The Rise of the Iron Moon

by Stephen Hunt

  Hardarms tried to speak to Lord Starhome, but the half-steamman craft’s hull was humming loudly like a tuning fork, his voice faint under the effort of casting a magic he had long forgotten; low as it was, Hardarms still heard the craft’s ancient mantra. ‘My shields can deflect particles at point one-C under lightspeed, my shields can deflect particles at point one-C under lightspeed.’

  Then the mantra was drowned out by a terrible burst of light and an explosion, the green energy of their shield fizzing beneath the onslaught. The field umbrella covering them flickered and died and for a moment Hardarms thought that their protection had been vaporized, but the craft had only let it fall after the neutronic field front had punched past.

  Hardarms mounted the crest of the rise again to take in the scene. Every tree on the moor had been uprooted, every bush and blade of grass flattened, and radiating out from a blackened core, the valley below was filled with the corpses of steammen. Nothing was left at the epicentre of the blast. Hardarms could even see where some of his comrades’ shadows had been left etched into the soil, while beyond this lay a felled forest of the people of the metal – bodies intact enough, but their soul boards, crystals and circuits scrubbed of every last iota of sentience by the neutron-level force front. Little more life left down there than in the metal ores that Longtreads trundled down from his mountain mine. A handful of bodies at the periphery jerked and shook as their secondary systems tried to come back online, limbs vainly twitching now they had been burnt clear of all intelligence, of all pattern. Near the flattened standard of King Steam a few warriors stood activate but deeply shocked, the energy shields of their own ancient artefacts from the Chamber of Swords falling away now that the enemy’s vicious field front had passed.

  Of the Army of Shadows’ cannon and its two gunners there was no sign, but those that they had sacrificed themselves for were visible now – a distant black horde advancing under the cover of the unnatural clouds to mop up the few survivors that still stood, startled, shaking, before them.

  Hardarms turned to stare down at Longtreads. ‘How fast are you without your load?’

  ‘How fast?’ The cantankerous steamman miner was insulted by the very question. ‘I can carry over a hundred tonnes of ore and not think it too much. Free me from my load and my treads can move with the speed of a gun-box shell, as if the shadow of the Dark Lord Two-Tar himself were chasing me.’

  ‘I fear that something just as bad soon will be,’ said Hardarms, climbing up onto one of the trailers and thumping on Lord Starhome’s skin to open a door in his silver shell. ‘Go back to the Free State and report what you have seen, miner. Tell King Steam to look to the defences of our capital. Only the rocky depths of the mountains can protect us against such weapons.’

  ‘And where do you expect me to go, to lighten this dirt-hauler’s trailers?’ asked Lord Starhome. ‘I cannot reach the void with my impellers. I have told you, gravity is too distortive down here.’

  ‘Crane Lord Starhome off your trailer,’ Hardarms ordered the miner. ‘Then clear our vicinity at your top steam.’

  Lord Starhome watched as his silver shell-like body was lifted away from the miner’s tractor cradles and lowered down onto the grass. ‘You are not thinking of what I—’

  Hardarms pointed in the direction of the black horde pouring across the moors. ‘Fire your engines anyway.’

  ‘I cannot reach escape velocity.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to. Flop across the land like a dying fish, bounce us like a frog escaping boiling water, but move us out of here!’

  ‘Flop!’ shouted Lord Starhome. ‘I don’t flop! If I open a warp inside a gravity-well this deep, you’ll have an explosion that makes the neutron weapon we just saw detonating look like a wax candle being lit.’

  Hardarms gazed in the direction of the low, fleeing form of Longtreads, the dust from his wake kicking up into the air behind him. Longtreads was every bit as fast as he had boasted. To ensure he was obeyed, Hardarms brandished the golden ring that King Steam had given him before he departed the Free State, etched with control circuits so fine even a steamman’s vision plate had trouble resolving them. ‘You are sworn to obey me. You have your orders and we will move.’

  ‘Oh, we’ll move all right. We’ll move, the whole bloody land will move, and you’ll die of gravity particle poisoning. My reactors are inside my shields. The only use I can put my shields to is to cushion our eventual crash landing. I can’t save you if you board me. It’ll be a slow, lingering, painful death for you. You might be better off staying here for an instant end at the hands of those things.’

