by Stephen Hunt
'We must unseat them quickly, before their beachhead is established further,' explained Keyspierre. 'The Army of Shadows has captured six of our cities in the north, but they have only begun building like this in two of them. The conclusion we have drawn at the Institute des Luminaires is that even using our captured compatriots as slave labour, the slats do not yet possess the numbers to construct more widely. We believe that the Army of Shadows' rate of advance isn't currently being dictated by the obvious military superiority of their weaponry over our own, but by the paucity of their forces on the ground.'
Commodore Black laid a hand on Jeanne's shoulder. 'You're not alone in this fight, lass. I never thought I'd be glad of the sight, but as we left to sail for you, Jackals' roads were packed with regiments of redcoats marching east towards the border, our skies dark with the high fleet's airships preparing to fly out here.'
'And King Steam's knights are coming down out of the mountains to reinforce our regiments,' reassured Oliver. 'The forces of three nations to turn back the Army of Shadows, with Molly's damn great cannon to carry the fight back to the devils' homeland. To pay them back for what they've done to you here.'
Keyspierre seemed briefly encouraged by their words. His nation had often been on the wrong end of the cannons and bomb bays of the RAN's indomitable airships, and the shifties had taken enough beatings from King Steam's knights, both before and after the revolution in Quatershift, that it seemed possible that their three combined armies could stand up to any invasion. Even against beasts like the slats. Even here, hiding in the hilly woods with a view out onto the ghastly scorched remains of one of the Commonshare's great cities.
But any courage they might have taken from the pair's words faded as their train of mules came in sight of the worked-out mine where the components for the original cannon had been buried. As they gazed across at the latest horror being wrought by the Army of Shadows from the protection of the tree line, a dark shape the size of a house smashed out of the pine trees to their rear, a split second away from crushing the life out of them.
Hardarms allowed himself a moment's pride as he crested the top of the hill, one of the last before the undulating hinterland of the Steammen Free State gave way to the windswept moors of eastern Jackals.
Below lay the steammen army, without doubt the greatest the people of the metal had ever assembled. Every order of knight steamman was represented in those ranks, the order of the Steel Rose and the order of the Vanadium Lance, Hardarms' own order of the Pathfinder Fist, banners snapping in the wind from the poles attached to their bodies. They sounded like an earthquake on the move, the orchestrated stamp of their feet almost drowned by the fighting hymns that lifted up to the sky. Close to seventy thousand voiceboxes singing in perfect unison. Every now and then, when the clouds parted, the steel and iron of the vast moving mass became a surf of glinting limbs and weapons, pressure repeaters coiled to boilers, drums rattling with balls. It was not just the orders militant on the move down below, there were a hundred legions of common steammen, militia who had answered King Steam's call from the high mountain villages, towns and cities of the Mechancian Spine. King Steam was taking a risk, stripping the Free State of so many of their people; trusting the paper of the freshly inked tripartite pact. How things had changed. Now, it seemed they would stand or fall together, the three mightiest civilizations of the continent. The Kingdom of Jackals. Quatershift. The Steammen Free State.
Hardarms rested the iron palms of his two manipulator arms on his hip and swung his two war arms – sharp, razor-flowered spears – to clear the kinks in his joint seals. His reverie at the sight of their host below was quickly broken by the sound of bickering slowly following him up the slope.
'Can you not move any faster? It is not dignified for a personage of my status to be seen trailing the main body of the force in this way,' came one of the voices.
'Now don't you be getting your steam up. How many damn tonnes do you think you weigh? You can thank the blessings of Steelbhalah-Waldo that the paths down the mountain actually took your damn weight without us both taking a tumble down a gorge.'
Hardarms looked around, clearing a burst of smoke from his single steel stack. Lord Starhome, a long silver shell some two hundred feet long, was being borne slowly up the slope by the articulated tractor cradles of Mandelbrot Longtreads, the hoary hauler not the slightest bit impressed by the noble graces emanating from one of the largest of the steammen army's holy artefacts, only recently removed from the Chamber of Swords.
'It does not matter,' Hardarms called towards the hauler and his quarrelsome load. 'Within a day's march the army will turn north to rendezvous with our Jackelian allies and we three will have left them and turned south towards Halfshire.'
'And up until that point I should be borne alongside the royal standard and the command staff,' insisted Lord Starhome.
'Oh, should you?' grumbled Mandelbrot Longtreads, his skull unit rotating around on his cab to stare at the long silver shell. 'Well then, why don't you just fly? Why don't you hover like a great big fat Jackelian airship above the royal standard and give my tracks a rest from hauling your noble carcass the length and breadth of the continent?'
'I shall fly soon enough,' retorted Lord Starhome.
'Now!'
'Oh, you lowly ignoramus.' Lord Starhome's silvery mirrorlike surface flashed crimson for a second as the artefact allowed fury to overcome his usual haughty attitude. 'You dirty ore-hauling miner, you think to question me?'
