The Rise of the Iron Moon

by Stephen Hunt

  No wonder jack cloudies were hailed as the heroes of the nation and welcomed into every jinn house and drinking establishment with offers of a song and a round freely stood, while the earthworms had to be press-ganged into the regiments, or recruited from the ranks of those facing transportation to the colonies to an alternative service under the sharp tongues – and sharper floggings – of the army’s sergeants.

  Hanning’s musings about the good luck of his employment were interrupted by a clatter of bony feet coming down the ladder to his little glass bubble of solitude. It was Ti’ive, the young craynarbian midshipman bearing a note scribbled in the captain’s hand for him to translate into lamp flicker.

  ‘Another one for the Thunderbolt, if you please, Mister Hanning.’

  Hanning checked to make sure he still had line of sight to one of their flagship’s h-stations (as a flagship, the Thunderbolt had the unusual honour of possessing four h stations – fore, aft, port and starboard), then the skyman flicked into action the flint igniter on the side of his lamp’s gas assembly. Hanning looked at the note he had been handed by the officer and harrumphed. The skipper was asking permission for the Revenge to break east to make contact with the missing steammen army. The steamers were a day late for the planned rendezvous, and it seemed the skipper considered it unlikely that the Free State’s usually punctual army would allow themselves to fall so behind schedule.

  ‘I doubt if we’ll cut any orders independent of the fleet, sir,’ opined the lamp operator. ‘None of our hawks have been taken since we’ve started sailing convoy fashion.’

  ‘The captain’s worked with King Steam’s fellows before, and he’s a sight more concerned by their non-appearance at the border than our flag officers seem to be at the moment,’ said the young middie.

  ‘And has he said anything on the bridge about the six missing brigades of Quatérshift’s finest that were meant to be waiting on their side of the border to join up with our earthworms?’

  ‘Jon Shiftie?’ Ti’ive said, fiddling with his starched officer’s uniform. ‘Only that they’re not fit for much beyond the fine art of retreat anyway, and that it might be better all round if the shifties took to their boot leather now, rather than folding a flank under fire and leaving good Jackelians exposed to the Army of Shadows when things start getting thick down below.’

  Hanning started to blink the message out to the Thunderbolt. ‘I saw Jon Shiftie fight in the Two-Year War, and I’d sooner have a few regiments of their bluecoats to add to our number than not. Even if their backbone does owe a debt to political officers with pistols ready to cut down anyone who tries to run, I reckon their boys held their lines well enough under our hawks’ shells last time around.’

  Skyman First Class Hanning was trying to talk over his nerves. Everyone on board the Revenge had been nervous since they had crossed the border into Quatérshift. It wasn’t just the sight of the dead Cursewall that had once been raised to separate the two nations, now drained of the very power of the land that once fed it. Not just the missing brigades the shiftie attachés had promised and failed to deliver to the House Guards staff. Not even the uneasy alliance with their most ancient of foes. It was the fact that they were sailing into a war of aggression for the first time, breaching a covenant that was timeless for the people of Jackals. Jackelians kept to their borders and, as stalwart as they were in their nation’s defence, they had no taste for empire. The very idea of crossing into another nation and taking the fight to an enemy they hadn’t even caught sight of yet felt unseemly. And it was a wrongness that had seeped through the airships and unsettled every jack cloudie serving in the four fleets.

  Hanning was still clacking out the message to the flagship when Ti’ive’s sharp eyes spotted the Thunderbolt making a more basic communication, the craynarbian crying out at the sight of the all-ships command – a bright red pennant running up the flagship’s spine ropes, flapping in the wind. Enemy sighted.

  The flagship’s h-stations flashed new orders for all to see, not bothering to single out any one ship of the line, and all the other airships picked up the message for general relay until the fleet fast became a sea of winking stars. Form line. Engage.

  Hanning dashed out the orders on his pad, ripped off the top sheet and passed it up to Ti’ive. He might not have been sitting in the crow’s nest up top, but the skyman could see the ruby-red storm front rolling in from the north. One minute it was sweeping in above the distant hills and the next minute they were swimming in it, thick, red, as if the blood of everyone in Quatérshift below had been turned into steam and blown over the high fleet.

