Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

'So I am to trust you with the lives and fates of Quatershift's greatest minds,' said Keyspierre to Oliver and the commodore, 'but I am only to be told of these buried components when you arrive to steal them away from my people?'

'We didn't quite know whose country it was going to be when we arrived here,' said Oliver. 'And the Army of Shadows appears to have enough force on its side that we didn't need half the parts for Timlar Preston's prototype cannon falling into its hands.'

'Old habits die hard it seems, my new friends,' said Keyspierre, a tinge of sadness in his voice.

'Your First Committee has agreed to the construction of the cannon deep in the kingdom,' said Oliver. 'Well away from the fighting.'

'Well away for now, compatriot,' said Jeanne. She drew a sharp-looking dagger out of her belt and made a cutting motion across her throat. 'When you are fighting the Army of Shadows, the front line has a way of quickly shifting well beyond your control; but you will see.'

Oliver rubbed his forehead as if he had a headache developing. 'I don't need to see. I can feel them here. The creatures moving about, their hunger…'

'Don't you pay no mind to the fey lad,' said the commodore. 'Our friends back home are already hard at work on the cannon with your countryman, Timlar Preston. You get yourselves to the u-boat and we'll all be on our way to see the blessed project soon enough.'

'No, I am coming with you to retrieve the weapon's components,' announced Keyspierre. 'I have been charged with the success of this project and if there are pre-milled parts for the old prototype still in existence, they will be key to the rapid construction of a working cannon.'

Oliver was about to protest, but Keyspierre cut him short. It seemed there was a hard edge to the middle-aged scientist – but then, it would have been reckless indeed to underestimate anyone who had raised themselves to the top of Quatershift's institute of science in the maelstrom of revolutionary politics. 'I have spent longer than you have avoiding the Army of Shadows' creatures, young man, searching for all the staff your parliament requested. It may feel a little less like Jackelian looting if it is I who takes away the prototype cannon's components. Quatershift never completed the great cannon in time for the war between our two nations. I will not lose the chance to turn such a weapon against our new common enemy.'

'Take the lass to the dinghy, then,' said the commodore.

'I stay with my father,' insisted Jeanne. 'All are equal in the Commonshare, compatriot sailor. I am not some Jackelian maid who needs cosseting with silk dresses, expensive fragrances, or soft cushions for a coach ride.'

'That much I can see, lass,' said the commodore. 'But you'll be equal in death if we come across the Army of Shadows' beasts.'

Jeanne flashed her dagger angrily at the commodore. 'Who do you think has been keeping my father alive as we've been hunting down every retired scientist and engineer in the occupied provinces?'

'I take your point, now,' said the commodore, flinching back from the blade. 'And it's sharply made.'

Jeanne looked with disdain at the commodore, Oliver, and the handful of red-coated marines left on the beach to help retrieve the prototype cannon components. 'Just keep up with us, Jackelian. Everything north of that pinewood forest is slat territory. Our people are getting used to staying out of reach of the slats' talons. I hope your soldiers are fast learners.'

The commodore watched Jeanne stalk away to the train of pack mules. 'Just a quick little smuggling run, you said, lad. I should be back in the Kingdom of Jackals, helping Coppertracks, Duncan and that rascal Timlar Preston lay down the barrelling for your blessed great gun. I'm a game fellow, but I'm getting too old for these mortal dangerous jaunts you seem so damn fond of dragging me into.'

'I bring you along because apart from me, you're one of the few who ever survives these little adventures,' said Oliver. 'You're damn unsinkable, old man.'

'Is that what I am? When my unlucky stars put me in the way of every bullet and blade our age has to offer.'

But the age wasn't finished with Commodore Black yet. There were sights of horror enough to haunt the group on their five-mile journey to the worked-out mine. Memories fit to torment the visitors to Quatershift for decades to come. The smallest of these barbarities were the cold remains of fires where the slat companies had camped, littered with the blackened bones of the captured citizenry. The shifties might have been starved for years by the failure of the revolution to produce a decent harvest, but there had been meat enough on their bones to satisfy the foot soldiers of the Army of Shadows.

The largest of the outrages was the ruins of the city of Courau, briefly visible from the brow of a forested hill where the party rested, what was left of the place spilling across a wide valley next door to a lake. Its outskirts had been completely flattened by the sweep of war, an inner core of buildings standing intact but still smouldering from the small weapons fire of the slats. Out of the wreckage a new Courau was rising, an evil green luminosity lighting up the rubble as massive domes were raised in the heart of the old town. Made of hexagonal panels, the domes looked like the eyes of giant insects, ripped out and embedded deep in the race of man's territory. Taking the commodore's telescope, Oliver saw long lines of Quatershift's citizens being marched into the city along the outlying roads, their bodies – many of them were naked – painted viridescent by the tainted light of their conquerors' eerie constructions.

'You can't see from here,' Jeanne told Oliver, 'but the slats have branded their prisoners on their foreheads. A single triangle means they are to be kept as slave labour and used to rebuild the city to the Army of Shadows' template, a double triangle means they are to be farmed. See to the right of the domes, the low glass structures that resemble greenhouses? They are pens where our people are fed slops and fattened. If you were watching during the day, compatriot Jackelian, you would see the slats pulling out the ones they intend to consume. If you were close enough, you could hear the screams of our compatriots begging for the slats to select someone else, anyone else, someone fatter or younger or older or healthier. Fighting each other to be at the back of the pens. The food pens are where the Army of Shadows keeps the children it captures. If you waited for morning you could watch adults throwing children forward when the slats come to select the day's cull, infants whose parents have already died and have no one left to protect them.'

'You see now why I came with you,' said Keyspierre, his voice like steel as he stared grimly towards the conquered city. 'There is no price I would not pay to lift the hand of this terror from our land. If the cannon the Hero of the People Timlar Preston tried to build during the Two-Year War will turn back this invasion, then I will construct it with my own hands if I have to, one rivet at a time.'

'Sweet Circle,' whispered Oliver. 'This is where their hunger leads… I felt it like a sickness in the north, but I had no idea.'

There was a tear running down Commodore Black's fat cheek, soon lost in the scrub of his black beard. 'Ah lad, I don't need to be fey like you to feel their evil. This is the future we are looking at, for everyone on the continent, unless we find a way to turn them back.'

'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.'