Prologue – the Strider Ship
Note: I find myself writing a series of first chapters, looking for something that will hook me into writing a full outline. All of them, so far, have had something to do with a journey, all have involved some sort of self-sufficient community wrestling vestiges of an ancient, malformed world. If this is what's consuming by brain, I figure I just need to start writing and eventually I'll build the momentum for it to come out.
The mech vomited fire and smoke as it barreled, servos screaming, over the last dune. For months, the inhabitants of the sand strider had been aware of the machine's pursuit; the advancing black plume of its smoke trail had affirmed their worst fears. They had not been forgotten or forgiven. The men who tended the crumbling ruins of Kharst had, amidst all the decay and destruction, found the spite to assemble the ruins of an ancient war machine and fling it out into the desert after them. Now it had caught them up, and, fires burning within its stony chassis, it screamed toward them like a maddened engine of the apocalypse, driven to crush and tear before collapsing itself into wreckage.
The inhabitants of the strider – “crew” was the wrong word for a people who expected to reside within it for the remainder of their days – met the onslaught with determination. Their escape from Kharst had been furtive: in secret, and over many months, they had conducted repairs on the strider, pulling into it components from many machines from the scrapyard of giants that ringed the city. They had stolen, welded, oiled and murdered to bring the machine – dignified in its ruin, even after centuries – back to a state of working order. Then two hundreds had boarded, families from the forgotten outer ring of Kharst, and, one night when the revelries of the city center had risen to a frenzied pitch, and the glow of bonfires had lit the as-yet-still-pristine towers, they had stolen forth, through the corpse ring of war machines and out into the silent desert.
They had hoped that they would be forgotten; one less wreck, one more empty neighborhood in Kharst's decrepitude. They turned their eyes to the horizon, where, legends said, lay other lands, vibrant and fertile, where perhaps their grandchildren's progeny could dwell. They settled within the comfortable chassis of the strider – as large within as a middling tower of Kharst – and established all the comforts of home. Gardens and cisterns covered every unused inch of the deck. Rooms once dedicated to the housing of troops and munitions now held families, store rooms, a school. There was even, fantastically, a library, gathered at the insistence of a small band who refused to let all knowledge and all stories wither in the dust of Kharst. All this was tucked up in the belly of the strider, whose ancient core hummed and drove its limbs to advance steadily north. A year had passed, and the exiles had begun to think that the city had let them go, and that this tiny world of theirs would be left undisturbed.
When the plume of smoke had first appeared southward, a thin trail that at first had wavered and disappeared in the wind, some had hoped it was nothing; a desert phenomenon caused by the passage of the strider. As the plume grew, its dark cloud following resolutely in their trail, these voices had silenced, and preparations began. The strider was home to their community, but it had once been a weapon of war, intended at its conception for the siege and destruction of Kharst. Balistae, long maintained, hoped never to be used, were unfurled from the deck. Watches were set, and families planned their retreat into the heart of the machine if a time of violence came.
Now the smoke-stained colossus was driving towards them, in the last stage of its relentless pursuit. It evoked the twisted skeleton of a man; bone white, the grinding gears and cables powering its motion exposed to the desert. Its chassis was segmented, and sheets of plate metal – clearly the work of the modern men of Kharst and not of its first creators – covered places where it had riven asunder in some long ago battle. Smoke poured from a dozen holes in its chest. Its head was a skull of white stone; where jaws may once have hung was now grafted a canon glowing with heat. From the nozzle spouted tongues of flame as it faced the down the strider. It was, in fact, a shambling wreck, its once titanic destructive power spent by centuries in ruin and a year driven, unmanned and unmaintained, across a desert. Sand ground in its innards. There had been no thought of its returning to Kharst – it had been sent to rend and crush, and then to detonate.
As the mech came into range, the strider stood at the base of a now dead river. The balistae lifted massive boulders. The first volley slammed into the mech's head and body, knocking away plates but leaving the innards undamaged. The mech roared like a blast furnace, and as the balistas readied another volley it slammed in to the strider.
By mass, the strider was the larger machine, its long metalic body held up by a series of limbs which braced and steadied against the blow. Nevertheless the mech struck it with concussive force, denting the outer hull, the heat of its frame igniting what plants and wooden equipment had been left on deck. One of the bastilaes fired again, its arm flinging harmlessly against the mech's frame, the boulder passing wildly overhead and landing with a thud beyond. One skeletal arm swept across the surface of the strider and grabbed a tower at its mid point. There was a scream and a thud of twisting metal, and the building collapsed inward, crushing those within. With its other limb the skeleton began to slam its fist upon the deck, each blow like that of a towering, malignant blacksmith seeking to puncture it and grab at the organs and people within.
The strider heaved forward, and with its greater mass it lifted the other war machine up and back, its screaming limbs dragging on the rocky surface of the river bed, its titanic arms still raining tectonic blows. The strider accelerated, then, where the old banks of the river bed rose up, tipped its nose down and slammed the mech against a wall of rock. There was a rending and a crushing sound, and one great shoulder buckled inwards, the arm in its socket falling lifeless. Bellows and screams still resounded from the mech's core, its body streaming smoke unabated even as the strider hauled itself backwards, leaving its enemy exposed upon the rock.
Up the mech lurched, its great arm hanging and all but one of its mighty appendages broken and shattered. Fires belched from its core. Sheet metal that had been welded clumsily to its frame now ran molten and dripped to the ground. Its eyes stared with autonomous madness at the strider, now out of reach and readying for another blow. From the cannon beneath its skull-like frame there came a noise the like the rending of iron, rising swiftly in pitch and volume until it became unbearable to those deep within the bowels of the strider, the light within the nozzle blinding all who still clung to their stations on deck. The mech leaned forward to unleash an attack that would destroy both its foe and itself.
At that moment, the remaining balista on the strider fired, hurling a massive boulder in a swift ark that struck the mech in the heart of its burning, exposed chest. It slammed through the innards of the machine, shattering the engine at its core before passing through its back in a gout of fire. A hulk of glowing, fiery metal sailed backwards and fell with a monstrous clang onto the stones of the riverbed. The eyes and the cannon of the mech went suddenly dark, and it pitched forward, lifeless, like a monster struck to the heart. No fires burned, but the black, billowing smoke seemed to increase, wrapping the great war machine in a veil of darkness to hide its ruin.
The alarms wailing within the strider were silenced. The fires that raged upon its deck were doused. The dead, who were miraculously few yet an unutterable loss for the colony, were found, buried, and mourned. The next morning, a party was sent out to the still smoldering wreck of the mech to see what could be salvaged. There was remarkably little. The old war machine had little to offer, save a few metalic cables and sheets of metal. Better, argued the exiles in their councils, to let the machine burn away as the last vestige of Kharst. Repairs were made to the strider, crops were re-sown.
And so, on the dawn of the second day after the battle, the strider heaved itself up and turned to the north. Behind it, in the base of the ancient river valley, lay the mech of old Kharst, the last trial put forth by the decaying city from which the exiles sprang. They looked again toward the horizon, and wondered, to themselves, where they would find a lasting home.