Gawain: Yasmin of the Desert, #2

By Blaze Ward

Yasmin has rebuilt the American Mechaniod named Gawain with the help of Behrooz and her Grandfather Ardashir, the Lion of the Desert.

 

New monsters lurk everywhere. A chance radio call draws Yasmin into a battle for the very future of humanity in Persia, where she must go beyond merely fighting, and become a king.

 

Yasmin of the Desert: Volume Two contains three new, exciting tales. Be sure to read Volume One then be on the lookout for future wars.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Knotted Road Press
• Release date: Sep 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781644702376

Blaze Ward

Blaze Ward writes science fiction in the Alexandria Station universe (Jessica Keller, The Science Officer,  The Story Road, etc.) as well as several other science fiction universes, such as Star Dragon, the Dominion, and more. He also writes odd bits of high fantasy with swords and orcs. In addition, he is the Editor and Publisher of Boundary Shock Quarterly Magazine. You can find out more at his website www.blazeward.com, as well as Facebook, Goodreads, and other places. Blaze's works are available as ebooks, paper, and audio, and can be found at a variety of online vendors. His newsletter comes out regularly, and you can also follow his blog on his website. He really enjoys interacting with fans, and looks forward to any and all questions—even ones about his books!

Book preview

One

Bannerman

P lease, God, can anyone hear me? We need help!

Yasmin perked up in surprise, so astonished that she stopped moving. Around her, the mighty war walker she had named Gawain came to rest as well, that seven-meter-tall American killing machine she had stolen.

Recovered. Repaired. Something.

He was hers now. The Americans had vanished from Persia long before she was born, leaving only destruction and chaos in their wake. In that, they were only more recent than the British, the Russians, or any of the rest, even going back so far as the Romans or Alexander.

Yasmin stared at the screen projected onto the inside of her helmet.

She had been scouting ahead of ibn Rustah, the tracked monstrosity carrying Grandfather and Behrooz across the radioactive desert, mostly just talking to herself because they were kilometers behind her as she ranged.

In the background, the automated systems on her mech had located a signal on a different channel and automatically hopped over to listen.

There wasn’t supposed to be anyone around here, let alone modern technology. At least as modern as the world had known before the apocalypse.

System, channel three, Yasmin enunciated carefully now, speaking in English because the stupid computer in her mech only knew the tongue of the Americans who had invaded her homeland.

The screen lit up and skipped over to the other channel from ibn Rustah. It would bounce back if someone sent her a message, but long stretches of silence was normal in the heat of the day.

Hello, she asked, switching back to the Farsi the caller had used.

Someone’s there? a man screeched in surprise, his voice rising until he almost sounded like a woman. Can you help?

What’s happening? Yasmin asked.

Around her, sophisticated Japanese electronics wove strange magics. A map appeared, showing ancient topography overlain with short-range scanners. A vector indicated northeast, roughly ninety degrees to the left from where she and her steed had been headed.

Yasmin had only just begun to understand what the enemies of man had been able to do with their technology by the end of the wars. When the satans of the west and the wizards of the east had combined forces to conquer the world, and in failing that, just decided to destroy it all instead.

We’re being attacked by raiders, the man said. They keep circling, threatening to come over the wall.

Raiders? Here?

Yasmin had not seen another human soul since she left her home at Aynalo. Just Grandfather who had accompanied her and Behrooz, who had brought the mighty war machine across the plateau from what had once been Kurdistan.

Most of Persia had been destroyed by armies and nuclear weapons, with the population fled north to cooler climes. And greater wars when they reached the Russian steppes.

What kind of raiders? Yasmin found herself asking, the lessons of Grandfather, the once-mighty Ardashir of the Desert surging up from the depths of her mind like a cloak she would wear into battle.

Hands automatically checked the status of the three-inch dazzler beam weapon on Gawain’s arm. His shield. Even the three-meter-sword she and the men had taken to calling Excalibur. Fitting, as this mech was a model the Americans had called Excalibur one upon a time.

They come in land vehicles, burning petroleum, he said. A few are on horses or camels, but those are not attacking. Just the technicals.

Technicals.

Yasmin had heard of such things. Ardashir had been a genius at taking a normal truck, stripping the non-essentials, and adding weapons to make a mobile fighting platform. She had heard all sorts of stories from the man growing up.

Beams? she asked the man.

A few, he replied. In the background at his end, she also heard the sound of an explosion transmitted. Mostly firearms. Can you help?

What are your coordinates? Yasmin asked, solidly in the role of a combat soldier now. The kind Ardashir had impressed upon her for more than a decade now.