  ‘Have you ever seen such a thing?’ asked Ti’ive.

  Hanning was trying to think what to say when a lance of light and fire jetted past the Revenge’s aft, so hot that he could feel the glass of the h-station’s dome burn with it, a sudden wave of thermals buffeting their airship and briefly clearing away the crimson fog. And beyond the Revenge, the Flying Fox, the lucky Fox – was revealed cut in two down her middle – the whole mid-section of the stat’s hull vaporized in a cloud of superheated celgas. As broken now as her luck. Both the surviving sections of the airship tumbled away, spilling burning sailors and ballonets into the mantle of tumbling debris: the melted keel catwalk, exploding engine housings, celgas netting and flailing bracing wires, all steaming white hot from the enemy’s strange heat ray.

  Both sailors were struck dumb, but a voice sounded from the corridor above the tunnel that led down into the h-dome. ‘They’re above. They’re above us!’

  ‘What is it?’ Hanning shouted up. ‘Has the crow’s nest sighted something? All I can see down here is—’

  Seven or eight streams of energy similar to the last one jetted past, rocking the Revenge like a pigeon tossed by a tornado. Hanning fell off the operator’s bench, Ti’ive sprawling about somewhere above him – his hard craynarbian shell cracking into the dome’s glass.

  Having lifted himself back up, dazed and bruised, Hanning blinked away the images torched on his retina to see a garden of bright red flowers – blooms of fire and smoke and blazing jack cloudies. ‘Sweet Circle. How can they do this to us?’

  Ti’ive tried to steady himself, as the airship and its h-dome rocked from side to side like a fairground ride. ‘What’s the matter with our damn airships today?’

  Something caught Hanning’s attention on the ground and he pulled his gaze away from the field of mushrooming destruction in the sky to look down upon the smashed ranks of the New Pattern Army in full ignoble retreat: the redcoats of the Light Infantry; the green uniforms of the Rifles; the cherry-trousered Hussars on their steeds, all retreating. Adding to the terror below was a rain of airship girders and the boiling ballast water falling from the Flying Fox. A few regiments of the infantry were trying to pull back in a disciplined line, but they were collapsing ragged against the sea of black – an undulating dark mass of the beast-soldiers of the Army of Shadows. Jackelian artillery units were attempting to set up their guns under the cover of the House Guards, each large cavalryman protected by an armoured gutta-percha cuirass, riding high and heavy on their exomounts; but the riders were encircled by a scattering of slats that had already broken through the collapsing squares of the West Pentshire Regiment. There were a few puffs from the heavy rifles carried by the House Guards before they were knocked off their mounts by streams of springing black creatures and torn apart.

  The last glimpse of the ground Hanning had was the desperate uncoupling of artillery pieces from the trains of horses by their gunners before they too were swarmed over, then the unnatural cloud enveloped the Revenge and Hanning’s dome was sealed once more inside a sea of dense crimson mist.

  Hanning and Ti’ive looked at each other in shock. So used to flying above the carnage. So used to drifting high above the fog of war, dispassionate angels of destruction, directing the New Pattern Army and smashing any force foolish enough to break the Jackelians’ peace. Now the two sailors suddenly found themselves as much
subject to the vagaries of war as any confused redcoat, stumbling through the thick clouds of rifle and cannon smoke that settled over every battlefield.

  Ti’ive yelled in shock as the eyeless face pushed itself up again the outside of the dome, tapping a curious, clawed finger against the glass.

  ‘It’s got a sail-rider’s rig on its back,’ shouted Hanning, not so panicked he didn’t forget to draw his pistol from where it lay tucked into his belt.

  Homing in on the sound of the two sailors, the beast drew its talons teasingly across the glass, leaving scratch marks on the crystal surface, then it threw itself back and disappeared into the crimson mist.

  ‘It was whispering,’ said Ti’ive.

  ‘What?’

