Sgt. Golem: Royal Mech Hussar - Stubs Soon!

Dr. Victor Frankenstein, Grand Duke of Transylvania, strode through the halls of his castle, accompanied by a pair of his Model 8 golems. They had been an attempt at a more favorable strength-to-body-mass ratio. While he found it important for his lab assistants to be strong enough to handle heavy equipment and bodies, the full-sized golem bodies required a great deal of food. Model 8 topped out at 4 feet 8 inches tall but kept the usual golem muscle density, making them short and squat, like the dwarves of childhood folklore. He had discontinued experimentation with this line after the unit’s spines had developed an annoying tendance to hunch, but he still had a few units in his service. The pair behind him carried empty bottled lightning jars to replenish in his third lightning chamber.

The castle was dark and chilly. Fortunately, Frankenstein and most of the occupants didn't mind. Golem eyes worked well in the dark, Golem bodies were resistant to temperature extremes. It saved a great deal of cost in fuel, and he only really needed good light in his laboratories anyway.

Frankenstein climbed the tower to his new prison cells. He had repurposed the old dungeons. Why waste them on prisoners when they were the perfect storage for fresh bodies for experimentation? The cool temperatures would keep the bodies stable for years if necessary. Of course, it was still important to have facilities for unwanted guests. Frankenstein had long experience dealing with other people's prejudices, and so he had outfitted two of the old castle's towers with locks on the outside of the doors and stationed Golem guards at the bottom.

This tower also housed one of his lightning chambers. He instructed the Model 8s to place their jars in the topmost room, connected to the long cables leading down from the forest of lightning rods on the castle roof. The weather looked promising tonight. Just hot enough and the air rumbling with power. He was quite likely to get a lightning strike. While his machines could and did use a variant of desh fuel to bring Golems to life, he himself preferred to use lightning for the newest model in each run. That primal force of nature, in his opinion, lent a little more grace to the creation.

He dismissed away his servants before descending one level to the only occupied prison cell in his fortress. Here he unlocked the door using the great ring of keys he trusted to no one but himself. The room was airy with a window looking out. Bars on it, of course. No sense letting prisoners choose to end their confinement and their lives by leaping 40 feet to their death on the rocks beneath the castle. It was crowded with a small bed, a chamber pot, and a furious young woman.

The girl leapt up and threw herself at him, her hands flailing. He caught her easily, lifting her off her feet and letting her dangle.

"Tut-tut," he said. "I know you were raised in a forest without the benefit of civilized companionship, but surely you understand this is no way to treat your host."

The girl Eva spat at him. "You monster!"

"I have heard that one before. Try something more original."

"Let me go!"

"Or what? You'll tell Baba on me?" Frankenstein shook his head. "No, my dear, you are here as my guest until I have unfurled your grandmother's secrets. I do not think she will attack me while you are in my care."

"That stone isn't yours," Eva cried. "What do you want with it, anyway?"

She kicked out at him, her legs connected with his shin, but he barely noticed. He had modified the pain receptors in this body, keeping all of the nerves in his hands just as sensitive as ever while dulling most of the rest. It was stupid to completely block your pain receptors if you cared about your body, but Frankenstein changed his out every six months or so, whenever he came up with a better design. He was already considering possibilities for his next upgrade, including a few too daring even to whisper about.

"I'm glad you asked," he said cheerfully to the girl. "Why don't you come and see?"

The girl glared at him. "Put me down."

He did.

"Now," Frankenstein said, "if you will give me your parole just for an hour or so, and promise not to try to escape or attack, I will allow you to see just what it is I'm up to. I will be lunching shortly, and I would be pleased to have you join me. I know you have been subsisting on the same diet I feed my servants, but I assure you, I set myself a much better table. And don’t think to run. My castle and grounds are filled with many deadly hazards."

The girl stared up at him sullenly, her arms crossed in front of her chest. It was hard to believe that this was the descendant of the most powerful woman in all of Europe. But then, Frankenstein had not been much to look at in his original body. Not with the limp, and hair that had started to fall out before he was twenty years old, and the nose no woman had ever brought herself to see past.

He banished that thought. The entire point of being a mad scientist was the ability to correct the flaws in yourself that everyone else considered unfixable.

At last the girl said, "Very well, I will not attack you while I am out of my cell, unless you or your golems attempt to harm me first."

He lifted an eyebrow at that, noting she said nothing of trying to escape, but he was confident that she had no chance. All of his golems had basic security directives in their load. They would know Eva was not one of the castle's authorized occupants, and detain her for him to deal with at his leisure.

Frankenstein led her down to the large Research Lab 2, where he kept his one-off experiments, the ones he wasn't sure would work as intended. There were more security measures on this lab, including a pair of the Model 3 golem, the one he sold to the militaries and used himself as muscle. It was probably the body plan that most Europeans thought of when they heard the word "golem." Giant, seven-foot-tall meat slabs with a generically chiseled face and hair programmed to grow no more than two inches long.