Just in case, she keyed the computer to start mapping from verbal commands.

Near the bend in the dry river, he said.

Yasmin nearly yelled at the man for his lat/lon, but the system around her was smarter than she realized. It suddenly shifted and placed a spot on the map. Hopefully, it was correct.

She was headed there now.

I’m coming, she said. It will take me a little while to arrive.

What can you do? he asked. What army do you bring?

I bring a sword, Yasmin snarled quietly.

She shifted the channel back to eight and spoke.

Behrooz? Yasmin asked.

Here, he replied.

Yasmin felt a rush of cool come over her. Pleasant. Comforting.

I just received a distress signal from a village or something being attacked, she spoke plainly. Coordinates here.

She pressed a button in her gauntlet and the system beeped happily.

I can get there in fifteen minutes at top speed, Yasmin said. The attack is happening now.

It will take me most of a day to cross that terrain to get to you, he said after a moment. Be safe.

Thank you, Yasmin said.

No arguments. Nothing to try to talk her out of the insanity of rushing to the sound of the guns, as the ancient Europeans had once phrased it in their history books.

But they had already had such ugly yelling matches previously, her against the two men. She had convinced both of them of the rightness of her cause.

Or rather, Gawain had refused to activate under Behrooz’s repairs, but immediately came live when she stepped inside, as though the Lady of the Lake had chosen her, to quote Behrooz at the time.

Yasmin cut the radio and studied her systems. She had spent two weeks now inside this suit, learning how to walk. To dance.

To fight.

System, plot best route for high-speed passage, she reverted to English, which was not her best language, but it probably would be in another year like this.

She scanned the skies with eyes and sensors, but not even birds flew in the mid-day heat, those few who could survive.

The course turned red on her map.

Yasmin settled herself in the harness, took a breath, and began to run.

Behrooz heard the door open behind him as Ardashir entered the flight deck of his war machine.

Former war machine. Unlike Yasmin’s mechanoid, ibn Rustah had no guns of any kind. He had deliberately disabled them when he repaired the ancient rolling fortress. He mission was trade. Rebuilding the ancient communications networks with whoever had managed to eke out a survival in the highlands over the last two generations.

Ardashir sat in the spot where Yasmin normally had, when she had accompanied him. Them.

She will be fine, the ancient said abruptly.

Behrooz kept his thoughts to himself. Even at seventy-three, Ardashir was more dangerous than he was, and her grandfather spoke of Yasmin in terms equating the woman with himself, back fifty-something years ago when he might have been the best in Persia.

But Behrooz was still nervous.

The mechanoid, Gawain, transmitted a tracking signal that he could follow, so he could watch her move.

ibn Rustah lacked the sorts of processing power that Gawain had, but the machine moved at a slow jog at the best of times, so Behrooz could see where he was going.

They had been heading roughly southeast, skirting the Caspian Sea basin, though well inland. Or whatever remained of it now that it had shrunk to barely a third of its size two centuries ago. But the deep end of the basin was still the south, butting up against the Persian Plateau.

There was a path. He set his mind and his tracks in that direction.

So what would you have done about raiders? Ardashir asked abruptly.

If I am locked inside here, there is nothing they can do to get to me, he said. I suppose vandals might destroy all the pots and planters on the top deck. And I could always run over someone too stupid to walk out of my way.

Now you see why she must have Gawain, the ancient announced.

I never doubted that, Ardashir, Behrooz said glumly. I still get to worry about her.

Ardashir nodded sagely.

The two of them were not engaged. Not even promised.

He was nearly a decade older than her at twenty-six, although she like to tease him that his clean-shaven chin made him look closer to her seventeen years.

Behrooz had been raised with Kurdish cousins, the kind who didn’t take the hardline of some of the Muslims he knew about relations between men and women, but Yasmin had come from a farming village, however much it existed entirely inside a mountain.

Insular.

Not necessarily backwards, but the women had been raised to be wives, rather than engineers.

Ardashir had made her a warrior in spite of the stupid old goats in charge of Aynalo.

Today, she was going to war, for the first time.

He would be along when he could get there, bringing civilization in the wake of destruction.

In that, he supposed he could see the legends that future generations would write.

As long as both of them survived long enough to live such adventures.

Yasmin slowed as she came to the top of the rise. She could see places where smoke rose, black and foreboding, but only in a spare, few columns.

She walked to the point that her head sensors could see the valley below, only about three kilometers to where a box wall extended out from the face of a cliff.

