The farmhouse smelled of unwashed soldiers and stale bread. We had commandeered it for the night, turning the rustic kitchen into a high-tech maintenance bay.
I sat in a heavy oak chair that groaned under my weight.
Lavoisier stood on a stool behind me. He held a wrench the size of his forearm.
"Initializing scrub cycle," Lavoisier announced. "Hold your breath, Administrator."
"Proceed," I rasped.
He turned the valve.
HISS.
The flow of oxygen cut off.
Silence inside the helmet.
My lungs immediately panicked. They were spoiled, addicted to the pressurized flow. Without it, I felt the fluid rising in my chest, the heavy, wet sensation of drowning.
I counted the seconds.
One. Two. Three.
I watched Charles. He was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, cleaning the mud from my brass greaves. He didn't look up, but his hands moved with a nervous speed.
He was learning the suit. Not just how it looked, but how it sounded. He knew the difference between a healthy servo whine and a stressed one. He was becoming my mechanic.
Fifteen seconds.
My vision blurred at the edges. Black spots danced.
"Hurry," I thought.
"Filter replaced," Lavoisier muttered. "Reseating the gasket."
Clank. Twist.
"Engaging."
WHOOSH.
The air blasted back in. Sweet, cold, chemical air.
I gasped, my chest heaving against the brass plate.
"Status normal," Lavoisier said, stepping down. He wiped sweat from his forehead. "The scrubbers were clogged with lead dust. From the bullets."
"Good," I said. My voice modulator crackled.
The door burst open.
Fouché rushed in. He was holding the portable telegraph unit—a wooden box with a brass key and a battery pack.
"Administrator," Fouché said. "We have a problem."
"Troop movements?"
"Interference," Fouché said. "The wire is picking up a signal. But it's not Morse. It's not ours."
He set the box on the table.
Tap-tap-SCREEE-tap.
It wasn't a clean click. It was a rhythmic, static-filled screech. It sounded like metal tearing.
"Triangulate," I ordered.
"We already did," Charles said, standing up. "It's coming from the hill. The windmill."
We walked out into the night.
The moon was full, illuminating the valley. On the crest of the hill, an old stone windmill stood silhouetted against the sky.
But the blades weren't turning with the wind. They were spinning too fast.
And they weren't covered in canvas. They were wrapped in copper wire.
"It's a dynamo," I said. "Generating power."
"For what?" Napoleon asked, his hand on his sword.
"Let's find out," I said.
We marched up the hill. Me, Charles, Napoleon, and a squad of Chasseurs.
The closer we got, the louder the humming became. A low-frequency thrum that vibrated in my teeth. My suit's sensors started to glitch. The HUD (Heads Up Display) flickered.
Warning. Magnetic Field Detected.
"Stay back," I warned the men. "It's electrified."
I walked to the door of the windmill. I didn't knock.
CRASH.
I kicked the door in.
The room was empty of people. But it was full of noise.
In the center of the room, a massive wax cylinder phonograph was spinning. A copper horn amplified the sound.
"Does it hurt, Alex?"
The voice was tinny, scratched, but unmistakable.
Cagliostro.
"Does it hurt to be a tin man without a heart? Or is it peaceful in there? Like a coffin?"
"Turn it off," I growled.
I stepped toward the machine.
Above the phonograph, a massive device sparked. Two brass spheres separated by an inch of air. A spark gap transmitter.
ZZRRTT.
A blue arc of electricity jumped between the spheres.
"Welcome to the Dead Zone," the recording laughed.
BOOM.
The device pulsed.
It wasn't an explosion of fire. It was an explosion of invisible energy. An EMP shockwave.
The wave hit me.
It hit the unshielded electronics of my suit. The solenoids. The magnetic valves.
SCREEE.
A high-pitched whine tore through my helmet.
Then... silence.
The pump on my back stopped.
The servos in my legs locked up.
The oxygen valve slammed shut—a fail-safe designed to prevent leaks, but now a death sentence.
I froze mid-step.
