It was starting to get light outside. As the airship lifted away from the treetops, I got a good look at just how high I was before the swirling mists closed in around the gaping door on the side of the air machine. There was no time to lose. I had to capture or disable this thing before it got too far away from the ground and my allies.

I dashed forward and yanked open the hatch. The thin aluminum sliding door flexed and almost ripped off its rail as I slammed it open. Directly in front of me, a golem froze, staring at me with the closest I'd ever seen to surprise on one of their blank faces. I shot him between the eyes.

The thunderclap of the .45 in the closed corridors was like someone hitting both sides of my head with a baseball bat.

The quarters here were tight, and the thing had not yet realized that most of his brains were no longer in his skull. I shoved the golem up against the wall and squeezed past him.

Up ahead, I passed a galley and other small rooms. Then came two small open hatches, on either side of the gunship, opening onto small turrets. In each, a golem sat behind a gun. Both peered into the darkness below, intent on their task. I almost felt bad sticking my .45 against the back of their skulls as I shot one, then whirled and shot the other before it could react. I didn't envy whoever had to up clean those turrets later.

Slightly farther along, I found the cockpit. The space was crowded with controls, levers, and chairs, as well as massive banks of dials. All the usual cockpit stuff, with a bit of steampunk flair.

There were also two golems. The first golem sat in a chair near the door, in front of a massive bank of instruments. He move to stand and I shot him in the chest. His hand shot out and grabbed my arm just as I fired again. My second shot grazed the side of his head the head, off-center. His head jerked to the side as the panel behind was sprayed with blood. The golem’s lips peeled back in a sneer.

"You, you're the aberrant one. You should come to my laboratory. I would love to study you." The voice was rasping and inhuman, as if pried from the throat of the normally stoic golem. This one also wore a different tunic than the others, dark blue instead of a light gray, but still without insignia.

I twisted my gun arm against his grip and shot him in the mouth. This time he went down.

"What the hell was that?" I hadn't heard one speak before, and hoped I hadn’t just shot the only other golem with a mind in all of eastern Europe.

My slide wasn’t locked back, so I had I had at least one round left. I didn’t want to damage the controls, so I held my fire.

The second golem lunged up from the controls. Its chair was tied against the control panel, and it had to struggle to get clear. Its hands stretched out, straining to get me. It got its leg free and lunged. I only had the one round left, and I still didn't want to shoot in the direction of the forward controls.

Did you know you could judo throw someone while holding a .45 in one hand? I hadn't known that. I'm not quite sure how I did it, but my body had a lot of interesting reflexes now. The golem sailed through the doorway into the narrow corridor behind. It crashed face-first into the aluminum deck. I fired my last round into the center of his back and quickly reloaded. As I finished, the golem on the floor was thrashing and twisting and trying to get to me. Its legs didn’t seem to be working. It took three more shots to make the twitching stop.

As I crossed the cockpit, the dizzying array of instruments and levers filled me with panic. My head swam, and then came the familiar headache. I slipped into the seat. Everything fell into place. My hands slid over the levers with the easy familiarity of getting behind the wheel of my old pickup truck. Trim for level flight. Re-pitch the main propellers. Shove the left pedal to bring us around. A bit more pitch on the main drive for thrust to complete the turn.

Just outside the glass windows, misty-shrouded mountains slipped past. I glanced at the compass as I executed a roughly 180-degree turn. I hadn't felt a big turn since we took off, so hopefully this would get me back to the camp. I throttled back the trimming blades and we settled lower, brushing the tops of the trees. Ahead, there was an opening. A field. But it wasn't the camp.

There was another airship parked in it, and it was swarming with golems. How many of these things were there?

I swung my commandeered flying machine around the clearing. It was big enough for two of these machines with room to spare. From above, I had a great view of the one on the ground. It was about the size of a Chinook helicopter. Instead of main rotors there were two sets of much stubbier blades, which my brain called ‘trim rotors’. The engine pods in the back stuck out farther and had propellers.

As I looked over the scene below, I saw the golems were leaving. A row of them was streaming into the other airship. Many of them had heavy weapons slung over one shoulder, so I almost missed the one that carried a girl instead.

