by Stephen Hunt
The last legend told by the Jackelians.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Molly recovered her senses with a start as she was dragged out of the tight confines of the tunnel. There was a clear, pain-free lucidity to her thoughts. The realization that she appeared gloriously free of the burden of Kyorin’s memories battled for attention with the fact that it was one of the giant ant’s forelimbs currently dragging her out of the dark shaft.
Then she was free on the chamber floor and about to go hell for leather as the ant pulled back, but she heard a familiar voice calling from behind the insect. Sandwalker! The Kal nomad, still in his white sand robes. Molly’s eyes danced between the nomad and the insect, and as Sandwalker rested a hand on the ant’s thorax, the dim chamber began to lighten. Molly realized that these walls were far too smooth to belong to any ant colony worthy of the name.
‘We are deep within one of our mountain shelters,’ said Sandwalker. ‘And as I promised, the great sage has cured you. Kyorin’s memories have been taken out of your mind. It was an operation of great sophistication to unentangle your patterns.’
Molly raised a confused hand to point at the giant ant calmly watching her through its compound eyes.
‘Machines shaped in the form of our predators. What better place to hide from the slats’ long-range patrols than a false ant colony in the side of a mountain.’
‘I thought I was about to be eaten,’ said Molly, finding her voice.
‘For that I am sorry, although I believe you now know what it has been to live as one of my people for the last couple of thousand years,’ said Sandwalker. ‘Come, Molly Templar, my tribe’s sage is eager to meet you and your friends.’
The nomad led Molly through empty corridors and chambers that had the reek of ages about them. Dusty machinery lay about the place – instruments as large as buildings – most looking scavenged, with plates removed and cables hanging out like torn intestines.
‘This was a centre of science, once,’ said Sandwalker. ‘Built very far from the inhabited lands of my people – to protect against the exotic nature of the experiments that were once conducted underneath our feet.’
Molly was escorted into a large circular room where her friends were waiting and overjoyed to see her recovered, Commodore Black pumping her hand while Coppertracks sped past Keyspierre and Duncan Connor to speak to her. Molly was a little overwhelmed by the greeting so soon after waking. Surreally, bright panels displaying scenes and sounds of Kaliban as it had once existed surrounded them. Lush green forests filled with the familiar blue faces of the Kal, as well as long-extinct creatures she didn’t recognize; nothing like the killers that were stalking the wastes now. Images so realistic she might almost have been looking through a window.
‘I told you she would be fine again,’ said Sandwalker, proudly. ‘The medical devices we still have here date back to before the occupation.’
‘So you say, lad,’ grinned the commodore. ‘And you’ve lived up to your word right enough. You’re blessed lucky to still be with us, Molly. Your heart stopped out there in the desert during your last few minutes. How do you feel now?’
‘Clear headed.’
‘As you should,’ announced a voice behind her. Molly turned. More mind-speech. So, this was him! The great sage, Fayris Fastmind, as old a creature as Molly had ever seen. A pale blue body borne along on a floating ceramic carriage, his legs hidden, his face covered in silvery metallic tattoos that glowed with energy pulses as he spoke. ‘The magnetic resonance scanner I used to operate on you is the last functioning one we have in this facility. Probably the last one on Kaliban, now.’
Coppertracks looked at the Kal, the energy waves under the steamman’s transparent skull circulating in excitement. ‘Why, you are a metal-flesher, a man-machine hybrid.’
‘’Pon my soul,’ said the astonished Kal, returning the steamman’s gaze. His mind-voice was like the unrolling of an ancient parchment. ‘And you are sentient? Self-aware? After all these years, a self-replicating machine entity. I haven’t seen such as you for two millennia.’
‘People similar to mine once existed on Kaliban?’ asked Coppertracks.
‘Oh yes,’ said the great sage, his carriage gliding around the commodore and Molly. He gestured to the far wall and a panel shifted view to a lightless hall full of black cabinets. Something told Molly she was seeing one of the chambers under the mountain, a view of dust and decay now. Row after row of dead machines.
