Here’s the next chapter in my new novel, Trans-Continental: Cannon Belle Run! This is the third book in the Trans-Continental series, which can be read independently of Girl in the Gears and Mississippi Queen if you’re curious.

This book is being written as a serial, published and collected on this site and on Royal Road, if you want to read ahead.

Note: Reality Check, Trans-Continental, and The Multiverse Blues all occur in the same multiverse, in that chronological order.

Chapter Eight – Thomas and Goldie

Chapter Nine – Tin Man

Friday rode astride a giant mechanical albatross, screeching as she swooped down out of the sky toward me. She carried a metal staff, topped with four blunt tines, which she used to prod her mount into action. Violet flames erupted from her eye sockets.

I turned and ran, my feet sinking into sticky, spongy mud, and each step pulled at my boots with a sickening sucking sound. I moved at a snail’s pace past a glistening yellow lump the size of a haystack. A huge cluster of dark purple spheres greeted me on the far side of the lump. The avian machine struck me across the shoulders and knocked me face first into the sticky ground—not mud at all, but thick maple syrup, covering pancakes wider than the Clair de Lune.

As I rolled over, Friday stood over me, and she raised her hand to slap me across the face.

“Ida!” she cried, but her voice was that of Captain Levi. “Ida, wake up, ye lazy girl! We’re under attack!”

I blinked as his face became Levi, his face backlit by sunlight streaming in through gauzy curtains behind him. “What? Huh? Levi?”

“Of course it’s me! Get up, we gotta go. Now!”

I turned out not to be covered with syrup, so I rubbed my face with my hands and sat up on the sofa where I’d been napping. “Attack? What’s going on?”

Levi pulled me to my feet. “Dionne spotted Friday’s warship, it’s hoverin’ a couple miles away to the west. Won’t come any closer, for some reason, but it dropped off a coupla babayagas. They’re gonna be here soon!”

I let him lead me out of the house and onto the porch, where Thomas and Goldie stood, looking off to the east, where the dark mass of Friday’s massive airship loomed like bad weather.

“Thomas, are we still safe here?” I asked our bearded host.

He adjusted his hat and didn’t turn to look at me. “She wouldn’t dare. I retired.”

Levi cleared his throat. “You don’t know her, she’s more’n a little moonstruck, if you know what I’m sayin’.”

Thomas whirled, his eyebrows gathering like storm clouds over the dangerous blue flash of his eyes. “You’re mistaken. I do know Friday Melancon. She has the ear of the Emperor, but she deals in unnatural technologies. She was the final straw for me, the reason I retired. Come, I have urgent business to attend to!”

Levi and I trotted along behind Thomas, accompanied by Goldie, who delighted in the fast pace. I glanced at the barn, where I could see Duffy and Dionne leading horses to drag the Clair de Lune out of the massive barn. I pressed Thomas for more information. “Where are we going? How are you going to stop her?”

Our host gave me no reply, and I was left staring at his back as he broke into a long-gaited run toward a tall silo.

Sooty steam poured from an opening near the domed peak of the silo, and as Thomas reached it, the corrugated tin side of the structure split vertically as enormous doors swung wide to reveal something that stopped me in my tracks.

When I was little, I had a tin toy, a little metal man with a key in his back. If you turned the key and wound it up, it would walk across the floor, waving its stiff arms up and down like an angry sleepwalker. The little man had a grinning, inhuman face, with windows set into its chest. Painted in the windows were the tiny faces of two serious-looking men.

When I asked my father why there were people inside the metal man, he told me of a war out west where the enemy used iron giants as monstrous foot soldiers, with people inside to pilot them. I asked him whether the iron giants were still out there, ready to stomp us all, and he just laughed. He told me that no one used the iron giants anymore, not now that we have great airships.

Inside Thomas Dillard’s silo stood an iron giant, steam and smoke curling from its grinning metal teeth. A rickety wooden ladder led up its leg and waist, and the giant’s chest stood open and ready for a pilot to board. I now believed that a locomotive could stand up and walk like a man.

Thomas began to climb the ladder with purpose. Halfway up, he called down to us, “Get to your ship and depart immediately. I can no longer guarantee your safety here. But I shall buy you time. And Friday will regret trespassing on my property.”

I stood there in awe of the massive war machine from the past. “I didn’t believe the stories! Why do you have an iron giant, Thomas?”

He snapped off a salute with a grimace as he climbed into the chest cockpit. “This is the Henrietta Cosgrove, a Colossus-class juggernaut! I retired along with it before you were born, I reckon. No time for war stories now! It’s been a pleasure, but now go to your ship! Goldie, mind the house!”

His dog barked twice and loped off back the way we’d come.

“Bejabbers!” cursed Levi as the juggernaut clanged shut and its engines began to chug. “I don’t believe my eyes!”

The goggled face of Thomas Dillard appeared in one of the windows, and he flicked gloved fingers at us in a shooing motion. Groans of old gears accompanied a shower of powdery rust from the juggernaut’s shoulders as its arms flexed to the side, then forward and back.

