Sgt. Golem: Royal Mech Hussar - Stubs Soon!

The soldiers around us tensed. We had ten men with us. The rest of our men were upstairs in second-floor windows or on rooftops, wherever they could find a firing position. I knew there was another squad working its way through the forest north of town, but I hadn't seen them.

We left our building by the back door and started working our way up the street. The Russians had spotted Hannah's mech and were opening fire from buildings all over town with rifles and at least one machine gun. The Hungarian sergeant had gone across the road to rally the other group, and Wysocki and I, with the others, started clearing house to house.

At the next house, a small one-story building, three of our soldiers rushed straight in with more eagerness than skill. There was a lot of pounding footsteps and slamming doors but no gunfire. A minute later they came back out breathless, declaring the house clear. We moved on to the next one, a larger two-story shop with an apartment over it. This time I took point, brandishing a Colt .45 in my right hand and a new Steyr Hammer in my left. I had picked it up when we had raided the regimental quartermaster back at the town. It had a fixed magazine like my old one, but twice as long, and the gun was fully automatic. Strange combination, since it would take two stripper clips to reload it, and 16 rounds of 9mm didn't last long on full auto. But at close range, it could be devastating.

A Polish corporal followed me, wielding a pump shotgun. He immediately turned and ran up the stairs as I continued to sweep the first floor. I checked under the kitchen table and behind closet doors. Nothing.

Rifle and shotgun fire roared from upstairs almost simultaneously, then two more shotgun blasts. I met the corporal at the foot of the stairs. He looked grim. "Almost got me."

As we returned to the street, Sergeant Wysocki assigned two men to go up to the second floor of the house and secure shooting positions.

The door of the next house down burst open. Two Russian soldiers rushed out. They were as surprised to see us as we were to see them. I fired first. My machine pistol sprayed them with 9mm rounds, and both of them were hit. One still raised his rifle, but the Polish troops near me gunned him down before he could fire. The bodies fell in a heap.

There was a flicker of movement at one window. Several of our men fired, shattering the window and putting holes in the wall all around it.

I dashed over to the door, stepping over the fallen Russians on the house's back steps. The door had closed. I kicked it in. The door shattered , spraying the kitchen with shards of wood. I stepped through. The door to the next room was open and a Russian soldier stared at me in shock. He was clutching a wounded shoulder and tried to raise his rifle one-handed.

I put two rounds of .45 ACP through his chest. Even as he fell, dead, blinding pain exploded behind my eyes. I staggered. I hadn’t though a skill headache would hit me when shooting a handgun. Back home, I had fired thousands of rounds on the range, both in the military and afterward, as a hobby.

That made it even worse now. I had trained in a style of handgun use in the military and learned two or three other techniques on my own afterward, including entering some practical handgun competitions. Most of those techniques involved holding a gun in two hands, with a variety of stances. That gave a stable platform to rapidly engage targets.

It was a very modern style. I knew from a book I had read years ago that the US Army and Marine Corps had trained people to fire 1911s one-handed back during the World Wars. Whatever I had gotten from the Hungarians had apparently been similar. Rather than a stable, modern two-handed grip, my reflexes wanted to simply point and shoot.

The new reflexes crashed hard into deeply-engrained habits and caused me a world of pain. It took me minutes of agony before the feeling began to recede.

As I came out the house, Hannah's mech was moving up the street. Behind it came our car and truck. Hannah herself rode in the car, her hands extended. The shield she cast was deflecting an impressive amount of incoming fire from the Russians.

With the convoy serving as a major distraction, we cleared the next couple buildings easily. The occupants were focused on shooting out the windows at the massive war robot instead of paying attention to us sneaking in the back door. Each time I came outside again, I got glimpses of the action along the main road. The mobile fortress was belching smoke from several holes, and its rate of fire had slackened. I had lost sight of where our other chargers were, but it was apparent they were still firing.

I cleared three more buildings myself, one of which wasn't much more than a shed. All three were empty. My squad ran past the mobile fortress without taking fire. The crew inside was apparently distracted. None of its many machine guns fired in our direction.

By the time we had cleared our side of the main street, the battle was almost over. Our Hussars had blown up one building entirely. Two other structures were riddled with holes, and our forces had them surrounded. No one inside was shooting, so we weren't in a big hurry to charge in.

The mobile fortress sat smoking with multiple holes on the south side from the howitzers. I grabbed a big wrench I found in a tool shed and climbed up on the hull. I pounded on the biggest hatch with my wrench. "Come out and surrender!" I yelled. "You are finished! You have no hope! Give up, and you will be well treated!" I took full advantage of my newly-granted knowledge of Russian.

