Chapter 151: 149 – Burgess

There came an explosion that shook the ground and sent shrapnel flying skyward. Alcerys wondered how exactly Strake had made the suit move without a person inside, but she both wished not to risk asking such questions and thought she had a good enough idea. She wagered he’d somehow imbued its mechanisms with a memory of the specific movements to get it past the corner, then had it perform the same automated walking motion she’d seen it do during long stretches of marching, merely faster. 

Arcanely rigging the fuel cell to detonate was a basic enough act that questioning it didn’t even cross her mind. What did puzzle her was the nature of those pills and Strake’s relationship with them - if they permitted him to exert such fine control over a tank suit, what else could he do?

Their path through the areas that the Recluse had marked as caution zones ended up being conveniently unimpeded, save a single encounter with a mixed group of soldiers drinking cheap grain alcohol and playing craps with bonafide knucklebone dice in a suspiciously out-of-sight alleyway. Some were Pateirian, some Grekurian, one even wore weird mercenary clothes with patches from seven different nations - they had united over the universal appeal of gambling. 

Taking notice of the unfitting individuals, the soldiers immediately directed their gazes towards them, their eyes glinting like those of bored, wild beasts. They began hollering at them, some notably more drunken and hostile than others.

Alcerys wasn’t willing to deal with them, and so parted her cloak and just pulled her sword, inhaling and pouring enough essentia into it to set its edge alight and its quills a trembling.

“I have the backing of the Grekurian Inquisition’s highest authority,” she proclaimed, raising her left hand in her modified prayer gesture and positioned it so that the Eye would dangle well within the soldiers’ sight. “Whether you choose to stand in our way makes no difference to our passage, it only adds corpses to the tally.”

The men looked her up and down, their eyes jumping to Strake’s altogether unassuming countenance only briefly. Visibly bitter and annoyed though they were, the soldiers nodded and walked away. They seemed used to such posturing.

Beyond the inevitable need to avoid a patrol or two - one of which, as they learned by simply listening, had been sent by the very soldiers Alcerys had intimidated - they reached Burgess’ hideout without incident. It was buried and out of the way, but not overtly - it was in an rundown, old part of the city, both removed from the busiest streets and the outer walls. 

As they neared that place, Alcerys could not help but feel a surreal sense of longing, unease, of not belonging. In every city there were forgotten places like this, abandoned for reasons from mere disinterest by the property owners, to historical ordinances preventing demolition, to complex legal disputes or merely because they fit poorly into the city plan.

These strange places that the inexorable march of history had forgotten about, slowly dragging them along forwards in time. 

A hidden grove amidst the forest of urban sprawl.

Just like any good hidden grove, it was difficult to reach by those who had not been there before. Turns into streets that one would ignore, that seemed like dead ends, and from there, more turns into more apparent dead ends. Walking up stairs that, at first glance, seemed to lead to a private courtyard, only to learn that said courtyard connected to an exterior hallway in a long-forgotten apartment building.

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And then, of course, there was Burgess’ place proper.

It was a garage, or perhaps a warehouse, or some long-abandoned railway station for the city’s public transit system - one which the duo hadn’t encountered in any way beyond having glimpsed rails embedded in the roads of the wider streets. Its doors were conspicuously stuck closed, the map leading them round the back, at which point they were to bang the rhythm of a particular folk song on the back door. 

Within they found a storeroom full of various heavy machinery and parts, much of it covered in dust. Only after finding a particular spot amidst the mess and moving some quite heavy scrap out of the way did they find the large trapdoor the Recluse’s instructions had directed them to go down, which concealed not stairs or a ladder, but a diagonal cargo lift shaft clearly sized for heavy equipment, the platform visible at the bottom. Closing the trapdoor behind themselves, they entered.

Down there, an old man waited for them with a big gun in hand and a considerable explosive payload at his feet, in the form of stick grenade bundles. The grenades’ strings stretched all the way to his hands. Both his clothes and his skin were sullied by oil, paints, and who knew what else, his greying mustache still desperately clinging onto its well-trimmed shape whilst the hair of his head was a total mess. 

Pale-blue eyes stared at them from behind the brass frames of his glasses, and for a moment, neither side dared move or even speak… Until Burgess’ gaze had sat on Strake’s face for a moment, and a spark of recognition flashed through his face, causing the old man to lower his firearm.

“Sodan?” he asked disbelievingly. “Strake Sodan?” 

“The very same,” hissed Strake. “And you must be Andrei Burgess. We’re here to extract you… And your work.”

“The tank, of course, of course,” he nodded, taking his gun in hand and folding it in half before stowing it away into a proportionately small hip holster. He then picked up the two bundles of stick grenades and led them deeper into the underground chamber, reaching an underground workshop. 

“I had an unfinished prototype framework, three recovered wrecks, and enough salvaged parts to get two of them up and running, but I never thought anyone other than me would ever see it come to fruition. I thought all… I thought all of the First Brigade were dead. That there were no real Tankmen left at all. So I took everything I had, put to task everything I knew, I hid away and toiled, hoping that they wouldn’t find me before it was complete,” spoke the engineer.

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