Engines of winter, p.1
Engines of Winter, page 1
Copyright © 2024 by E.M. Rensing
Cover Design by JV Arts
Editing by Kenneth Zink and Lisa Henson
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Generative AI was not utilized for any component of this book; narrative development, drafting, editing, formatting and cover artwork were all accomplished by humans. With help from Hurricane Beryl, late morning walks, late night tea and endless replays of the Nutcracker ballet music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
ALSO BY E. M. RENSING
The Heliosphere Trilogy
The Lighthouse of Kuiper
The Ariums of Earth
The Cathedrals of Mars
The Abiota Series
Source Code
Unity Code
Numina Code
Domain Code
Virch Code
Anyon Code
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Afterword
About the Author
CHAPTER ONE
Tall as a god, Marie Stahlbaum strode the moon of Bavaria.
It was easy to lose oneself in that feeling. The strength of star-forged steel. The fluidity of perfectly tuned hydraulics. The balance of the halberd in her hand. The threat of the guns built into her back. The roar of her reactor heart, powering her into the fight.
That was what she loved the most.
When Marie was in her engine, she was no longer that little girl fleeing in terror through darkened streets. She no longer had to fear the shadows.
When Marie was in her engine, the past could not touch her.
All there was here was—
Marie whirled, her guard coming up only just in time. Both weapon and shield, the halberd was the choice of weapon for engine pilots the sector over, and it saved her in that moment. A twist, a duck, and she was swinging back one-handed, grip low on the halberd’s haft.
The weapon was matched to her engine’s stature, with a blade long enough to sever the legs of even the largest of verrater. Its mass was staggering. The curving arc of its movement dragged her engine into a spin.
The tip of her blade grazed the chest of the other engine. Almost, she thought, almost…
But she could not quite change the momentum of the movement. The spin continued, exposing her back, carrying her far too close to one of the vast granite crags at the edge of the field.
Through the rear cameras, Marie saw her opponent leaping, its own halberd held high for an overhead killing stroke.
Gritting her teeth, she parried, knocking it away only just in time. It was terrifying. It was exhilarating. The opponent’s blade hit the rock face instead, sending out sparks as it raked down, glowing yellow motes, bright in the fading afternoon.
“Too slow!” she called back through the radio link.
Suspended in her control cradle, the fight took on a kind of otherworldly sensation. Her entire body was encased. Feet in knee-high boots, hands in gloves wired with delicate actuators that could capture and transmit the smallest of gestures. Larger braces ran up her arms and legs, translating larger movements. Her torso was held loosely in a padded cage similar to those used in fighter spacecraft, albeit adjusted to allow for constant body motion. Neck and head supports rose from the back of that, connected to her helmet, offering some modicum of protection during combat.
An engine could rattle the human body apart.
The sounds of combat would be ringing loud across the snowy land. This makeshift arena was not big enough for everything their engines could unleash, rugged cliffs rising to the south and east, a delicate curtain wall of gold-veined white stone to the west and north. A four-acre expanse of heated marble cobblestone lay within the curve of that wall; it was not suited to engine war, and they avoided it. This had forced them onto the slopes instead, the narrow strips of land that rose sharply to meet those cliffs.
The halberd was a weapon poorly suited to such an environment. It was designed for reach, for the momentum of the strike. Using one here was like having a knife fight in a coffin. Every movement was tight, every step measured. Marie couldn’t extend, couldn’t fight the way she was trained to. If only she had a sword, she thought.
But her own uncertainty didn’t seem to be echoed by her opponent. On and on and on he came, circling, jabbing, blade flashing far too close to critical systems for comfort. With an engine, there was no possibility of a decapitating strike, no head unit to attack. Such things were of vital importance, however, when fighting the verrater; so much of Marie’s muscle memory had been dedicated to learning those strikes.
Her body strained in the harness. Her muscles ached. But the longer she fought, the more it all faded away, far away from anything that mattered.
Sinking into her machine, Marie swung and thrust, almost giddy. This was the first time she’d been out of a simulator in long, long weeks. She took chances, brandishing her halberd, showing off. Her opponent was dogged, predictable, using the simplest strikes, brutal and effective. Except she was practically dancing in her engine now—as much as one could while encased in a thirteen-meter-tall machine of war—savoring the freedom that open combat brought.
Here, she had nothing to fear.
Here, all was made right.
Here, she would have her vengeance.
Finally, after long minutes of punishment, Marie saw an opening. There, a gap in his guard, space beneath the other engine’s left arm. She brought the tip of her blade underneath, stabbing up toward the unguarded joint. If she severed that, cut off the arm…
She stopped cold, barely catching herself before committing to the extension. The muscle fibers of the engine screeched in protest.
The tip of her opponent’s halberd was less than a meter from her main camera. So close, in fact, that the electrified tip was creating distortion in the image. But that wasn’t the real problem. No. Finishing the stroke would carry her to the side. Right over empty air.
Biting back her frustration, Marie nodded. But the engine wouldn’t translate that movement for her, not without a head section. Such movements were discarded by the guidance computer.
“I yield,” she answered instead, and stepped back, pulling her halberd up.
She looked around.
She had indeed been pushed back. The castle had been sited on relatively flat land, a rarity on this moon, but even here, there were limits. Behind her, there was a steep drop-off. It was at least five hundred meters straight down, her engine’s computer offered unhelpfully. They had come as far away from the castle as they could manage.
The slope around her had been torn up by the feet of their engine, heated by the kinetic fury of the fight. The churned-up mud was already cooling. Snow was beginning to settle anew.
“I did not realize we had gone so far,” Marie admitted. It was then she realized how tired she was, how freely she was sweating. She’d overextended herself. Not just in that last blow, but in the fight as a whole.