'Lord Starhome may not safely fly here,' said Hardarms, detailing the shortcomings that the powerful relic would never admit to a lowly miner. 'He moves by distortion of the weak-strong force of mass. The radioactive poisons generated by doing that within the gravity field of a celestial sphere would, I have been told, be immensely dangerous.'
'But you are expected to pilot him?' said Longtreads.
'After we are safely free of the gravity-well of our home, I shall do just that.'
'I assure you, you will not,' said Lord Starhome. 'I am quite capable of setting my own trajectory without your hands on my controls.'
'I rather think that is what worries King Steam,' said Hardarms. 'You know what cargo you carry inside you. The looking-glass device is almost as valuable as your own shell, and I shall not allow it to fall into the hands of the Army of Shadows intact.'
The long silver capsule seemed mollified by the knight's grudging flattery and ceased arguing with the steamman carrying him up the hill. 'Whoever sets my course, I shall be free of this tugsome ball of dirt soon enough. I was never meant to be captured by the tiresome pull of a world's mass.'
'My understanding is that the people of the metal dug you out of our tiresome dirt, rebuilt you and gave you one of our own soul-boards to reactivate you,' said Hardarms. 'Some gratitude for repairing you after your crash would be in order. You are at least part-steamman now.'
'Pah,' said Lord Starhome, 'my place is soaring free in the great darks. Once I was a ship-to-ship packet, a launch for creatures so mighty you cannot even begin to imagine their power. I have crossed between galaxies, borne on craft larger than your pathetic world, relativity sails billowing in front of a furnace of screaming matter that would make your sun seem like a glint of light on my hull.'
'Shoot him now,' begged the steamman transporting Lord Starhome.
'Ah, but he is our shell,' said Hardarms. 'Now we must take him to his cannon.'
'It's hard to believe a steamman soul lives in this quarrelsome piece of quicksilver.'
'Only to patch up the damage in his original fragmented intellect, broken by a too-hard landing,' said Hardarms. 'His escape from our home will be both his and our own salvation.'
Longtreads rotated his vision plate upwards to stare at their baleful new moon, a pale crimson shadow in the daylight, just visible between the fingers of cloud. 'By the beard of Zaka of the Cylinders, while he's about it, I wish he would burn that red abomination out of the sky.'
Hardarm
s' iron hand reached down to touch the satchel that bore the package from Mechancia's observatory. Papers and real-box images sealed with the wax emblem of King Steam himself. To be passed to Coppertracks and his soft-body friends. 'You don't know the half of it,' he muttered.
As if the gods had answered Longtreads' request, the pale circle of the new moon began to disappear under the rolling scuds of an advancing storm front. Shadows began to lengthen across the moorland below, a creeping crimson twilight trailing across the vast assembled orders of the steammen knights.
'The Army of Shadows,' growled Longtreads.
'Stop where you are,' ordered Hardarms. He drew a magnifying assembly out of his satchel and clipped it over his vision plate. 'Now I can see why the survivors fleeing the fall of Catosia chose such a fitting name for the enemy.'
'But can you see their army?' asked Longtreads, his tractor treads stalled on the slope.
'There's something at the other end of the moors, but the smoke from our people's stacks is obscuring my view of it. Ah, that's better, the wind is clearing the smoke, it's-'
'What? What?'
'This is a joke, surely,' Hardarms' voicebox called back down the slope. 'There are just two creatures out there. Ugly, eyeless things like the offspring of a bony black slug that has mated with a mantis; and they are manning a cannon, or perhaps it is a mortar, so stubby is the mechanism. Is this all they have to field against our forces?'
'They insult us,' said Longtreads. 'A deliberate slight. May the Loas appear and curse their spawn down to the fiftieth generation.'
'Our gun boxes are walking forward through the army's ranks. Our bombardment will speak our answer well enough-' Hardarms was cut short as a wail of anguish sounded from Lord Starhome's silver shell.
'What?'
'I feel it,' called Lord Starhome. 'Oh my giddy sensors, I have not felt such a thing for a millennium.'
Longtreads' skull rotated to directly face his heavy load. 'I'm a simple miner, you length of noble rust, speak plainly now.'
'A neutron-level force,' replied Lord Starhome. 'Like the parsec-tossed light of the neutron stars that once glinted off my belly inside the Nebula of Dreams.'
'Is it dangerous?' asked Hardarms.
'It-' the shell-shaped ship stopped for a moment. 'Step into my shadow, steamman knight. NOW!'
Hardarms leapt back down the slope towards Longtreads and his cargo, a crackling dome of green energy forming instantly behind him and enclosing Hardarms, Longtreads and Lord Starhome under a suffocating blanket of raw power.
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 transp
arent 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 Quatershift 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-parts and boards, objects that obviously had a utility other than fertilizer for these slopes after their feeding.