The Rise of the Iron Moon

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘Not that they could, now,’ said Coppertracks. ‘I have just finished encrypting the ignition mechanism of the sphere. Only Duncan softbody and myself can activate the looking-glass gate.’

  Molly pointed to herself. ‘And me, I need to know the key.’

  ‘That may not be prudent,’ said Coppertracks.

  Molly was shocked. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You have received an uninvited infusion of knowledge into your mind from a native of Kaliban,’ said Coppertracks. ‘There are some among the Free State who would consider that a transgression, a virus.’

  ‘Dear Circle,’ swore Molly, ‘you sound like Rooksby now. That virus you’re so glib about has seen us well on our way to Kaliban.’

  ‘Kyorin may have been a pawn of his masters, dear mammal. Have you not considered the possibility this whole voyage to Kaliban might have been a test? To see whether we possess the abilities to directly threaten their home – a test that if passed, may decide whether we are all to be exterminated rather than merely enslaved and farmed.’

  ‘You really think that’s the case?’ asked Molly.

  ‘King Steam’s council considers it a possibility, however remote, along with a hundred other options that do not match Kyorin’s story and explanation for seeking our help. We know so little about our attackers, beyond the ease with which the Army of Shadows has vanquished all our attempts to resist their advances. It is possible they may even have used your bond with the Hexmachina as the mechanism to trace and imprison it within our world. We carry with us a gate that leads straight to the heart of my people’s kingdom. I hope you understand King Steam’s caution in how we exercise its activation.’

  ‘You know me better than that,’ said Molly.

  ‘You I do know,’ agreed Coppertracks. ‘Kyorin and his race, however, are a different breed of softbody. We have yet to see the Army of Shadows’ true masters with our own eyes. How can we be so sure that Kyorin and his blue men are not the masters of Kaliban’s vicious soldier race?’

  Their argument about Kyorin’s intentions was cut short by Lord Starhome’s intervention. ‘There is something coming towards us.’

  Molly looked at the hull of the craft. ‘Surely we are not at Kaliban yet?’

  ‘No, that we are not. But there’s something forward of my sensors, coming up fast and it’s like nothing I have ever seen before.’

  Molly frowned. Now what were they facing? ‘Could it be a fleet of the shells that the Army of Shadows used to travel across to our world …?’

  ‘It’s nothing physical,’ said Lord Starhome. ‘More like a wall of energy, a wall that resembles nothing which I am familiar with.’

  ‘Aye, it may be a Kaliban weapon,’ said Duncan.

  ‘I am conversant with the screens and shielding of countless void-faring entities,’ said Lord Starhome. ‘And I can assure you that this is no such primitive deflection mechanism. I’m trying to resolve its nature, but it is actually defying my sensors: there are fundamental fluctuations moving along the stuff of existence; I can detect positrons moving backward in a storm above the field’s surface. It appears immensely strong, yet I can hardly get a lock on it; even now we’re this close. You’re lucky I didn’t just fly straight through the field unawares.’

  ‘I trust your own shielding is fully activated now,’ said Coppertracks, nervously.

  ‘Naturally,’ boomed Lord Starhome’s disembodied voice. ‘At my current most impressive velocity you would be dead from micro-dust impacts and radiation poisoning many times over if my shields were not functioning. I can shelter next to the skin of a sun if I have to. Still … a haze of positrons moving backwards, I have never seen such an outlandish sight, not once while traversing two galaxies.’

  Molly dug deep in the confused jumble of memories and recollections that Kyorin had left to her, but there was nothing forthcoming from the residue of the slave’s soul to suggest he had any inkling of a wall of exotic energy protecting Kaliban. But her gut spoke volumes. ‘Pull away! Pull away, Starhome, I have a bad feeling about this.’

  ‘Pull away?’ said Lord Starhome in derision. ‘Do you think that I am one of your clockwork-driven horseless carriages that can be swerved into a side road at the tug of a lever? I have been accelerating up towards light speed – it will take me the rest of the journey to brake. This field is too wide to avoid, you may only make a slight modification to the speed at which you wish my bow to cross it.’