"Eva!" I shouted.

It was definitely Eva. There were no other girls in Polish uniforms with long red hair in the area. My gunship swung past the clearing and arced around. I thought desperately. I didn't have any guns I could control from the cockpit. All the turrets were mounted on the sides and manually operated. I turned wide to come back around. In the distance, I noticed the looming gray curves of an airship, nestled in a ravine a mile away. The mist closed in as I completed the turn, and I lost sight of it. More strange golems, or was it the Russians?

The landed gunship came back into view. I angled my trim propellers and dove for it. The golem carrying Eva was already aboard, so I couldn't take the risk of ramming directly into them. Instead, I aimed for the rear rotor blades.

I swooped in low, barely skimming the top of the other gunship. Something thudded further back on my own craft. It lurched in the air and then yawed hard to the left. Something was wrong. I turned into the yaw and let it take me all the way around.

The other gunship was lifting off the ground. It shot past me, ascending rapidly. The rotors were for trim and vertical control. Most of the lift was provided by a desh-powered luff engine. Even if I had broken one of its rotors, it wouldn’t have stopped them from lifting.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

I adjusted my trim and angled upward, trying to chase them as the enemy gunship disappeared into the clouds above. Their luff engine was set to high lift, and I would need the engineering station at the rear of the cockpit to turn up my own lift. My station only had control over the trim rotors.

I swore and glanced over my shoulder, trying to gauge how far the other station was. Could I get back there and adjust it? It was impossible. The yaw hadn't stopped, and we were spinning out of control. I throttled back on the main engines, and the turning stopped. One of my main propellers must’ve been broken.

Now my machine was almost uncontrollable, might still have golems aboard, and I had lost all chance to go after Eva. It was definitely time to land. My wild turn had taken me away from the clearing again, but I worked the throttles and swung back around in another complete circle. I throttled back my right hand engine and nosed down.

I managed to level off the gunship just before it slammed into the ground. The impact almost threw me from my seat. The structure groaned but held together. Any landing you can walk away from, as they say.

I pulled the lever down and set the luff engine to idle.

Something was stomping down the corridor outside the cockpit. It was time to get out of here.

I stepped into the hall and opened fire, emptying half a magazine into the first golem, and then ducking back into the control room. Standing by the engineer station, I was out of line with the corridor. I waited one heartbeat, two, three, and then heard the body of the one I had shot hitting the floor.

There had been another behind him. This time, I didn't even step out. I just stuck my gun around the corner, lined it up down the hall, and emptied the rest of the magazine. A quick reload later, and I was moving down the corridor. The first golem was sprawled out, the second one was slumped against the wall, slowly sliding downward. He feebly lifted a gun as I put two more rounds through his skull.

As soon as I stepped off the airship, I took off running in the direction I thought camp lay. I put the nearest big peak on my left. Staying at this elevation should get me home.

By the time I got back to camp, the morning had dawned gray and damp. The trees dripped. I tread carefully across slippery pine needles as I approached, calling out ahead to make sure anyone on guard wouldn't open fire at a golem coming through the trees. A Polish private with a bandage on one arm met me at the perimeter. Damaged mechs lay strewn about, but none of them were ours. There was a pile of golem bodies and a neat line of Polish and Russian ones. Most of the Russians were young women. The sight drew me up for a moment. I still wasn’t used to teen girls fighting and dying like this, even if I had the blood of more than one mech pilot on my hands. I understood why. That didn’t make me like it.

Tamara ran over. "Oh, thank goodness you're okay." Angelica and Veronica stood near the Red Widow, both with glum expressions. "It's good that you're here. Major Popova insists you need to fix Eva's mech.”

“There's no time to lose," the Russian woman said. I was glad to see Angelica had gotten the better of her after I’d left.

I shook my head. "Eva's been captured. I saw the golems loading her onto one of their gunships."

"Yes, we know," Angelica said, her face grim. "And they tore open her mech and took the firestone."

I opened my mouth and then closed it as I thought furiously. The attack was starting to make sense. “It was Frankenstein, wasn't it? How did he know about the gem?”

