Read Giants (A Distant Eden Book 6) Online
Authors: Lloyd Tackitt
Giants (A Distant Eden Book 6) (3 page)
Our heads were covered with leather also. The head covers were separate sacks that draped down over our shoulders with eye holes cut in, fitted with tempered glass lenses sewn in between two pieces of leather. It made Pa look pretty funny and kind of spooky, too. I suppose I didn’t look any better, just smaller. The “steam bloom,” as Pa called it, would still be hot enough to scald exposed skin, but would dissipate rapidly. We could pull the hoods off quickly once the steam lost its heat.
The machine was actually fairly simple. We’d basically built a steam-fired cannon that would shoot a large flechette wrapped in a sabot. The cannon barrel was a six-inch piece of drill pipe, heavy walled, sixteen feet long. It was mounted on top of the trailer on a bipod that we could adjust to raise or lower the elevation. It also had a boiler and a compressor mounted behind it. All of this was on a turn table, sort of a very large Lazy Susan, so that the aim could also be changed horizontally.
We had polished the inside of the pipe to a high gloss, then attached a compression chamber to the pipe by means of a globe valve, which would hold the compressed steam in the compression chamber until the valve was turned a quarter-turn. The steam in the chamber was drawn from a steam generator and pumped under pressure, using a cylinder and piston system. The steam would be built up to six hundred and fifty pounds of pressure inside the chamber. The chamber had its own furnace to keep it hot, and it glowed red hot even under strong sunlight.
When the ball valve was turned, the compressed steam would instantly charge the pipe where it would expand at an astronomically fast pace and create huge pressure. The sabot – basically a large, round wooden dowel, split down the middle – held the steam in the pipe, but only for a micro second The sabot was made of two pieces of wood that were shaped on the outside to fit snugly inside the pipe, filling it completely diameter-wise, and fourteen feet long, leaving a two-foot chamber at the bottom of the barrel for the steam to enter. The pipe had been swabbed with axle grease and the wooden sabot had been coated with axle grease on the outside.
The sabot was hollow in the center which was carved out to fit the flechette snugly. Inside that hollow, and filling it, was the flechette. The flechette was a piece of sucker rod, a fourteen foot long solid steel rod, one inch in diameter. We had welded three vanes on the bottom end, made of thin springy stainless steel. The vanes were wrapped tightly around the flechette shaft and would spring outwards when freed from the sabot’s constraint, providing flight stability just like on an arrow. And it was just that – a large, steel arrow we would fire at the giant at a muzzle velocity of one thousand two hundred feet per second, according to my mental calculations.
The wooden sabot had holes drilled into it from the outside, slanting in towards the bottom. These holes, near the top, would create air resistance and slow the wooden portion of the projectile down, causing the sabot to open up and fall away, releasing the flechette to continue on at full speed.
The business end of the flechette was honed to a triangular shaped needle point. This point was sharp enough to make a finger bleed if just barely touched – we spent a lot of time getting that point that sharp and then tempering it so it was just short of brittle. The entire weight of the steel rod, and it was heavy, plus the velocity of the rod would be focused onto that needle point when it hit the giant’s heavy armor. Cannon balls bounced off that armor, but they had a large surface area; the arrow had a tiny little microscopic surface area driven by super large forces.
It was a simple enough system, but clever and efficient at the same time. I was right proud of Pa’s invention, and my part in building it.
# # #
It wasn’t long before we could see the dust rising up from the giant’s feet as it moved towards us, and we watched and waited. Pa waited patiently. I tried to be as patient as Pa, but my right foot might have been tapping just a little as the dust tower rapidly came closer by the minute. All too soon the giant’s head became visible over the horizon. It was big and it was ugly. One eye, two holes where a man’s nose would have been, a wide mouth full of teeth that reminded me of a picture I had seen of a shark’s mouth one time.
As its full body emerged into sight it only became uglier, four arms that were long and slender and almost snake like and two thick, fat-looking legs . The legs were great huge things that stomped with every step, as though it was trying to beat the earth into submission. From neck to below the waist it was covered in metallic armor, rusted and dirty and stained.
And it stank – it stank bad. I could smell it when it was still two miles off because the wind was blowing from it towards us. Made me want to gag, and the closer it got the worse the smell became.