  ‘But they,’ Hardarms pointed towards the darkening clouds of the Army of Shadows, ‘will die also.’

  ‘Oh, give me the stars again,’ wailed Lord Starhome. ‘Free me of the petty land disputes and foolery of ground huggers and give me instead the infinite sky.’

  ‘And you can give me my engine ignition,’ ordered Hardarms, swinging through the portal that Lord Starhome had created in his hull.

  ‘A minute, to override every safety protocol my great creators wisely placed in my systems,’ spat the craft.

  A screen formed in Lord Starhome’s nose, giving Hardarms a near-perfect view of the moors as seen from the front of the holy artefact. ‘The Army of Shadows is closing in.’

  ‘Sit in one of my pilot seats at the front,’ urged Lord Starhome. ‘You’ll fry a margin slower inside the protection of my internal acceleration dampeners.’

  Hardarms had to retract his two spear arms to fit, but he positioned himself onto one of the transparent chairs, his manipulator arms grasping the controls that extruded out from the hull. More to make him feel better about his predicament, he suspected, than to give him any real control. He looked nervously at the rapidly advancing clouds. ‘Are you ready to fly?’

  ‘Ha!’ laughed Lord Starhome. ‘Fly? We’re going to scud across this dirt ball like a flaming angel of hell and my every impact is going to leave a burning crater a mile wide.’

  ‘Is Longtreads outside your launch radius?’

  ‘Don’t you worry about that common little miner, his troubles are over.’

  A roar sounded from the back of the long, sleek shell, louder and louder, until Lord Starhome had to scream over his protesting impellers to be heard. ‘It was an eon ago, but the system jumper that gave birth to me gave me two pieces of very emphatic advice. The first was this: never, never, never ever attempt to warp gravity within the mass signature of a celestial body with an active magnetic core.’

  Hardarms flipped the iron blast hood down over his vision plate. ‘And the second …?’

  Lord Starhome’s reply was lost to posterity in an explosion so ear-shatteringly loud that its echoes were heard back in the mountain passes of the Steammen Free State.

  Jeanne pushed the commodore and Oliver out of the way of the great dark beast rearing up behind them, a shower of oily liquid spraying them from a whale-large mouth, giving the two men a hasty glance at multiple sets of rotating teeth. The apparently limbless creature, as tall as a two-storey house, crashed through the remaining trees and slid across the clearing. Oliver and the commodore picked themselves up, astonished, as Jeanne ducked into the woods behind them to see if there was anything else about to come ploughing through.

  The monster was a giant elephantine slug undulating silently across the grassland, powerful enough to push down trees as if they were mere blades of grass. Dozens more of the creatures were busy consuming the landscape under the light of the new comet moon, burrowing into the hills of Quatérshift and occasionally emerging maggot-like from the slopes. Hot clouds of foul-smelling mist were rising from the giant slugs’ bodies, trails of it spearing up into the dark sky. It made for a hellish sight. They were mining the earth, consuming everything they came across, loudly grinding up rock and ores with their circular maws. Wherever the beasts surged they left trails, not of slime, but lines of objects discarded in the grass, hexagonal plates and piping, machine-pa
rts and boards, objects that obviously had a utility other than fertilizer for these slopes after their feeding.

  Jeanne re-emerged from the woods and shook her head at her father. ‘Just the slugs, this time. No sign of any slats or slaves coming to pick up their shit.’

  ‘I didn’t sense it,’ said Oliver. ‘It was as if—’

  ‘They lack even the wit of cattle,’ said Keyspierre, ‘but they are creatures of the Army of Shadows, nevertheless. If you stand in one’s way it will attempt to consume you, but they are so insentient that you can walk up behind one and freely put a torch to it – then their greasy skin burns like lamp oil. Usually, we’d set fire to the whole filthy pack of them, but the slats are aware when we kill them and come calling to see who has been making mischief. The beasts are living mills, organic factories churning out the building blocks of the Army of Shadows’ machines and cities. Teams at the Institute des Luminaires have been studying the creatures’ excretions when we have managed to steal them, but we have so far divined little of the parts’ purpose or secrets. We are like monkeys cracking open a fine watch and marvelling blindly at the cogs and gears as we shake them out onto the dirt.’

