Chapter Text
A buffet of sound, light, and motion left Meryl feeling like she got hit point blank by a firework, her wild refusal to lose control of the vehicle the only thing keeping her hands locked around the steering wheel. Time crystallized as she watched its center bulge with the airbag about to explode, and the only thought she had time to think—one that felt frivolously irrelevant—was that she hoped the impact wouldn’t break Vash’s sunglasses she had borrowed.
But instead of a faceful of rapidly inflating nylon, Meryl found herself yanked sharply to the right and thrown over the center console. Vash pinned her down as the truck skidded and shards of window drummed down like cover fire.
It took Meryl a long moment to orient herself—her blood pounded loud in her ears, and she heard Vash’s rapid heartbeat above her as he pressed her down. Remarkably, the truck hadn’t rolled. Meryl was okay, Vash was okay—
“Milly!” Meryl gasped, shaking Vash off her and twisting to look into the back seat.
Milly was huddled under her open book like a tent, eyes wide and her own sunglasses askew. The book’s cover was impaled with a particularly wicked shard of glass. The rims of the windows were jagged with them, like crooked teeth.
“I’m fine, ma’am,” Milly squeaked, and Meryl’s lungs finally let out a shuddering breath like an old radiator.
“We have to move. They’re coming,” Vash said, clicking his door open and emphatically beckoning them out of the truck. Milly unbuckled her stungun from where it had been strapped into the back seat next to her, and Meryl climbed over the center console, scooping up her briefcase from its place in the passenger footwell. She had stowed it there much to Vash’s grumbling, but it needed to be accessible in the event of an emergency evacuation. Given the present dire circumstances, Meryl tried not to feel too vindicated. As she exited, she looked over her shoulder in the direction of their mysterious attackers—the sunlight glinted off something dark and large in the sand, advancing with unsettling speed.
Then half a dozen similar shapes crested the dune behind it.
Meryl slammed the door behind her and crouched with Milly and Vash behind the meager cover of the truck. Whatever was coming, they were severely outgunned and stranded in one of the most isolated, exposed parts of the desert. They had long since left the rocky crags surrounding Tombstone.
There was a reason small vehicles typically stuck to designated routes, and why travel on foot or by thoma was impractical for reasons other than the sheer distance between Inepril and May City: without the broad, flat surface area of a sand steamer or a vehicle with wide sand tires, traveling across the sand was like walking over a grate. One wrong step, and the desert could swallow someone, leaving nothing behind. Such disappearances were far from unheard of.
The sand behind the truck was still smoking from the impact. If Meryl hadn’t slammed on the accelerator in time, the shot would have hit them broadside instead of clipping one of the rear tires—and all three of them would likely be dead.
There was the doppler-shifted sound of another projectile whizzing through the already-shattered windows over their heads, then a deep, heavy thud as it slammed into a dune a few dozen yarz away. Sand hissed as half a dune crumbled downwards.
Milly growled and cocked her stungun. “That is it. We were going to help them! Ungrateful, rude–”
“Milly, wait!” Meryl said, tugging on the edge of Milly’s cape, but Milly had already stood and aimed, bracing her elbows on the edge of the truck bed.
“Get! Away!” Milly shouted, punctuating each word with a shot.
There was nothing for it. Meryl exchanged a glance with Vash as she drew two derringers, then they dove around opposite edges of the truck to cover Milly.
Milly’s stunners had found their targets, grappling two of the… things. They were almost vehicles, almost giant beetles, but nothing like any make, model, or species Meryl had ever seen: quadrupedal and skittering, each one easily as large as their truck, limbs covered with interlocking metal plates.
She didn’t see any sort of cockpit, driver, or rider. They were being attacked by machines.
One had been knocked onto its back by Milly’s shot, waving its leg-like appendages in the air like a bug struggling to right itself. Where the legs attached to the undercarriage, Meryl saw exposed servos: that gave her a weak point she could aim for on the others.
Milly’s second shot had grappled a front leg of another machine, but it effortlessly switched to a tripedal gait. Meryl aimed for the servos and incapacitated two more of its legs. Its single remaining leg buckled, and the machine collapsed.
“The infrared cameras are how they’re sensing us,” Vash yelled as he shot the eyestalks of the machines one after the other, like a row of targets at a carnival.
“What are they?” Meryl asked, gasping for breath as she ducked behind the frame of the truck. She discarded two derringers into the sand and drew two more from their holsters under her cape.
Vash crouched next to her and ejected the empty shells from his Colt. “Lost technology.”
“All the way out here?”
Vash reloaded and gave her a tight smile. "I guess some of the shipwrecks haven’t been discovered yet."
