but the fifth one turned right and headed towards us. I ran down the stairs and to the Scorpion. The gate on the stronghold was opened and Sergeant Miter drove the three of us out to meet the mechanical spider.