| |
Synchronicity Jones was named for his ability to synch up mechanical inventions with steam locomotives for maximum fire power at minimum fuss. He had survived the chaos war at the end of time through his inimitable mechanical skills and his deft changing of sides among the armed militias that sprouted up afterwards. The side that claimed the services of Jones always won any engagement, even those that were reputed to be technologically advantaged. Jones’ unique capability was to design old-style computer functionality into his purely mechanical devices and to use guns, rifles, swords, mines and whatnot in innovative and diabolical ways. So he would have been considered the Leonardo da Vinci of his era if anyone knew about Leonardo any more, and his business card read simply “Synchronicity” with nothing else on the obverse and “Mechanic” on the reverse. As a sign of his intelligence the rangy Jones had a quiet sense of humor and a rugged independence, at least before Leila the female warlord came along and changed his life forever.
Now Jones was laughing to himself as he went about assembling a marvel of a killing machine that could fire with deadly accuracy at sixty targets ranged 160 degrees on either side of a train in motion. His individual pistols and rifles could automatically lock on, fire, reload and fire again at a new target within three seconds. The device with its oiled wheels and cogs required a human only for periodic reloading, major repairs and maintenance. Its self defense included whirling swords at many levels and angles. You could hear them whistle as they swung through the air. Jones had calculated the chance that a human could invade his contraption at nearly zero. In its last combat operation, the device had chopped up a dozen enemy militia fighters to sushi before their comrades backed off under withering fire from the clockwork contraption’s blazing guns. Jones thought of his machine as a clock that tolled the end of life for the victims it took.
Jones liked the new militia that had shipped him aboard because they fed him well, paid him in gold, gave him the pick of the females to use as he liked, and did not abuse him with impossible technical requirements. They told him what they needed and wanted. Then he told them what he could give them and gave them that and nothing more. Finally their warlord had struck a deal, and he delivered as promised. This warlord always paid on delivery. He had evidently heard what happened to those who did not pay, or so Jones thought. Jones’ inventions could turn on anyone Jones chose to eliminate or intimidate, so Jones felt secure for good reason.
Jones’ sidekick, who always traveled with him, rotund Chas Rayburn, was known as Engine Man because he was the best steam locomotive engineer in what was left of the world and because the mechanical drives that were powered by his steam locomotive were as elegant and precise as Jones’ weaponry was deadly. Engine Man claimed that all he needed was wood or coal, oil, fire, water and a few tools to make his contribution possible. He was a perfectionist, like Jones, but he liked facts and he had absolutely no sense of humor. What he could not fix, Jones could fix, so they were a symbiotic pair with somewhat overlapping personalities but essential, complementary skills. They were the best of friends, but they did not always agree. Sometimes, like this morning, they would halt their work to debate a design option and they would shout and gesture, but in the end they would agree on a compromise solution that worked and get back to their jobs.
The two men were professionals in a world without normal jobs or homes or families. Engine Man did not care for women or for men; he loved only his machine. So when in the late evening he stopped working, he would fall asleep in his engine house with his feet up on the dash dreaming of building a head of steam out on the frontier to run a blocked track with all guns firing. Jones would tease his friend by saying, “You sit in your engine house and dream of your engine running on tracks while I am awake in my tent firing my guns with a red-blooded woman.” Engine Man just shrugged because Jones in this mood was not to be trifled with, and they both had to think of enemy militias.
The militias were always changing position all along the tracks, and everyone had interests in keeping the railroad tracks clear and workable. Any disruptions in service were fixed immediately, and you would hear of track repair teams from rival militias mending the same track together and when they were finished, cutting each other up fighting again. Spies were everywhere and combatants were always changing sides, but Jones did not care whether the enemy militias saw his inventions before battle or not; in fact, he thought the psychological effects of seeing his hardware were useful in the fight. He was not particularly concerned for his own safety or welfare when his chosen militia would defend him with the last combatant just to keep him alive and on their side. Jones had been wounded twice by sniper fire, but in both cases the snipers had been apprehended, tortured slowly, killed and then crucified as negative examples for other would-be assailants.
Among the women in his current militia, Jones favored Judith, the warlord’s former consort, and the warlord might have objected if Jones had not made Judith part of the oral contract for his services. Truth be told, Judith liked the change from the warlord, an uncouth man who lived by bluster and savagery, to Jones the perfect mechanic who used genius and finesse. Besides, Jones knew how to please a woman with mechanical devices for he had studied what women wanted and needed as carefully as he studied the orchestration of his machine firepower. He also knew how to make a woman laugh with his laconic jokes or cry with his intimate caresses. This night Jones would cause Judith to cry out or moan in ecstasy and drive the warlord wild with jealousy and envy, but both Jones and the warlord knew that one day Jones would be moving on to other pastures. Then things could revert to the norm, and Judith would be the warlord’s mate again.
