The carriage was a prison of velvet and iron.
I sat hunched forward. I had to. The massive oxygen tank strapped to my back made leaning back impossible. The brass collar of my helmet dug into my shoulders with every bump in the road.
I looked out the reinforced glass window.
Outside, the world was green and alive. The French countryside rolled by in a blur of summer colors.
Napoleon rode a white stallion, laughing as he raced a courier. Charles rode a black gelding, his face set in grim concentration.
They were free. They could feel the wind. They could smell the grass.
I smelled recycled air. Rubber. Oil. The faint, metallic tang of my own decaying lungs.
KHH-HHUUUU.
The regulator hissed. A constant, mechanical rhythm that replaced my heartbeat.
I was thirsty.
I tilted my head. I caught the rubber straw inside the helmet with my lips. I sucked.
Lukewarm water. It tasted like brass.
I wasn't eating anymore. I was refueling. I wasn't sleeping. I was powering down.
"Administrator," Fouché said from the opposite seat. He looked pale. He hated riding in the 'Iron Carriage' with the monster. "We are approaching the Strasbourg sector. The border."
"Any sign of the enemy?" I rasped. My voice boomed from the chest speaker, too loud in the confined space.
"Scouts report nothing. The road is clear."
Suddenly, the carriage jerked.
The brakes squealed. The horses whinnied in panic.
We stopped dead.
"Why have we stopped?" Fouché asked, reaching for the door handle.
"Don't," I ordered.
I looked out the window.
The lead element of our column—ten Chasseurs—had stopped.
They weren't dismounting. They were falling.
One by one, they slid out of their saddles. They hit the dust without a sound.
No gunshot. No smoke. No scream.
Just men dropping like marionettes with cut strings.
"Sniper!" Fouché yelled.
I kicked the door open. CLANG.
The heavy steel door flew off its hinges. My hydraulic strength was hard to modulate when I was adrenaline-spiked.
I stepped out.
The pneumatic steps groaned under my 400-pound weight. My metal boots sank an inch into the dirt road.
KHH-HHUUUU.
I walked toward the fallen men.
The rest of the column was in chaos. Horses were rearing. Soldiers were spinning in circles, muskets raised, aiming at nothing.
"Where is it coming from?" a sergeant screamed. "I can't hear the shots!"
I reached the first body. A young corporal.
I knelt. The servos in my legs whined.
I turned his head.
A small, neat hole in the center of his forehead. No powder burns. No massive exit wound.
I looked at the ground.
I saw a glint of lead.
I picked it up with my articulated brass fingers. It was a ball. But not a musket ball.
It was smaller. .46 caliber. perfectly round.
Pfft.
A sound like a suppressed sneeze.
DING.
Something struck my chest plate. It didn't ring like a bell. It sounded like a hammer hitting an anvil.
I looked down. A lead smudge on the brass, right over my heart.
"Air rifles," I rasped. The speaker amplified my voice to a roar. "Girandoni pattern. High pressure."
Cagliostro. Of course.
He had equipped the Austrian Jaegers with the weapon that was too expensive and fragile for regular armies. The Girandoni air rifle. Silent. Deadly. And capable of emptying a twenty-round magazine in seconds.
Pfft. Pfft. Pfft.
More sounds from the treeline.
Three soldiers behind me dropped.
"Take cover!" Napoleon shouted, trying to control his horse. "They are in the woods!"
But the soldiers were panicked. They couldn't fight ghosts. They were breaking.
"Form on me!" I boomed.
I stood up. I turned toward the treeline.
I made myself a target. A giant, shining, brass target.
"I am the cover!" I shouted.
I walked forward.
CLANG. CLANG.
Pfft-DING. Pfft-CLANG. Pfft-THUD.
The bullets hailed against me. They struck my chest, my legs, my helmet. It sounded like being inside a metal drum during a hailstorm.
My oxygen gauge flickered. The impacts were jarring the sensors.
"Warning. Structural Integrity 90%," I thought.
I didn't stop. I marched into the fire.
Suddenly, a shadow slid behind me.
Charles.
He didn't run. He moved with fluid precision. He pressed his back against my oxygen tank.
He used my hip servo as a rifle rest. He leveled the Whitworth sniper rifle.
"Range 150," Charles said calmly. His voice was muffled through my thick helmet, but I heard him. "Elevation 10."
BANG.
The crack of the gunpowder rifle was deafening compared to the silent air guns.
A figure fell from a tree in the distance. A man in green camouflage.
"Target down," Charles said.
I kept walking. I was the shield. He was the sword.
"Two degrees right," I rasped, spotting a muzzle flash—no, not a flash, a shimmer of gas.
Charles adjusted.
BANG.
Another Austrian fell.
We were a tank. A single unit of war. I absorbed the kinetic energy; he delivered the lethality.
"Charge!" Napoleon screamed, seeing the enemy revealed.
The Chasseurs rallied. They spurred their horses past us, sabers drawn, charging into the woods.
The silent ambush broke. The Austrians, revealed and terrified by the metal giant, fled.
I stopped.
My suit was pockmarked with lead smears. My left pauldron was dented.
KHH-HHUUUU.
Charles stepped out from behind me. He reloaded his rifle.
He looked at my armor. He reached out and touched a fresh dent over my gut.
"They aimed for the soft spots," Charles said. "They knew the schematics."
"Cagliostro designed the suit," I said. "Or he guessed the engineering."
I walked over to a dead Austrian Jaeger. I picked up his rifle.
It was beautiful. Walnut stock. A black iron air reservoir screwed into the butt.
I looked at the pressure gauge on the rifle.
It looked exactly like the pressure gauge on my chest.
I crushed the rifle in my hand. Wood splintered. Metal bent.
"He's mocking me," I growled.
"What?" Charles asked.
"He's using my technology," I said. "Compressed air. Life support. He turned the thing keeping me alive into a weapon to kill my men."
I dropped the twisted wreckage.
"It's not just an ambush," I said. "It's a message."
I looked down the road toward Vienna.
"He's telling me that my science won't save me. It will just make me a bigger target."
Charles looked at the road. Then he looked up at my glass eyes.
"Then be a bigger target," Charles said. "Be the biggest target in the world. And while they look at you..."
He patted his rifle.
"...I'll do the math."
I nodded. The heavy brass helmet dipped.
"Mount up," I ordered. "We don't stop for ghosts."
I turned back to the Iron Carriage.
I was a monster. A tank. A target.
But I wasn't alone.
And for the first time since the surgery, the cold metal against my skin felt a little less like a coffin.