Wildfire Riders

"Brace it with the- Brace it with the crossbeam, you fucking ponce!"
"No, no, it's gonna get stuck again. You've got to-"
"MOVE it! If the wheel gets stuck again..."
"I said brace it with the godsdamned crossbeam!"

This was not how I pictured the Army would be.
For the third time that week the downpour had been torrential, sweeping down from Zul'Drak in what had originated as a blizzard but had turned into a rainstorm as the clouds dropped down that last few hundred yards in elevation. The result was one that immersed the forest in a bog of mud and pine needles, reducing visibility to only fifty yards and our pace to that of a snail's crawl. Our beloved Lieutenant Priensen, a pale southerner whose head was currently blistered from a botched shaving job, was screaming at us to support our lead wagon's left side with wooden planks. The storm had caught us off guard, and we hadn't had time to get to higher ground; as such, when the trail started to turn to slop, we'd started rushing and gotten careless. The wagon was now immobilized, thus holding up the rest of our column- but as we'd gotten stuck at a bend in the trail, the downward facing side was starting to tilt as the dirt beneath it washed away.

The rain was cold- so cold I wasn't entirely sure how it couldn't be snow. It pelted against our faces as a slush and soaked through our winter clothes- a feature of our standard issue gear we'd come to loathe was that it kept you warm based on the assumption that it would be cold enough to keep snow or ice from melting, even taking into account your body heat in the midst of action. So, for deployments like the Storm Peaks or Icecrown, the wools you wore under your armor were great, because nothing was ever liquid in those places. But in areas like the Grizzlies, where it did rain, they'd get heavy with moisture and suck the heat right off of your skin.

As I tried to get a foothold to push the ever-tilting supply wagon back to an upright position, it was the thought of foul-ups like these that filled my head. The Army worked when regarded as an enormous and ponderous thing; the entire foul machine, with its airships and steam tanks battalion after battalion of men. But on the micromanagement level it fell to pieces. As miserable as I was, always almost-slipping down a freezing hill with my back pushing against a wagon that was about to tip over and crush my crazy head to mush, I couldn't help but think of the poor son of a bitch who'd been on the other end of our supply foul up; stuck somewhere in Icecrown with skivvies built to repel moisture but not the cold.

"Fucking hells, it's gonna-"
"MOVE YOUR ASSES!"

I'd felt it start to go before various other people in my unit shouted their warnings, and I'd already been jumping out of the way. The path underneath the downward facing wheels collapsed, sliding down the hill all at once. The wagon, without anything to keep it upright, lurched over onto its side and began tumbling down the hill in a series of crashes and bangs as its frame splintered, sending its contents to be strewn all along its path before impacting on an ancient tree stump.

"Shit!" Priensen started cursing, pacing back and forth as the path where the wagon had been washed completely out, "Shit shit shit! Why didn't you brace it with a crossbeam like I ordered?!". He grabbed the nearest enlisted man that had been working to save the wagon -thankfully not me-, and shook him. The soldier, a boy from Westfall named Silas Terfen, was fortunately too smart to give any answer beyond a gasping "I'm sorry, Sir," before Priensen tossed him aside into the mud. Nobody moved to help him up.
"We're sitting ducks on this hillside," Priensen growled, casting a suspecting glance into the mist-choked woodlands, "Strung out over a hundred yards." He drew his horn and blew it, Hooooo, Hooooo, Ar-ooooooo, signaling an about face. "We're heading back down the hill!" he called out, mounting his horse and riding towards what had moments ago been the ass-end of the column, "Circle the wagons at the base of the hill! Eyes up!"

Grabbing what we could from what had fallen out of the wagon closest to the path, we began our long, serpentine march back down the hill. We didn't know it at the time, but we were hours away from our first major engagement with the enemy.

(Ok, a brief explanation. The Third Stormwind Inquisitive is a unit devoted to dealing with the mortal elements within the Scourge- Cult of the Damned, Arthas sympathizers, and the unaffiliated dregs of society that would prey on wounded units for their gear's resale value and suchlike. They are currently attempting to move through backwoods trails in southeastern Grizzly Hills to meet up with the Westfall Brigade and get further orders. I'm writing this story without any of our typical characters being part of the show; if you'd like to join, please do! I have no set endpoint for this story.)

(( I love stories like this ))

Three hours later we'd managed to inch our way back down most of the trail. If we'd been moving slowly before we were rewriting the definition of caution now; Priensen was convinced that a unit of Cultists, who we'd been picking up chatter from before the storm knocked out our boxes, was in the area. As much as I thought our Beloved Lieutenant was a cock, I had to admit that he had a pretty solid sixth sense about these sorts of things. The rest of the men, though they bitched and moaned, had the same impression of him. You wanted him around, but only so long as there was a threat.

