In lieu of any of the things I wanted to put here, like reviews of recently read works purchased in the latest based books sale, here, have a snippet from the reworked first chapter of the ever so slowly coming together novel. Obviously, my one update a day schedule wasn’t sustainable, not between working a full time and actually writing non-blog things. But let’s see if I can’t get to twice a week on the regular without killing myself, eh?
Royal Demesne, Novy Moskva
Eden, Edenstar System
Pentagram Cluster, Solar Hegemony in Exile
Two near identical iron giants clashed shimmering, high-frequency singing blades into a spark sputtering bind, silhouetted against the great blood-red eye of setting Edenstar. Each titanic combatant was twelve yards from cap to pie if it was an inch and the armoured plates of each of the custom Pz.KpfM.112.Ausf.R Royal Hippogriff panzerkampfmarchen - armoured fighting walkers - was enamelled in the bone-white with pink and gold trim of the royal household retinue. The kampfmarchen on the sinister shifted it's mass forward while pivoting the long blade of the two-handed HF great-sword over the top of the bind, moving with the slow deliberateness required to pass a Kajita-Holtzman barrier without resistance. As the KH barrier of the dexter-side marchen began to ripple with the passage of the shimmering, singing, vibrating mono-molecular high-frequency edge, the pilot of the threatened machine engages his jump-jets in a brief burst back while re-chambering his blade up into a high roof guard, allowing his opponent's blade to crash down into the dirt suddenly unopposed.
Startled birds flew past the two titans then as each great war-golem seemed to pause and study his opponent. In form, each giant combatant resembled a medieval man at arms in full Gothic plate harness, with bladed wings sprouting each harness's back plate. Each sallet-helm shaped head's single cyclopean sensor-slit glowed in the infra-red spectrum as each warmachine's sensor suite tried to find the weakness his opponent's defence as, if by unvoiced agreement communicated by mind alone, the two kampfmarchen begin to circle each other in gliding gathering steps, carefully maintaining a supported centre of balance at all times, lest a momentary weakness provoke an attack. Faster and faster they circled, closing in at times to exchange a flurry of blows, only to break apart again nearly as quickly, as each fighter began the tell-tale dance of an experienced marchenkampfer - walker warrior - testing the rhythm and timing and distance of this particular fight and the opposing fighter.
And then, on the fifth such pass, the kampfmarchen whose holographic heraldry and transponder code identified it as the mount belonging to the Count of Landing, Lord Ulysses 'Ollie' Williams Walker, sometimes called Red Knife, after his flame red hair and affectation of always carrying a great seax knife of metoric iron and ancient heritage, failed to concede the pass and withdraw, instead pressed after the other marcher as it attempted to jump away, matching the other machine's backwards hop with a forward leap of his own, launching a spread of mini-missiles as he came bounding in. The withdrawing kampfmarchen, whose own displayed arms proclaimed it to be the ride of Sir Father-Brother Ignatius, Hieromonk of the Order of the Shield of Saint Benedict Militant brought it's two two inch photonguns into play in full missile defence mode. The invisible infra-red beams pulse into the air, creating lighting like sounds and flashes and leaving dissipating lines of ionised super-heated air in their wake, strobing forth to stab at the incoming ordinance, splashing four of the six incoming threats. The other two missiles detonate in the air instead of crashing into Father Ignatius’s warmachine, spreading a rapidly expanding cloud of vision and telemetry obscuring smoke.
In his cockpit, Father Ignatius gives a short ejaculation of frustration as forward infra-red, thermal, and radar sensor returns are all blotted out by the obscuring smoke, but as he wisely and automatically picks up his visual scanning through physical vision blocks, he misses the warning light and buzzer that signals the failure of his machine’s KH barrier for a spare handful of crucial seconds. It’s only as Ollie’s kampfmarcher punches through the obscuring smoke into a flying tackle of a grappling take-down that connects, unopposed by any sparking barrier, that he realises that both combatant’s protective barriers have been shorted out by aerosolised neutronium particles.
“Ollie! You cheating son of a bitch!”
Love you man