“Shipwrecks—” Meryl started, but was cut off as Vash peeked around the edge of the truck and yelped. Meryl peered out around him. The machines whose cameras he had shot were still charging and hadn’t even slowed down, continuing their charge undeterred. Then the machines fired their guns, and Meryl felt dizzy from the speed at which Vash yanked them back behind the cover of the truck. The sound of bullets hammering its body was almost deafening.
Vash raised his gun to reach over the hood of the truck, and without poking his head back out, he fired six shots.
“They’re locked onto our location now,” he said. “We can’t stay here. We have to run.”
“Run? Are you crazy‽” Meryl shrieked.
“I think they’re much faster than we are, Mr. Vash,” Milly added, ducking down from her firing position to join them. She drew several long metal cylinders out of a pouch at her hip and loaded the folded projectiles into her stungun.
“I took out the rest of their cameras,” Vash said. “They know we’re here, but if we move, they won’t be able to track us. More will come—we have to get somewhere they can’t sense us before that happens.”
“Where are we supposed to go?”
“They have to be coming from somewhere,” Vash said. “That means this part of the desert isn’t as empty as it looks.”
It was a vague answer, and Meryl didn’t like what it implied.
Vash opened his ammo pouch, but his hands faltered and his face fell.
“What is it now?” Meryl said accusingly. The situation was bad enough, and that expression on Vash’s face didn’t mean more good news.
“I’m, ah,” Vash looked up and smiled sheepishly. “Out of .45s?”
“You’re out of bullets?”
Another heavy blast rocked the truck, and Vash grit his teeth, face tightening. “Time’s up! We have to go. Follow me.”
Then Vash dashed back out from behind cover without turning around, confident they would follow.
“Ma’am?” Milly asked, looking between Meryl and Vash.
“We are so filing for hazard pay when we reach May City,” Meryl hissed. “Let’s go, Milly.”
“Right!” Milly said, and together they dashed out from the protection of the truck to follow Vash. The machines continued firing at the truck instead of strafing their aim toward them, just like he had predicted, and Meryl allowed herself a swell of exhilaration and relief at the growing distance between them.
As always seemed to happen in proximity of the Humanoid Typhoon, their luck didn’t last long. Vash was half a dozen yarz ahead of Meryl and Milly, but he suddenly broke out of his run with a yelp—then, of all things, he started running back towards them.
“Abort! Abort!” Vash cried, waving his arms as he half-ran, half-skidded back down the slope they’d been climbing—which wasn’t easy, the hungry sand sucking their feet down with every step.
“What the—” Meryl started, but then she saw what Vash had seen: a hoard of the machines crested the dune like a swarm from a hive. And Vash was out of bullets.
Suddenly the gunfire from the machines shooting the truck behind them cut off, and Meryl looked back. The first group was spinning to face them, and Meryl noticed curved dishes in their head pivoting. They didn’t just have cameras, they could hear—if they’d somehow missed their running, they definitely caught onto Vash’s screeching.
Vash, Milly, and Meryl all skidded to a stop when they reached each other, shifting back to back as machines advanced toward them from all sides.
Meryl grit her teeth and unclipped two more derringers—she was well into her second panel of them by now. She raised them at the closest machine, the one leading the pack that Vash had been running from, but then it… spoke?
“Unauthorized vehicle neutralized. Now scanning unidentified entities.”
Meryl froze in confusion. Its voice was flat and toneless. A red flickering light shot out from its chest and scanned Vash first, head to toe. He yelped and watched it pass over his coat with something akin to disgust, like the light was an unsavory substance.
“Scan complete,” the machine that had spoken first said. “ID confirmed: crew member. Your presence in this area is a violation of security protocol. For your safety, please proceed to your nearest rally point until all hostile entities are neutralized.”
The red light then turned to scan Milly, then Meryl. The same flat voice said, “Scan complete. Your IDs have not been registered. Therefore, you may not enter this area.”
“—Wait, wait, we’re buddies! They’re with me!” Vash tried to cut in, but was ignored.
“—You will now be removed by force.” The air heat warped around the barrel of the machine’s gun aimed right at Meryl’s chest.
Then Vash was in front of her, and a loud pop and cloud of smoke burst from the machine’s gun. Vash had shot straight down its barrel, exploding the round still in its chamber.
Hadn’t he been out of bullets?
The machine spoke again, voice devoid of either surprise or aggression. “Entity ID reclassified: hostile.”
The sound of multiple automatic guns cocking and swiveling to aim at them sent a shiver down Meryl’s spine—but then, with what almost sounded like a single shot, the barrels of the machines’ guns each let out a puff of smoke, jammed similarly by Vash.
“Get down!” Vash said for the second time in the last five minutes, and like before, Meryl complied just in time: the group of machines with functional guns and broken cameras fired right where Vash, Meryl, and Milly had been standing, their shots hitting the second group. They made a break for it crawling under metal legs, and when they could, stumbled to their feet.
