Chapter 1
In those days, few people at all understood what would happen next with the world. Everything that people saw, everything that they knew and appreciated, collapsed a few years ago and now lived out its days under the scorching sun of the newborn Wasteland.
It is still difficult to say how the Mechanics appeared and conquered their niche. Probably, this was the case when a chain of unrelated incidents with a fuse-cord led to the storehouse of gunpowder ideas. An explosion burst, then another and another, and now the name of the Engineers sweeps through the Wasteland with a trumpet roar, forcing the aliens to lower their heads in sacred horror.
The name of the Mentor in those days was associated with a sharply honed instrument, capable of carving out, bit by bit, drawing a new order, forcing the remnants of the previous devastation to crumble in a cracked vault on the heads of those who disagree.
The most important role in everything was played by the Founders, who came from the factory of special equipment, the name of which was drowned in the flow of time. Their weapons, safely hidden in fortified garages, were legendary. Teaming up with the Mentor, they turned into Engineers and rode out deadly armored beasts only in extreme cases. But one demonstration of this power was always enough. Armor, almost as strong as the protection of military vehicles, mighty trunks, directing impenetrable blackness to the sky and capable of destroying an entire settlement in one volley ... It was hard to imagine that once they were, albeit ahead of their time, but construction vehicles. They changed under the sensitive hands of Maya, a talented engineer, in whose veins red-hot metal seemed to flow.
The Mentor was the absolute leader, but the formation of the Engineers would hardly have been as quick if Eva Linnholm, a woman who managed to win over her former colleagues to the side of the Engineers, did not stand on his right hand.
Oh Eva Linnholm! The warehouse manager - who could have imagined her as the leader? This, probably, is another of the jokes of the story - a small clever pebble under the harsh winds turns into an excellent spearhead.
The Mentor and Eva led their people to a future that they saw clearly, like the stars on a clear night. And the way to it was blazed by experimental machines from the factory, which underwent metamorphosis under the guidance of engineers and became a deadly weapon.
In just a few years, the Mechanics sun will fall from its zenith and rapidly roll downward.