‘Artificial life that was pure intellect, crushed by the Army of Shadows. Burnt out by the machine plagues the masters sent before they invaded in force.’ The Kal pointed to the silvery etching glowing around his face. ‘It was hard to tell where your kind began and ours ended, once. Now both our races have ended our days on Kaliban. How sad.’
‘You are the intellect that was signalling to my world from Kaliban?’ asked Coppertracks.
‘Not I,’ said the great sage. ‘We dare not send such messages for fear of being tracked down. We still have a few ancient communication devices in orbit, broadcasting the original warning of the Army of Shadow’s invasion out to anyone who might be able to help. You must have heard one of those.’
‘We’ve travelled a long way to reach you,’ said Molly. ‘I owe you my life for healing my mind, but I have an entire world still to save.’
‘You have travelled further than you know, I think,’ said the sage. ‘And it sounds as if you carry a heavy burden for your people, much as I have done for mine.’
Keyspierre stepped forward. ‘We have not come such a distance to trade homilies, compatriot. You have a weapon to destroy the Army of Shadows. To keep my nation safe I must have it.’
‘Oh yes,’ chuckled the Kal, before he doubled up coughing.
Sandwalker was at the great sage’s side, checking the readouts on the carriage. ‘You are tiring him!’
Fayris Fastmind waved the nomad away, irritated. ‘Do not fuss so, my friend. I haven’t had anyone visit since I dispatched your brother to seek out Kyorin of the city-born. I will lose my reputation as a hermit if you keep on turning up like this, unannounced, with all your associates in tow.’ The sage beckoned Molly forward. ‘I felt the machine life bubbling inside your body when I unentangled Kyorin’s memories from your mind. We are alike, you and I, both the last guardians of our land. But there is a way in which we must not be alike—’ he stopped to rummage around inside his floating chair, withdrawing a golden sphere not much bigger than the tip of a finger. ‘I have failed my land, so it falls to you to end the sickness of the Army of Shadows.’
Molly took the tiny sphere in her hand, smooth and slippery except where a single tiny black button broke its surface. ‘What is it?’
‘Why, you hold in your hand the weapon to destroy the masters.’
‘Now, I don’t mean any disrespect,’ said the commodore, ‘since it’s your genius that’s just saved my friend’s precious life, but you must be out of your gourd if you think that mortal little marble is going to stop the Army of Shadows.’
‘This is surely not the weapon?’ said Sandwalker, as astonished as all the others by the sage’s revelation.
‘One of a pair, in fact. The other was destroyed when your brother’s party was ambushed trying to take it to Kyorin. It will stop the Army of Shadows,’ said the great sage. ‘Starve them to death, in fact.’
Duncan Connor came over to inspect the weapon in Molly’s hand. ‘We point this at the Army of Shadows, press the wee button, and they all die?’
‘More or less. Well, perhaps a little more, when coupled with the truth of the masters’ nature. Their little secret.’
‘What is it?’ asked Molly.
‘You have to carry my weapon onto the iron moon, the satellite currently fixed to your home in lunar orbit. The weapon only works inside the iron moon, but if this sphere is activated there, I promise you, the majority of the Army of Shadows will die, and nature will take care of the few that remain.’
‘Gettin
g onto the iron moon? That’s quite a stipulation,’ said Molly.
‘The iron moon!’ whined Commodore Black, as the shock of what this wizened little man was telling them sunk in. ‘It will be full of the wicked slats and their masters and blue-faced vampires.’
‘Full is a relative term,’ said the great sage. ‘There are by my estimate no more than a thousand masters left alive now, half of those biding their time here on Kaliban, half waiting for victory over your people on the iron moon. Perhaps twelve times that number of slats and a handful of Kal carnivores on the moon with the masters.’
‘Against a handful of us,’ said Molly.
