John fought running battle after running battle throughout the night. The Harc’otti were relentless in their attempts to attack the town until suddenly everything was quiet again.

He took the moment of peace to run and rearm. During the fighting he had completely exhausted his rifle ammo, both the gunpowder stuff and the pneuma rounds. He had been forced to switch to his revolvers toward the end, and even that ammo was now running low.

Every round he fired was well spent, but that didn’t mean much if his supply was limited. Sooner or later, the materials he brought with him would run out. If the Harc’otti kept up attacks like this, that was going to happen far faster than he was comfortable with.

Night eventually turned into day without any further attacks from the barbarians. The scene that greeted the first rays of dawn was a grisly one. Corpses lay strewn in a rough perimeter around the East side of Ember Creek but it wasn’t what John expected to see.

Only one in three corpses was a Harc’otti warrior. The rest were women or elderly. The savages had used their non-fighters to drain the town’s resources. The non-fighters didn’t even have weapons. They had sticks shaped to look like weapons to trick the scouts into wasting the limited supply of ammunition on them.

What sickened John was the fact these people seemed to have come of their own accord. They had to have known their fate, yet they had still followed their warriors into the attack. It was a vile approach and spoke volumes of the type of people the Harc’otti were. They were just as bad as Jacob and his group.

Despite the tactics used, the town had survived. John shook his head and walked away from the line of corpses. Someone would be along to clean them up and bury or burn them. While the town had survived the overnight attack, it hadn’t done so without loss. Three of the scouts had been killed by Harc’otti archers who had gotten too close without being noticed.

They still killed far more than the Harc’otti but that was a moot point. The Harc’otti had a lot more people. He didn’t have an exact count, but between the battle the day before and last night, John suspected three to four hundred Harc’otti had died. That was a small drop in the bucket, he had seen over a thousand stationed near that treeline. And if they were now throwing in their women and infirm, he couldn’t say for certain how many they could bring to the battle. Even if they only managed to kill a few citizens a night, the town was going to run out of able-bodied defenders far quicker than the Harc’otti would.

Something needed to change and fast.

John made his way over to Travis’ yard. He needed to convince the man to stop wasting his time building whatever nonsense he was working on. He needed to switch to crafting weapons and ammo. Firepower was their only advantage at the moment, arming even ten more people in town could mean the difference between winning and losing the next fight. Survival meant another day they could arm more people.

Eventually, the town would have enough weapons that the Harc’otti’s numbers would be meaningless.

Seeing as the train was out of commission, and Daniel was six feet under, they had plenty of raw materials to work with now. Hell, if it came down to it, he would send people out to dismantle the train. There was more good quality steel in the locomotive than probably all of Ember Creek at the moment.

Speaking of the train, he glanced off in that direction. The black cloud from the coal fire was still curling into the air, hardly diminished from the previous day. He wondered how long it would take to burn out as he reached the artificers compound.

The compound was quiet, save for some light banging and cursing from beyond the wall. He realized the nearly omnipresent sound of the drop hammer had stopped at some point during the night. Maybe the man had finally finished working on whatever had gotten him so fired up the previous day.

John pounded on the wooden gate, which was locked. It was the first time he found the entrance barred since he arrived in town. Probably Seline’s doing if he had to guess. The compound was close to the edge of town and a prime target. The fighting had gotten close to the place during the night. He glanced over at an arrow protruding from the wall. Perhaps closer than he knew.

“Who is it?” Travis yelled from the opposite side. “I’m closed for business, come back later!”

John sighed. “It’s Smith!”

“I don’t care if your name is God, I’m closed!”

Did the man seriously not recognize his voice? “It’s John Smith. Open the damn gate!”

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“Oh, John… Why didn’t you just say so in the first place?”

John opened his mouth to reply but thought better of it and clamped his mouth shut and ground his teeth as the mand fumbled on the other side to unlock the gate.

“Give me a moment, gate’s giving me some trouble. This is why I don’t bother to lock it, stupid gate,” the man muttered. “Ah ha!” There was a clank and the gate swung inward as Travis poked his head out.

“Oh, it is you, John. I thought for sure someone was just mimicking your voice to get me to do some work for them.”

John stared at the man. “Maybe you hit your head harder than you thought. Are you sure you’re ok to be working?”

“Pff, I’m fine. Seline kept an eye on me.”

John pushed the gate open, making the man step back in surprise. “And where is the Deputy?”

“Oh, she fell asleep a few hours ago,” he stated offhandedly as he walked back toward his shop. “Have you come to take a look at what I built?”