  Duncan Connor ran over to his precious battered travel case, as if he could use its weight to smash through the unknown obstacle. Coppertracks stopped fiddling with the looking-glass gate they had stowed away. Was the steamman now suffering from the temptation to activate it and leap through to safety in Mechancia before their ship struck the barrier?

  ‘It’s coming up fast,’ said Lord Starhome. ‘Brace yourselves for a collision.’

  Molly’s hand struck out for one the girders supporting the store room, gripping hold of the cold silver surface a second before the ship’s lanterns went dark, gravity lost in a storm of crates, overwhelmed by a roaring explosion and a scream of agony from Lord Starhome. Then they were lost in a spinning, careening mass of metal that had been their craft.

  It was time. The Hexmachina had finished modifying the workings of her internal components as best as she could. It was hard to tell whether her plan would work. Trapped inside the centre of the world in a cage that could modify and adapt itself in response to all of her attempts to escape. A cunning cage built for only one purpose. To contain the Hexmachina while the power that fed the god-machine was bled away, slowly starving her to death. But would the cage be clever enough to detect what the Hexmachina had done to herself? The cage was cunning, but not self-aware; the Army of Shadows had stopped short of giving it a soul or real intelligence. But that did not mean it was stupid. A mousetrap was a dumb machine, but no mouse in its right mind wished to be caught by one.

  She could not escape, the Hexmachina, not in any form that would be recognizable as her. But her lover the Earth knew the god-machine well, and the Hexmachina could feel the throb of the world’s pain outside her prison: the planet’s soul, its very lifeforce, leeched away by the invaders from Kaliban. And the Kingdom of Jackals. Jackals was part of the Earth. Its soil and stone both ancient and true. Jackals, so ran the whispers of the lava outside, now lay ready. With a moment’s fierce concentration, the Hexmachina forced open a pinprick-sized tunnel in the unnatural lattice imprisoning her form, flipping the cage’s molecules to a liquid state before firing a stream of her essence out through that pin-sized channel.

  The lattice that imprisoned her instantly detected the change of state in part of its structure and moved to contain the Hexmachina, modelling the altered laws of physical stasis used by the god-machine and overwriting the infected mathematics to close the tiny tunnel that had been hacked into the cage’s fabric. The minuscule channel was closed, cutting off the stream, leaving the depleted, shrunken form of the Hexmachina inside. Depleted, but elated – for outside, a wave-front of energy was passing through the magma at the speed of sound, ready to be caught by the kingdom and stored in the old way. Stored in stone, just as the druids had once done. After all, the Hexmachina was at heart a device for opening and closing doors. For keeping dark gods out of the world. And there was an ancient door that badly needed opening, while yet another had to be shut on the Army of Shadows.

  The Hexmachina’s prison was complete again. The tiny breach had only lasted a second and the cage had learnt that trick and put in place a series of running equations to prevent another such hack against the fabric of matter. Yes, the enemy knew her well. But then, that cut both ways. She knew them, and their filthy kind should have burnt themselves out like a spent plague long ago.

  Now it was up to the land above. And the last queen of Jackals.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Adream of flying, and when Molly opened her eyes – ignoring the throbbing pain at the back of her head – it had come
true. Molly was drifting above a storm of crates and shock-loosened supplies. The ship’s lantern flickered, adding to her headache, but showing Duncan Connor swimming across to her. She looked down. A belt had been stretched across her stomach and looped around one of the room’s silver girders to stop her floating away in the ocean of cargo.

  Molly rubbed her neck. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’ Then she saw that Coppertracks’ little drone was helping Connor move around, one iron hand on his ankle while another gripped one of a series of handles formed onto the wall.

  ‘It’s not so bad,’ said Duncan. ‘Aye, like falling with a sail-rider chute, but none of the wind. You had better get used to it. We’ve been without gravity for a couple of hours and I don’t think we’re getting it back.’

  ‘Is Lord Starhome all right?’

  Coppertracks’ voice sounded remotely from the drone’s voicebox. ‘I am attempting to restore some of the steamman components that burnt out. He cannot even remember Jackelian. I am communicating in hexadecimal code, but our ship only seems to remember his creators’ tongue.’

