The Pack Howitzers were a fussy piece of gear, a compromise between firepower and portability. They could be broken down into man-portable chunks and reassembled almost anywhere. Just not easily. The crew had one of them in operation and was still fiddling with the other when I showed up. Communication wasn't a problem since everyone here spoke fluent Russian, but they were a bit skeptical at taking targeting direction from a golem.

The nearest transformer complex had already been destroyed. The NCO in charge of the team seemed doubtful that they would be able to strike the next one across the valley. The guns had the range, but possibly not the accuracy.

The bombers carrying the Polish Hussars flew over while we were working with the guns and were intercepted by enemy craft. I watched helplessly as they made their drops.

Only two of the bombers made it away, and one of those looked badly damaged. But I counted parachutes for all the girls and their mechs.

I wasn't able to pay more attention to them than that because things on our side of the valley started heating up about the time the Russian chargers got to the bottom of the ridge. Several well-camouflaged bunkers revealed themselves. Grass heaved aside as a set of heavy doors swung up almost directly below us, a couple hundred meters into the valley. Coil and sphere antennas of a lightning gun rose up out of the ground. I shouted to the howitzer crews to target those sites, and they sprang into action, dropping shells all around it. Before they could zero in, the lightning gun fired. Blinding light sheared across the slope from the antennas toward the nearest Russian mech.

It blasted into the grassy slope a few yards away. I couldn't see any damage to the mech or injury on the rider, but the unit stumbled to a halt and started staggering back up the slope away from the lightning gun. It didn't seem to be moving properly anymore. The howitzers fired again, dropping shells near the antennas and showering them with dirt, but it wasn't disabled. Another blast of lightning shot out and caught the mech full on.

When I blinked away the afterimage burned into my retinas, the Russian mech was a charred lump on the ground. Secondary explosions tore its gun apart, and its torso was cracked open like an egg. I couldn't make out the rider, but there were enough blackened bits scattered around that one of them was probably a body.

The howitzers roared, and both shells struck home this time, ripping the lightning antennas apart. It must have been about to fire, because sparks and bolts of lightning shot out for dozens of yards all around, lighting the nearby grass on fire.

I swore to myself. I wasn't going to cry over a Russian mech who I still considered the enemy, but for this assault to succeed, we needed them. I scoured the slope and area below it for any more of the hidden emplacements. Half a mile to the south there was a clump of rocks. Those didn't look suspicious, but a little further on was a similar-sized lump, covered in grass. In this valley, anything that wasn't flat and smooth was usually made of stone. This small hill of grass was suspiciously square in shape. I pointed it out to the commander of the gun crew.

He was skeptical but got his men shifting their aim in that direction.

Before they could get lined up, the hillock split open. Its doors swung upward, dumping dirt and grass clumps all around. The gun crew commander and I yelled at them to move faster.

Boom! Lightning tore across the slope. This time, the very first bolt struck near a Russian mech. It wasn’t a direct hit, but close enough to cook off all the ammunition in its gun and send the mech stumbling backward. The explosion tore off one of its arms and sent its rider flying.

She landed hard on the slope and didn't get up. The unpiloted mech took three more steps then pitched over on its face to lie still.

A moment later, our howitzers roared to life. One shell badly overshot, but the other landed close to the antennas. We couldn't see any damage to them from here, but the lightning gun did not fire again before our howitzers were able to fire two more volleys and destroy the site completely.

The first wave of the air assault arrived in the form of four Russian gunships. They swept in over the ridge, accompanied by two other smaller flying contraptions that must have used magic engines because they had the aerodynamics of a bumblebee.

Natasha's mechs had reached the valley floor and were starting across. The gunships swooped around them like angry hornets. Finding nothing to shoot, they swooped away, scattering across the valley before converging on the armored column of trucks and tanks approaching from the east. A furious firefight ensued.

Frankenstein's vehicles threw up an impressive wall of anti-aircraft fire, while the gunships circled like vultures and poured their own firepower down into the column. Vehicles exploded. Had Frankenstein's forces been ordinary soldiers, I would have expected to see them scurrying for cover in all directions. But the golems stood their ground, firing doggedly back at the Russian air machines.

A gunship took a hard hit; it staggered in the air. As it slowed, the gunners on the ground focused their fire, turning the flying machine into a burning wreck. Bizarrely, the wreck remained hanging in the air, a drifting fireball. It remained like that for several seconds. When its magic luff engine finally gave out, the burning wreck plummeted to the ground, where it continued to burn. Another gunship took several hard hits and started trailing smoke but remained aloft and in the fight.

I was still with the Russian pack howitzer crews and their man-portable cannons. They had told me the armor column was well out of range, so we stayed back and watched the action. Our primary targets, the nearest transformer sites, were tangled heaps of metal, which was hopefully enough to make them useless.

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With all the frantic fighting around the armored column, I almost missed when the top of the big gun-less hauler split open, and something emerged. I swore. It was a coil antenna. That thing was a lightning tank.

I yelled at the gunships who couldn’t hear me. "Focus your fire!"

The gun crews looked at me.

“Sergeant?” They're still out of range."

"Damn it, I wasn't talking to-"

I was interrupted by a blinding flash of light. A bolt of lightning connected tank to a gunship. From this distance, the sound didn't reach us for a long moment. The gunship exploded. Boom, boom. The crack of the lightning and the explosion of the gunship rolled over us, even as its flaming wreck tumbled to the earth.

"Holy..."

