Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

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.'

Hardarms' 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.