Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

As if the gods had answered Longtreads' request, the pale circle of the new moon began to disappear under the rolling scuds of an advancing storm front. Shadows began to lengthen across the moorland below, a creeping crimson twilight trailing across the vast assembled orders of the steammen knights.

'The Army of Shadows,' growled Longtreads.

'Stop where you are,' ordered Hardarms. He drew a magnifying assembly out of his satchel and clipped it over his vision plate. 'Now I can see why the survivors fleeing the fall of Catosia chose such a fitting name for the enemy.'

'But can you see their army?' asked Longtreads, his tractor treads stalled on the slope.

'There's something at the other end of the moors, but the smoke from our people's stacks is obscuring my view of it. Ah, that's better, the wind is clearing the smoke, it's-'

'What? What?'

'This is a joke, surely,' Hardarms' voicebox called back down the slope. 'There are just two creatures out there. Ugly, eyeless things like the offspring of a bony black slug that has mated with a mantis; and they are manning a cannon, or perhaps it is a mortar, so stubby is the mechanism. Is this all they have to field against our forces?'

'They insult us,' said Longtreads. 'A deliberate slight. May the Loas appear and curse their spawn down to the fiftieth generation.'

'Our gun boxes are walking forward through the army's ranks. Our bombardment will speak our answer well enough-' Hardarms was cut short as a wail of anguish sounded from Lord Starhome's silver shell.

'What?'

'I feel it,' called Lord Starhome. 'Oh my giddy sensors, I have not felt such a thing for a millennium.'

Longtreads' skull rotated to directly face his heavy load. 'I'm a simple miner, you length of noble rust, speak plainly now.'

'A neutron-level force,' replied Lord Starhome. 'Like the parsec-tossed light of the neutron stars that once glinted off my belly inside the Nebula of Dreams.'

'Is it dangerous?' asked Hardarms.

'It-' the shell-shaped ship stopped for a moment. 'Step into my shadow, steamman knight. NOW!'

Hardarms leapt back down the slope towards Longtreads and his cargo, a crackling dome of green energy forming instantly behind him and enclosing Hardarms, Longtreads and Lord Starhome under a suffocating blanket of raw power.

Hardarms tried to speak to Lord Starhome, but the half-steamman craft's hull was humming loudly like a tuning fork, his voice faint under the effort of casting a magic he had long forgotten; low as it was, Hardarms still heard the craft's ancient mantra. 'My shields can deflect particles at point one-C under lightspeed, my shields can deflect particles at point one-C under lightspeed.'

Then the mantra was drowned out by a terrible burst of light and an explosion, the green energy of their shield fizzing beneath the onslaught. The field umbrella covering them flickered and died and for a moment Hardarms thought that their protection had been vaporized, but the craft had only let it fall after the neutronic field front had punched past.

Hardarms mounted the crest of the rise again to take in the scene. Every tree on the moor had been uprooted, every bush and blade of grass flattened, and radiating out from a blackened core, the valley below was filled with the corpses of steammen. Nothing was left at the epicentre of the blast. Hardarms could even see where some of his comrades' shadows had been left etched into the soil, while beyond this lay a felled forest of the people of the metal – bodies intact enough, but their soul boards, crystals and circuits scrubbed of every last iota of sentience by the neutron-level force front. Little more life left down there than in the metal ores that Longtreads trundled down from his mountain mine. A handful of bodies at the periphery jerked and shook as their secondary systems tried to come back online, limbs vainly twitching now they had been burnt clear of all intelligence, of all pattern. Near the flattened standard of King Steam a few warriors stood activate but deeply shocked, the energy shields of their own ancient artefacts from the Chamber of Swords falling away now that the enemy's vicious field front had passed.

Of the Army of Shadows' cannon and its two gunners there was no sign, but those that they had sacrificed themselves for were visible now – a distant black horde advancing under the cover of the unnatural clouds to mop up the few survivors that still stood, startled, shaking, before them.

Hardarms turned to stare down at Longtreads. 'How fast are you without your load?'

'How fast?' The cantankerous steamman miner was insulted by the very question. 'I can carry over a hundred tonnes of ore and not think it too much. Free me from my load and my treads can move with the speed of a gun-box shell, as if the shadow of the Dark Lord Two-Tar himself were chasing me.'

'I fear that something just as bad soon will be,' said Hardarms, climbing up onto one of the trailers and thumping on Lord Starhome's skin to open a door in his silver shell. 'Go back to the Free State and report what you have seen, miner. Tell King Steam to look to the defences of our capital. Only the rocky depths of the mountains can protect us against such weapons.'

'And where do you expect me to go, to lighten this dirt-hauler's trailers?' asked Lord Starhome. 'I cannot reach the void with my impellers. I have told you, gravity is too distortive down here.'

'Crane Lord Starhome off your trailer,' Hardarms ordered the miner. 'Then clear our vicinity at your top steam.'

Lord Starhome watched as his silver shell-like body was lifted away from the miner's tractor cradles and lowered down onto the grass. 'You are not thinking of what I-'

Hardarms pointed in the direction of the black horde pouring across the moors. 'Fire your engines anyway.'

'I cannot reach escape velocity.'

'I'm not asking you to. Flop across the land like a dying fish, bounce us like a frog escaping boiling water, but move us out of here!'

'Flop!' shouted Lord Starhome. 'I don't flop! If I open a warp inside a gravity-well this deep, you'll have an explosion that makes the neutron weapon we just saw detonating look like a wax candle being lit.'

Hardarms gazed in the direction of the low, fleeing form of Longtreads, the dust from his wake kicking up into the air behind him. Longtreads was every bit as fast as he had boasted. To ensure he was obeyed, Hardarms brandished the golden ring that King Steam had given him before he departed the Free State, etched with control circuits so fine even a steamman's vision plate had trouble resolving them. 'You are sworn to obey me. You have your orders and we will move.'

'Oh, we'll move all right. We'll move, the whole bloody land will move, and you'll die of gravity particle poisoning. My reactors are inside my shields. The only use I can put my shields to is to cushion our eventual crash landing. I can't save you if you board me. It'll be a slow, lingering, painful death for you. You might be better off staying here for an instant end at the hands of those things.'

'But they,' Hardarms pointed towards the darkening clouds of the Army of Shadows, 'will die also.'

'Oh, give me the stars again,' wailed Lord Starhome. 'Free me of the petty land disputes and foolery of ground huggers and give me instead the infinite sky.'

'And you can give me my engine ignition,' ordered Hardarms, swinging through the portal that Lord Starhome had created in his hull.

'A minute, to override every safety protocol my great creators wisely placed in my systems,' spat the craft.

A screen formed in Lord Starhome's nose, giving Hardarms a near-perfect view of the moors as seen from the front of the holy artefact. 'The Army of Shadows is closing in.'

'Sit in one of my pilot seats at the front,' urged Lord Starhome. 'You'll fry a margin slower inside the protection of my internal acceleration dampeners.'