“Bingo!” Cheered Vash. “Time to get out of here.”
Vash launched himself down the steepest side of the sand dune with one foot in front of the other, surfing down the surface and leaving a dusty cloud in his wake. Meryl followed his move, and Milly behind Meryl, the sand rushing around their feet as they gained speed.
Meryl had a half a million questions for Vash—starting with how did you still have bullets and ending with what did they mean by crew member—but instead of any of that, she asked the most pressing question:
“Where are we going?”
“Down!” Vash yelled back, and Meryl could almost throttle him for making a joke at a time like this, but he was intently scanning the sand at the base of the dune. With a start, Meryl saw that the sand there was shifting, swirling—like it was draining somewhere. Vash wasn’t just stating the obvious. “Take a deep breath,” Vash yelled, and Meryl gulped in a lungful of air just before they plunged into the sinkhole.
Meryl felt like the shifting darkness would smother her. For a terrifying moment she wasn’t sure which direction was up, and she flailed wildly in an attempt to break free of the sand, fighting the burning in her lungs.
Then a hand grabbed her wrist and pulled her out, and Meryl fell into a coughing heap next to Vash, who reached back into the sand column to pull out Milly, and they stumbled away from the ever-growing pile. The echoing of their feet revealed the ground to be not bedrock, but metal—a floor. A shipwreck, buried under the sand this whole time.
They’d escaped from the machines for now, but if they originated somewhere in the depths of the buried structure, they were still far from safety.
Wide utilitarian hallways were cast in a pallid orange from footlights spaced along the bottom of the walls. Like those machines, the ship inexplicably still had power.
It took Meryl a moment to realize that the footlights themselves weren’t orange—Vash’s glasses had, remarkably, not fallen off in her tumble down. Their sepia lenses cast the room into sharp, defined gradients. Rather than dimming her vision in the low light, they somehow made it sharper by bringing out contrast.
“So,” Meryl said, then spat out sand that had made its way into her throat before trying again. “So, we’re trapped. We don’t have a vehicle, we don’t have rations, and we’re stuck in a shipwreck with weapons that are actively trying to kill us.”
“But why are they trying to kill us? This is a colony ship, just like the rest of them! Isn’t it?” Milly finished hesitantly. “Maybe the shipwreck is a base for robbers? And they have really, really good technology?”
“Robbers didn’t build those, and robbers wouldn’t be able to control them, either,” Vash said. “I don’t think this shipwreck has been discovered. I had assumed, by now, that any still out there would be—it doesn’t matter,” Vash said. His jaw was working, and Meryl struggled to place his tone and expression. It wasn’t anger, or confusion, or even resignation. Vash just looked lost. “We’re in one of the Lost Ships. A Gregorian capital ship.”
Meryl’s breath caught. “We’re in one of the Lost Cities?”
The capital shipwrecks that had survived had become the largest cities on Gunsmoke over time, but several were unaccounted for. July wasn't the only Lost City, just the most recent.
“This one wasn’t a passenger ship. It was the fleet’s carrier vessel for war machines.”
The machine had called Vash a crew member—somehow, that was rocking Meryl’s view of him almost more than the knowledge that he was a plant. Humans had lost the knowledge and technology to create new plants in the Big Fall. On some level she knew Vash must be ancient, but like the knowledge that he had destroyed July—it was all just so easy to forget.
Vash seemed to sense Meryl staring, and he met her gaze and held it. She wondered if there was another reason he usually wore his tinted glasses: the reflections of the footlights seemed to multiply and dance in his eyes like fire, or the shifting aurora around him and the other plant when they’d entered the control room in Tombstone. In the confined darkness of the shipwreck, it looked eerie.
Milly’s voice broke their strange connection.
“A military vessel?” Milly said, like the very idea was appalling.
Vash’s eyes darkened. “SEEDS knew that whatever planet they found might have life already on it, and they didn’t expect colonization to be a peaceful process. They were prepared for military operations. It wasn’t something I learned until—until later.”
“That means you haven’t been here before?” Meryl said.
“No. If I knew about it, I… it doesn’t matter. I’m here now.” Vash sounded distant. He trailed off, then strode over to a wall and wiped at a panel with a sleeve. He rubbed away buildup to reveal a sign like Meryl would expect in a large building, with numbers and arrows likely indicating the direction of various numbered rooms or corridors the hallway led to. Meryl saw no surprise in Vash’s eyes as his fingers lingered on an insignia at the bottom center.
A hollow groan like the digestion of an empty stomach echoed off the metal walls. The hiss of sand filling the sinkhole behind them sounded like the warning rattle of a toxic worm, bouncing between the narrow metal walls, reverberating in Meryl’s chest.
“Welcome to the Lost City of March.”