A Day's Wage

In the midst of a revolution in the nation that hired him, a foreign mercenary fights less to preserve his employers and more to preserve his own life.

"With an awful grinding of gears, audible only in the dead and awestruck silence, the ship's turrets turned to bear down on the fortress walls. "

Note: This story is set in a world I call "Altera": an alternate 19th Century Earth, with nations and events that are similar enough to our world to be familiar, yet different enough to be new. Altera occasionally veers into steampunk territory, as technology is about 15 years ahead of our timeline.