Pa stood by the tripod to make any last adjustments. My job was to pull the valve lever when Pa dropped his arm as a signal that the giant was in range and the barrel lined up properly. I was in awe of the giant and nearly not paying attention to Pa as he rapidly dropped the barrel’s elevation by several inches and then swung it to the right a foot. He slowly raised his arm and suddenly I was all attention riveted on Pa’s arm, watching that arm, that tense arm that seemed to be at the end of a dark tunnel. Everything else was blocked from my awareness, even the smell was gone.
I waited for an eternity as the giant came ever closer. Pa had lined up his shot based on where he thought the giant would be at the critical moment when it came in range.
The giant was coming, pounding, the earth shaking now with every stomping foot as it approached.
It was coming at a slight angle and we had this one shot, this one chance to get it right, one chance to see if the steel arrow pierced the armor, one second to see if the arrow hit something vital inside the giant or just slid through harmlessly.
And if it didn’t? If it didn’t we’d only have a second to regret it.
And then Pa’s arm dropped and for a split second I almost froze, but I didn’t. I pulled my lever and inside the valve body the valve’s globe turned a quarter turn and what had been a round surface holding the steam back was now a hole all the way through. The pressurized steam screamed into the bottom of the pipe where it began expanding at a rate too fast to comprehend, creating the pressure we needed against the sabot, forcing the sabot up and out of the barrel at over a thousand feet per second.
The sabot and flechette were on the way!
And right then everything became too blurry to be able to see. Pa had thought about the steam cloud that would envelop us as the steam left the barrel, but what neither of us had considered was that the grease we had so generously applied inside the barrel would become superheated and then combine with the steam to create a hot grease cloud.
The leather suits protected us from the heat, but the grease coated everything including our eye lenses. We couldn’t see.
We couldn’t see the arrow’s flight.
We couldn’t see if it hit the giant, and we couldn’t see if it had penetrated the armor.
It would have either hit or missed by the time we thought about it, so even though we both ripped our head gear off as fast as we could, it was too late to see anything except the giant still coming at us, not the least bit slowed. But where before it hadn’t seemed to take any notice of us, it now had that one eye completely focused on us, and it changed course slightly to come straight at us, accelerating up to a terrible rate of speed.
It was too fast, we couldn’t run. All we could do was stand and watch it coming for us.
It took ten steps, each step faster than the last until it was at a dead run. We had only a few seconds left and Pa was beginning to turn to say something to me when the giant stumbled just a little. We watched as it stumbled again, this time a little more. It still ran towards us, but it was slowing down.
And that’s when we both noticed that three feet of the steel arrow was protruding from the armor in the middle of its chest. We’d done it! We might not live to see the results, but we’d done it!
The giant came on, right at us with what looked like rage on its primitive features, stumbling and staggering and reaching out towards us. And then it fell, hitting the ground with its outstretched arms only yards away as it fell dead.
It hit the ground with so much force that the trailer was thrown on its side with Pa and me jumping clear at the last second to hit the ground and roll. The force of the giant’s fall kicked up a huge dust plume that surrounded us for several minutes and clung to our grease-coated leathers, leaving us spitting dirt and grease and dust – and mighty damn happy to still be alive.
From the great beast’s back the razor sharp arrow protruded several feet. It was a glorious sight – a sight that hundreds of people would come to see.
Word soon spread far and wide that a man had found a way to kill the giants, and people kept coming. We were offered enormous amounts of gold to sell the machine, so Pa sold it and we began making more of the machines and selling them at great prices. By the end of the year Pa said we had more gold than we could spend in ten life times and he was damn tired of building the machines. But he felt an obligation to help other people kill giants.
Our machines always worked, but often the people that used them didn’t do it right, and many died. Still, giants were being killed for the first time, and those were heady days. Commerce being what it is other people began imitating the design and building giant killer machines for lower prices. Pa was happy about that because it meant we could quit making the machines, and we did.
# # #
Six months after we had built the last machine we were sitting on the porch after dinner watching the sun go down. Ma said “It’s been too long since it rained, this drought is the worst I’ve ever seen. I’m tired of it.” She turned to Pa and looking him in the eye with determination continued, “Make it rain.”
Pa looked at her for a moment, kind of stunned. But then I could see the idea working its way through his mind.
I said “I’m going to the barn to work on an idea I have for floating the house and barn.” I had a hunch that we were going to have some flash-flooding pretty soon.
If you enjoyed this short story you might want to check out the highly acclaimed and best selling five novel series - also from this author - available from Amazon in kindle or paperback: