"Corporal, go. Good luck." I ordered, and he nodded and started down the rocks, the two boxies in tow. I resumed scanning the walls with my telescope, looking for sentries. Activity began not long after, heads moving behind the parapet, figures rushing about, the barrels of muskets starting to emerge in the loopholes. The muzzles of the first few cannons started emerging.
Beside me, Theda was lying against a rock, her rifle perched in her hand. I watched her flick the power on, pull open the bolt on the side, and select a needle with a blue band from her crumpled bandoleer. She fed it carefully into the magazine slot and worked the bolt, the weapon's capacitors whining to life as she stared down the scope. The target wasn't going to be hard to spot: they apparently liked to have a buddy with a banner nearby, and, well, they dressed important. We were told we couldn't miss them.
Minutes ticked by.
"Movement above the gatehouse. This might be our friend." Theda said, her voice dead calm. "Mhmm... that's them. They look old, don't they?"
I adjusted my scope, zooming in on the figure that emerged at the top of the gatehouse. I could see what Theda meant: they had a sort of yellowish wear at the edge of the exoskeletal plates and they looked somewhat gaunt even by the standards of their species, but they walked with head held high, confident. They had a patch over one eye and were wearing a tunic like the farmers here, but much finer, with blue and yellow details and a white scarf of sorts.
"That must be them. The butcher." Tardy whispered, and there was a bit of commotion as Impetuous wrestled for the binoculars.
"I wish I could hear what he was saying." I said. "I'd kill for a directional microphone."
"I think he's just moving troops around. Getting them to hold fire, I think? A lot of barrels pointing skyward." Theda said. There was a puff of smoke from the wall a moment later, and the gunshot echoed in our ears a little over two seconds later as a smeared pop.
"Did he shoot at them?" Tardy asked.
"No, warning shot." I explained. One of target's posse had fired a pistol into the air. "Come on machines, keep moving…"
"Okay, weapons are being pointed. They're getting closer to the wall, I think I have a shot." Theda said, shifting slightly. "Komm schon, Freund, du musst nur für mich schlafen…"
"Are they saying something to your machines?" Impetuous asked, and it sure looked like it. Like they were addressing them. A hand extended to them. An expression of sympathy in the scope.
… they must have thought they were deserters or messengers. I hadn't considered that, and it made this feel even more profane. This person's reaction to seeing soldiers approaching from a nation occupying theirs was to extend a hand, when the culture of the Orange Empire seemed uncomfortable with the idea of people from different families so much as touching. This... this was starting to feel like the beginning of something terrible, the first in a line of compromises we'd never come back from, and I hated it.
"Hold fire, Theda." I said quietly. Too quietly, I had to repeat myself.
"Ma'am?" she said quizzically, her finger hovering over the trigger. "I have my shot."
"I know… I just… we can't do this. We have to find another way." I said. "This is wrong. You know it is, and I've just been going along."
Slowly, she nodded, moving her eye away from the scope.
"We're still going to need electricity." she said, picking herself up and sitting back against the rock. "And we need to recall those three."
I pulled my sword and fiddled with it a moment, switching it to the recall pattern and activating it before waving it above my head. I held it for a long few moments before one of them noticed, probably looking back curious as to why nobody had shot yet, and all three machines took off at a sudden run.
"We're going to have to find another option. We've tolerated this long enough." I said, lowering the blade.
"What are you doing?" Tardy asked, "They're right there! Shoot them!"
"Adults are talking." I said dismissively, turning my back on them.
Out in the pass, there was something like a momentary stunned silence over the scene. Eventually this was broken by one or two opportunistic shots at the fleeing machines, but they didn't seem to come anywhere close to hitting, not that it would have mattered.
"How long a head start do you think we'll have, if we leave these two at the fort?" I asked, and Theda paused for a moment, thinking about the telegraph lines.
"At least a day to the newest telegraph station, probably longer as they have to walk everywhere. Long enough for us to get moving." she said. "We could also maybe leave them farther away, with a village or something?"
"That's probably a death sentence here." I pointed out, glancing back as I saw a flicker of movement. The two of them, climbing down toward the horses. "Can they use those?"
"I'll stop them." Theda said, picking herself up. At about the same time, the three soldiers we'd sent forward arrived at the base of the outcropping, accompanied by a snap as a stray musket ball hit the rocks.
"Lieutenant? What happened?" Corporal Theo called, and I beckoned him up.
"New plan. We're going." I said quickly. "Grab your gear and get your jackets back on."
Without complaint, they moved, and we slide down the back of the outcropping to the horses, balanced precariously on a tiny rocky shelf. Theda was there, shifting the two cuddlebugs to a sitting position as the groaned and whined, clearly stunned.