‘My plan involves infiltration, not assault,’ said the great sage. At a touch of the console on his carriage, a section of floor disappeared and a line of black forms rose into the chamber. They looked like dissected slats hung over a fence post as a warning to any others that might trespass. ‘These are slat suits. They will seal around your body when you step into them. Like the soldier ants guarding my mountain they are indistinguishable from the real thing – they smell the same, walk the same, emit sonar screeches from the throat, and will translate the slats’ own tongue both ways.’
‘An impressive feat, Fayris softbody,’ said Coppertracks. ‘But not as impressive as a moon-splitting weapon miniaturized down to the size of one of my iron fingers.’
‘To understand my weapon you need the truth I talked of,’ said the great sage. ‘Before you arrived on Kaliban, you passed through a disruptive field of some sort?’
‘That terrible wall of energy that nearly burst our craft apart?’ whined the commodore. ‘The wicked thing nearly did for us.’
‘That was because you were passing through it the wrong way,’ said the great sage. ‘It was only intended to admit causal objects travelling the natural way along the timeline, from the past, forward to the future.’
‘Timeline?’ said Molly.
Coppertracks’ skull blazed with light. ‘Of course! All the stars, disappearing, being in the wrong place! Procession …’
‘Procession? Are we to have a blessed parade now?’ said Commodore Black. ‘Talk some sense, Aliquot Coppertracks.’
‘The field we passed through in the darks of space was no defence field of the Army of Shadows,’ said Coppertracks. ‘It was a time field. When my telescope back at Tock House was looking out onto the sky, the stars had appeared to move because the portion of the sky I was observing was sitting behind a field of time – I was staring at the right stars, but as they were in our past, rotated out of kilter by the dance of galactic procession. No wonder the Steamo Loas have been ignoring my calls, my rituals of Gear-gi-ju … it is not physical distance that led them to forsake me: my ancestors haven’t even been born yet!’
‘Quite correct,’ said the great sage. ‘The Army of Shadows aren’t just invading your world from Kaliban, they are invading you from the Kaliban of your own past. As soon as I saw the heavens above Kaliban shifting around your celestial sphere, saw new stars appearing and other stars vanishing, I realized what the masters were doing. From the level of processional movement in the star field, I would estimate that your Kingdom of Jackals lies some five million years in the future of Kaliban as it sits now.’
‘How can you be sure of this, man?’ asked Duncan Connor.
‘Because they plundered the equipment and the fuel source for their time field from a facility very like this one,’ said the great sage. ‘We only made one, you know. An artificial singularity heavy enough to distort time itself when it rotates, a stillborn star. It was mostly my research into the fifth dimension the masters stole. I had to watch the Army of Shadows plunder my singularity two thousand years ago. Then, a century ago, the masters constructed the iron moon with what was left of our land’s mineral wealth, building it around the singularity. They launched it on a comet’s trajectory through the solar system, set to pass your world every few millennia. A timer was set to open a gateway back here, a gateway that leads five million years ahead to our future. Our future, but your present.’
‘But why did this dead star they stole from you need to be loaded onto the iron moon at all?’ Molly asked.
‘The only stable time field we found we could project was one that extends backwards, from the present to the past,’ explained the great sage. ‘We could use our technology to travel back in time, but not forward. Our time machine must already be sitting in our future in order to open up a passage to the present. But that is not a problem. A comet’s trajectory keeps the iron moon and its chronological distortion mechanism safe from erosion and geological incident, safe from interference by sentient creatures. You can keep something as hardy as the iron moon spinning around the solar system for millions of years. You could launch the iron moon today, and if you can set the timer on its machinery accurately and it survives long enough, next week you can have the moon open a portal in time above your world, a doorway leading millions of years to the future.’
‘But why?’ asked Molly, her head spinning. ‘Why would the Army of Shadows send their legions forward millions of years into the future, to invade us from our own past? Why not just invade our world as it is now, in your present?’
‘You must trust me on that matter, it is better that you do not know,’ said the old Kal, avoiding her question. ‘I am aware I am asking a lot of you, attacking the iron moon. Even though your people find violence easier than mine, but there are things that you are far better off not knowing if you are to succeed.’