  ‘It’s not the parts that are squeezed from their arses that I’d be mortal worried about,’ wheezed the commodore, pointing to the entrance of the old abandoned mine in the hills. ‘If they’re inside the hills making a feast of them, they might be inside the mine. It could be the parts to Timlar Preston’s great beast of a cannon they’re putting on their supper menu.’

  Oliver seemed hypnotized by the sight. Any campaigning force lived off the land while it fought, but Quatérshift wasn’t being looted, it was being infested, the landscape remade as a hell by the Army of Shadows. The words of the ancient warrior woman who had appeared like a ghost before him drifted back to mind. Even together, the two of you are not enough to defeat that which you will face. Molly should have been here with them, not back in Jackals; she could have put this in one of her books.

  Jeanne motioned forward the shiftie troops holding the train of mules. ‘Let’s scoop the cannon parts up. Keep your eyes open for slats, compatriot Jackelians, and try not to get killed inside the mine. I won’t be able to watch your backs so well when I’m digging.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Molly stepped out of the mail coach, the only passenger to alight, and looked around. Halfshire was one of the kingdom’s last ancient border counties before the uplands began in earnest and there wasn’t much to its acres except for pine forests and isolated farms nestled in the shadows of crags like Mount Highhorn. She absently raised a hand to stroke the flank of one of the four midnight-black mares tethered to her coach; the horse she was touching was looking suspiciously down at the steamman trailing up the path towards them.

  ‘I thought you might arrive via the canal,’ Coppertracks called out.

  ‘It’s hard to get a berth on any narrowboat, now,’ said Molly. ‘Even carrying full parliamentary papers. With the merchant marine grounded, every mill owner and shopkeeper from Hundred Locks to Calgness is shipping their goods by the waterways. Prices have gone through the roof.’

  ‘Are things that bad?’ asked Coppertracks.

  Molly nodded her head back to the mail coach’s escort. A troop of Benzari Lancers, stocky mountain people from the hinterland south of the Kingdom of Jackals. Hardy little warriors who competed fiercely for the few vacant places in the Royal Benzari Regiment each year. Ferociously loyal to their regiment’s oath and deadly with the curved blades hanging from their black breeches.

  ‘That’s who parliament are trusting to keep open the Great Middlesteel Road. There hasn’t been a desertion from the Benzari Regiment since they were formed.’

  ‘Have you heard any news of Oliver and the commodore?’ asked Coppertracks.

  ‘No, but things are turning to the worse in Quatérshift. The news sheets are full of how the shifties sent their Third and Seventh Brigade to the north and both forces just vanished without a trace. Sixty thousand men gone, the country’s been split in two by the Army of Shadows.’

  Coppertracks raised an iron hand towards the sprawl of makeshift barracks; manufactories and buildings that had been raised inside the forest clearings, hidden from the sight of whatever eyes the Army of Shadows might have high in the sky by green netting hung between the trees. ‘We only have a handful of the experts on Preston’s list, and without those parts buried in his mine we’ll have to attempt to mill the cannon components ourselves. We can do that, but it’s time we don’t have—’

  Molly waved her hands to quieten down the nervous steamman. If she knew Coppertracks, he had been working day and night without a rest. He was pushing himself to the point of exhaustion to complete the massive cannon. ‘Let’s trust the commodore knows the old smuggling routes out of Quatérshift as well as he boasted he did.’ Molly glanced up at Mount Highhorn, its grassy slopes bare except for crimson fingers of light from their strange new red moon. ‘I can’t see supports for the cannon being installed?’

  ‘This isn’t one of your celestial fiction novels, Molly softbody. The cannon will not tower up the side of that mountain. It’s flat.’

  ‘Flat?’