The girl did a quick double-take as she passed them, staring up. That's right, she hadn't been exposed to many golems, not living in the forest with Baba Yaga, so most of her experience would be with that rogue sergeant attached to the Polish Hussar unit. Frankenstein was resolved to deal with that minor inconvenience soon, once he'd unlocked the secrets of the Firesoul.

The lab was full of some of the odds and ends from previous experiments. Jars of captured lightning sat in corners, crackling with potential. There was an alchemical station across the room with bottles of frog's eyes and bilious liquids, dried body parts from every creature from the cockroach on up to humans. A silver astrolabe helped him predict the next round of werewolf attacks from his unpleasant neighbors, and a whole collection of golem heads he was working on were mounted hooks on the wall.

The girl's eyes widened in horror as she stared at the row of heads. Frankenstein was annoyed. He'd spent a lot of time working on those. He was eager to get a new line of servitor golems that would replace human servants in all the best palaces in Europe. He had hired at exorbitant wages the butlers and best cooks from across Europe to extract their knowledge in preparation for making new modules. This inconvenient little war was getting in the way of his marketing opportunities. With the Russians and Hungarians duking it out on his doorstep, his supply lines were at risk, which was why he was taking action now to secure his own borders. Once he had his newest line of defense golems up and running, no one would be able to challenge him here in his own valley or anywhere in Transylvania. They would come to accept the new status quo soon enough. After all, this part of Europe had always been ruled by various strong men. He just intended to be the last.

The firesoul sat on a pedestal in the center of the room. Long curling copper wires ran from its harness to a table on which lay a covered body. The girl's eyes narrowed as she studied it, her eyes dancing over the similarly-covered slab on the far side of the room.

"Care to take a look?" Frankenstein asked, and then, before she could answer, he twitched back the sheet, revealing his new model combat golem. "I have refined some of the difficulties with the old model. This one is slightly shorter and slimmer, as you can see, which will make it more limber. I am developing a new form of martial arts specifically for these golems."

"Why is it connected to the firesoul?" Eva whispered.

"Because," Frankenstein said, "aside from the increase in strength and dexterity the firesoul will offer, using Baba Yaga's own power, I think I will be able to overcome the single biggest limitation that comes with being a golem."

"And what's that?" the girl asked, just as he had hoped she would.

"Why, control, of course. Golems have such limited ability to take and receive orders. Any time they are confronted with a scenario outside of those limits, they freeze up. That's why I had such difficulty getting you here. You have no idea how hard it was to get through to them that I wanted you brought here alive."

Frankenstein shook his head. He'd had to send one of his special deputy golems, the ones imprinted with a stripped-down version of his own personality, along to oversee. He didn't like letting those out of his control. Not after the trouble he'd had a few years back when one of his deputies got into its head that it could replace him permanently.

"But you see, I believe that if I bring golems to life with the Firesoul, I can make a permanent connection to them. I can already do that at great cost," he frowned, remembering how he had spent an entire day in his room with a migraine after the confrontation with that rogue golem. He'd had to. He'd ended up having to destroy that body entirely, replacing it with his current form, because he just couldn't get the blinding pain out of his head. Babayaga’s ability to project her power over great distances was indead impressive. Soon he would turn that power to his own advantage.

"With the firesoul, I shall be able to build golems that are stronger, sturdier, and more importantly, completely under my authority," he declared. "With the last few restraints that keep me from fielding an army capable of conquering most of Europe removed, I will at last be in a place to force the world to recognize my brilliance."

"Uh-huh," Eva said, not looking particularly convinced. "So what's the scheme then? You're going to take over Hungary next, or Russia?"

"I have not yet decided. Russia offers some interesting opportunities," Frankenstein said. "They are used to dealing with strong men and have a base of serfs that I could replace easily enough with golems."

It was unfortunate that his experiments at producing fertile female golems had yet to bear any fruit. He was not yet able to replace the peasant or serf with an upgraded model. Not entirely. Some would have to be kept for breeding stock, but Russia had always had more people than it needed. Perhaps he could make a deal with some of the Russian strongmen, trading his new and upgraded golems for a few thousand unwanted serfs. With a large docile population to experiment on, he might make progress.

"How come you're a golem yourself?" Eva asked, staring up at him. "It took me a minute to be sure. You don't look like Sergeant Golem, but you are one, aren't you?"

He frowned. "Your wayward sergeant is a Model 3 golem body. This is a Model 6B-Alpha, a variant of my most specialized design. Golem bodies are far superior to those of ordinary humanity. We are immune to disease, resistant to poisoning, able to go days without food and water. And of course, once I had learned the secret of transferring my consciousness to a golem body, mortality was no longer a concern. I was born over 200 years ago."