The Widow interrupted. "That doesn't matter right now. Every moment we delay, the link could be lost completely."

"What do you mean?"

"Eva's mech is still magically bonded with her. Even with no power, the link may not have faded yet. If you can transplant a new desh engine into it, we can keep that connection alive and use it to find where they've taken her."

I looked sharply at Angelica. "Is that—"

She shrugged. "No idea. They don't teach us that much about how the mech magic works, only how to use it." I saw a look on Veronica’s face that made me think maybe she had a thought, but she was keeping it to herself.

"Where is Eva's mech?"

Tamara pointed up the mountain, her expression grim. "Up there, where they took her."

Angelica's mech stomped over. "Climb on,” she said. “My charger will take you there. We've already extracted a desh engine from one of the fallen Russian units and sent it up with Corporal Sienkiewicz."

I nodded. "Okay. And tools?"

"Already there too."

Her mech crouched down. I eyed the handles on its back There was no time to be lost. I scrambled up. With one hand on each of the handles behind its shoulder blades, and my toes precariously positioned on a lower pair, I was not at all secure. I held on tight as the mech straightened up.

"Hang on, this will get bumpy."

What the hell was I doing? With a lurch, the mech took off. By the first few bounding strides, I was already regretting my decision. As it started weaving between the trees, throwing me from side to side, I cursed myself for a fool.

My hands were massive and had unbelievable strength, but the handles I was grabbing were too small for a comfortable grip. The metal dug into my palms. My feet kept slipping off the lower rungs, forcing me to fight to reclaim my toeholds.

It felt like I was in a rock-climbing competition in the middle of an earthquake. If I survived all this, maybe I could invent a new extreme sport. The mental image of a climbing gym wall mounted on hydraulic pistons to make it shake violently was almost enough to make me laugh.

My grin vanished as the mech leapt over another boulder. I gritted my teeth and hung on for dear life. Clinging on the back, I couldn't see anything. Eventually, I got the rhythm of its movements and braved hitching myself a little higher. I pulled up and managed to get one of my hands on the grip on the machine's head, peering over its shoulder.

Trees and rocks bounded ahead of us in the early morning light. I repeatedly ducked to avoid branches whipping past. The metal man, of course, paid them no mind.

Eva’s antique charger was sprawled across several large stones. The chest armor had been pulled aside by incredible force. There was a hole where the desh engine should have been. I remembered from my earlier maintenance that that was where the firestone had nestled. We hadn't understood how it had powered the mech, so we had just left it in place. Two Polish privates stood by, one of them with a bandage around his shoulder. Corporal Sienkiewicz was hovering over the mech, wringing his hands. When he saw me, his face flooded with relief.

"Sergeant, they need us to—"

I nodded. "I know, we've got to get the desh engine in there."

"I have no idea where to begin."

I wasn't sure I did either, but I didn't tell him that. "We'll figure something out."

In the end, it took 45 minutes and three blinding headaches. The guts of Eva's mech were unfamiliar at first, but after I'd been taking them apart for a while, and after my second headache, it all started making sense. I wasn't sure what knowledge had been loaded in me that made such an antique machine familiar, but I said a silent blessing for the Hungarian scientist who had selected my training program. Twice I sent the Polish soldiers to salvage fittings and contacts. Fortunately, there were several smashed Russian machines nearby, courtesy of Tamara.

With the last connections made, we sat back and surveyed our handiwork.

“Well, no way to know if it works until we try it.” We bolted the armored panel back over the chest cavity and stepped back to give the machine room. I had no idea if a normal Charger's Bond could reach as far as they had taken Eva. By now, they could be hundreds of miles away.

We only had a minute to wait after the last bolt was tightened.

The machine stirred like an old man rousing from a nap in his favorite easy chair. It shifted and then stood, glancing around the room as if looking for something.

"We need you to find your master," I told it, hoping it understood.

The machine turned and pointed.

"Quick, who has a compass?"

One of the privates did, and we took a bearing just south of due west.

"Well, that's something," I said, a bit surprised it had worked. "Ok men, let's get back to the others."