We set out into the woods at a brisk march, initially heading to the southeast. At the end of several days marching back and forth through the woods in something that may have been an intentional search pattern, we found a rebel base. It was a small unassuming compound, a cluster of low stone buildings. Under other circumstances, I would have assumed it was a monastery or something; but the military nature of the installation was clear. The soldiers were a dead giveaway.

Gregor, as the veteran of long years that I most certainly was not, identified some of them as professional mercenaries. Based on their distinctive steel helmets, high-quality armor, and equal mix of halberds and arquebuses, they were a free company from one of the mountain cantons to the far west. Other soldiers were clearly amateurs; patriots rather than mercenaries. These were armed with a wider variety of weapons, from longbows and pistols to shepherd’s axes and boar spears.

I even saw some sharply-curved sabers that looked as if they had been left behind by the Sultan’s men when his troops had been routed by ours in the contest over Wallachia.

The soldiers seemed to have been caught by surprise and readied themselves in great haste; some wore nightgowns or pajamas under hastily donned helmets and shields; others were only partly dressed.

They were also all dead as soon as we got there. I didn’t mean that in the way military historians do when they say a battle was lost before a single shot was fired; it’s true that there were more of us, and we had steam suits, mechs, and an efficiently murderous war mage on our side, but we didn’t need any of those things to defeat them. The crows were already feasting on their corpses when we got there.

I recognized the footprints of the old lady’s mech here and there, so we weren’t even the first ones to show up after whoever killed the rebels came by; the little grandmother had beaten us to the post-battle looting. Colonel Romanov insisted that we conduct a thorough search for any survivors; we found none, but the low unassuming buildings were larger than they looked from the outside, dug deep into the earth. There was a workshop, large enough and well equipped enough to take apart and rebuild a heavy mech; and crates upon crates of parts.

The general was very excited; but after examining the labels on the crates and checking through each building, Colonel Romanov was unhappy. The rebels had stored valuable supplies here, but fuel did not appear to be among those, and we were running low. The weasel and the war mage consulted with each other for a while, conferring while the rest of us continued quietly searching for personal valuables and other objects of interest, such as fancy pistols, jewelry, coins, clothes, and other valuables that might have escaped the notice of the unknown killers or subsequent looters (such as the little grandmother).

Colonel Romanov announced that he would lead an expedition to town to procure fuel and supplies, while the general stayed to secure the base. My squad was one of two steam knight squads that escorted Colonel Romanov and the pack train into town.

The townsfolk were set astir by our arrival. Some nervous, some wary, some cheerful.

We had emerged from the woods into a farmer’s field, and by the time we reached the town proper, news of our arrival had spread to the entire local population. Rumor marches faster than draft horses. The officer in charge of the garrison of infantry posted here rode out to greet us; as he did, Colonel Romanov gave me a stern reminder that all details of our mission were secret, and not to trust anyone with them, not even our fellow soldiers.

No sooner had we marched to the barracks and gotten our boots off than the colonel demanded a quick private meeting with his squad leaders and the commander of the local garrison. Us, he delegated the shopping to; what he and the local infantry officer had to talk about, I don’t know; he sent us off before getting into anything substantial.

Ilya and Gregor had already slipped off to some sort of establishment where they expected to find alcoholic beverages and loose women, which left Misha and Vitold at my disposal. Vitold was wearing his newly acquired pistol; it was a pretty piece, with gilded inlays, the sort that a gentleman might wear, formerly belonging to a mercenary officer. A mercenary officer would have to make quite a pretty sum to afford such things, though perhaps the dead man had been given it as a gift directly by an appreciative employer in lieu of a cash bonus.

Misha had found himself a lovely new sword, with a pommel that looked like a hawk’s head. The taciturn fellow had apparently been carrying on a lengthy conversation with Vitold about how the ladies like to see signs of class like a fancy sword, but in spite of his talk, he hadn’t had the nerve to head out and about with Gregor and Ilya.

Personally, I’d found a pocket watch and a little book bound with a gold clasp on the most unlikely-looking fellow – an elderly and balding fellow whose corpse was dressed in a greatcoat with naught but smallclothes and a bandoleer beneath, wearing fuzzy slippers and a nightcap. Precious little things, even if the other soldiers weren’t interested in them, I knew they were valuable.

He’d had a triple-barreled pistol when I first spotted him, the barrels designed to rotate like a pepper mill to bring each barrel’s sparking stone in line with the hammer operated by the trigger. Unfortunately, another one of the soldiers grabbed it first. A pepperbox (as I later learned they were called) is tricky to make and almost as good as a brace of regular pistols, a very impressive gun for the purpose of showing the ladies that you are an accomplished soldier.

Misha, Vitold, and I went about rousting shopkeepers and craftsmen from their dinners and evening entertainment, rounding up an ample supply of coal – a tedious task – and I resolved to give Gregor and Ilya a firm tongue-lashing for skipping out on the job.The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

The morning found me instead fuming silently as Ilya received a very warm farewell from a giggling girl; she whispered something in his ear and gave him a kiss. It wasn’t as if he was holding up our departure, as one of the horses had thrown a shoe, so I didn’t reprimand him for the delay. His earlier disappearance had been without leave, but by that point, I worried reprimanding him for the previous night would just make me look petty and jealous.

One thing caught my eye about the giggling girl: She was wearing a pendant, an amethyst crystal in a silver setting. It looked just like one I’d seen a red-headed sharpshooter pulling off a dead rebel during our looting. Ilya must have won it from the sniper while playing cards, and then given it up last night as a gift.