I was what they called 'mixed infantry'- the politically correct way to designate those of us who'd been trained mostly in hand-to-hand combat (but lacked the good fortune to be outfitted with a standard footman's heavy armor), but had been given a gunman or archer's equipment (without the training to make decent use of them). It was the Crown's way of solving that age-old problem where archers break their lines and retreat when charged by standard infantry or cavalry; we were expected to unleash a hail of mostly inaccurate gunfire until our quarry was point-blank, then draw steel and skewer them. The few times I'd seen it happen, it worked... but really inflicted no more casualties than if you'd trained a real unit of snipers, or a real unit of footmen. I supposed it was just a way to save on equipment costs and training time. Fortunately for me, I'd learned to be a decent enough shot on my parents' farm in Darkshire, but not everyone was so lucky.

"I dont like this place," Terfen murmured, wiping away a sheen of icy slush that had built up on his forehead, "Can't see the next fucking wagon up, much less any corpselovers out there." He gripped his rifle closer.
"Easy, Junior," another man said from nearby, his voice rife with apprehension. The man speaking was Corporal Johnathan Masiks, another Westfall man born and bred, though where Terfen was barely eighteen, Masiks was in his early thirties. He was an absolute bear of a man, standing above six and a half feet, and he'd taken the much smaller Terfen under his wing. He'd say that the kid, called 'Junior' by most of the unit, would cut into a good soldier in a few years, but for the moment he was still very jumpy. That unease he had for himself tended to spread throughout the squad and put everybody on edge, so Masiks usually took it upon himself to calm him down. "Nothin' worth shootin' just yet."
"Aye!" laughed a third man, "Ye don' wan' be blowin' yer load jes yet, lad! Y'got ta eeeaase inta it, like yer makin' love t'yer..." he stopped, snickering. "Ah, lad like tha' would'nae ken 'bout that. Jes take m'word for it, Junyah." The man, a fiery-haired northron usually referred to only as "ar'Wiland", had taken it upon himself to act as the polar opposite to Masiks' style of teaching, and as such relentlessly harassed Terfen. Masiks, in turn, growled at ar'Wiland, who kept chuckling to himself but otherwise quieted himself, while Terfen scowled more but didn't release the death-grip on his rifle.

We walked on.

By the time we had finally reached the base of the hill, the deluge had only become more intense. Instead of merely freezing rain and sleet, the wind had picked up as well, driving from our minds any hope of something resembling warmth within the next twenty-four hours. Our wagons were circled by an outcropping of boulders, probably the run-off from some other mountain rainstorm long ago. We had five wagons remaining to our unit. Two of these were LA-SC designation wagons; LA standing for Light Armor, and the S standing for Supply Carrier. Most of the time we referred to them as 'the girls' (LASC pronounced all at once sounds like Lassie). Two more were MA-TC, or Medium Armor Troop Carriers, even though these were little more than over-glorified supply wagons with a couple of steel plates bolted on to the outside frame and iron-rimmed wheels. The wagon we had lost on the hill had been one of these, and morale had immediately plummeted as it meant that some of us wouldn't have a set place to take cover if we were to come under fire.

The last of the wagons was our big-and-nasty; its model actually earned it a real name, rather than just an acronym. The Windigo was again basically a wagon, but a much larger version of one that was built around the idea of housing a main gun, instead of just retrofitting a civilian-built chasis with armor and slits to shoot out of. It stood four yards tall and three yards wide, and instead of a dome of cloth covering like the other, smaller models had, it was armored with two-inch thick forged mithril plating all the way around. With eight steel-rimmed, tredded wheels for extra balance and traction, it was constructed around the quad-barrel .45 gauge "Hornet" anti-personnel assault cannon, which had a 360* horizontal and a 90* positive/15* negative vertical swivel. It was the only one of our wagons that was equipped with a self-propelling steam engine, but to make the model lighter the steam powering systems did not extend to the gun. Instead, the gun (which was centrally top-mounted) was fired by a pedaling mechanism that the gunner used while sitting in its turret. The Hornet could hit an ROF of eight bullets per second if the gunner could pedal that fast, and was typically fed armor-piercing bullets for mowing down infantry and disabling lighter enemy armor. Against something like a repurposed steam tank the gun was next to useless, but we weren't expecting to come across anything of that size so far from primary battle zones.

It was actually fortunate that it was raining as hard as it was, in a strange way; had it been a clear night, most of our twenty-five man unit would have probably been sitting around a cooking fire and bullshitting. As it was, many of the men were laying under the wagons, attempting to wrap themselves in what waterproof canvas we had and sleep through some of the storm.
P'tang!
I startled, looking at the nearest of The Girls, from where the sound had come. "Fuck me sideways," I cursed, "Its not enough to sleet, its gotta fucking hail on us too?"
P'tang! zzzzZZZZIP P'TANG!
"A'int hail, ye damn fool," ar'Wiland cursed, grabbing at his rifle and scrambling behind a wagon wheel, "s'bloody gunfire! TAKE COVER!"
Whoever was shooting at us really opened up as soon as the alarm was sounded, sending men diving for cover and trying to get a bead on our quarry. I dove into the nearest of the Girls, sticking my rifle out of the outward-facing firing slit and trying in vain to peer through the ever-denser mist. Most of our men were firing blind, and I assumed our attackers were too. Bullets rang off of the armor plating in some sort of bloodthirsty song, and, unable to draw up a target, I watched the plates dent inward as shells ricocheted off of them.