Stephen Hunt - Secrets of the Fire Sea

'What sort of thing will you be?' Hannah cried.

'A better thing than your precious Circlism,' spat the colonel. 'All this time the church knew what it had here – the means to save our land! And your people buried it away; you forgot it along with our greatness! And the church claims to care for the needs of the people…'

'I have completed the steganographic key,' said Boxiron. 'I am ready to begin deciphering the main code.'

Colonel Knipe picked up the first two sections of the god-formula that Hannah had dropped and threw them towards the steamman. 'Pick up the girl's pencil and begin writing on that paper. Quickly! Your Inquisition friend only has a few minutes of life left in him.'

Hannah looked down. Jethro Daunt had fallen silent and was lying with his back against the flare-house cannon, as still as a corpse bar for the trembling of one single leg. The floor below was awash with his blood.

'Jethro Daunt is not a member of the Inquisition,' said Boxiron as he worked. 'He is not even a churchman anymore.'

'So you say. For hire, then. A mercenary, no better than the dirty wet-snouts the senate believed they were buying.'

Boxiron continued to write out the equations of the final piece of the god-formula, his iron fingers moving several times more rapidly than any human hand could. 'Not for hire, for love.'

'He really was going to marry the archbishop?' said Colonel Knipe, sounding surprised. 'Well, I never did get around to checking if that part of his story was true. More fool him. Everything that you love you end up losing. That is the way of life.'

'What will you do with this, colonel?' asked Boxiron. His voicebox sounded as if it was vibrating with pain, as if the mere effort of translating the final section of the god-formula burned at the core of his being.

'I will save your Jackelian friend. I have never broken my word.'

'Afterwards.'

'I shall restore Jago to its natural position at the head of the world's nations, just as I shall burn the last wet-snout left on the island into ashes. Fire, then ice!'

Hannah pulled herself up, clutching her bleeding scalp. If that meant what she thought! 'You can't.'

'My will shall be done,' shouted the colonel. 'The world's winter shall be Jago's summer. Our civilization will rise once more. Everyone will want to dwell here again and those who do not will consider themselves cursed. And they shall be!'

No. A new age of ice. A winter without end, never the spring again as the world turned.

'Please!' Hannah begged Boxiron to stop what he was doing, but instead the steamman slid the final completed section of the god-formula back towards Colonel Knipe.

'We gave the world everything, little girl,' snarled the colonel. 'And they turned their backs on us, believed us fit only for use as a rock to break the rising wet-snout tide. A mere pawn in the game of our betters. We passed the world the light once, after the age of ice ended, now the torch of their civilizations shall be ours to snuff out again.'

Seizing the completed god-formula, the colonel vaulted over the railing, landing on the lower walkway, then sprinted into the flare-house instrument room and sealed its door behind him.

Hannah was on her feet, groggily climbing down the ladder to the lower level. She picked up Boxiron's hammer and smashed at the door to the instrument room, but its head bounced uselessly off. She screamed for Boxiron to help, but he was standing on the upper gantry as immobile as an iron statue. Had the enormity of what he had done finally begun to sink in? The terrible cost of his friendship with the man who had saved him? She tried to batter the crystal panel in the door, but it had been hardened to withstand a flare misfiring inside the launch barrel. Hannah's strength was draining away. On the other side of the glass, a haze of twisting, turning diamond-sharp panes of light surrounded Colonel Knipe as he read the god-formula, enveloped by energies that were too exotic to be contained by the mortal world. His body was growing translucent, his organs pulsing with light. He was shedding his mortal shell.

Hannah felt fingers circling her ankle.

'Don't…let…him.'

'It's no good,' said Hannah, kneeling beside the ex-parson. 'The colonel's in there changing. He's taken the godhead.'

'Boxiron! Boxiron!'

'He's frozen,' cried Hannah. 'Please, Jethro, Boxiron's not even moving anymore.'

There was an awful ripping sound behind the instrument room door, something alien and terrible, the fabric of matter itself tearing.

It was the laughter of a new demigod striding the earth. Commodore Black heard the cadet commander's yell as she scooped up his sabre and tossed it across to him. He rolled through the blood on the flagstones and speared Ortin urs Ortin squarely through the stomach, the tip of his sabre emerging through the back of the Pericurian ambassador's jacket.

Commodore Black was on his knees, the ambassador looming over him, still trying to move forward despite the wound. At first the commodore could barely hold the ambassador back, but gradually the realization of his imminent death seemed to sink into Ortin urs Ortin, his eyes losing their glare of insanity.

'Well – played – dear – boy.'

The commodore nodded, trying to rise, still keeping both hands on the sabre's grip and preserving the gap between them.

'I – am – not – a – savage.'

Commodore Black pulled out his sabre and the ambassador swayed. The old u-boat man raised the steel to his nose in salute as the ambassador crashed onto the flagstones, his monocle rolling away across the floor.

'Just two blessed nobles,' said the commodore, 'living through a savage age as best we can.'

But the ambassador was beyond hearing him.

Commodore Black turned as the barricade cracked open to admit a wave of ab-locks, tools jangling from leather belts, bayonet-fitted rifles at the ready, followed by a pair of men in guildsmen's robes. They looked for all of the world like a couple of hunters taking their hounds out for a walk through the vaults of the mountain.

'Our RAM suits wouldn't fit through the Horn's corridors,' said the nearest of the guildsmen.

'There's a pity,' answered the commodore. He watched the ab-locks fan out across the assembly rooms towards the stairs to the higher levels, followed by the guildsmen. Hunting down creatures that looked and smelt like ursk cubs was something that no doubt came quite naturally to the pack.

'On, T-face,' cried the younger of the two valve-men. 'Smell them out for us, up the stairs, up.'

Commodore Black drew out his mumbleweed pipe and searched for a packet of leaves to light, standing next to the white-faced cadet commander who was starting to tremble in shock now that the combat had ended. He took her rifle from her clenched fingers and set it down on the ground.

'Is this war?' she murmured in horror.

'Not for us, lass,' said the commodore. His eyes moved across the heaps of dead cadets and ursine, bodies locked together in death, mourned by the cries of the shivering children behind them.

'For us, this was campaign experience. For us it's the chance of a medal. It's only war for them.' Hannah had hold of Jethro's hand, the tremor of his fingers growing weaker as the alien gale of laughter behind the iron door became a storm. The energies being unleashed inside that chamber were leaking through the seals as little flickers of ball lightning.

'Boxiron. He…' Jethro gasped. 'Top. Gear.'

Hannah glanced up. The steamman was standing statue-still, transfixed by the scene below. What was the point, what was the point of anything now?

'Bel. Bessant.' Jethro's fingers tightened around Hannah's hand. 'How. Do. You. Fight. Gods?'

Hannah stopped. She could see something moving down the corridor, a shadow, the blur of a rooting animal. Or a badger.