Our return to camp was greeted with enthusiasm. The general had been growing impatient; sitting still wasn’t something he liked to do. The cavalryman had been sent off to report directly to High Command on what he had uncovered so far. In the two days we’d been gone, the soldiers had peeled apart the base looking for loot; only a few dozen boxes remained untouched, piled in the dark corner of the workshop, which didn’t look much different from when we’d left it two days before.

I was surprised our mechanics had left the workshop largely untouched, but then I found out the general had put them to disassembling, cleaning out, and reassembling the boilers on the mechs, one at a time – and the mechs that the general selected were rough-terrain models with heavy boilers. Not a fun job, and not really a necessary one considering the light use they’d been put to since we left the train.

Colonel Romanov decided to silence the grumbling by announcing we would be having a party tonight – we had more, he said, than we could reasonably carry with us on the march, so it was fitting to eat and drink a great deal of it tonight.

I woke up in the morning with a fuzzy head and new orders: Captain Nikita Egorov was to be placed in charge of defending the rebel base. He would do so with a single platoon of regular infantry, two steam knight squads, and one mech. This detachment would remain in place here, to ambush any rebels returning to this base, which (Colonel Romanov assured us) must be a vital link in the resistance movement’s network. The rest of the force would go with the general on his hunt for partisans.

The general took me aside for a quick word in private before heading off. He told me that in the event Captain Egorov turned out to be a traitor to the state, died, or took ill, I would take charge of the defending force, being that he believed I was the most senior of the squad leaders. (I hesitated too long to correct this misapprehension.)

Nikita Egorov was a plain-spoken fellow, thoroughgoing and hardworking, but with little imagination. His first order of business was to set up watch and mess duty schedules, which he posted by the front door of the main building. He then posted a schedule of drills, “surprise” inspections, and maintenance checks next to them. I and the other squad leaders were exempt from holding watches or taking up mess duty; Captain Egorov believed we would have our hands full making sure our soldiers didn’t shirk.

Say what you will about Captain Egorov, but he understood how to keep soldiers busy, even if the true meaning of the word “surprise" eluded him. I spent my spare time working through the little book and investigating the contents of the workshop with Vitold. (Being that we were trained mechanics, and didn’t like running the risk of being boiled alive by a malfunction, we had been keeping our suits very carefully maintained and tuned already. This meant we had some spare time, provided we didn’t advertise its existence to one Nikita Egorov.)

It turned out that the workshop contained some very valuable items. I recognized (more from manuals than from personal experience) the parts of several arcane engines as well as elemental cages, mechanically geared control systems smaller and more efficient than the ones in our mechs. It was a treasure trove, and the book I’d grabbed off the dead man with the fuzzy slippers was the key to all of it. It was the diary of the man who I assumed was the project lead, a wizard and mechanic.

It was written in Latin, though not very good Latin. My knowledge of the dead language was limited. My parents had made me sit through lessons in it when I was younger, and the old lady had some books in Latin lying around her place, but it had been years since then. It took me a while to make headway on the book; but once I did, the cache of valuable supplies suddenly made sense.

The base was a manufactory of sorts, a site where the partisans could assemble advanced mechanical tools of war. It wasn’t meant to be a base of operations for a large number of troops, those were elsewhere, though the diary wasn’t specific about exactly where. The entries of the diary described the development of an increasingly organized rebellion, one that was trying to build its own mechs and recruit or train war mages. The owner of the diary was a wizard himself, though not a war mage.

I didn’t want Captain Egorov stealing the credit, or, far worse from my perspective as a trained mechanic, ordering me to destroy the “inferior" (but actually superior) imported machinery out of a misplaced sense of imperial patriotism. The value of the machinery lying in the workshop was a secret between Vitold and myself, so far; I hadn’t told him or even the rest of our squad. The news could wait until the general returned.

On the fourth night, Gregor and Ilya had the midnight watch, and Vitold had the pre-dawn watch alongside a scruffy infantryman by the name of Andrei. I asked Vitold to wake me early, so the two of us could get a head start. I wanted to try to see if I could start up one of the cortices, and that was something best done without Captain Egorov peering over my shoulder.

In spite of my best intentions, I woke with the morning sun as it broke through the window, with Vitold snoring on the bunk next to me. I rolled out of my bed and prodded Vitold in the ribs, irritated.

“Vitold, you lazy fellow, you were supposed to wake me up!" Not only had he forgotten to wake me up at the start of his watch, but he had gone right back to bed at the end of his own watch, leaving me late for breakfast!

Vitold woke, blinking in confusion at my accusations. He stammered back excuses, and after the two of us had woken up enough to communicate properly, I worked out that he was telling me that he’d never been woken up for his watch. I stormed off to find Gregor and Ilya.

Gregor was passed out with an empty bottle at his post up in the little bell tower that served as our watchpost, reeking of ethanol to a degree that suggested a surgeon’s office. Ilya was nowhere to be seen, and when I checked through the camp, his stuff was missing – his prized boots, his pack, and his personal effects, all gone. I felt a twinge in my left shoulder as I remembered Colonel Romanov’s discussion about how the general had been struck by the coincidence between the number of intact limbs possessed by myself as a squad leader and the number of men I was responsible for (excluding myself).

I was very fond of having two arms and two legs. Ilya had deserted us, meaning that there was no longer a one-to-one correspondence between the number of my limbs and the number of my squadmates.

This was a problem.