The rise of the Iron Moon j-3

by Stephen Hunt

  'You didn't even want me to go on this voyage,' said Molly. 'And now I've lumbered you and the others with the expedition too.'

  Commodore Black looked at the image of their home receding on one of Lord Starhome's screens, a small blue sphere against a field of velvet night. Blue save for the northern pole, where a red infection seemed to be spreading out, smoky coils of crimson clouds obscuring the cancer eating away at their world. And above it all the ugly red coin of the iron moon. 'Ah, poor Purity. I should have stayed to protect her. Coppertracks was right, and I am an old fool for not having settled matters honestly.'

  Molly was puzzled. 'What did Coppertracks say?'

  'It doesn't matter now,' said the commodore. 'My mortal wicked stars have given me the fate that I deserve, and that's to be cast off on this perilous journey, into the heart of the enemy's dark territory. As if facing their monstrous slat soldiers on the good soil of my home wasn't burden enough. Now I must be thrust deep into a nest thick with their kind, where the Army of Shadows' writ has run as law for an age. Even my bones will know no rest when they are lying bleached on their red deserts, so far from the Kingdom of Jackals and all that I hold dear. But I'll accept the fate of a fool, if only the fickle lady of chance goes kind on our friends back home.'

  'We'll save them, Jared,' said Molly, 'we'll save them all. Oliver will look after Purity until we get back, and we'll find a way of smashing the Army of Shadows. Kyorin said the answer lies on his home and that is where we must go.'

  'So it seems,' said the commodore. 'I shall stay here then and watch our home as it gets smaller, dwindles to a glint of light in the sky, and put my trust in a strange blue man fleeing the storm that now rages in Jackals. And put my faith in you, lass, who once saw us survive the undercity and the dark legions of Tzlayloc and his demon revolutionaries.'

  Molly left the commodore to his brooding. She was just a woman now, without the might of the Hexmachina to call upon. Lord Rooksby was right. A mere author of celestial fiction. How in the name of the Circle was she going to bring them back alive from this one? She felt as if she was spitting against a tornado. Picking her way down one of the ship's new corridors, Molly went aft to find where Coppertracks had disappeared to with Duncan Connor. The canny steamman was up to something, but her instincts told her she would be better off not drawing attention to that fact in front of Lord Rooksby and the two shifties.

  Lord Starhome's voice followed her as she walked down the craft's passage. 'How you softbodies achieve anything is beyond me. So fractious. Always arguing.'

  'We'll work it out between us,' said Molly.

  'While you are about your painfully slow cognitive processes, do you have any idea where you wish to be deposited on Kaliban?'

  'The face,' said Molly. There was nowhere else. 'Take us to the carving of a face. There will be a city nearby – the last city on Kaliban.'

  'Oh, my sensors can resolve plenty of cities on the surface,' said Lord Starhome. 'Mausoleums, mainly, they have the appearance of having been dead and empty for centuries. You organics certainly don't know how to clean up your mess after you, do you?'

  'But there is a city near the face, with living people? Kyorin's race and their masters.'

  'Yes, yes,' said the half-steamman craft. 'Locating it is quite easy. I just have to follow the glow of dirty isotopes and the filthy concentration of pollutants.'

  'Take us there,' said Molly. 'That's where this fight will be settled.'

  'Fight?' The sneer was audible in Lord Starhome's voice. 'Like two drunkards brawling over a half-empty bottle of jinn. You should stay on board me, little ground hugger. I could show you such sights: rainbows glistening off the water particles of the Wormwood Nebula, the seventy sun system of Leo A, all the wonders of the cosmos.'

  Molly twisted the control ring on her finger. At times, the tracery of circuits on its golden surface burned fit to scald her skin. It was taking more and more of the ring's failing power just to keep the ship in check. 'Stay on course for Kaliban.'

  'Of course,' muttered the craft. 'Of course. So futile. The races of your home will be murdering each other long after you and I have died, and that's an immensely long and full life for me. It's just a good thing you people breed like bacteria in a bog down there. Always more bodies to throw into the fray if you wait a generation or two.'

  'Kaliban,' ordered Molly. 'Just take us there.'

  She could hear Duncan Connor talking to Coppertracks up ahead, and rounding the corridor, she found the two of them in among the boxes of supplies that had been half-packed when Molly had stolen the craft. Along with something else stowed at the aft of the hold. It appeared to be a looking-glass, circular and as tall as she was, but there was something strange about its surface – a quicksilver movement, flexing like water, distorting what it mirrored. And the circular looking-glass was mounted on top of a sphere held up by six iron legs that might have been borrowed from a metal spider. Coppertracks was fiddling with the sphere, adjusting something, but the whole thing looked wrong, out of place. The senses that once allowed Molly to pilot the Hexmachina, the weirdness in her blood, called out to her that here was something that should not exist in their world.

  'What are you doing with that? It's a machine, isn't it? So dense, so many parts packed in at such a small level…'

  'The others aren't behind you, lassie?' asked Duncan.

  'They're off sulking,' said Molly. 'Or in Rooksby's case, probably busy detailing written charges against me seeing as he's parliament's chosen head of our little excursion.'

  'That insidious mammal,' said Coppertracks. 'A life in politics would at least have spared the Royal Society his divisive presence, even if it would have done little to advance the principles of Kirkhillian democracy.' The steamman closed the panel on the sphere, passing a small set of tools to the single mu-body that had been on board at launch. 'Your affinity for matters mechanical serves you well, Molly softbody. What you see here is our second gift from King Steam, almost as precious to my people as Lord Starhome himself.'

  'It's like this, isn't it?' said Molly, indicating the hull of the void-faring craft. 'It's not truly of the people of the metal.'

  Coppertracks' crystal skull dome flared in concurrence. 'One of the advantages of cycling his soul through the great pattern on the path towards eternity is that King Steam has picked up many a strange curio down the ages. Do your symbiote senses tell you what this is?'

  Molly held her hand out in front of the circular looking-glass. 'It – it is a door. But how can that be, and where does it lead?'

  'Imagine you held the very stuff of existence and sliced it in two,' said Coppertracks. 'Two halves of a membrane that stays connected no matter how far apart you then separate the two parts.'

  Molly reached out and touched the surface of the looking-glass. It felt cold, wet, like water and oil mixed. But when she pushed on the surface, nothing happened, it was a solid. 'A doorway. Then this machine has a twin, two looking-glasses connected.'

  'Its twin resides in the deep halls of Mechancia,' said Coppertracks. 'Within King Steam's palace. The sphere sitting beneath the mirror contains a grain of contra-matter that can open the doorway, though not for more than a minute – so great is the tension between the two membranes. The energy needed to equalize each brane-field quickly destabilizes the mirror and destroys it beyond use. We may travel through it only once.'

  'This is how King Steam intended for us to get home,' said Molly.

  'Rooksby and those two shifties mustn't ken about this until we're ready to tell them,' said Duncan. 'They would want to use the doorway immediately, go back to King Steam's land for a properly resourced expedition. I don't trust any of those three dafties not to abandon the voyage and leave the rest of us to hang.'

  '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 Coppertr
acks' 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.