  Lord Starhome’s disembodied voice sounded in response, half a song and half an alien screech. A shudder ran down Molly’s spine. It was nothing anyone on her world had ever heard the like of before, and Starhome sounded very annoyed.

  ‘Our craft’s surface has been badly ablated,’ continued Coppertracks. ‘Many of Lord Starhome’s sensors and the external components he had grown on his surface were ripped off as we passed through Kaliban’s defences. His shields held, though, or we would be dust upon the void.’

  Another alien howl followed, the singsong static hectoring and strident. Molly let Duncan undo the strap he had secured her with. ‘How dangerous is Lord Starhome right now?’

  ‘Well, we’re still floating about,’ said Duncan. ‘And I don’t think that’s entirely because of the damage. I’m not sure if he remembers who we are, or if he thinks he’s got a wee infestation of rats aboard.’

  Sweet Circle. Molly winced as she followed Duncan and the drone out of the cargo hold and back up towards the bridge, hand over hand on the holds in the wall. What was to stop Lord Starhome opening a door in his hull to suck them all out into oblivion? The cold gold band of her control ring was still on her finger, but it felt as useless as a broken pair of stirrups on an untamed stallion.

  ‘You realize,’ barked Lord Rooksby as Molly entered the command deck, ‘that treacherous native Kal must have known that his home was defended by a killing shield, and you—’ he pointed at Molly ‘—by your own admission carry around his knowledge inside your dim-witted little skull.’

  They were all drifting around the open space, tethered by belts to various girders, handholds and seats – only Keyspierre’s daughter looked comfortable. She moved across the air like a ballet dancer, gracefully arching her back and using a wall to kick off before gripping a seat on the other side of the bridge.

  ‘I certainly didn’t know about the shield,’ said Molly, ‘and I don’t think Kyorin knew about it, either. Why trick a handful of us up here just to kill us?’

  The commodore bunched his hand into a fist. ‘You’re a mortal nasty piece of work, Rooksby, and I’ve a mind to teach you a few manners.’

  ‘You, sir, are not even meant to be here,’ said Rooksby. ‘If parliament’s writ had been followed, you and your menagerie of freaks would be sitting back in the kingdom and letting a professional expedition venture forth to Kaliban.’

  ‘Ah, my lord commercial,’ spat Commodore Black. ‘Parliament’s writ runs a long ways distant from the strange shores we’ve set a course for, and if you keep on with your poisonous jabbering, I’ll be minded to float over there and toss you and your rotten House of Guardians-given title out of this ship of ours.’

  ‘Please,’ said Coppertracks, his iron hand inside an instrument panel at the front of the craft. ‘A little peace for me to work. I’m nearly done. I have stripped two of the three steamman logic drums used to rebuild Lord Starhome, replacing the components in the least damaged of the trio. Paul-Loup softbody, if you would pass me my magnetizer, I shall attempt to close the new circuit I have built inside here.’

  Keyspierre took one of the instruments floating in the air and passed it across to Coppertracks, the steamman examining it and tutting. ‘No, the circuit magnetizer, please, that one.’

  Exchanging instruments, Keyspierre passed Coppertracks the magnetizer and Coppertracks gave a nervous squirt of steam from his stacks before closing the broken circuit. The ship’s lanterns dimmed for a second, then returned to full illumination, followed a moment later by the weight of gravity – gradual enough that they all landed lightly on their feet – or in Coppertracks’ case, treads – from wherever they had been anchored.

  ‘That’s better, now,’ said the commodore, winking at Jeanne.

  ‘A fine figure of my girth needs to feel the weight on his boots and know which way is up and which way is down.’

  A disembodied sigh sounded around them, hopefully Lord Starhome finding his full cognitive abilities coming back to him.

  ‘Are you recovered from the effects of the weapon?’ asked Molly.

  ‘Weapon?’ said Lord Starhome, impatiently. ‘An ineffective sort of weapon I would say.’

  Molly rubbed the back of her bruised head. ‘Not from where I’m standing. How far to Kaliban now?’

