Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

Harry was about to reply when the door of the lifting room at the end of the corridor slid open, revealing a warder doing his hourly cell check.

The warder looked quizzically at the trolley, the cell number hooked around the front just as regulations required. 'What's Timlar Preston doing out of his cell? He's not due to be put under for a room sweep until the end of the week?'

'What does it look like?' said Harry. 'I'm a wolftaker, he's a wolf. I'm taking him.'

'I know who you are, Mister high-and-mighty Wolf Twelve. What I haven't seen are any release from custody papers for Timlar Preston.'

'Special orders,' said Harry. 'He's about to get time off for good behaviour.'

'You've got to be having a bloody laugh-' the guard's protests were interrupted by a klaxon, an urgent, intense burst of sound from the other end of the prison sphere.

'Proximity alarm,' announced Harry for Oliver's benefit. Not their prison break discovered, then.

'But we're well out of season for a skrayper attack,' noted the warder.

He walked to the other side of the corridor and rotated a handle, lifting a storm shutter off a viewing porthole. Something megalithic, grotesque, was slipping through the clouds, drifting past the aerospheres of the Court's city in the firmament. Brief gaps in the cloud cover revealed a wall of dark, rust-coloured metal peppered with jagged spikes and lit by savage bursts of red light.

'What in the name of the Circle is that thing?' sputtered the warder. 'It looks like it's riding a lightning storm!'

'Not a lightning storm,' said Oliver, glancing over the guard's shoulder at the strange craft. 'It's riding the leylines.'

Oliver could feel the power of it. A spike of raw energy leeched straight from the heart of Jackals below, lifting this monstrosity up, pushing a devil's cauldron into heaven's limits. It was like a bloated flying citadel, a hideous castle riding on the energy of the leylines.

'We're opening our gun ports,' said the warder, hardly believing what he was seeing. Apart from driving off the skraypers and other gas creatures, the Court's defences had never been used in anger. From somewhere inside the city a series of small aerostats emerged like angry hornets protecting their nest, then they were past the porthole and there was a thump-thump as they ran into the attacker's fire. A backblast of burning hull fragments bounced off the viewing glass, spinning ribs of hull skeleton windmilling past.

The warder noticed Harry rushing the handcart down the passage at speed. 'Hey!'

'What's the very best way to start a fight with your enemy?' asked Harry.

Running behind the cart, Oliver raised up two fingers. The two fingers he could use to push into an opponent's eyes, blinding them.

'Glad to see your time with me wasn't totally wasted.'

They nearly lost their footing as the corridor tilted, the handcart slipping across the floor with the impact of an explosion. Timlar Preston's restraining straps held him on the flatbed, but Oliver barely managed to escape having his legs crushed by the buggy. There was another explosion inside the Court of the Air. More distant this time, the impact taken by one of the spheres at the far end of the aerial city. The tenor of the klaxons changed, becoming a frantic hoot as Harry redoubled his efforts at dragging the cart forward, Oliver struggling to keep up.

'Will the lifting room to the hangar still be working?' Oliver shouted over the racket.

'Not in a minute's time,' called Harry. 'That's a separation alert.'

'Separation from what?'

'Our transaction-engine chambers have done the maths on trading blows with whatever the jigger that is out there. We're losing.' There was a rattle as a porthole next to them was covered with an iron grille sliding down the outside of the prison sphere. 'The Court of the Air is preparing to separate. Each sphere of the city becomes an independent airship and they scatter.'

Oliver gripped the handcart as the prison sphere began to list in the opposite direction. 'Scatter to where?'

'Damned if I know, this is the first time we've had to do it since I've been with the Court. There'll be a rendezvous point for anyone who makes it out alive.'

'Stop!'

Oliver looked around. It was the warder catching up with them.

'Get him back in his cell.'

'Why?' asked Oliver.

The warder stared at Oliver with contempt.

'He's just a cadet,' apologized Harry, abandoning the cart and moving back down the corridor. 'Wasn't so long ago that I slipped him out of Bonegate Jail to join us.'

The warder grabbed the handles of the handcart, pushing Oliver to the side. 'You think we're going to risk the prison sphere crashing into Jackals with fifty year's worth of captures? If this mob of rascals got out all at once, Jackals would be an anarchy within a year-' His words were interrupted by a muffled crash from down the corridor, followed by the pop of explosive compression. 'We're flushing out all of the prisoners, high category ones first, and they don't come much higher than Timlar Preston.'

Harry's hand slipped over the warder's mouth from behind, silencing him as he thrust a dagger through the man's spine. The warder arched violently and then slumped over Preston's comatose form. 'That's why I need him alive, old stick.'

'You didn't have to do that,' said Oliver.

'You're a fine one to talk. Of course I bleeding did,' said Harry. He pushed the corpse off Timlar Preston's unconscious form. 'Just like I'm going to have to drag him into an empty cell before it's flushed. Half measures won't see our people through today safely.' He snapped a chain of punch cards off the dead warder's belt. 'And he wasn't going to give us the keys to the guards' station if we'd just asked him nicely.'

An acrid burning smell reached Oliver's nose. That wasn't good. Just how badly had the prison sphere been hit? The rattle of explosions outside grew louder. Harry left Oliver to manhandle the prisoner gimbal forward while he slotted a red punchcard key into the guard station's lock. Ducking down to check inside before the armoured door had fully withdrawn into the ceiling, Harry waved his old comrade-in-arms forward. 'Nobody here. They'll all be up top in the main station, trying to work out which one of them has the most flight time on an aerosphere.'

Oliver had nearly gained the door when a series of detonations thunder-cracked in a timed sequence, then the floor veered off from under them, leaving Oliver holding the gimbal with one hand and the door with the other.

Harry staggered to the guard station's entrance and reached out to help pull Timlar Preston's unconscious form inside. 'Unfortunately, right now, I think that would be me.'

Oliver looked up. Those last explosions had been too measured to be part of the battle. Separation! Through an arc of glass in the guard station their perilous state of affairs stood revealed in its true horror. The Court of the Air had split into a hundred separate globes, many trailing smoke and flames, stabilizer rotors being reorientated into flight position, the rubber gangways and sealed corridors that had connected the aerial city drifting down now through the clouds like streamers at a country fair. Some of the spheres' gun ports were still firing, a few surviving airships looping through the carnage, razor prows thrumming uselessly with the power electric – their enemy today no pod of skraypers that could easily be repulsed with a few shocks. The vapour cloud cover generated by the city's vast array of transaction engines had cleared away sufficiently to reveal the passage of the executed prisoners; white trails like spider legs reaching out, thin lines of heated oxygen where the cells' decompression seals had been explosively blown. Every few seconds there was another pop and a new captive would be launched flailing – quickly stilled – into the airless vaults of the upper atmosphere.