Marie hung her head, gulping air. In the still, muggy interior of the cockpit, she could taste her breath as it ran out through her teeth. “I understand, Major.”
And with that, the other engine anchored its halberd in its back-mounted weapons cradle and headed back down the slopes toward the castle.
Lesson over, Marie figured. Tired and not a little frustrated, she followed.
CHAPTER TWO
Steering the engine back toward the castle, Marie had an excellent view of the surrounding land.
Bavaria was a wild moon, small but mighty, terraformed in a distant past now only half-remembered. I
The plateau below her was one of the few places anywhere on the moon with enough flat land to host a large human settlement. Down there, the city of Baumberg spread out, its low timber structures and meandering streets giving way here and there to grand market squares and towering stone cathedrals. A charming place, it clung to the edges of a mountain range that ringed half of the broad, wide plateau. A plateau it was, rather than a valley, as the other side of the alpine plain fell off again, down sheer cliffs to a true river valley, with the endless Bavarian mountains sweeping up and away again, as far as the eye could see. Between city and cliffs was the small spaceport, nothing more than flat plains scraped clean of anything that might interfere with a landing craft’s skids. Right now the area was full to the brim with men, women, and equipment.
All borrowed from the battle raging out in the system’s Oort cloud.
All torn away for more critical engagements, all by the whim of one man.
Thinking about that soured Marie’s mood even further. It did not help that her legs were shaking and her cheeks were flushed from the lecture she had just been given. Walking was a surprisingly difficult task in an engine, exhausting both mentally and physically for the pilot. For long-haul journeys or treacherous ground, a seated position was best, but she had not had time to shift the harness to accommodate the terrain. She almost lost her footing as the angle of the slope changed, flattening.
Major Ivanov, on the other hand, strode along as easily as on the endless tidal flats of Thalassa.
He had been doing this a lot longer than she, Marie reminded herself, and she did not begrudge the mentorship. But losing the fight to him still felt like failure.
“Is it truly necessary to put on these shows for the Lord Silberhaus, Major Ivanov?” she asked over their radio link as they approached the castle.
“This is a waste of our time.”
She steered her own engine into position. “What mistakes? You cheated!”
“We are not automata, dancing for a lord’s pleasure!”
Grumbling to herself, she started running her post-op checklist.
It was no disgrace, Marie told herself, flipping switches and turning off screens, to lose in such a match to one like Major Ivanov. He was a forty-six-year veteran of the Alamani Sector Engine Corps and had recently undergone his second round of regenerative procedures in order to stay in the cockpit perhaps another ten years. Such treatments became less effective over time, especially if one lived a hard life. Engine service was not kind to the human body, and Ivanov had once told her himself that he should have long since moved up to a higher echelon of command.
But he was part of their colonel’s handpicked retinue, a retinue that Marie herself was now part of, as dubious an honor as that seemed now. And, she suspected, with the current war on, the Engine Corps could not afford to lose any of its pilots to old age. Not when so many were being lost on the battlefield.
Her engine did not require a full shutdown. It would be manned by another from her squadron, standing guard at the castle gates, as it had for the past fortnight. Guard duty was tedious. A fight, even a lost fight, was far preferable to that.
Marie released the controls that held the harness in its combat configuration. Mechanisms in the cockpit clicked and purred, loosening in some places, tightening in others, and Marie gratefully sank down. As her body sat down in the harness, joints locked and a padded platform rose, finally allowing her to take her weight off her legs, letting her sit down. She slipped her arms free and disengaged her foot treads.
What had only moments before been a full-body motion-capture rig was now a seat similar to those in atmospheric fight craft.
“I could have fought better.” Marie said, gritting her teeth as she worked. It had been a bad fight and surely Major Ivanov knew that. She didn’t need his charity compliments.
Marie ran her last few items quickly, gloved hand pausing on the lever that would power down the Hussar’s miniature fusion reactor. “Your engine is not optimized for you, either.”
“As you say, Major, it will not matter against the verrater,” Marie said, angry at herself now. The sympathy she heard in her superior’s voice was worse than his humor.
She finally peeled herself out of her control harness and looked around one more time at the tight cockpit. With two final brusque movements, she finished the partial shutdown and punched open the hatch.
It was then that she heard clapping.
As if this afternoon could not get worse.
Hussar-class engines, like all the engines fielded by the Corps, possessed an airtight seal and a pressurized cockpit. This allowed for operation in all but the most extreme conditions, including the void. Marie had fought often in the airless environments of the asteroids and moons of the Academy. The air inside the tiny cabin had been warm, almost muggy, and the chill of Bavaria was kept well at bay.
Now, the winter air outside hit her hard, turning sweat to a vicious chill almost immediately. Marie grimaced as she took off her helmet, exposing her pale face to the full force of Bavaria’s long winter. Her blonde hair settled slowly around her shoulders. She’d braided it, of course, but long strands had been pulled out during the fight. Sweat plastered the bulk of it to her neck.
Automatically, Marie grabbed her fur-lined uniform pelisse jacket from its cubby behind her chair, pulling it on. Engines could only tolerate a certain range of human body; she was just tall enough to qualify. The Alamani Sector Academy of Engines had given her the body she currently had. Lean, finely muscled limbs, a slender torso. A runner’s body more than anything else, shaped for endurance.
She was still exhausted.
Marie tried to set it aside as she stepped out and dismounted. On a moon such as this one, where gravity was a mere quarter of Fleet Standard, the drop was of little consequence. She jumped down from the cockpit to hand and from hand to ground. The parade ground was snowy, however, and her boot connected with a patch of hidden ice. Marie landed hard, groaning a little as she did so.
