So, I had really mixed feelings about this one.
On the one hand, I had a rollicking good time. Wars replaced by duels! Awesome explodey steampunk cyborg fights! Neat superhero vibe! Tormentuous implications of humanity losing out to machine invasion! Also, from a craft perspective, a neat setting, characters with interesting fears and flaws, witty dialogue, and an unexpected direction to go in at the end. Well done.
On the other hand, the story left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Steampunk as a genre - its obsession with privileged white people of an era when privileged white people were even more empowered to be jerks, the way it gleefully throws itself into tropes of sexism, racism, and classism without examining them and uses "it's period!" as a defense - has already been deconstructed by critics far articulater than I. What I am going to try to show in detail is that this story swallows a lot of those tropes without pause.
I mean, sure, we had Sophia, who it turned out was secretly a queen, and that was pretty cool. And yet, even though she is secretly the most badass of the badass combat cyborgs, she was also very classically feminine, and her character as presented could be summed up as "the knight's girl sidekick." I do see how it's implied that there might be more to her... but we don't get to see a lot of that in the story. So she's a girl sidekick.
And then there's Thoth... Thoth really took me out of the story. The way the narrator dwelled on how alien and ~exotic~ and therefore nasty and dirty and untrustworthy - but also weirdly appealing, because he's so unique and different from everything else in the story - Thoth was... it did not sit well with me. Not at all. Set the story in Arizona and change Thoth's name to Carlos or Mictlantecuhtli or something and whoa boy, have we got something that American listeners will recognize as racist immediately.
And then Oakshott chose to die, basically because he was afraid of the dirty foreign immigrant technology he had bought, which would have been a great opportunity to examine how his racism and xenophobia got him killed... but instead, the author chose to make the comparison mostly about the giant hulking monstrous rook. Thoth's metal face - and his dirty foreign-ness - was only there to put the idea into Oakshott's head.
The final touch for me - where the story really just fell into the uglier side of Steampunk rather than doing anything to examine or explore it - was the way that I was expected to root for Oakshott. In Steampunk, there's this bias towards Western European - often but not always British - culture over everything else, including Eastern European culture. I know that Russia is being a bunch of jerks right now in the real world, but I don't think that the author did enough to make me care how this fight turned out. Oakshott was a racist who refused to use a weapon that could have saved his own life, so I didn't really care about him. I had no reason to particularly care if Russia advanced in - or even won! - this war, because I had no reason to believe that they were the "bad" guys, except that they aren't British, and in Steampunk the Brits are supposed to be the best at everything, and always the heroes.
But honestly, in my mind, they are just another state. Unless you prove that they are the better state in this particular case, I'm not going to assume it.
So, yeah... overall, I'd call this a miss for me. Without a doubt, the craft was sublime. Very well done pacing, snappy dialogue, and evocative descriptions. But the story itself did not really appeal, and while it was fun and explodey at first listen, it gets less and less appealing the more time I have to think about it.