“Roger dodger.” Sinclair tipped his helmet and ran forward through the deserted trench, and I slung my machine gun over my shoulder and climbed up the trench wall.
The Manual came into view, as did the field of barbed wire, mortar fire, and tanks advancing toward Strasbourg. The device was well over thirty feet in height, with pneumatically driven legs as large as my body and a central cockpit in the chest of the machine where the human pilot sat. Two large arms sprouted from the top of the central body, the right one carrying a large .50-calibre machine gun, the other missing below the mechanical elbow.
The pilot inside was peering through the bulletproof glass mounted at the front of the machine, looking right at me to get my attention. Approaching him, I could see the large metal chest piece mounted on him was tightly locked around his chest, limiting his movement. I also saw some blood on said chest piece, but it wasn’t enough to warrant concern.
“Hey, hey, Cleanup Crew this deep in no man’s land?” the pilot laughed as I climbed his machine’s back. “Check my pressure tank, see how things are going up there for me.”
“For the pneumatics?”
“For the Trauma Harness.”
I wrestled with the back end for a while before I found a mud-covered dial leading to a well-protected tank at the top of his Manual’s back. The dial gave me both a general idea of how much pressure was going into that chest piece to keep him alive, as well as roughly how much morphine was being put into his system. “You’re at thirty-five. Is that good?”
He laughed, the monstrous hands of the Manual gripping his rifle as he reloaded a fresh clip of .50 rounds from the belt connected to its shoulder. “Excellent. It means I’m coming home for Christmas. Get my leg fixed up and you can ride me to the end.”
“I got you!”
I laughed and headed down, reaching the leg, which was as large as I was. I stripped the main hose, which had frayed, and fitted a new adapter on it. The hose was jutting out of a shelled piece of steel, revealing the inner workings of the left leg, and it wasn’t too hard to find my way around repairing the damn thing.
I had trained for months learning how to fix these things head to toe, and this was the easiest repair I’d had to do in quite a while. I peered over at the Manual’s missing arm, seeing a hole where the pilot could stick an arm out to fire his sidearm.
“What happened with the arm?” I yelled.
The operator looked through the hole to speak. “A 21 Morser hit me, nearly took out my real arm. Reloading is going to be a bitch, but I got the time to do it now. How are the trenches?”
I paused, the scene of gore rushing back. I nearly threw up in the middle of the repair. “F-fine, clear. Mostly clear.”
“Good, good, Cleanup Crew doesn’t have much to clean up.” He laughed, gripping the main rifle in his machine’s right hand tighter as he prepared to take off as soon as I finished.
Moments later, a whirring sound filled the air over the hissing pneumatics. I had little time to react, but the Manual operator twisted his machine and nearly crushed me. I was about to scream at him, but an explosion knocked the machine off of me and sent me skidding several feet across the mud. My teeth were like rubber, and I couldn’t feel anything. Everything in my body was ringing and numb, like I couldn’t work it properly.
The Manual stood, its back mangled by the direct hit from a Diesel. The Central Powers’ war machine was almost double the width of a Manual, carrying two built-in 20mm cannons on its arms, one of which it had just used to fire a shell into the Manual’s back. The hill roughly fifty feet ahead of us must have given it a chance to get closer to us, its lumbering speed picking up as gravity pulled it to more level ground.
The Allied Manual swung at it, trying to tear open its chest cavity and access the many pilots driving the Diesel, but its strikes were no match for the double-plated armour. The larger robot crushed the newly repaired Manual’s leg, trapping it as the Diesel stuffed one of its cannons against the bulletproof glass, trying to get to the operator.
I didn’t know what happened next — either the operator was alive and fired his pistol at the Tesla Battery, or the cannon hit the Manual’s power source. A blinding light enveloped me, and the hairs of my beard and my eyebrows were singed. The explosion was less shrapnel than pure energy. The sound practically split my head in two and seared my closed eyes.
After the heat had dispersed, I stood up and gathered my bearings before approaching the carnage. The Diesel’s front half no longer existed, and most of the Manual had been vapourized by the explosion, not even leaving a body to mourn. I fell back down, crawled to the trench, and rolled into it. Sinclair made his way to me moments later, and though he spoke, I couldn’t hear. I felt water on my face — not mud or blood, but water. Tears. I got up and ran alongside him. It was so quiet — I couldn’t hear anything. Another Manual fell and tipped into the trench, another blew up like a tin can over a stove.
I couldn’t see — but it wasn’t because of the explosion. It just didn’t make sense. The crunching underfoot was either rocks or bones, either mud or organs. The metal falling from the
