Now that he had a sketchy deal in place with the mostly unknown and probably unreliable Klein family, he could open the mines.

To be fair, he fully expected Pappy to honor the deal if only to suit whatever agenda the patriarch had. And that was enough for John. It wasn’t like this was his money he was spending. Good old Daniel would certainly throw a tantrum if he learned of this, but he was back in New Gata. What he didn’t know, couldn’t hurt him.

As long as John maintained a significant influx of raw ore, the mining magnate would be happy.

The only question was, did he have enough miners left to make this happen? He was about to find out.

As soon as he returned to Ember Creek, he made his way to the workers’ camp. It wasn’t nearly as busy as it was the first day he arrived in town. But there certainly was more activity than when he came looking for Jacob.

A few people walked around with metal legs that seemed to spring back as they walked, leaving them with a slightly limping gait. Some individuals also had mechanical arms or hands. The result of injuries taken during their captivity.

John was glad to see Doc and Travis the artificer had come up with a workable solution. He had seen his fair share of men and even some women simply give up hope when they lost a limb. But these people all looked in decent spirits.

He thought that the attack on Travis’s compound might have destroyed the artificer’s only reference for crafting these artificial limbs. But it seems that hadn’t happened. John paused… Travis couldn’t have had more than a few hours to study the armor. And he had spent most of that time trying to open the suit’s firebox. Either the man had more skill with creating clockwork limbs than he let on, or he had learned more about the suits than he told John.

After he spoke with the workers, he would have to have another chat with the scatterbrained artificer.

The workers gathered as they saw him coming. They seemed eager for any news, and he was glad to oblige.

“Good news! I’ve secured a deal for protection at the mines. You can return to work tomorrow.”

A few of the workers broke out into cheers, but some of the others looked unsure. “What if those men in the suits return?”

“I’m not forcing any of you to go. If you encounter those suits, run. Nobody should have to face down those things. Secondly, I suggest you all arm yourselves with at least a pistol and a rifle if you can.” There were mutters of concern following that statement.

Another man spoke up. “Where do you expect us to get the money for that? We barely have any left after getting kidnapped, and then not being able to work for two weeks hasn’t done us any favors. I have a family to feed!” The man’s complaint was taken up by more than half the group.

He cursed internally. John had forgotten a fundamental rule. People needed money to live. It had been ages since he had needed to worry about money himself. He didn’t buy much, and anything he had needed until he was sent out here was paid for by Daniel’s father. Most of which John just stuck in a bank and forgot about.

He did have the bag of diamonds but from what he had seen in the general store, they didn’t have a huge selection of weapons. He would gladly buy them all out, but he couldn’t just pick and choose who got a weapon and who didn’t.

John rubbed his chin in thought. One option was to have the Sheriff deputize some of the workers, but he doubted the old warhorse would do that. Those qualified to be deputies, even on a temporary basis, already were. And it wasn’t like the Peacekeepers had an armory full of guns to outfit the people with either.

With his options dwindling, he started to wish he thought this through more. This is why John never wanted to be a leader, even back in his army days. He was never good at the whole management aspect.

“For now, rely on the guards, run if you need to. I will try to figure out a solution to the weapon issue.”

The group grumbled but started to break up. John watched as they began gathering their gear and piling it into wagons. They may not like the current situation, but they had little choice. If they wanted to make money, they needed to work.

Seeing as he had made a big enough mess here, he walked away.

When he found the artificer, the man was cackling wildly and staring into a thick glass window on some sort of rounded metal component. A bright white light was pouring from the window, bathing the man and making him look like some sort of specter.

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John pulled the cord for the bell and the man jerked upright.

“Oh… It’s just you.”

“Expecting someone else?”

“I was expecting Seline. But she must be busy. What did you need?”

“What’s that?” he nodded toward the container.

“That?” The man turned and looked at the container. “Oh, right, that. That is a testing chamber.”

When the man didn’t elaborate further, John sighed. “What is it testing?”

Travis scoffed. “I would have thought that would be evident. I’m testing that nifty little gemstone you provided me.”

“… Wait, that little gem is producing all that light?”

“Light, energy, same thing really. I can see why they were able to power those suits and those steam cannons now. A complete waste if you ask me. Hmm, maybe that was by design. Engineer into the suits, a failsafe to keep the Harc’otti from turning the weapons on their masters. Brilliant. Truly brilliant. I need to meet this artificer.”

