The Clock
Tick tock. Time moves a little bit forward. A small gear turns a cog that spins a lever turning a smaller gear syncro-meshed with a much larger gear with hundreds of tiny teeth. Brass. Steel. Silver. A long coiled spring. Things move. They click and whir. There is a dusty smell and the faint hint of oil, in thick black globs congealing around edges, squished out by the teeth of the gears.
Its just a clock.
Pan back. Take a look at the old wooden clock, carefully kept and restored to working order by the Captain. The little round glass window has been recently cleaned. The three hands are clear behind the invisible class. The clock is almost six feet high and sits on a little circle of carpet, up against a metal, rivet studded wall. Thick hemp ropes hold the clock in place. The room lurches.
There is a chair secured to the floor which can slide in and out under a wooden desk. Beside, immediately beside, the desk and the clock is a short bed, unmade. The pillow would fall onto the floor, if there were room. The room is less than ten feet by ten feet. A heavy iron door, showing hints of rust is the only exit. Luckily the door opens outwards or precious room would have to be cleared simply to enter and leave.
The Corridor
The Corridor The corridor beyond is tight. Two men could pass if they turned sideways, and not at all between the bulkheads. The walls, the floor, the ceiling are metal. It is like a mechanics version of the minotaur's labyrinth. Clean. Painted gray, or white. Functional. An axe and rolled up hose connected to a pipe make one corridor narrower. Heat radiates from the pipe but hot water puts out fires just as well as cold —and there is hot water pumping through every inch of this structure, this machine.
Pan back beyond the many narrow corridors. See the steam pipes grow larger and feed a myriad of gadgets, devices, weapons and even the fans that circulate the air. Look at the giant furnace, a furnace you could fit a village in, and watch it consume wood and coal. Pan down at the gear forest, a sea of spinning gears, each larger than the entire clock but serving almost the same purpose. Steam pouring down, enhanced by gravity, pushes leavers which push cranks which turn the largest of the gears, which turn smaller gears which turn levers, which spin hundreds of attached gears which work their way back up the mech sending power to every inch of the machine. It is a think of genius and beauty.
The Gear Forest
Someone once asked why the gear forest was in the legs instead of the torso. The answer exists only in part now. Scan out through a dirty yellowed glass window. There is a barren hill, brown and rocky. A dry creak bed drops over a short cliff, only a few meters high. There is a smashed wooden building with a large shattered water wheel that once spun as the water cascaded down over the waterfall. The image moves by. The mech moves forward.
The gears spin. Pistons pump. Legs the size and groves of ancient trees move. Children hold their breath. They try to keep from breathing from the time on of the great legs leaves the ground until it comes down again. Some will not be able to do it. A rock, a boulder, shatters as the great foot comes down.
The Bridge
Up. Past the legs, through the furnace burning with a heat that melts iron to butter, up into the inhabited areas, back into the narrow painted corridors. A crew sits in a command room with controls and windows looking out in front and using mirrors to see below, beside and behind. The captain drinks his tea out of an old tea cup, something created on the surface in the time before now.
Levels above him, above the crew wielding a steel plate into place, above the stow away trying to get into a food locker, is the roof. It is a roof like the back of a whale, covered in barnacles. Steel tents, wood buildings, cardboard homes. This is a shanty town. Here and there are a few proper structures, more near the front of the mech. Further to the rear is all smoke and oil from several gigantic pipes sticking up from the back of the mech. The roof is the most open part of the mech but also the dirtiest and smelliest.
Even here it is not quiet. There is the roar of the furnace, the bubble of water and hiss of steam. Fans drone on, barely able to provide enough air to breath in the deeper sections of the mech. It is always hot and loud, worse in combat when the vents and windows are ordered closed and sealed.
The Arms
The arms are gun barrels and vise-like hands with the smallest of access tunnels, storage closets and other necessities including an access way for those rare times this goliath encounters a docking port a hundred feet off the ground. Few remain in the arms for very long. If the weapons fire, those in the arm are pounded by the vibrations.
Look beyond the mech. Look at a forest burned to the ground, the earth black and scorched. A dry lake, only stones and clay. Brown. Black. Grey. No green in sight, even from the vantage point high atop the colossal mech slowly lumbering across the wasted landscape. A trail of black smoke slowly drifting upwards and slight impression of feet the size of building foundations mark the passage of the machine across the dead planet.
The sun is a dot in the sky beating down heat and light. Dominating the otherwise clear blue sky is the hulking white moon, many times too big, many times too close. It looks as though it is ready to fall out of the sky. It is.
Lunar Rain
Lunar rain, rock, gravel and hate, fall from the sky. It pounds on the enormous steel machine harmlessly. A shanty house is crushed but the occupants were wise enough to be under real cover. It is not much of a storm. It is barely noticed. Someone writes it in the log, an order send down long ago to record the occurrences in case a pattern can be found.
This is Nedderpik, a city mech, and the last hope for all living things on this muddy little dust ball of a world.
Chicken Little was right. The sky fell. It fell and fell and fell. It fell until the forests were destroyed and the seas were gray with dust. It fell until every living thing either died or moved underground. Only the unlucky, the insane and the brave remained on the surface. Most of them perished. Cities were destroyed.
Then it got worse. The invasion began. The lunar creatures arrived, white skinned beasts of different shapes and killing efficiency with vein-pulsing skin. The construction of mechs heralded the end of the retreat. There was little further to go. The denizens of the underworld moved a little deeper as the survivors moved underground and every cave became occupied.
A mech allowed a pilot to fight a lunar dragon with a hope of victory. Society slowly crept out of the underground. It was a simple idea—build a mech so big no lunar creature could challenge it. The first one took countless hours and effort to build.
Citymechs
The citymechs do two things. It gives people a place to live on the surface, smelly and oily as it is, that can move around and is virtually immune to the lunar rain and attacks of the lunar creatures. It also provides a weapon that has cleared entire treks of land of the lunar menace so that society can start rebuilding.
Welcome to the world of steam and steel. Welcome to DragonMech.
MCDM