I heard arguing inside, and then a gunshot, followed by three more. Sounded like the Russians were having a debate with their commander. A moment later, the hatch squealed and opened. Smoke poured out, followed by Russian soldiers. By the time I got down off the monster tank with my prisoners, the final two buildings in town had been cleared.

The battle was won. Our casualties were remarkably light. I remained busy, organizing the troops while Angelica and the officers discussed our situation.

It was decided we would fall back toward Transylvania and set up a defensive position. My two maintenance corporals and I were given the task of seeing if we could get the mobile fortress running again. The plan was to run it into the gorge, disable its engine, and blow its wheels. That would leave it as a roadblock for anyone coming up the pass after us.

"Will it even fit in that gorge?" Corporal Sękowicz asked. We were standing on top of the armored beast, looking into the hatch. The smoke had mostly cleared. Corporal Jędrzejewski started down inside.

"I don't know, it'll be a tight squeeze. We can at least wedge it in the hole."

The two topside hatches both looked too tight for me. There were some larger hatches on the side, thickly armored and dogged from the inside, apparently intended for maintenance use. Corporal Jędrzejewski got one of them open and let me in.

Inside was a mess of blood and bodies. The stench made me gag. If I had designed golem superbodies I would definitely not have given them as good a sense of smell.

The engine itself was in decent shape. Most of the damage had been to the occupants, not the machinery. Apparently my recently uploaded knowledge included heavy engines, so I set to work. The monster had two, one in the front and one in the back, each driving different sets of wheels. That explained how it had been able to make it up this mountain pass.

As a weapon of war, it didn't seem practical. It was much too large and too slow to evade anti-tank fire. But as a concept, it was terrifying. I could see why militaries of this world had been messing with the idea for years.

I wondered how long it would be before smaller, more mobile tanks would catch on. In my own world by this time, English and French tanks were getting pretty advanced.

A fortress like this thing was a sitting duck to chargers. Though, if we hadn't brought howitzers, that might have been different. There were at least a dozen dents in the side from our smaller autocannons. I found one place where a smaller caliber round had punched through from the north. When I studied the hole, I saw it was in the middle of several overlapping smaller caliber dents. That must have been Tamara’s work.

Impressive. I doubted most mech riders could command the kind of accuracy needed to put four or five 35 millimeter rounds into the same three-foot patch, even against a stationary enemy.

We managed to get one of the engines running and disconnected the drive on the other. The controls themselves were even more complicated than the hauler’s had been. We brought in one of the captured Russians to explain it. Between the complicated controls and running on only one engine, it took hours to get the thing out of town and even more to get it up to the narrow part of the gorge.

It did fit, but just barely. The big metal wheelhubs scraped several times as we tried to maneuver it around the bend in the middle of the gorge. Our car and truck had gone on ahead to the west and weren't going to be trapped, so we ran the engine up to full power and turned the machine hard into one of the walls. It ground against the stone and stopped. Not wedged tight, but it was a start.

After that, we ripped out vital equipment for both engines, disabling them as effectively as we could. Some of my new knowledge was demolitions, which was awfully convenient. I couldn't tell if it was from the original Polish load or from the new Hungarian knowledge. Either way, I ripped out wiring harnesses and modified cannon shells to be improvised explosives with impressive ease. It would have been nice to have some proper demolition charges, but the explosives, when they detonated, made a satisfying whomp and sent columns of smoke pouring out of all the open hatches.

Next, we set about using more shells and hand grenades to try to damage the hubs of the wheels. They were incredibly strong, thick steel. Our first few attempts merely blackened the axle and took a tiny chip out of a spoke. We were just about out of ideas when I realized there was a massive wrench strapped to the back deck of the fortress. A tickle in my brain told me it was for removing the huge bolts holding the wheels on. It looked like it would take several men to use. Or one golem.

About ten minutes later , we had all the wheels off. We rolled them one at a time out of the gorge to the east. Hannah and Eva carried each of the wheels up the nearby cliff and threw them off. They made a hell of a racket hitting the rocks below. Some of their cleat plates broke off, and they ended up warped and damaged beyond usability. It was an easier method than wasting whatever precious explosives we could scrounge to try to blow up hardened steel.

I gave the mobile-no-more fortress a final kick. “That ain’t going nowhere,” I said, and we moved back up the pass to rejoin the rest of our unit.