We all stood agape. Even I, who had been shot at by one of these things, was taken aback by the sheer abruptness of the weapon. The remaining two gunships and the smaller flying machines scattered.

I yelled impotently at them. "Focus fire while it's recharging!"

It was a pointless gesture. We were long before the era of handheld radios, and there was no way anyone on those crafts was watching for semaphore flags or even my frantic hand waving. They were on their own, and so were we.

The deep bass droning of a million bees rolled over us, and the sky was blotted with darkness. The zeppelins had arrived. The three massive forms passed over us; two turned to the right and one to the left. They slowed and hung there in front of us. A moment later, they started venting gas and drifting down to the valley below.

It was a stupid plan. They would have been better off dropping their mechs on the top of the ridge or even the valley behind, the way the Widow had done. Dropping their airships into the valley below made them sitting ducks.

The fortress opened fire, but their accuracy wasn't good at that range. We were helpless spectators up here on the ridge with no worthwhile targets in range of our guns. But it was an incredible view.

As the zeppelins started their descent, a swarm of biplanes came in from the west. The Russian fixed-wing air support had arrived. These were the smaller pursuit craft tasked with suppressing Frankenstein's defenses. Their arrival was well-timed.

The biplanes buzzed across the valley and swooped down on the fortress, one after another, strafing the upper battlements and suppressing the enemy aircraft fire, taking pressure off the zeppelins. After a few strafing passes, they headed off to the south, where I could see them harassing an enemy airstrip. It looked like some Frankenstein pursuit craft came up to meet them, but this far off, it was difficult to tell.

One of the Russian airships was descending faster than the others. I suspected it had taken artillery fire and was venting gas too quickly. The crew was slow to react, and it was still venting its own gas as it hit the ground hard. I could hear the superstructure groaning from up on the ridge, but the machine remained intact, and a minute later, I saw mechs scurrying away from it.

With the mechs unloaded, the airship lifted off and started to rise. Suddenly, almost directly under the big Zeppelin, a section of ground split open, and a lightning antenna started to rise. I opened my mouth to shout orders but froze. We couldn't shoot that close to the Zeppelin itself. The chance of hitting it was incredibly high. They needed to shoot it themselves, or the mechs, which were now scattering in all directions, needed to intervene. If they just turned and used their autocannons...

I could only stare in horror as the antenna finished rising. A bolt of lightning shot skyward and tore through the Zeppelin's gas bag. The entire center section of the airship exploded in a ball of fire. The explosion went on and on as released gas burned. It looked like a candle held sideways and hit with a blowtorch. The Zeppelin broke in half and simply melted into the ever-expanding ball of fire. As it burned, it settled onto the ground below. The lightning cannon antenna was engulfed in flames.

Few human-crewed installations would have done something so suicidally stupid, but golems weren’t human – if I did say so myself.

Several of the mechs had escaped the conflagration. The other two airships, which had been starting to descend, turned. I could hear the engines of the closest roar to life as it desperately tried to climb. It had been venting gas, and while its descent slowed, it was still going down. It picked up speed, turning to the north. The descent stopped, but before it could gain any altitude, yet another hidden bunker popped open along its line of flight. This one, over two miles to our north, was directly in front of the Zeppelin.

This airship hadn't had time to unload anything. The lightning bolt caught it across the bow, and the gas bag ripped apart. Again, the explosion seemed to go on and on, as billowing balls of fire rolled up the sides of the craft. The engines continued to drive it forward at full throttle, into the expanding ball of flame. The craft pitched forward, angling down as the ball of flame roiled upward, stretching out into a plume of burning gas.

The horrible vision stretched on and on, as seconds seemed to take an eternity. The burning wreck hit the ground. The airship squashed and split apart, spilling fire like a water balloon full of napalm. The skeleton of the ship was visible through the flames as the quick-burning gas lifted above, sucking up into a mushroom cloud. I’d seen the famous black-and-white photos of the Hindenburg disaster, but this was in full color, right in front of my eyes, accompanied by explosions and heat I could practically feel.

Dozens of human-sized figures and even a few mech forms ran from the conflagration, their shapes silhouetted against the blaze. My heart froze as I saw another figure completely engulfed in fire, staggering away before falling down, still burning, on the charring grass below. I forced myself to look away from the horror.

The third airship was rising and turning away. It had gotten almost to the level of our ridge. Another lightning bolt, this one from a bunker miles away to the east, reached out. Its crackling fingers of light brushed the tail fins of the retreating zeppelin, but there was no immediate explosion. Cannons in the fortress were firing in its direction. The whistling shells that missed the zeppelin hit along the ridge where me and the howitzer crew stood. Our guns were silent as all of us stared in wide-eyed, open-mouthed horror at what we were seeing.

It was as if that iconic photo of the Hindenburg had been brought to life and multiplied fourfold as it played out before our eyes. The surviving zeppelin crossed the ridge to our south, engines screaming. A fire burned in the tail fins. I couldn't be sure if it was from the anti-aircraft guns or the glancing blow of a lightning cannon. Either way, the airship was in serious trouble.

The captain of the final ship must have caught on to the danger. The airship slewed, venting gas and dropping over the ridge to the east, away from Frankenstein's guns. It settled softly in the valley below us, narrowly missing the airship that had brought the Widow and her force, and started spilling out its crew and mech payload into the valley below. The fire on its tail fins was gaining intensity. The airship was doomed, but it looked like it might save most of its passengers and crew.