  Coppertracks pointed to the heart of the forest below. It was hard to tell where the ancient forest began and the new canopy of camouflage netting ended. ‘It resembles a seashell, a spiral winding around itself. There has never been a cannon like it before. Timlar Preston is one of your people’s greatest minds. During the Two-Year War he was designing his wave-front cannon to be hidden inside a mountain, far from the reach of airship bombs. We, unfortunately, don’t have the time to excavate the mountain here, so instead we’re lying the spiral gun’s barrelling down across the forest floor. Yes, the fellow is truly a genius.’

  ‘I think Timlar had a little help,’ said Molly.

  Poor, dead Kyorin. He should have been alive to see his desperate scheme bear fruit. They began walking down the path to the forest camp, Molly’s coach and escort turning back along the trail. Up above the slope’s melting snow stood the honeyed stone of a squat round Martello fort, a rusting airship tower rising behind its walls. The fort was manned with redcoats now, but the airship dock hadn’t seen any traffic for a long while. The fort had no doubt been abandoned long before the camp was established, a relic of the ancient Jackelian civil war reoccupied by rough circumstance.

  The camp might be hiding from view, but as Molly walked closer to the trees she could hear the hammering of steel and the hiss of gas torches. ‘Has Duncan got over his disappointment?’

  ‘He works as hard as any other welder or smelter in the camp. He may not admit it to himself, but he’s clearly more usefully deployed here than fighting with the regiments,’ said Coppertracks. ‘He and Timlar Preston share their passion for rockets together; that is a small consolation. I think it is Purity we must worry about.’

  ‘People here don’t suspect … ?’

  ‘No, the false citizen code we acquired for her is solid. And as a seamstress for the cannon’s rubber lining she is as accomplished as any of the factory children that have been drafted in here. But Purity is changing. She is so possessed by the Loa that it is now impossible to see where she begins and that which rides her ends. The other softbodies here can sense the difference. They don’t know what it is, but they feel it all the same.’

  Molly sighed, looking up at the evil new moon of the comet in the sky, before entering the cool, shadowed cathedral of the forest. ‘Everything’s changing, old steamer. And not for the better. We just have to hold it all together long enough for this cannon to be completed.’

  ‘I tossed the cogs last night,’ said Coppertracks, ‘to read the auguries of our project in the trail of Gear-gi-ju.’

  ‘And what did you see revealed?’

  ‘The single skein,’ said Coppertracks. ‘The non-duplicated circuit. This project is both our peoples’ last hope of survival. Without its success the race of man and the people of the metal
will be exterminated by this Army of Shadows.’

  ‘No pressure on us, then,’ said Molly. Damn Kyorin. The murdered slave was right and the final vision the Hexmachina had sent to Molly had been right – and she would so much rather they’d both been mistaken about everything.

  ‘I fear for the timely completion of the project,’ said Coppertracks. ‘If Oliver and the commodore fail to bring back those components from Quatérshift; if my people fail to deliver what we need to see you safely to Kaliban … so many chances to fail, and there are other problems here, problems of our own making.’

  Molly raised an eyebrow.

  ‘The evening’s project review meeting is about to begin. Come. See for yourself …’

  Coppertracks led Molly under the canopy of trees, dappled shadows falling across an entire town that been raised in miniature here, hidden in the lee of Mount Highhorn. Raised on her word and that of the escaped slave still haunting her memories. Molly suddenly felt very small, a vessel for something so large that it overwhelmed her humanity. All that scale, pitted against a tiny voice of doubt that was wholly her own: what if I’m wrong? What if Kyorin was mistaken, or just a dupe of the Army of Shadows, released to sow confusion and distract the kingdom from the fight for life in the defence of its homeland? Just who – or what – were they building this peculiar cannon for?

  The building Coppertracks led Molly to had been constructed so recently she could smell the freshly logged pine. When the steamman opened the door and she saw who was arguing around the table inside, she gasped with shock. ‘What is he doing here?’

  Coppertracks indicated a vacant chair and the empty space next to it for him to tractor up to the table. Opposite, a group of scientists sat with Lord Rooksby at their head. Rooksby looked angrily at Molly – her assistance to Coppertracks at the Royal Society presentation obviously not forgotten.

  Coppertracks tuned his voicebox to a whisper. ‘You know how parliament likes to work. Every opinion on a project as important as this one has to be balanced by an intellectual counterweight so all views can be considered.’