Tomorrow the militia planned to do battle with the neighboring militia to the east. Everyone spent the evening and some spent all the night cleaning and checking their weapons. In the firelight while he whistled and thought of Judith, Jones checked the synchros of his masterpiece, which floated on their gimbals like a dream. He checked the loads of every weapon, the reloading mechanisms with their metal hoists and the ammunition stores. He ran a cloth with just a little oil over all the metal surfaces, and he squeezed oil into all the feeders that automatically oiled and cooled the cogs as they turned in action. Jones was confident that his rig would do its job. The question was whether the enemy militia would cooperate. “I do hate uncooperative targets,” he whispered to himself while he chewed on a piece of bees wax.
The enemy warriors to the east were savage and inhuman as an expression of their power and rage. They killed for delight as much as for necessity, and they were known for being creative in the ways they inflicted pain. The prospect of becoming a prisoner of that militia was so uninviting that standing orders prescribed that the wounded would be given the coup de grace by their own forces rather than face prolonged torture and certain death. An example of the enemy’s sadistic cruelty was their habit of lopping off joints one at a time until only the victim’s trunk remained. Then they removed each of the soft parts, halved the trunk at the navel and extracted the beating heart by hand and delivered it to the victim’s still-seeing eyes before they were put out with red-hot stakes. The warlord’s brother and cousins had been taken, dismembered and killed in this fashion, so the warlord wanted revenge. He instructed Jones to calibrate his machine to wound, not to kill, and the warlord ordered his troops to take the wounded alive and bind them so that they could experience the exquisite pain his brother and cousins had learned at first hand.
In the early dawn light, Engine Man stoked the engine fire and the steam rose and billowed around the locomotive. The warlord and his men climbed aboard the open cars of the train to the rear of Jones’ killing machine, which trailed just behind the steam locomotive with its supply of wood and coal. The killing machine got underway slowly at first, and then with building speed pressed down the tracks to where the enemy militia lay in waiting just as the warlord’s spies had reported. Ahead on the tracks the enemy had erected a barricade, but Engine Man did not care. He set his teeth, stoked his fires and sped the locomotive flat out to crash through the barrier and then he applied the brakes to bring the locomotive to a screeching halt just beyond the busted barrier. He knew that at the moment the train stopped if not before, Jones would unleash his machine on everyone on either side of the tracks.
The hot encounter went entirely according to Jones’ plan. When the steam locomotive burst through the barrier, Jones’ machine targeted, shot, targeted again and shot again, and so forth in a withering, continuous barrage of lead. A squad of enemy militia rushed the machine but was cut to pieces by the machine’s whirling blades. In spite of their leader’s threats and recriminations, the enemy retreated and were shot but not killed by the machine in the process. When the firing stopped, all the enemy militia forces lay writhing on the ground to either side of the tracks and the warlord and his combatants jumped off the train to bind and lace the victims together with ropes and lead them onto the train for the return to their camp. The warlord saw that every one of the enemy that was shot had lived, and he nodded his approval to Jones, who was busy chuckling, checking his reloads and oiling his still-smoking machine. With a grimace Engine Man put the locomotive in reverse and began the slow run back where he started only two hours earlier. Looking back past the caboose of the train, Jones saw that smoke rose from their camp, and he guessed that the camp had been attacked soon after the train’s departure from it. The enemy militia from the west had laid waste to the camp while its defenders were busy fighting to the east. The warlord was not oblivious to what might have happened, and he had half expected that it would happen. He ordered the instant execution of all the prisoners he had taken with knives, and the prisoners’ throats were slit and his men threw their bodies, still strung together with ropes, from the train. The warlord told Jones to set his guns to kill this time, not to wound. Then the militia prepared to do battle to take back their camp.
This time the soldiers had to face those of the enemy who lay on or closest to the tracks. Jones’ machine began to target and kill when the train came within fifty yards of the camp’s center. The militia fired their weapons from the train but faced crippling fire from the enemy as they approached their camp on the train. In the general carnage two pincers of enemy militia raced from hiding on both sides of the tracks, and Jones’ guns targeted the closest enemy warriors first in a sequence that kept reloading and repeating with different targets each time and his machine walked its fires out to the farthest edge of combat. The smell of cordite and a rising fog of smoke and steam filled the air. Men and women shouted, and the ground was littered with bullet-ridden corpses while the trainload of militia was decimated by enemy fire. Those who remained alive on both sides rushed to kill each other in a melee where only those who wanted to live kept struggling. Now not guns but knives and swords devoured lives. Jones’ machine kept firing at the living enemy until all their foes were dead.
