The Steam Age: Gears and Bones

Chapter 43

The damage inside the main command building was more severe than it appeared from the outside.

Pficott followed Chertzov across the blown-up iron gate, his boots creaking against the shattered metal.

The lobby, which should have been a service office, is now just a mess of broken bricks and overturned tables and chairs.

The duty roster on the wall was still there, but half of the paper had been torn off by shrapnel, and the remaining half was trembling in the cold wind. The names and duty times on it were so blurred that they were no longer legible.

Most of the doors on both sides of the corridor were open, and some had been blown away, leaving only half of the hinges hanging on the door frames.

Scattered on the ground were shards of glass broken by military boots, torn canvas document bags, several bent brass bullet casings, and a worn-out duty log with a moldy and curled leather cover.

Cherzov did not linger in the corridor.

He walked through the foyer and headed straight for the room at the end of the corridor that had a bronze plaque that read "Command Center".

The bronze plaque hung crookedly on the door frame. A bullet passed right through the center of the plaque, leaving a small hole with the edge turned outwards.

The command center was smaller than Perfitt had anticipated.

In the center of the room was a combat table made of thick wooden planks. Most of the map on the table had been torn off, and the remaining corner was pressed down by a teacup. The water in the teacup had long since frozen into ice, sticking the bottom of the cup to the map.

The metal filing cabinets against the wall were all open, with drawers pulled out and thrown on the floor, their contents scattered everywhere. Some of the documents had been stepped on by boots, and the mud on the shoe prints had long since dried.

Perfit stopped in front of the worktable and bent down to pick up the nearest document from the floor.

The paper was softened by the dampness, and a layer of grayish-green mold had appeared on the edges. The ink had smudged most of the way, and only a few scattered phrases could be barely made out—the words "ammunition," "supplies," and "wounded soldiers" were relatively clear, but when put together, they could not be deciphered into a complete sentence.

She turned the paper over; the back was blank, there was nothing there.

She picked up a few more documents scattered under the table, all in similar condition.

Most of them were routine administrative records—supply requisition forms, outpost duty rosters, and lists of feed rations for military horses. There was a combat order torn in two; the top half read "Ninth Border Division, Shipol Pass Garrison," and the bottom half contained a line of text, soaked with water, with only the last few words still legible—"...Hold firm and await reinforcements; do not retreat a single step."

There was a small dark stain on the edge of the paper, which could be spilled tea or something else.

"These are useless." Perfitt stacked the few tattered pages of documents into a pile and placed them on the edge of the war table. He turned to Chernzov, who was squatting next to the filing cabinet searching through the documents. "They're all routine administrative records, no operational intelligence."

Cherzov did not answer immediately.

He was squatting in front of the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet that hadn't been pulled out yet, taking out the documents one by one. His movements were slow but very methodical.

He paused when he turned to the third document, brought it close to his eyes and examined it carefully for a moment, then stood up and spread the document out on the war table.

"This is the combat log." He pointed to the unit number at the top of the document, "The combat log of the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, 9th Frontier Division. They recorded the entire process from receiving orders to contacting Romulus's army."

Perfit walked over to him and looked down at the battle log.

Chertzov's fingers moved down the lines of handwritten Russian script, translating in a low voice.

The first half of the log records some routine information—duty shifts, patrol routes, and the arrival and departure times of supply convoys.

The handwriting was neat and the ink color was even, indicating that the person recording the information was clearly still in a normal state of duty.

But starting from a certain page in the middle, the handwriting suddenly changed.

It wasn't that the recorder was changed, but rather that the same person's handwriting had become noticeably messy, with varying ink shades, and some lines had even been crossed out and rewritten.

The date column showed consecutive records, one every day, sometimes two or three times a day, with the content changing from routine patrols to brief and urgent tactical descriptions.

"...His records say that Romulus's army amassed at least two regiments in the hilly area outside the pass, carrying at least four field guns and an unknown number of catapults."

The forward observation post spotted several large, heavily covered supply wagons behind Romulus's position. These wagons were low-slung and had heavy-duty wheels, unlike typical ammunition wagons.

Chertzov's translator paused, looked up at Perficott, and then continued reading: "The next morning, the first infected person was launched across the defensive line by a catapult."

The record devotes an entire paragraph to describing the chaos at the time—a significant portion of the infected who were dropped were still active, rolling around a few times after hitting the ground before regaining their footing and roaring as they pounced on the nearest Ross soldiers, causing far more panic than actual casualties; while the wounded were isolated in the medic's tent.

This is the first infection control measure consciously implemented by the Russian military, clearly stemming from experience in the capital.

He pulled out another copy of the order from the pile of documents; the paper was yellowed but relatively well-preserved, and unfolded it in the center of the table.

"But the isolation itself could not stop the panic of being surrounded from spreading. The front lines began to collapse less than two hours after the first contact. The sergeants tried to reorganize the defenses, but Romulus's artillery chose to open fire when the fleeing troops were in the most disarray as they retreated into the second line of defense."

This was a classic double whammy—first creating chaos, then using regular artillery to strike the already disorganized positions.

Perfit's brow furrowed slightly.

The fact that Romulus's army was using catapults to hurl infected people didn't surprise her in itself—Major William had mentioned the Romulus doing this on the front lines during a briefing in Langdon. But when she read those descriptions firsthand in a front-line operations log, it felt entirely different.

Every line Chertzov read was like a painting unfolding before her: the defenders, flintlock muskets aimed at the things flying from the catapults, thinking they were corpses, siege weapons meant to instill fear, then the corpses crashed to the ground, shook their heads, stood up, and began to bite.

She pinched herself to refocus her attention on the documents in front of her.

"It wasn't the artillery that routed them," she said, her voice low but rapid, "it was the infected. The artillery simply took advantage of the chaos."

Cherzov nodded and continued flipping through the pages. The last few pages of the log recorded the final period at the pass outpost. He read slowly, his fingers moving over the messy handwriting line by line, then laying out several documents with different dates side by side, piecing together a timeline of the last few days.