"Uh-huh," Eva said, prowling through the lab, looking at the Desh refining machinery apparatus stacked against one wall. "Plenty of nutters come to Baba Yaga asking for immortality or renewed youth. She always turned them away, said that it was against all of nature, everything she stood for. That if she wouldn't do it for herself, why would she do it for anyone else? She said that the old have to give way to the young. That's how the world has always worked."

“Considering Baba Yaga has been around for a thousand years, I find that hard to believe.”

Eva shook her head. "You don't get it, do you? Baba Yaga's power has been around. Her name has been around. But this one is no older than she appears. You're meddling with things you don't understand, Dr. Frankenstein."

Eva's eyes went dark. She lowered her voice and spoke. Her words chilled Frankenstein to the core. "You don't know what you're messing with, good doctor. You have invited destruction down on yourself. You might have gotten away with it if you'd just stayed holed up in your fortress. But no, you had to go and get the girl involved."

Then Eva blinked. She cocked her head to one side. "What happened?" she asked. "Did you? Am I?"

"What's the matter?" Frankenstein asked.

Eva shook her head. "Nothing." She was studying him, an intent look on her face. Frankenstein felt a chill run down himself. Had that been Baba Yaga talking to him? Could she dominate the girl the way he could dominate one of his golems? That made sense. He should have taken the opportunity to deliver an edict. Perhaps a piece of his mind suggested that it had not been Baba at all, but the girl trying to get under his skin. He considered that and then rejected it. The girl had been raised in the backwoods and spent the last three months trekking about with some barely literate Polish peasants. She would be no better equipped to clash wits with him than he would be to fly.

Well, for now. He was still working on plans for that model, and it was going to take some time to get off the ground, as it were.

"Come," he said cheerfully, leading Eva over to the other covered body in the room. "Let me show you this. It's my most recent model."

He flipped back the sheet, revealing the head and upper torso of a young, naked woman. The girl's eyes widened.

"What?" she looked up, horror in her eyes. "What are you planning?"

"My current line of Golem products are too restrictive. I intend to venture out into offering female models useful as cooks, maids, and other roles. But in this case," he waved a hand, "I wish to continue my efforts at harnessing the by-product of desh engines."

"Istota," Eva breathed. "You want a golem that can burn Istota? You want a golem that could pilot a mech?"

He shrugged. "I am not certain that the mechs bring any value, as opposed to an entire army of super golems powered by the firesoul," he said honestly. "But yes, I do intend to do experiments with such. Unfortunately, I do not have a mech pilot module to load into this Golem, although I am certain my adjustments have made it so she would be capable of channeling Istota. I shall have to make a new module before I can activate her."

The girl's eyes narrowed, but she said nothing.

"Don't you wish to know how I make my modules?" Frankenstein prompted.

The girl shook her head. "No. In fact, I think I've lost my appetite. Why don't you have one of your friends escort me back up to my cell?"

"Nonsense. What kind of a host do you think I am?" Frankenstein gestured toward the door, and the girl reluctantly followed him. He gestured for both of the golems he had left at the door to follow them up through the meandering wings of the castle to his everyday dining room. There, a long table had been laid, with two places set at one end. He pulled out the chair for Eva. She sat. He took his own seat at the head of the table and rang a small bell.

A troop of golem waiters appeared, carrying covered trays. They set them down in front of Frankenstein and the girl. Frankenstein sniffed. His sensory receptors were far keener than the average golem's. He could detect the smell of cinnamon and honey from one dish, the aroma of roast lamb from the hearty goulash, as well as the redolent herbs in the softened butter for their brown bread. He served himself, and noted that despite her protests, Eva sat to eating with vigor.

"I make my golem education modules by consulting with experts," he said, just as if the conversation had not paused fifteen minutes prior.

The girl said nothing as she devoured her lunch.

"I have brought in experts in every martial art in Europe. Keen riflemen, mechanics, drivers, even doctors. I extract their knowledge in a format that can be uploaded into a golem."

Eva's eyes were drawn back to his face with horrid fascination.

"Extract?" she whispered, the word seemingly pulled unwillingly from her lips.

"For humans to teach other humans, it is sufficient to tell and show and perhaps write down concepts. Golems cannot learn that way. They must have their brains imprinted with the information directly from another brain. I have perfected the art of extracting such patterns from a human mind and storing them so they can be used on a golem. It is an unfortunately destructive process. While I have had a few subjects survive physically, their brains generally are, shall we say, scrambled."

He smiled and ate another spoonful of the spicy paprika-heavy goulash.

"So, as you say, I have not previously had a chance to make an impression from a mech rider. I was so pleased when my golems brought you back to me alive."

He leaned over and looked directly into Eva's wide-staring, horrified eyes.

"If Baba Yaga is listening, let her know that I am a reasonable man and can be negotiated with."

He leaned back in his chair.

"Of course, if another candidate for extraction were to present herself to me… I find you have value as a hostage and would certainly prefer to keep your brain intact. But one way or another, I will be creating my Istota golem soon. Keep that in mind when you return to your cell, will you?"