Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

The lad nodded. Explosive decompression, a couple of seconds choking in the slipstream of the troposphere, then unconsciousness long before the impact of a mile-high fall from the dizzying height of the Court's levitating city removed his mischief from the face of the world. A fitting fate for an enemy of the state.

The lad looked up at the card above the next armoured door. It was purple, with the numeral one stencilled across it. 'That's the first time I've seen that colour over here.'

'A P1. So, you've a taste for the strong stuff?' noted the warder. 'Do you really want to see who's inside this cell?'

'I-' he hesitated. 'I think so.'

Warder Twelve laid his hand on the viewing slit. 'Then gaze upon Timlar Preston!'

Timlar Preston? But this was just a man, not an ogre. Old and thin, in a cell wallpapered by white sheets, every inch thickly pencilled with formulae and diagrams. He was standing pushed up against a wall – so close you'd think he was trying to draw warmth from the riveted metal, his pencil scratching in ever smaller circles, the writing increasingly tiny now there was hardly any space on the papers left. He turned around to gaze at the viewing slit, a flash of wild eyes and wispy silver hair, then returned to his scribbling.

'He can see us?' asked the lad. 'I was told that the door's cursewalls allowed one-way viewing only?'

'He always knows when we're watching him,' said Warder Twelve. 'Don't ask me how. There's a touch of the fey about him, if you ask me.'

The greenhorn gazed into the cell again. Timlar Preston didn't seem like much, certainly not the man who had nearly destroyed the Kingdom of Jackals during the Two-Year War, the Great War, the foreigner whose weapons had propelled the hell of conflict deep into the Jackelian counties. He was from Quatershift, that much you could see, a dirty shiftie, no honest, round jowls of the Jackelian yeoman for this one; no honest fat from a diet of roast beef, beer and jinn. Thin, wiry, with a proud nose that lent him an hauteur distinctly lacking in his mad scratchings.

'You still think you have what it takes to keep such as he away from our shores?' asked Warder Twelve.

The lad held his tongue. Inside the cell, Timlar Preston was turning in a circle, waving his pencil. Conducting an imaginary symphony of madness.

'You want to keep him dancing for us, rather than inventing bloody great devices of war for the shifties to use against your fellow Jackelians? Men like him aren't controlled by this-' the warden slapped the transaction-engine drum turning on the armoured lock. 'They are controlled up here!' He tapped his skull. 'Walking the cells with a toxin club swinging from your hand won't be your vocation in the prison spheres, any more than tapping the ivories on your key-writer was your job when you worked over in analysis. Getting into the minds of people like Timlar Preston, that's the task for you and me. We drug his food once a week; change his pencil for one slightly fatter, slightly longer, a different shade. To keep him off balance, you see? Then we take his sketches, the ones we can understand, and change some of the formulae. Forgery section uses his handwriting to do it for us. Just enough to keep him wondering if it was he who wrote the maths or one of us. Just enough to keep him wondering if he's going mad. And while he's doing that, he's not trying to break the hex we've got laid around his cell. He's not thinking of creating weapons that could lay waste to our country.'

Timlar Preston's mad dance in the centre of the cell had ended, the genius arriving at the other side of the viewing slit in three long, low strides. His shriek was relayed by the voicebox next to the cell door, the piece of paper he had been writing pushed up against the viewing slit, full of spirals, a procession of seashell-like geometries drafted with insane precision. 'They're coming! They're coming!'

The lad looked at Warder Twelve. 'What is he talking about?'

'Something new,' said Warder Twelve. 'He's been ranting about it for days. He's due for the old sleepy soup and a few mind games at the end of this week. When we search his cell, we'll probably find the notes on whatever his latest obsession is.'

'I can hear him!' Preston yelled. 'Talking to me. Telling me what to do. What we need to do to survive.'

Warden Twelve flicked the sound off the voicebox and closed the viewing slit. 'Back to the lifting room; the next level down is where we keep the prisoners with special powers- all the fey ones, the sorcerers and witches. You're going to love them.'

They walked away, oblivious to the muffled banging on the other side of the cell door. Timlar Preston howling and throwing his papers around the cell.

Commodore Black looked over at his friend Coppertracks. It would take someone very used to steammen ways to tell that the scientist was nervous. But then, the commodore had lived with the steamman under the roof of Tock House for long enough that he could read the patterns of energy that danced under his iron friend's transparent crystal skull like other men could read furrows in a brow or the nervous drum of fingers on a desk. And it took a lot to make one of the metal creatures nervous.

The patter of polite applause from the direction of the stage indicated that the previous presentation in front of the massed ranks of the Royal Society was going well. Well for the presenter, but not so well for Coppertracks' chances of extracting the full financial and intellectual backing of the society if they squandered their time and resources on too many of his rivals' proposed projects. It was a competitive business, this society of ideas, mused the commodore – as if the Kingdom of Jackals only had so much deck space for what its people thought about, and the pondering of one belief – one truth – left less room for any others to thrive.

'You are sure you have all of my slides in the correct order?' asked Coppertracks.

'You know that I do,' said the commodore. 'Haven't I practised enough on your blessed magic lantern back at the house? You keep your attention on the audience, I shall give your scientist friends a visual display of your genius that would put to shame the lantern operators of the theatres along Lump Street.'

'There is really no need for you to assist me, dear mammal,' said Coppertracks. 'I could have brought one of my mu-bodies to operate the projection apparatus.'

Commodore Black nodded, but didn't point out that having one of the steamman's metal drones capering about the stage would only serve to remind the mainly warm-blooded races sitting in the auditorium that Coppertracks was a slipthinker – his genius so large he had to distribute his consciousness among multiple iron bodies. Back home in the Steammen Free State, they treated Coppertracks as royalty. Here in the Kingdom of Jackals, he was just a metal clever clogs who constantly reminded the members of the Royal Society how dim most of them were in comparison.

'Now,' said Coppertracks, rubbing nervously at his metal hull, polishing it to a high, gleaming sheen, 'where is Molly softbody? She must have picked up that slide I changed by now.'

'I have,' said a voice behind them. It was Molly Templar, the third member of the trio that shared the comforts inside Tock House's walls. Molly was sweating slightly under her long red hair – she had obviously been straining to get to the presentation in time. 'It turned out the chemist finishing off your last slide was one of the more persistent devotees of my writing. He wouldn't hand over the damn thing until I had signed at least two of my novels for him.' She produced a little glass square, chemically etched with one of the steamman's images.

Molly peered round the curtain to see how well the current presenter's talk was going, then ducked back and lifted a copy of the Middlesteel Illustrated News out of her coat pocket, passing it to Coppertracks. 'Read the cover story. It's a pity your presentation isn't proposing a superior design for airship engines. The merchant marine has grounded all its flights – apparently dust from the wake of Ashby's Comet has fouled the fleet's motors. While they're being checked and cleaned out on the airship fields, the cost of narrowboat berths and stagecoach tickets is rising in every county.'