If the rains ever started to fall again, those people over there would have to move themselves back from the river bed, but for now it protected them on a second side.

The wall itself looked like large stones that had been piled together and then filled in, with a fighting platform above that. Stone wouldn’t burn, nor would the steel wall. The smoke was coming from two vehicles on fire, out on the flat in front of the wall.

Another dozen or so raced around as she watched.

Technicals of some sort or another, along with a pair of what looked like home-made dune buggies of a type she had seen in an old video. All armed.

Not much shooting going on right now. Bullets would kill people, but not harm the rocks. She could see a number of places where small cannon had blasted holes in the wall atop the rocks, and the watchtower on the nearest corner was a smoking stump right now.

In the distance on her right, she could see a larger vehicle. Not anywhere near ibn Rustah for size, but that mighty beast was ninety meters long, thirty-five wide, and ten tall. This one had the appearance of what the ancient might have called a city bus, armored over and converted into a smaller kind of war machine.

A flag hung limply from a pole atop the bus in the still air, with red being the only characteristic she could make out from here.

As if her popping up to look was a rallying sign, several technicals suddenly turned and opened fire on a section of wall that she realized was a gate, camouflaged to look like stone. As the man on the radio had said, mostly firearms and light cannon, but at least one of them had a dazzler suddenly pulsing a medium particle cannon shot.

She couldn’t tell how heavy the beam was from here, but the gate began to suffer serious and possibly terminal abuse under the assault.

Yasmin was out of time.

She crested the hill and pushed the immense weight of her seven-meter-tall biped down the slope, concentrating for now on her footing and not bothering to shoot anything until she got down to the valley floor.

Somebody must have seen her though. Two of the smaller attackers suddenly spun around so that bed-mounted machine guns faced her direction.

On a flat terrain, the technicals could outrun her, if she actually challenged anybody to a race, but they were linear creatures. Four rubber wheels down on the road and fairly high centers of gravity with the pair of men in each bed minding the weapons.

Not that maneuverable.

Gawain had a shield, just like the English Round Table knight he was named for. Yasmin rotated her torso a little to her right as she moved, pivoting the shield up to protect the chest cavity, where she rode.

The range was extreme, so their accuracy was poor. Plus, they were using up precious ammunition in an era where it had to be made by hand or stolen from ancient weapons dumps, like she had with Gawain. Yasmin just needed to refill her water tanks then let the systems break everything down for the hydrogen her fusion reactor needed to create power.

She juked. The Excalibur moved like an extension of her will, letting her dodge as fire became more intense and more accurate.

The one on the right got overly ambitious. Or foolish. She hadn’t fired at them at all, so maybe he thought she was harmless?

Yasmin let her autopilot handle running for a moment as she brought up her right fist. Above and around her, Gawain did the same. Unlike her, this Knight had a 3-inch dazzler mounted on the back of his forearm.

The Technical drove right into the first bolt, almost perfectly in line with the bore.

An ancient, internal-combustion engine had a radiator on the front for cooling, much like the fins on her back and legs. The dazzler cut it in half, and then continued into the engine block behind that.

Ammunition would not be affected by the loss of a motor, unlike her dazzler, so she raised her aim just a shade, letting everyone’s momentum carry them together for a second shot. Something in the bed exploded, shattering the vehicle and generating a tremendous flash of light and heat that threw bodies and metal in all directions..

Yasmin fell into the fighting katas that Grandfather had taught her. One hand back to grasp the sword she had mounted diagonally on an enormous steel tache, a scabbard/rack across her mech’s shoulder blades. Three meters of blade with not much edge ground into it, but a hardness of a level better than even of the magical swords of history.

Possibly rivaling ancient Excalibur itself.

Yasmin pivoted now, aiming herself not directly at the gate, but to a spot where she could pinch technicals between her and the walls. Cut their maneuverability. Threaten them.

The other one that had been shooting at her had blown past, unable to slow in time, and not realizing how fast she was moving.

She ignored it and picked out one of the dune buggies crossing from her left, eyes apparently on the gate, between her and the big flatbed with the dazzler mounted. Her sensors were close enough now to rate the weapon as a 5-inch. Big enough to hurt Gawain. Maybe kill it.

Yasmin had to make sure they couldn’t catch her.

The dune buggy bounced and

Reviews for Gawain

[Lee DeWitt · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As usual, a fun, well-balanced tale from Blaze Ward. Just the right amount of setting, plot and character to balance the scifi, as well as a feasible future history. A thoroughly enjoyable book.

This book is #2 in a series. I would recommend reading #1 (entitled Avalon) before reading this one.