  The craynarbian looked at his comrade. ‘Didn’t you hear it, Mister Hanning? It was whispering something in a language I didn’t recognize and it was clicking, clicking like a blood bat. By jingo, they see by the sound of their throats – no wonder they prefer to fight inside this deadly red pea-souper of theirs. They must hunt by the screams and whimpers of their victims.’

  Hanning shook his head – no, he hadn’t heard the monster’s whispers. The craynarbians were long diverged from the race of man through millennia of jungle survival, the hairs on the back of their skulls giving them a sixth sense lacking in their soft-skinned cousins. But Hanning heard the yells and shots from somewhere on the other side of the Revenge clearly enough, the distant echo of pistol fire reverberating through their wooden corridors. Hanning pulled a crystal charge out of his belt and broke open his bell-barrelled gun, pushing the shell into the breech.

  He had solved the mystery of what had happened to the missing airships of the merchant marine. But after today – bar a few clerks of supply manning the inkwells of Admiralty House – there wasn’t going to be anyone left in the Royal Aerostatical Navy to warn.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Coppertracks exited the long, low building of the camp’s infirmary and indicated the door he had left open for Molly, Oliver and Purity to enter. ‘The poisoning my patient is suffering has declined to residual levels. There is no danger of infection now if you talk to him.’

  Hardarms had been dragged out of the smoking silver shell he had crashed in, and while the steamman warrior had accomplished his main charge – bringing Lord Starhome safely to the cannon project in Halfshire – the price of his success was the gradual failure of his proud metal body. For most of the time he had been unconscious – only Coppertracks’ efforts had kept him alive even this long.

  ‘And the steamman knight asked for me by name?’ said Purity.

  ‘He did,’ admitted Coppertracks.

  ‘But how did he—?’

  ‘King Steam will have told him,’ said Oliver. ‘And that canny old steamer is so close to the Steamo Loas, he might as well be a spirit himself.’

  ‘I thought King Steam was young,’ said Purity. ‘Barely out of his childhood.’

  Oliver shrugged. ‘The body, perhaps. His mind is the latest incarnation of a monarch older than the mountain behind us.’

  ‘Soul,’ corrected Coppertracks. ‘King Steam’s mind is unique to his latest body; it is his soul that is passed down through the generations.’

  They entered the infirmary and were guided by Coppertracks to the room where Hardarms had been isolated. There was a smell of rubber in the room; wet, rotting and foul. One of Coppertracks’ drones lay deactivate in the corner – sacrificed by Coppertracks to care for the dying pilot. The dead mu-body was speckled with flaking brown where the rust of the radiation sickness had eaten away at its shiny shell. Hardarms was – if it were possible – in an even worse state, his entire body a quilt of raw brown-and-red metal, the hardened armour of the steamman knight eroded by the final advances of the gravity warp poisoning.

  A faint light pulsed behind the knight’s vision plate as he noticed the three newcomers ushered in by Coppertracks. ‘The male softbody I recognize from my sharing of cables with King Steam. Oliver Brooks of the race of man, halfling child of an Observer. The older female must be Molly Templar, which makes the younger … Purity Drake.’

  ‘You know me, then?’ said Purity.

  ‘My sovereign knows well the part of you that is awakening with the land,’ said Hardarms. ‘As he knows your two companions here, from our last time of troubles.’

  ‘Well, this latest time of troubles we’re suffering seems to be going from bad to worse,’ said Oliver. ‘Has Coppertracks told you of our news sheets’ reports of the rout of the RAN and the New Pattern Army inside Quatérshift?’

  Perhaps it was a side effect of his radiation poisoning, but Hardarms seemed hardly disturbed by Oliver’s information. ‘Of course, Oliver softbody. When I saw the destruction of the steammen army it was obvious that no force of the race of man could match our adversary. Not if every nation in the world poured its resources into a single regiment and marched against the Army of Shadows as one.’

  ‘Did the king speak of me?’ said Molly. ‘Did he speak of the fate of the Hexmachina?’