‘They’re a strange evil crew,’ said the commodore. ‘I don’t care that they’re from our blessed past, it’s enough for me that you say that little marble in your hand will stop them.’
‘I’m sorry, young Sandwalker,’ said Fayris Fastmind looking at the nomad guide, tears in his ancient eyes. ‘Do you understand now why this weapon won’t help our people? Why I couldn’t give it to you when you asked me for it. My little weapon contains the fragment of a cosmic string that can be set vibrating at a frequency that will destabilize the singu-larity’s rotation and collapse the time field, destroying the iron moon in a tide of tremendous violence.’
‘You’re planning to seal the Army of Shadows off in this age,’ said Sandwalker.
‘Stranding them in our time, without sustenance,’ agreed the old Kal. ‘The masters are a cancer and any cancer will die after it has consumed its host. We can give the masters no new bodies to feast on. They have made a graveyard of Kaliban and I shall see them entombed alongside our bones before I die.’
Sandwalker spoke slowly, his mind-speech heavy with remorse. ‘This is how the Kals are to fight them? With our own sacrifice.’
‘No, this is how your people fight!’ laughed a familiar voice coming from just outside the chamber’s door. Molly spun around. It was the carnivore Tallyle, holding a slat rifle, the black, beetle-armoured bodies of a company of the Army of Shadows’ slave soldiers standing behind him. His rifle opened up and a bolt of energy hit Sandwalker square on the chest, burning a smoking hole through his robes. Then the slats were everywhere, their talons flashing menacingly, hissing at Molly, circles of jabbing rifles surrounding the expedition members. Two of the beasts ran to where Fayris Fastmind was hovering and overturned his carriage, spilling the ancient sage onto the floor and smashing his floating chair apart with their rifle butts.
‘You fight like a filthy sand-born bean muncher who has never tasted flesh and the kill, who has never sucked the life out of his prey,’ laughed the corrupted Kal.
Sandwalker stumbled back, moaning, into Molly’s arms and she tried to protect him from the slats coming to seize him, but one slapped her to the floor, leaving a bloody claw gash in her cheek. The other slats howled fanged warnings as the commodore and Duncan bridled. The slats’ meaning was clear enough.
Tallyle picked Molly up by her throat and licked at her face. ‘So, you’re the new breed. Well, more salt in your veins than in the Kals’. Must be your diet.’ He tossed her contemptuously against
the broken carriage, and turned to grin at Commodore Black and Duncan. ‘Yes, I can see you two can fight. Good. Meat eaters. Bring the sand-born to the table.’
Slat soldiers pulled the fatally wounded nomad to a circular table and pinned him down. Tallyle crossed the room, dipped down and unleashed his fangs on Sandwalker’s neck and face. The wounded Kal’s death throes were thankfully brief as Tallyle tore into him, draining his blood.
Carnivore Tallyle rolled the body off the table and imperiously clicked his fingers, prompting his personal retinue of slats to fall upon the corpse and tear it to pieces. Tallyle turned to Keyspierre. ‘Where is it?’
‘The woman slipped it into her pocket as you broke in here, compatriot,’ said Keyspierre.
Carnivore Tallyle walked over to where Molly was kneeling by the carriage and dipped a hand inside her pocket, triumphantly lifting the great sage’s little golden sphere in the air as if it were an eye he had plucked out. Dropping the moon-destroying weapon on the floor he crushed it down under his boot heel into a mound of broken metal filaments.
Commodore Black tried to lunge towards Keyspierre but the slats surrounding the commodore clubbed him to the ground and kept on with their beating until he lay still.
‘You filthy jigger,’ Molly spat towards the Quatérshiftian. ‘How much have you sold us out for? Did they promise to give you a set of blood-sucking fangs?’
‘Every land needs collaborators,’ laughed Tallyle.
‘It seemed such a small thing to buy the survival of the Commonshare,’ announced Keyspierre, shrugging his shoulders in that particularly Quatérshiftian way. ‘Giving your nomad friend vegetables laced with an isotope that would allow my new compatriots to track us all the way back to the great sage’s location.’