Flies and crows wasted no time when the firing stopped and feasted on the freshly killed. The beak of one large crow was red from blood. The warlord and his few remaining men began to survey the damage that had been done to their camp by the marauders in their absence. “A Pyrrhic victory, my friends, and what have we gained against such a loss?” he said.
All women and children in the camp had been slaughtered, including Judith, consort of the warlord, who had also been raped and mutilated before they had dragged out her entrails and cut off her breasts and head. What came next was not surprising to Jones, for the warlord told him and Engine Man to restock, reload and prepare for instant battle. Because of the warlord’s extreme losses of manpower, Jones’ machine would have to do the major part of the fighting. “It’s up to us, now, Engine Man,” Jones said. “So you keep the steam going and make my cogs whirl!”
Engine Man nodded and maneuvered the train so that its long trail of cars was left on the side tracks. All that remained of the train when he had finished decoupling cars were the steam locomotive and its fuel car, the killing machine and one flat car fitted with sandbags to protect the remaining warriors of their militia. The enemy had not been able to seize and carry off their stores of oil and ammunition, so Jones re-oiled his machine and fed rounds into the belts and chambers until the rig was full and ready. Engine Man took on water and wood and coal, and he built up and let free steam. Meanwhile the warlord and his men reloaded their weapons and their bullet belts, grabbed hand grenades and knives and each one strapped a sword to his waist. There were no bravado, no boasting about what was going to happen next and no questions. The warlord’s eyes glittered with grim determination and fixed on his goal to the west. Each combatant had a reason to wreak slaughter and no reason not to venture everything to do that with ruthless efficiency.
The warlord climbed aboard the car and his men climbed up after him. He signaled that the steam engine should push back to the west at full speed. Engine Man nodded and eased his iron beast into reverse motion, and Jones checked his machine one more time as it moved along the tracks before he jumped into his hide at the controls and waited. The train moved swiftly down the tracks to the camp of the enemy militia. When the train was orthogonal to the camp, the warlord raised his hand for Engine Man to come to a complete stop, and the metal of locked wheels met the metal of track in a prolonged screech. He then called for the camp survivors to come forward and surrender because their protectors had all been slain. One by one they emerged and grouped alongside the tracks on both sides of the train. Infirm old men, women of all ages and children who seemed resigned to the shift in fortune that defeat portended. One bold woman stepped forward and asked for clemency for her people. The warlord knew her to be his enemy warlord’s wife. “And will you join me now as my consort or will you die?” he asked her. She first looked defiant, but then thought better of it and said she would join him. The warlord offered her his hand to mount the rail car. When she extended her hand, he took it and swung her up onto the car so that she stood beside him.
The warlord then ordered the machine to open fire on the rest of the enemy personnel, and he ordered his warriors to shoot them dead as well. Within four minutes all the enemy except for the woman on the car was dead. She drew her knife and wheeled to stab the warlord, but he grabbed her wrist and shook her knife away. He then offered the woman his own knife so that she might try again to kill him. She refused his gesture but warned the warlord, “I will remember this day, and at some convenient time I will take revenge for what I and my people have lost.”
“I like your spirit, woman. Now prepare a feast for my men. Have it ready by the time they finish burying the dead or I will have you stripped and flogged.” The warlord then ordered his men to take over the enemy camp, to bury the dead in a mass grave and only then to eat and rest.
Engine Man and Jones cleaned their machines because they might be called upon to use them at any time. “Jones, your machine is one mean mother,” Engine Man said.
“The warlord’s new woman is a looker—and she has an attitude. I like her already,” Jones said apropos of nothing and smiling as he continued to chew his wax.
The dinner the woman, whose name was Leila, made included a rare meat stew with spices, rice and flatbread. The men ate well. After the feast, Jones approached the warlord who was lounging by the great fire his men had built and asked for his due. “Your last consort Judith was part of our deal, but she his dead,” Jones said. “Your new consort Leila should be substituted for Judith. Give her to me.” Grudgingly the warlord agreed to honor Jones’ request. So Jones acquired Leila and that very night enjoyed her in such fashion that Leila gained a new appreciation for the art of love and astonished respect for Jones’ technique. Meanwhile the warlord, angry about Jones’ having taken the woman, sent two men into the night as scouts because the land was full of threats.
