Free Broken Hero by Jonathan Wood Page B

Uhrwerkmänner.”
    Clyde claps excitedly, unable to restrain himself. “You were right, Tabby,” he says, voice hitting a squeaky register. He fixes his full attention back on Volk. “Are you first generation? Were you really made by Joseph Lang?”
    “He was the creator,” Volk says.
    Clyde claps again. “Oh my God,” he says. “This is so exciting. We never get to work with actual functioning samples. It’s always descriptions in poorly constructed Greek. Abysmal Greek actually, for the most part. I mean, seriously, I know thaumaturgical research is time-consuming, but would it kill these people to take a month sabbatical and learn how to conjugate a dead language properly?” He shrugs violently. “Sorry, off topic. You need us to save all your lives. Probably more pressing.” He shrugs again. “How many of you are there?”
    “Once we numbered twelve hundred,” Volk replies, his mechanical voice still steady, still sad.
    Holy crap. Twelve hundred? Yesterday just one of them was hard enough to take down. My breathing starts to ratchet up again against my will.
    An army of them marching. An army of arms raised. Descending.
    I shake my head free of the image. Felicity shoots me a quizzical look, but I pretend I didn’t see it. I just let Clyde roll.
    “Lang was a busy fellow, wasn’t he?” he says.
    “He needed many of us,” Volk says by way of explanation.
    Hermann leans forward, lays a massive bronze fist on Volk’s shoulder. “They need to know none of this. It does not help us.”
    “Well,” Clyde leans forward, a slightly embarrassed look on his face, “we may need to actually. I mean, I don’t mean to be all contradictory—that statement may seem a little disingenuous after I just contradicted you, actually, but I hope you get the spirit of it at least. No need for this to be confrontational, is what I’m trying to say. Probably failing now. But I was aiming somewhere in the general direction of trying to suggest that the more information we have, generally the better it is for us, especially when we’re in the life-saving business. I mean there might be a considerable signal to noise ratio, but even the smallest detail might be important.”
    Hermann grinds his gears at Clyde. There doesn’t seem to be another way to describe the noise he makes. He falls back into the shadows of his shapeless cloak once more.
    “Look,” Hannah suddenly cuts into the awkward silence. “I mean, I’m new at this shit and all, but why are we interested in saving their lives here? I mean this is a giant Nazi robot who attacked you yesterday, right?”
    Felicity and I go to speak at the same time, her probably more tactfully than me, but it’s Hermann who cuts us off.
    “Do not mistake our creator’s broken philosophy for our own.” If he was disgruntled before, Hannah just managed to push him into full-on pissed off. Not a great start for her, which is pretty much exactly what I feared.
    I flap a hand at her to shush. She keeps a pretty tight rein on her expression, but I’m not sure if she’s more unimpressed by Hermann’s reaction or my own.
    “See, Hermann,” says Volk, turning to his fellow Uhrwerkmänn, “this is why I need to explain.”
    Hermann makes no more noise. Volk turns back.
    “Lang—he needed many of us to invade Russia. The war there had not gone well for the Germans. The winter had killed so many of their men. Lang believed that we, the Uhrwerkmänner, were the solution. We would not feel the cold. We would not need food. We could march on where men fell.
    “He had originally planned to build ten thousand of us. The rebellion came before that. I do not know if he miscalculated our intelligence, if perhaps it was the simple arrogance of a creator, the assumption that we were lesser because we were made, or if he just was blind to the flaws in his ethos. But even though he made us, he did not make us hate. We saw what he wanted us to do, and we rejected him. We would not be