He wanted to say no, but he decided to humor the man to speed the conversation along.

“Tada!” the man said, gesturing with both his arms at what looked like some sort of metallic torture device.

“… I don’t know what to say.”

“Brilliant, isn’t it?” the man beamed with pride.

“What is it?”

“I call it the human conveyance device. It’ll revolutionize travel.”

“Uh, huh… It looks like a pile of scrap loosely in the shape of an ostrich.”

“It is not a damn ostrich,” the man huffed.

“I told you it looked like one, Uncle,” Seline cut in as she came around the front of the building looking like she hadn’t slept hardly at all. “Hey, John. I heard you two shouting so came out to see what the fuss was about.”

“Sorry for waking you,” he replied.

She shrugged. “I shouldn’t have dozed off until someone else relieved me anyway.”

“So, this ostrich, what’s it do?”

“It’s not an ostrich, it’s a human conveyance device.”

“Yeah… nobody is going to call it that, so you might as well give up.”

The man let out a final huff before continuing. “The ostrich is a marvel of design. I took what made the walker such a versatile automaton and condensed it with the help of the clockwork components in our enemy's armor. And the best part, it runs on this!” the man plucked out one of the crystals from a bag with a gloved hand.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t those armored suits need a constant supply of water to keep from essentially melting? I don’t see a water tank on the ostrich.”

“Of course it needs water! And it has a tank. That tank will get you about two hours of operational time before it needs to be topped off again.”

John pinched the bridge of his nose. “That seems like a real hassle to deal with. Why such a short amount of time?”

“What my uncle is forgetting to mention, is that unlike the armored suits, these things can be shut off. So the crystal can be saved from cracking. That two hours of run time is also at full speed. You can reduce the speed and extend the duration. At half speed, it would be four hours, and at a quarter speed, eight. We’re not quite sure how fast they are yet.”

“Ok, that seems better, have you tested it yet?”

They both looked at each other before turning back to John.

He let out a breath. “You're afraid to test it, aren’t you?”

“It’s a prototype,” they said in unison.

“Someone needs to test it, and you two are the only people who know how to operate automata.”

“Oh, I almost forgot, we simplified the controls so anyone can operate it with just a bit of training.” Travis looked at him. Then continued to look at him when John didn’t reply.

“You want me to get on that metallic deathtrap?”

“If something went wrong, you have the quickest reflexes,” Seline replied sheepishly.

“I don’t even know where to begin. How do you even sit on it?”

“This was Seline’s idea. We built it so that any standard saddle would fit. And you can see it has reins just like a horse.”

The thing did have reins that led up to a metallic protrusion at the front of the construct. He decided to get a closer look at this thing. He saw stirrups, but they were connected to metal rods that ran into the body. “What are those?”

“They control your speed. Push down on the left one to go faster, push on the right to slow down. Simple.”

“Simple? And what if I need to stand in them?”

Instead of looking put off by the question, the man smiled and pointed to a small lever that would sit in front of the saddle. “Flip this lever and it will lock the speed at the current setting. It also functions as the brake if it’s stopped.”

Ok, he understood that much. John moved around to the front of the thing and stared at the strange metal protrusion with a circular hole in the center. “Is this a cannon?”

“I’m calling it a one-pounder!” Travis proclaimed. “I designed it after seeing what the Harc’otti did with their steam rifles.”

John’s opinion of the device shifted from thinking about it as a more useless version of a horse to its application as mobile artillery. Mobility and firepower would be a game changer. Now if the Harc’otti got more armor, these things might be able to easily deal with them. Assuming it even worked. “How do you reload it?”

“The hard way, I’m afraid,” Seline commented. “but I’m working on a similar magazine-style mechanism as I built for your rifle. I figure that should allow up to five shots and that’s pushing it. Any more and you risk emptying the water tank.”

“Do you have a saddle?”

“Does that mean you’re going to test it for us?” Travis asked in excitement.

“Slow down. Let me get a feel for it before I decide to risk myself on this crazy thing.”

“It should be mostly safe,” Seline added quietly, earning a glare from her uncle and a skeptical look from John.

The man did indeed have a saddle. He placed it on the back of the metallic construct and sinched down the leather strap in a groove that would prevent the saddle from sliding. John sat in the saddle. It felt like a really short horse. But he could tell the legs were folded up underneath it.

That would make it easy to get on and off. He took the reins in his hand and tugged them side to side slightly. He could feel them move as they slid in and out of an opening along the front. If he had to guess, they led to the steering mechanism. It did seem pretty intuitive. He sighed internally, was he really going to do this?

“How do you start it up?”