The next morning the warlord ordered his men to seize everything of value in the camp and to put it on the flat car. The railroad steamed back east to the warlord’s former camp to reconnect the train and all the sidelined cars and to load the remaining valuables from their former camp. Then they proceeded to the camp of his defeated enemy to the east. At this camp, the warlord ordered his men to consolidate ammunition and stores, and he said, “Tomorrow we shall raid the next camp to the east. Our scouts report that a militia coming down from the north to attack us, and they are fleeing with their whole group including women and children. This is providential. Engine Man and Synchronicity Jones, are you ready for action?” They said they had what they needed and were happy to be busy. Jones noticed that Leila had fitted herself like a man and stood with the male combatants.
When the locomotive arrived at the camp as planned, the militia from the north attacked the train, and Jones activated his machine to slay half of their warriors and a few of their women who bore arms. Awed by the firepower of Jones’ machine, the fifty-percent who survived surrendered. The warlord ordered the surviving warriors, their women and their children to join him or be killed. A few decided to be killed, and he instantly obliged them; the warlord incorporated the remainder in his militia, which was led by the few from his original group who remained alive. He announced that his strategy was to rebuild his militia by incorporating other militias with his core group, and his followers with a single shout of approval agreed to help him to do that.
“The railroad tracks leading to the east is our path forward, and we will offer each successive militia that we meet a choice: join us or die.” Engine Man and Jones saw the wisdom of this strategy, and Jones told the warlord, “As long as we receive the supplies we need to work the magic of the locomotive and this machine, we will remain loyal to you.” Darkly, he insinuated that only by assuring his supply of oil and ammunition could the warlord avoid defeat.
So the militia moved eastwards according to the warlord’s plan, and their force grew in two months from two dozen warriors plus women and children to two thousand warriors plus many women and children. Still they kept the steam locomotive in the vanguard of their advance, and just behind it rolled Jones’ special killing machine. The larger their militia became, the less frequently Jones’ weapon needed to be employed. Finally, the warlord thought he had sufficient power in the number of his warriors that he didn’t need the machine or even the steam locomotive anymore. Leila informed Jones that the warlord intended that night to kill Engine Man and Jones and to take her back as a prize. “Leila, I knew that this man had no wisdom, and I was right.” He then told her what she should do.
Instead of going into the tent that night with Leila, he let Leila go into the tent alone. Meanwhile Jones and Engine Man stoked the fires in the steam locomotive and prepared the machine for imminent battle. When the warlord led a small group to the opening of Jones’ tent, the killing machine did its merciless work on them with headshots and they dropped dead onto the ground. Other militia ran to assist their fallen comrades, but the machine killed those also. The remaining warriors regrouped and charged Jones’ machine because they did not understand its lethal powers, and those in the front lines were cut to pieces by the whirling blades as the guns kept firing, reloading and firing again, flashing in the night. All warriors lay slain before the machine was silenced. Leila then emerged from her tent fully armed and spoke with the women and children, giving them the choice of service or death. A few chose death, and Leila slew them herself. She told the rest to be ready to continue east at first light with all their belongings.
The next morning, Engine Man and Jones were ready to depart, and Leila appeared dressed like a male warrior with a full load of weapons. She had assumed the role of the leader of the women, and the many who had imitated her she called her Myrmidons. She told the other women and children that if they did not become warriors immediately, they would be left behind. So many of those became warriors too, and some were left behind. Jones laughed to see how effective Leila was as a commander. “You are a natural woman warrior, Leila, an Amazon!” Jones complimented her with an ironical salute. The new militia led by Leila and backed by Engine Man and Jones with their machines pressed eastward invincible.
In the weeks ahead Leila became a great leader for her people and an even better lover for Jones as she emerged to fulfill her complementary roles as warrior and woman. She learned wisdom from Jones and led her women warriors by example. She never doubted the wisdom of keeping her secret weapons—by which she meant Engine Man and Jones—well-supplied and contented. She had sworn revenge on the warlord she replaced, but she saw no reason to seek revenge against machines or the men who made and maintained them. After all, her vengeance had been realized through the lethal machine that had been powered by the steam locomotive. She knew neither she nor any of her people could ever master machines as Engine Man and Synchronicity Jones had, and she understood that all her strategies had to accommodate the machines’ use on the two men’s terms.
Quickly for her victories Leila became a legend in her own time, and her troops loved her because they grew up in victory alongside her. Engine Man and Jones appreciated Leila’s gifts, but they knew that militias tended to be fickle as groups and often grew unwise. For the time being, though, the two genius technicians were content pressing eastwards and helping to grow Leila’s army militia-by-militia as they passed. They were survivors, and they were very good at what they did. “In fact,” Jones told Engine Man with a wink, “We are the best. Whoever says otherwise dies.”