  ‘I’m having to regrow most of my sensors,’ said Lord Starhome. ‘But let me see, I can still feel the unpleasant tug of gravity and – yes, we’re almost upon the ugly red-looking place. Even more disagreeable than that water-soaked rock of yours where my magnificent form was trapped for millennia.’

  ‘Then we shall land outside the face of Kaliban,’ said Molly, ‘and hope that we didn’t set off any alarms by breaching the Army of Shadows’ shield.’

  ‘Land?’ said Lord Starhome. ‘I don’t think I care to.’

  ‘You don’t care to …’ Keyspierre’s daughter drew a knife from her boot and threatened the ship’s exposed console. ‘You have your duty, compatriot, by alliance with the Commonshare.’

  Lord Starhome’s laugh echoed around them. ‘Please, little ground hugger, please don’t scratch me with your eight inches of sharpened steel. You might take some of the burnish off my hull.’

  Molly brandished the control ring on her hand – and noticed that it was glowing a sickly yellow. ‘By the loyalty you owe to King Steam, I command you.’

  ‘My apologies,’ the eerie, disembodied voice took on a dark tone. ‘I don’t really do landings. I spent far too many aeons interred under the surface of your disgusting dirtball to want to exchange my freedom for a similarly tedious experience beneath the sands of that sucked-out husk whose orbit we’re coming into.’

  ‘My people rebuilt you,’ pleaded Coppertracks.

  ‘Oh, but I have been rebuilding myself since we launched,’ said Lord Starhome. ‘Particle by particle, and doing a far superior job of it. There’s very little of your people’s art left within me now.’

  Molly’s control ring was giving up the ghost, smoking hot, too little left that was steamman for it to re-establish its hold. ‘You shall land where I order you!’

  ‘Oh, I think we can both get what we desire,’ said Lord Starhome.

  Coppertracks vanished in front of Molly as a hole opened up in the deck beneath his treads; Commodore Black, Keyspierre and the others yelled in alarm as similar apertures swallowed them up.

  ‘Well, mainly me, actually. Out with the old …’

  Molly tried to lunge towards the exposed control panel, but she was too slow, an opening taking her feet away from her. She found herself flying along a tunnel, squeezed by the living metal of the craft like a throat about to gob out a fruit pip. Out into the infinite night.

  It was cold on the heath. Oliver watched Purity shiver as she was exposed to the chill autumn winds, the grass and bracken crunching underfoot as the evening formed a frost. He was used to the cold, though. There was always a
chill at night. Where there were trees around them, they were losing their leaves, tinged as red as the baleful moon squatting unnaturally in their sky. Purity had fallen silent. Was she thinking about where he was leading her? And then Oliver saw it – the heath dipping in front of them before rising into a slope. A slope crested by a stone circle.

  There were similar artefacts scattered all across the Kingdom of Jackals: burial circles, circles of astronomy, circles of power where the leylines crossed and intersected. Many were treated with reverence by the order of worldsingers, those that called themselves sorcerers, but surely not this one – so far away from the industry and homes of the race of man. This isolated, wind-blighted heathland that had grown out of the forest’s borders and never seemed to end.

  ‘There’s nothing here, just a circle of standing stones,’ said Purity.

  ‘Nothing but the land,’ Oliver told her.

  Purity flashed him a look of concern – something in his voice seemed to be worrying her. Dejection? Acceptance? Relief? A dissonant blend of all of these? But then, she didn’t know what he was going to have to do here. Even if he succeeded, things were unlikely to turn out well. Not for him, at any rate. And he probably wouldn’t be doing Purity many favours either. Oliver led her across the grass, his riding cloak billowing in the breeze that whipped across the bleak open space. There was a mist rising out of the grass around his boots. A marsh mist. They slipped into the centre of the circle of stones, granite menhirs at least three times their height. There was a sense of stepping into another world up here, of isolation. Separation. One of the stone sentinels stood twice as tall as all the others, its shadow like the hand of a clock across the grass, descending over a menhir fallen in front of it – there to serve as an altar?

  Oliver moved in front of the circle’s tallest stone, letting the wind blow across his face. The night carried a scent that was not altogether pleasant: rich and boggy.