Durgen Smokefoot checked his musket one last time as the steamer pulled closer and closer to the shore. He and his squadron were stationed near the back of the first wave – even from where he was, though, he could see Captain Ironvein at the front, exuding his usual bravado.
Durgen was a member of a combat engineer squadron, tasked specifically with fortification, demolitions, and the maintenance and operation of heavy machinery. What this boiled down to was that he wore less armor than the average soldier, won less glory, and was almost always in the vicinity of things that exploded.
Durgen tried to stop his hands from shaking and noticed many of his squadmates doing the same. This was their twentieth deployment together – perhaps not much when compared to particularly legendary military careers, but considering the fury of the battles they’d seen, Durgen felt that they were pretty lucky to have survived this long.
If they survived today, of course, a possibility that seemed less and less likely as the explosions from the cannonfire grew louder and louder. He didn’t have long to ruminate on this pessimism, however – the whole world seemed to shake as the steamer crashed into the shore. The captain bellowed something Durgen couldn’t make out, and the sides of the ship were released.
The infantrydwarves ahead of them charged out immediately, all axes and warcries and bloody murder. Within an instant, the waters ahead were foaming with the blood of orc and dwarf alike, and it was that mess that Durgen’s squadron walked out to meet a moment later.
They didn’t walk alone, though. With a great hiss of steam and the groaning of gears, a war machine rolled slowly into their mist and into the shallows.
It was a contraption of grey iron, a great spiky mass of metal on four wheels. It wasn’t a true steam tank, not really – really more of a mobile gatling gun (though at the speed the thing was capable of propelling itself, Durgen thought that calling it ‘mobile’ was being a little generous).
It required two dwarves to operate – one to fire it and one to feed the ammunition. It was capable of moving in two directions, forward and backward. It was made specifically for this kind of amphibious assault and was good at its job, armored from the front and capable of mowing down hostiles, and Durgen hated it with all his heart. For all the weapon’s power, it was capable of being a terribly fragile and vulnerable machine – and so, as the squad was fond of saying, while the gun escorted the infantry, the engineers escorted the gun.
Durgen crashed into the foam alongside his squad and began his steady march alongside the weapon. An orc sprinted at him from the surf, snarling and waving an axe about. Durgen’s musket belched black smoke and the orc fell, a ragged hole in its torso. He crouched behind the gun, already spraying lead into the black mass in front of them as the gunner had what seemed to be the time of his life.
Durgen looked up from reloading his musket to see the Chief Engineer of his squadron bellowing at them. “Forward, lads! Forward!” These were the dwarf’s last words before an orcish spear flew out of nowhere and impaled him through the chest.
It seemed that the last order they’d be getting for a while was ‘Forward’, then. Durgen stepped back alongside the gun and marched with it, slowly, up the beach.