Before the man could continue his long-winded tirade, John stopped him. “What have you learned? Can we use it to our advantage?"

“I don’t see why not. The only issue is collecting enough to make it worth our while.”

That wasn’t ideal, he had buried the only mine of the stuff that he knew about.

“Is it truly worth it? Can’t we just use coal for the same effect?”

The man broke out into deep belly laughter. At one point he even clutched at his stomach. John thought he was gonna start rolling around on the floor laughing but he seemed to recover from his bout of hysteria before that happened… thankfully.

“Is it worth it? My whole shop is being run on that tiny little crystal you brought me. And it has been for four straight hours. It's absurd! I have no other words to describe this material interaction. Or how they even came across it. You simply set the gem into a thick bed of salt, then add water. I’m not certain, but I think as long as you keep those three things together, the reaction may never end. It would certainly explain why the gems inside the suits seemed to self-destruct when the boiler ran out of water.”

He glanced around the shop, it did seem like a lot of the artificer contraptions were active. Then again, John hadn’t paid much attention to all the doodads lying about. The large drop hammer was especially annoying, but he tuned it out.

“Seems rather dangerous,” John replied. “Some of the miners complained of getting sick from the stuff. Is that something we need to worry about?”

“Probably.”

“…That’s not what I expected you to say.”

The crazy artificer just snorted. “What did you expect? You don’t pack this much energy into something without it being dangerous. My shop uses about a hundred pounds of coal a day if I’m using everything like I am now. Now imagine compressing that coal down to the size of my pinkie finger. That’s the amount of power that little crystal has produced so far. At least it isn’t explosive.”

“How can you be sure?”

“If it were, you would have found out firsthand. You think dynamite is powerful? If these crystals had the ability to release all their energy at once, those suits would have turned that entire valley into a wasteland.”

That was not very reassuring.

“And the toxicity issue?”

The man shrugged. “Assuming it is even toxic. Simply not handling it with bare hands should be sufficient. I worked with it all day without any issue and it’s certainly outputting way more energy now than when it was simply sitting in a mine. Have workers extract it with gloves and their face covered and they should be safe enough.”

“Ok… That’s assuming we can find more of it. What about using an alternative gemstone?”

Travis gestured around his noisy shop. “As you may have noticed, I don’t exactly have a whole lot of options to test. I did a test on quartz and a few other easy-to-acquire gems. And nothing reacts like this one here,” he said as he tapped the glass. “I’ve never even seen a gem glow like that before. Whatever it is, it's unique.”

John ground his teeth quietly. He wasn’t about to tell the artificer what the crystal was. But if that tiny fragment was this powerful, and this unknown group had an entire mine worth, maybe more… they were going to need to even the playing field.

“I’ll keep an eye out for more deposits. How are the weapons coming?”

“Faster than I expected. After I realized how unique this gem was, I added a few upgrades to my shop to speed things along.”

John took a good look at the surroundings for the first time. As the drop hammer finished pounding a roll of metal flat, a pair of clockwork arms pulled the roll off the hanger and moved it off to the side before grabbing an empty roll. “What?”

Travis chuckled in delight. “I never quite realized how handy clockwork items were. But after studying the arms and legs of those suits, I was able to recreate something similar.”

“But how? I thought you didn’t have time to study them before they got destroyed.”

The man rubbed the back of his head sheepishly. “Well… I didn’t get much sleep that night. Now, before you get mad, I said I wouldn’t try taking them apart until I slept. And I didn’t. I just studied the parts I could see… until I passed out in the yard. You found me shortly after I woke up when I was trying to pry open the firebox.”

John sighed. This man had no sense of self-preservation. It was no wonder his niece was out here to keep him out of trouble.

“So you learned about clockwork from the suits. But how do they do what they are doing?”

“Oh! They just run on rails, like a train. It’s a rather ingenious solution, I must say.”

“So you had time to craft an entire rail system for these arms when you could have been building the guns?” a bit of annoyance crept into his tone.

“Pff, no. I already had the rails in place for my cranes. I just modified them slightly to work with the arms. Now I only have to stop to feed material into the hammers and presses, instead of having to stop every time a roll needs to be changed out. Once I get some time, I plan on adding more of the clockwork appendages to really speed up my work!”

Superpowered gemstones, clockwork arms that moved by themselves, armored suits powered by steam. It was all getting to be too much for this old farm boy. He turned around and walked out of the shop, leaving a befuddled artificer behind.