"They were rather argumentative." she explained.
We mounted our horses, our guests held securely in place, and made our way down the mountain. Miriam had already packed up camp, and we left the two of them with some water in sight of the fort, maybe a half-hour's walk, just to buy a little more time, then set off for home. This, at least, would be a non-stop trip.
Despite the dire straits it put us into, despite what this would make us do, it was the first decision I was proud of since the battle. It felt right.
---
Explaining what had happened to Lieutenant Kennedy and the ensigns went about as well as it could have possibly gone. None of them had been entirely comfortable with the plan in the first place, though it didn't take long for anxiety about power power situation to start settling in.
Seeing Diana again, after our last interaction… it was a bit rough. I could tell she was doing her best to stay professional, and fortunately the crisis was a good distraction, but it still tore at me.
Explaining the absent cuddlebugs was harder, but Miriam's diplomatic skills came to our temporary rescue. She spun a story to the South Hunter family that we had left them with the regiment passing through, as they'd desperately wanted to see battle after watching the shot get taken. They were skeptical, but silent, clearly still intimidated by us. It likely helped that it seemed believable enough for them to tentatively buy it and stave off confrontation. Probably wasn't hard to believe that those two would be impetuous and tardy, after all.
Still, we knew it had only bought us a small amount of time.
"So… ideas?" Sumner asked, pen and notebook at the ready.
"You can't just keep saying 'So, ideas?' in hopes things have changed since last time." Kennedy said, clearly frustrated. "What do we have so far?"
"Seize the power station by force and hold it as long as we can, seize the palace and force them to give us power, try to make a sufficiently powerful windmill and power generator ourselves, and go back to the gateway and hope for the best." Sumner read off, frowning. "All of these have a big X next to them due to the last four hours of discussion."
"So, nothing." I said with a sigh. "God, I'd do anything for a volta generator."
"Uh… Okay, this is going to be a stupid question, but how hard would it be to just build a volta generator? We invented them in the early 1900s, right?" Kelly asked.
Kennedy blinked.
"... you know, I'd not considered that. Honestly, it's almost closest to plausible. We have the materials here for a very basic one, and I've got a fairly good grasp of the basics." she said, grabbing some paper and scrawling something down.
"So we just do that?" I said, "How fast could we get one together?"
"If we can source a lot of copper wire from our hosts, we could honestly get it done pretty fast. They're pretty simple in their basic form, though they'll run down in a week, so we'll need two least. And they'll be big, they'll take up the wagons…"
"We'll get some local hauling wagons for our kit and casualties, pull them around cuddlebug-style." I proposed.
"Right. The only problem is that we'd need more power than we have available to jump-start it. It's been a few years since I've read Ørsted's Principia Dynamica, but eyeballing it, we need to discharge at least a hundred kiloamps at sixty kilovolts to jump-start the reaction."
"Is that a lot?" I asked.
"That's much beyond the local technology, yes." Kennedy said with a sigh, dotting something furiously on her page with her pen. "Much."
"How'd they start the first one? They'd have had to, right?" Kelly said.
"They hit it with lightning! What's stopping us from doing that?" Sumner asked.
"Can you summon a lightning storm on demand, Ensign?" I asked, and she groaned and drooped her face into her notebook.
The doors at the end of the hall clicked open, and Corporal Rifleman leaned in, removing his hat politely.
"Sorry to disturb you, but we've got a local bureaucrat who is poking around our wagons rather insistently. Says they've been ordered to." he said, sounding more than a little frustrated. "I think our hosts are growing a bit impatient with us."
"Stun them if you have to, we're on the clock anyway." Kennedy said, shuffling her own notebook up. "Okay, quick napkin math here. We could possibly do a bit of surgery on the flying guns and get one of their capacitors, they could handle it." Kennedy said. "Problem is, we'd then need to charge them, and that'd take…"
She scratched furiously, Milly leaning over her shoulder to be her calculator. We sat awkwardly a while around the table, Kelly drumming his fingers against the surface.
"... either we'd need to hook the capacitor up to the local power plant for nine hours, or we drain all but of our two field batteries." Kennedy concluded, setting down her pen. "And we'd have to have the volta generator ready by the time it's full up or the capacitor is going to melt. And, of course, it might just not work. To be honest, this is a long shot."
"So we'll want a backup plan." I said. "... I hate to say it, but plan seize-the-palace is the most immediately plausible of what we've got so far, and given how this society is organized it's probably the one we can achieve with minimal violence. Plus, depending on how they react over the next few days… we might not have a choice about fighting them."