“We better go,” I said, backing away from the iron giant. “We need to be gone before the babayagas get here. And I don’t want to get stepped on!”

As we walked away from the silo, another mechanical racket reached my ears. Levi shouted, “The babayagas are coming up the road!”

The thud of a colossal iron foot shook the ground beneath our feet, followed by another, and another.

Levi and I broke into a run. Up ahead, the Clair de Lune floated free of the barn. Dionne held the reins of the horses, their yoke laying in the grass behind them. She stood, mouth open and eyes nearly popping out of her head. “Holy crap. Is that a steampunk mecha?”

“A whatpunk whata?” said Duffy, her face split into a delighted smile. “That there is a juggernaut! A legendary war machine from the Great War of the Republics! I’ve never seen one that still worked! I have to go check it out!”

I grabbed her wrist to stop her. “No, Duffy! We’ve got to make our escape while we can! Is the ship airworthy?”

“Yeah, she needs more work, but she’ll fly.” Duffy’s eyes still fixed on the fifty-foot tall metal man in adoration. “But Ida, that’s the most beautiful machine I’ve ever seen! No one even knows how they were made anymore!”

“It’s gorgeous,” breathed Dionne. “It seems impossible. But look at it walk! It could squash a Volkswagen with those feet!”

“Lady, I don’t know what a Volkswagen is,” said Levi. “But I wouldn’t want to be in that thing’s way. Let’s fly!”

Levi climbed up into his ship without another word. Neither Duffy nor Dionne made any move to follow him, so I steered Dionne by her shoulders to the ladder and blocked her view of the juggernaut. With a sigh, she began to climb.

Next, was Duffy. “Duff, come on,” I said, taking her hand.

She tore her gaze from the Henrietta Cosgrove to look me in the eyes. “Are you tellin’ me, you don’t wanna see that thing in action? I gotta see it kick Friday’s babayagas into next week!”

“If we get a head start now, Friday might not be able to catch up. If we stay for the fight, she might get off some missiles. Maybe she’s got a rocket fighter on board? We just don’t know, and I’m definitely not going to make the mistake of underestimating Friday!”

Duffy scowled and shook her hand free of mine so she could start up the ladder after Dionne. “Fine, let’s go. I figure we’ll get a better view of the fight from above, hey?”

I matched her grin and soon we were all in the forward cockpit of the Clair de Lune. Levi threw switches one after another, and pulled back on a heavy lever. The zephyr fans whooshed to life, and the ground fell away below us. He cried out, “Let’s hope spit and twine is enough to hold ‘er together for now! Battle stations!”

Duffy disappeared aft toward the tail gunner’s nest. Dionne and I looked at each other and shrugged and followed her.

The ship thrummed with power, and I had to catch myself on railings more than once as I lost balance with Levi maneuvering the airship this way and that as we climbed up into the sky.

As we reached the aft compartment, I beheld a fantastical sight; the Juggernaut stood, arms straight out to its sides, striding toward two incoming babayagas. The metal chicken-legged steam coaches fired upon the iron giant from turret guns on top of their carriages. The shells, which would wreak terrible damage upon an airship like ours, failed to have any effect on Thomas’ iron giant.

The Henrietta Cosgrove turned out to be armed. One arm spun around and fired like a cannon at the right-hand babayaga, removing one of its legs and causing the steam carriage to fall sideways with a crash.

The juggernaut’s other arm extended into a sword fit for Paul Bunyan, menacing the remaining babayaga like a matador facing a rather small bull. The driver of that vehicle found the presence of mind to turn his babayaga around and began to flee.

“Ball bearings! That thing’s devastating!” crowed Duffy, as she swiveled the rear turret guns in that direction. “I’d help, but we’re out of range.”

“Let’s hope we keep it that way, their guns are nothing to sneeze at either.”

“Oh, I’d say they’re busy enough right now,” said Dionne, pointing. “Look, Thomas is about to skewer that second one!”

I peered past the mechanical melee toward the horizon, where the warship remained stationary. “Why isn’t Friday pursuing us in her warship? It’s not like her to give up so easily.”

“Look!” cried Duffy. “There she is! She just leaped out of the babayaga! She’s on foot! Wait, no, she’s rocketing into the sky!”

I watched in disbelief. “She was the pilot of that babayaga? This, after invading our ship on a glider? This must be personal for her! Why’s she waving like that?”

As I watched, a fine line extended from the massive warship, arcing over the farm and in our direction. At its head was what looked like an arrow with barbs. The scale was such that I knew it couldn’t be a regular arrow, it was too big.

On the ground, the juggernaut pivoted and brought its cannon to track the missile. I saw it fire, but the arrow continued its path, so Thomas must have missed.

Over the speaking tube, Captain Levi called, “Incoming!”

I had just enough time to grab onto a handhold when the ship rocked with the impact, its warhead detonated somewhere above, in the mechanical heart of the Clair de Lune.

The engines stopped and we began to fall.