"A Strike to the Heart of the Cannon Lord" by Steven L. Peck is a steampunk novella set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where a beleaguered resistance force known as the Vestige fights for survival against the mechanized armies of the tyrannical Cannon Lord. The story is narrated by a grieving soldier whose new bride has been infected by venom from a mechanical wolf — one of many horrifying war machines created by the Cannon Lord's brilliant and sadistic engineer, known as the Toy Maker. The venom has turned her into one of the living dead, a postum: a reanimated human corpse controlled by Mesmer field technology and deployed as a weapon of psychological and physical terror against the Vestige's dwindling ranks. The narrator destroys the steel wolf responsible, but his bride is irretrievably lost. Traveling aboard an airship with a ragged crew, the narrator and his companions plan a desperate strike against the Cannon Lord's citadel — not to kill the Cannon Lord directly, but to destroy the Toy Maker and the vast underground factory producing the mechanical armies. Without the Toy Maker's genius and the forge that supplies the Eusteel components for the mechanical soldiers and wolves, the Cannon Lord's forces will inevitably deteriorate and the Vestige may yet survive. Central to the mission is Amelia Moffen, a brilliantly inventive engineer who maintains and operates the tessellating magnetic resonance gun — the only weapon capable of disabling the spring-powered, hydraulic-gel mechanical constructs. Amelia is efficient, courageous, and pragmatic, and she and the narrator develop a quiet intimacy born of proximity to death and mutual dependence. She carries a wound from a wolf bite on her leg that has progressed to blood poisoning, requiring amputation. Her lost limb is replaced with a prosthetic fashioned from Eusteel, the extraordinarily rare and nearly indestructible alloy that forms the backbone of the Cannon Lord's war machine. The assault on the citadel is a harrowing operation. The narrator confronts his dead bride among the advancing postum horde, nearly breaking down before Amelia steadies him. Inside the citadel, the strike team locates the factory's power source — a massive underground mechanism of enormous Eusteel gears and gyroscopes — but the tessellating gun proves ineffective against Eusteel components. Every attempt to destroy the machinery fails. With mechanical reinforcements closing in and options exhausted, Amelia realizes that her own Eusteel prosthetic leg is the only material at hand capable of jamming the gears. In a scene of brutal necessity, the leg is removed from her living body by bayonet and bone saw, held down by the narrator and a Marine while she thrashes and screams. The narrator then drops the leg into the mechanism, where it destroys the great gears and triggers a chain of explosions that brings down the factory. The escape through the collapsing citadel includes a brief, charged encounter with the Cannon Lord himself — cool, theatrical, and shielded against their weapons — who retreats but acknowledges their achievement before disappearing in a dragonfly-shaped flying contrivance. Two allied warships, which had been trailing the mission undetected, arrive in time to turn the tide of the surface battle, ensuring the Vestige's survival. In the aftermath, the narrator buries what remains of his wife, and Amelia recovers slowly from her grievous injuries. The bond between them strengthens into something tender and hopeful. A poet aboard the ship composes a verse reflecting on the central irony of the story: the wolf venom intended to destroy the Vestige ultimately returned to ruin the Cannon Lord's greatest creation, because it was the wound the venom made that led, through a chain of suffering and sacrifice, to the destruction of the factory. Evil, the poem concludes, tends to circle back magnified to its source. The novella ends not with the grand orchestral finale the narrator once imagined for the world's end, but with quiet music drifting in from outside the ship, and the recognition that what has arrived is not an ending but a beginning.
By Steven L. Peck · Genre: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Adventure · 10 chapters