  ‘The god-machine is a cousin of the people of the metal,’ said Hardarms. ‘King Steam knows the Hexmachina has been locked in stasis, sealed away in the deep bowels of the world by our foe.’

  ‘And he’s not worried by that?’ Molly had to restrain herself from shouting. ‘I threw the Wildcaotyl back beyond the walls of the world with the Hexmachina’s power. You can’t count on me to save you all this time …’

  ‘You are a knight without a steed,’ said Hardarms. ‘A duellist without a sabre. His majesty asked me to tell you he understands how frustrating that must be for you.’ Hardarms stretched out and took Molly’s hand, pressing something into her palm out of sight of the others. Molly looked down. It was a gold ring, etched with lines so thin she could barely see the complex patterns that had been engraved on it.

  ‘For Lord Starhome,’ whispered Hardarms as Molly bent down to catch the whisper from the knight’s voicebox. ‘You will know how to use it when the time comes.’

  ‘Your sympathy is all very well,’ said Molly, hiding the ring away in her pocket, ‘but your army has been exterminated too, and Jackals now lies defended only by militia with pitchforks, fencibles who fire two training shots a year and a couple of RAN cadets in training ships.’

  ‘And I wish that were not so,’ said Hardarms. ‘Just as I wish that a tool for slaying gods had proved more effective against a mortal foe. But wishing will not make it so. Wishing will not bring either of our nations victory in this fight.’ Hardarms leant over to retrieve his satchel from a table next to his bed, removing a sheaf of papers. ‘And I also wish I had better news to bring to you than this …’

  Molly took the papers being proffered. She winced as she felt the steamman’s pain swelling up inside him. How could he bear it? Every sensor along the length of his body was flaring in agony. Molly forced her gaze down onto the papers and saw images of a large sphere that seemed to be made of rust-coloured iron, accompanied by commentary pencilled in by the hands of the king’s councillors.

  ‘The images are from the new observatory in Mechancia,’ said Hardarms. ‘Real-box pictures enlarged from our largest telescope.’

  Coppertracks trundled over to handle the pictures, scanning them with his vision plate in fascination. ‘I have never seen the like of this before.’

  ‘Oh, but you have,’ said Hardarms. ‘Every time you glance up at the sky and curse our baleful new moon swinging in orbit around the Earth.’

  ‘This—’ Coppertracks looked again at the images ‘—this cannot be Ashby’s Comet? Where is its ice, the rubble, the—’

  Hardarms extended a weak manipulator arm towards the ceiling. ‘Burnt off, fallen away. And that which remains beneath is what we once mistakenly thought was a comet. As you can see, our foul new satellite is an iron moon.’

  ‘Then, dear fellow, Ashby’s Comet was never a natural phenomenon?’

  ‘And its path around Kaliban and back to Earth no random a
ccident of celestial mechanics,’ said Hardarms, his voicebox losing volume as he spoke. ‘King Steam’s scholars have revisited all our theories of astronomy and can come to no conclusion save that this iron moon is some monstrously sized tool of the Army of Shadows.’

  ‘But the Army of Shadows appeared well before the iron moon was captured by our world,’ said Molly. ‘I saw the enemy in my vision from Kyorin. The slats were crossing the celestial darks in shells that ride beams of light all the way across to our home.’

  ‘I have no answers for the iron moon’s presence or intent,’ said Hardarms. ‘But I don’t need to see its corroded red alloy to know that fell, evil moon was created above Kaliban by our enemy. See here the last image taken at the observatory before we left for the Kingdom of Jackals and mark it well.’

  Coppertracks held up the final image, a snapshot of a long silver thread extruding from underneath the iron moon down towards the bottom of the picture. ‘Like the thread from a spider.’

  ‘And growing longer each day,’ said Hardarms. ‘Extending down towards our world’s surface! King Steam’s scholars believe the enemy means to use the cable to anchor the iron moon to our world, somewhere towards the Army of Shadows’ stronghold in the polar wastes. The iron moon is slowing, now. Soon, the moon will orbit no longer, but will be joined to us in a stationary position.’