"System failure," I tried to say. But the speaker was dead. I was shouting into a rubber cup.
I lost my balance. My gyroscope was offline.
I tipped over.
CLANG.
Four hundred pounds of dead metal hit the stone floor. The impact rattled my teeth.
I lay on my side. I couldn't move my arms. I couldn't move my legs. I was a statue toppled from its plinth.
And I couldn't breathe.
The sealed helmet was now a vacuum. The air inside was getting stale fast. Carbon dioxide building up.
"Alex!" Napoleon shouted.
I saw him through the fogging glass. He drew his sword. He raised it to smash the helmet.
"No!" Charles screamed.
Charles tackled Napoleon's arm.
"Don't break the seal! If you crack the glass, the pressure differential kills him!"
"He's suffocating!" Napoleon yelled. "Look at him!"
I was thrashing—or trying to. My body jerked inside the suit, but the metal shell didn't move. My face was turning purple.
"The manual override!" Charles shouted.
He scrambled on top of me. He was small, light. He straddled my chest plate.
He pulled a tool from his belt—a simple iron crank handle he had stolen from Lavoisier's kit.
He jammed it into the emergency port on the side of my neck ring.
"Turn it," I thought. "Turn it, son."
Charles gritted his teeth. He pushed.
The mechanism was stiff. It was designed for hydraulic assist, not a twelve-year-old boy's muscles.
"Come on!" Charles screamed.
He put his whole weight into it. His boots slipped on the brass.
Crrreeeak.
The gear moved.
Inside the helmet, a hiss.
Air.
A thin stream of oxygen flowed in. Not a blast, but a trickle.
I gasped. I sucked it down like water in a desert.
Charles didn't stop. He kept cranking. Sweat dripped from his forehead onto my glass faceplate.
Crrreeeak. HISS.
The valve opened fully. The flow normalized.
My lungs burned, then relaxed. The gray spots faded.
I looked up at him.
Through the glass, our eyes met.
He looked terrified. Not of the enemy. Of losing me.
"Breathe," Charles commanded. His voice was shaking, but fierce. "I did not give you permission to expire, Administrator."
I breathed.
Khh-hhuuu.
The mechanical systems were still dead. I was paralyzed. But I was alive.
"Reboot," I mouthed.
I triggered the hard reset sequence with my chin inside the helmet.
Click... whirrr...
Lights flickered on the HUD. The pump shuddered and restarted. The servos whined as they unlocked.
I moved my arm.
Charles scrambled off me.
I pushed myself up. Clank.
I stood.
I looked at the spark gap machine. It was still humming, preparing for another pulse.
I raised my fist.
SMASH.
I crushed the device. Glass shattered. Copper wire snapped. The blue arc died.
The recording of Cagliostro slowed down, warping into a deep, demonic groan.
...coooffffiiiinnnn...
Silence returned to the windmill.
I turned to the others.
Napoleon looked shaken. He sheathed his sword.
Charles stood by the wall, breathing hard, still holding the crank handle.
"Report," I rasped. My voice modulator came back online with a crackle.
"EMP," Charles said. "Electromagnetic Pulse. It fried the circuits."
"He built a minefield," I said. "Not of explosives. Of magnets."
I walked to the window. I looked out at the valley leading to Vienna.
In the distance, I saw other towers. Other windmills. Other church steeples.
"It's a gauntlet," I said. "A Dead Zone. If I walk through that, I die."
Napoleon looked at the line of towers.
"We can't march the army through that. We'll be blind. No telegraphs. No coordination."
"We don't march through it," I said.
I looked at Charles. He was wiping the sweat from his face, his expression hardening back into the cold mask of the Wolf Cub.
"We dismantle it," Charles said.
He reloaded his Whitworth rifle.
"One tower at a time."
I nodded.
"Then let's get to work," I said. "I'm tired of playing his game."
I walked out of the windmill.
Cagliostro thought he could turn my machine off. He thought he could unplug the Administrator.
He forgot one thing.
Every machine has a backup operator.
And mine was standing right beside me, holding the crank.