Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

Hardarms had to retract his two spear arms to fit, but he positioned himself onto one of the transparent chairs, his manipulator arms grasping the controls that extruded out from the hull. More to make him feel better about his predicament, he suspected, than to give him any real control. He looked nervously at the rapidly advancing clouds. 'Are you ready to fly?'

'Ha!' laughed Lord Starhome. 'Fly? We're going to scud across this dirt ball like a flaming angel of hell and my every impact is going to leave a burning crater a mile wide.'

'Is Longtreads outside your launch radius?'

'Don't you worry about that common little miner, his troubles are over.'

A roar sounded from the back of the long, sleek shell, louder and louder, until Lord Starhome had to scream over his protesting impellers to be heard. 'It was an eon ago, but the system jumper that gave birth to me gave me two pieces of very emphatic advice. The first was this: never, never, never ever attempt to warp gravity within the mass signature of a celestial body with an active magnetic core.'

Hardarms flipped the iron blast hood down over his vision plate. 'And the second…?'

Lord Starhome's reply was lost to posterity in an explosion so ear-shatteringly loud that its echoes were heard back in the mountain passes of the Steammen Free State.

Jeanne pushed the commodore and Oliver out of the way of the great dark beast rearing up behind them, a shower of oily liquid spraying them from a whale-large mouth, giving the two men a hasty glance at multiple sets of rotating teeth. The apparently limbless creature, as tall as a two-storey house, crashed through the remaining trees and slid across the clearing. Oliver and the commodore picked themselves up, astonished, as Jeanne ducked into the woods behind them to see if there was anything else about to come ploughing through.

The monster was a giant elephantine slug undulating silently across the grassland, powerful enough to push down trees as if they were mere blades of grass. Dozens more of the creatures were busy consuming the landscape under the light of the new comet moon, burrowing into the hills of Quatershift and occasionally emerging maggot-like from the slopes. Hot clouds of foul-smelling mist were rising from the giant slugs' bodies, trails of it spearing up into the dark sky. It made for a hellish sight. They were mining the earth, consuming everything they came across, loudly grinding up rock and ores with their circular maws. Wherever the beasts surged they left trails, not of slime, but lines of objects discarded in the grass, hexagonal plates and piping, machine-parts and boards, objects that obviously had a utility other than fertilizer for these slopes after their feeding.

Jeanne re-emerged from the woods and shook her head at her father. 'Just the slugs, this time. No sign of any slats or slaves coming to pick up their shit.'

'I didn't sense it,' said Oliver. 'It was as if-'

'They lack even the wit of cattle,' said Keyspierre, 'but they are creatures of the Army of Shadows, nevertheless. If you stand in one's way it will attempt to consume you, but they are so insentient that you can walk up behind one and freely put a torch to it – then their greasy skin burns like lamp oil. Usually, we'd set fire to the whole filthy pack of them, but the slats are aware when we kill them and come calling to see who has been making mischief. The beasts are living mills, organic factories churning out the building blocks of the Army of Shadows' machines and cities. Teams at the Institute des Luminaires have been studying the creatures' excretions when we have managed to steal them, but we have so far divined little of the parts' purpose or secrets. We are like monkeys cracking open a fine watch and marvelling blindly at the cogs and gears as we shake them out onto the dirt.'

'It's not the parts that are squeezed from their arses that I'd be mortal worried about,' wheezed the commodore, pointing to the entrance of the old abandoned mine in the hills. 'If they're inside the hills making a feast of them, they might be inside the mine. It could be the parts to Timlar Preston's great beast of a cannon they're putting on their supper menu.'

Oliver seemed hypnotized by the sight. Any campaigning force lived off the land while it fought, but Quatershift wasn't being looted, it was being infested, the landscape remade as a hell by the Army of Shadows. The words of the ancient warrior woman who had appeared like a ghost before him drifted back to mind. Even together, the two of you are not enough to defeat that which you will face. Molly should have been here with them, not back in Jackals; she could have put this in one of her books.

Jeanne motioned forward the shiftie troops holding the train of mules. 'Let's scoop the cannon parts up. Keep your eyes open for slats, compatriot Jackelians, and try not to get killed inside the mine. I won't be able to watch your backs so well when I'm digging.'

Molly stepped out of the mail coach, the only passenger to alight, and looked around. Halfshire was one of the kingdom's last ancient border counties before the uplands began in earnest and there wasn't much to its acres except for pine forests and isolated farms nestled in the shadows of crags like Mount Highhorn. She absently raised a hand to stroke the flank of one of the four midnight-black mares tethered to her coach; the horse she was touching was looking suspiciously down at the steamman trailing up the path towards them.

'I thought you might arrive via the canal,' Coppertracks called out.

'It's hard to get a berth on any narrowboat, now,' said Molly. 'Even carrying full parliamentary papers. With the merchant marine grounded, every mill owner and shopkeeper from Hundred Locks to Calgness is shipping their goods by the waterways. Prices have gone through the roof.'

'Are things that bad?' asked Coppertracks.

Molly nodded her head back to the mail coach's escort. A troop of Benzari Lancers, stocky mountain people from the hinterland south of the Kingdom of Jackals. Hardy little warriors who competed fiercely for the few vacant places in the Royal Benzari Regiment each year. Ferociously loyal to their regiment's oath and deadly with the curved blades hanging from their black breeches.

'That's who parliament are trusting to keep open the Great Middlesteel Road. There hasn't been a desertion from the Benzari Regiment since they were formed.'

'Have you heard any news of Oliver and the commodore?' asked Coppertracks.

'No, but things are turning to the worse in Quatershift. The news sheets are full of how the shifties sent their Third and Seventh Brigade to the north and both forces just vanished without a trace. Sixty thousand men gone, the country's been split in two by the Army of Shadows.'

Coppertracks raised an iron hand towards the sprawl of makeshift barracks; manufactories and buildings that had been raised inside the forest clearings, hidden from the sight of whatever eyes the Army of Shadows might have high in the sky by green netting hung between the trees. 'We only have a handful of the experts on Preston's list, and without those parts buried in his mine we'll have to attempt to mill the cannon components ourselves. We can do that, but it's time we don't have-'

Molly waved her hands to quieten down the nervous steamman. If she knew Coppertracks, he had been working day and night without a rest. He was pushing himself to the point of exhaustion to complete the massive cannon. 'Let's trust the commodore knows the old smuggling routes out of Quatershift as well as he boasted he did.' Molly glanced up at Mount Highhorn, its grassy slopes bare except for crimson fingers of light from their strange new red moon. 'I can't see supports for the cannon being installed?'

'This isn't one of your celestial fiction novels, Molly softbody. The cannon will not tower up the side of that mountain. It's flat.'