Join a dedicated Crown gunner on the battlefield
“Drop elevation by three degrees.” her voice screamed out.
The gears clattered as the sweating firing crew reacted, ratcheting the barrels downward and bringing them into alignment. Though seemingly minor, the fractional changes would translate to hundreds metres in the distance the destructive shells would travel.
“Charge coils. Hold for four.” The twin banks of arcmagnetic conductors buzzed violently like furious insects as they built up and stored the voltaic charge. The crew could feel their teeth beginning to itch and felt the hair on their arms standing to attention like recruits on the parade ground. Gunner First Class Charvi Alam checked the calculations once again on the scrap of paper smoothed out across her knee and took one final look through the rangefinder. The chipped and dusty glass showed three Hochmeister colossi wading through the sea towards the Konkan coast. Each step caused huge waves to roll away from them and every one of the towering war machines glittered in the hot Mumbai sun.
In a way, they really are quite beautiful, like knights of Arthurian myth Charvi mused to herself, she let her gaze linger a few moments more, enough of this she thought and bellowed out the order breaking the spell.
“FIREEEEE,”
The whine of the arcmagnetic conductors climbed to an almost unbearable pitch, it seemed to last forever, the gun crew covered their ears, gritting their teeth. The electrical chorus was suddenly replaced with a single deafening boom as the Merlin railgun bucked and fired. The sky reverberated with the sonic boom caused by the solid sturginium-alloy round punching confidently through the sound barrier. It was instantly lost to sight leaving only a trail of searing fire behind it as it plunged towards its target.
The Hochmeister colossus in the lead paused, its head pivoting in sudden alarm as the enormous shell pulverised its right shoulder. The impact sheared off the titanic mechanical arm carrying the riveted zweihander, spinning the metallic monster and showering the water below with armour fragments, gears and oil. The colossus staggered and then lurched to a halt, the head and shoulders slumped as fire erupted from the shoulder joint. It toppled, crashing face first into the ocean.
The gun crew began to cheer but Charvi silenced them with a bark “there’s two more out there, get back to it”
She began to calculate the next firing solution knowing the Colossi were getting closer as they stepped around their fallen brother and continued advancing. Her scrap of paper was yellowed, and covered in the dense scrawl of diagrams and equations, she flipped it over briefly to smile at the neat handwriting of her husband, his previous letters had always given her courage in the midst of battle.
They had run a little shop in Shepherd’s Bush, an automata repair outfit that aligned gears and re-punched code cards for the well-to-do’s domestic help. Faiaz, was the cheerful proprietor that dealt with servicing requests for the ubiquitous Mister Butler or Ms Maid units that went on the fritz. Charvi worked out the back in the den of broken metal men , it was her happy place and where she found her thrills. Nothing was more pleasing to her mathematician's mind than a well-calculated and programmed punch card and she could still recall the clangs and bangs of the workshop as if she was back there now.
“SSSIIRRRR” the hand roughly shaking her arm and a bang of another kind snapped her back to the present. She looked to see the smouldering remains of the nearest Merlin railgun on the beach and its gunnery crew scattered in the sand. More shots were raining down and the artillery positions came under attack.
“Traverse, ten degrees. Elevate four. Charge for ten, we want a proper hole in this next fellow. Move it”
“Aye!” came the shout of her crew. The gun began to swivel sideways, the elegant mouth of the barrel looking directly up at the nearest colossi as it closed in on them. The enemy raised its own weapon, planning to end them as it had the other Merlin.
“FIIRREEEE!” Charvi shouted, throwing her arm forward pointing toward their foe.
The round cratered the chest of the colossus, the kinetic energy enormous at this distance. The shell punched clean through its back, sending a geyser of glimmering RJ-1027 fuel out in a foaming jet, vital systems ruined, its synthetic lifeblood pumping out into the ocean. A second walker was down, one more to go. Charvi smiled, pleased with her crew’s work, and took another second to look at the letter again. Faiaz’s flowing script read:
My Darling,
I cannot lie, you being away has been harder than I expected but I’m so proud of you for signing up to serve. What can I tell you about here? I don’t think it's as exciting as where you are. The shop is busy, and Rosie has been so helpful in keeping the place going but there’s something I need to say….We didn’t mean for it to happen… I didn’t know if you and I had begun to drift apart even before you left…but Rosie and I have developed feelings for one another and now with you on the other side of the world, I think it might be for the best for us both if we end things. The papers are on the way, please sign them.
I know you may not want to hear this but I will always love you.
F
Opening misty eyes she looked down, seeing she had slightly crumpled the letter in a fist she hadn’t meant to make. Overhead the remaining colossus suddenly towered above them, raising the zweihander, ready to plunge it through the harbour wall to admit the Imperium fleet into the bay.
The shadow washed over Charvi who snatched up her chewed pencil and began to scribble furiously all over the writing of the man who had once loved her. She calculated not just her own gun's firing solution but also those of the remaining Merlins set along the beach. Grasping the telephony handset, she rattled off the elevations and transversals to all remaining gun chiefs and received shouted back acknowledgements.
The air above the beach warped and twisted with the heat radiating from the gun coils. The incessant hum that had been so awful before, was nothing compared to this. Each of the guns synchronised to fire at the last enemy unit bearing down on their final defences.
“FIRE FOR EFFECT,’ she boomed into the handset so as to be heard above the fully charged guns. Immediately dropping the set, and herself face down into the sand.
The Merlins sang a song of death as they fired together, the searing comets that launched from the barrels gave the impression the colossus had been run through multiple times by monstrous spectral spears. The rounds sheared through metal armour, splintering hydraulics and voltaic channels. There was an explosion from somewhere within it, a crunch that pushed plate outward and caused silver fire to leak through the gaping wounds. The titanic zweihander fell plunging into the bay tip first, standing upright like Excalibur whilst the mechanical body sank below the waves, the fires hissing out as the ocean claimed another metallic body.
Mumbai’s harbour wall was unbreached. The Imperium fleet slunk on the horizon, and Charvi fancied she could hear seething German curses on the wind. She looked through the rangefinder. Ten-point-eight kilometers……Well within range.
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