Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

'If the caliph has any welcome for me, it's in his torture gardens or on the slave block,' said Duncan.

'Is that the way of it, then, the usual fondness of foreigners for our redcoats? Well, if there's three arms of the compass denied to you now, there's still east. Quatershift is as good as rolled up, but you could reach the Holy Kikkosico Empire on the other side of the slopes of the Mechancian Spine, take a caravan across the pampas. But-' he reached out to touch Duncan's sleeve, '-there's one blessed thing you must know. Running changes a man. After too many years of it, you wake up not knowing whether you're home, or just bunking down in an impostor of a place you're pretending will do for the same.'

'The Kingdom of Jackals is your home,' said Duncan.

'So it is, or should I say so it might have been, six hundred years ago, before Isambard Kirkhill's gang of shopkeepers seized the land.'

'You're not going to run, are you?'

'No,' grinned the commodore. 'I'm a sight too tired to run and a sight too old to remember a new alias. So let the slats come for old Blacky and prize my sharpened sabre out of my cold fingers if they dare.'

Duncan watched as the commodore lumbered over to the scientists he had rescued from Quatershift, before turning to haul the crates out of the narrowboat, the long boxes still dark from the dust of the mine where they had been secreted.

‹It wasn't Purity you were worried about, was it?› said the voice from inside Duncan's travel case as he dropped the first crate next to it on the back of his cart. ‹You were thinking of running with me before we're attacked by the Army of Shadows.›

'Was I?' Duncan went back for a second crate, balancing the load across his muscled shoulders.

‹It won't make any difference. Not to me.›

'Don't talk like that,' spat Duncan. 'I'd run if I thought it would keep you safe. But it won't. Those ugly kelpies from the Army of Shadows will arrive wherever we flee to soon enough, and the stronger for having consumed all the nations between us and wherever we end up. We might as well make a fight of it, here, on our home soil.'

‹Do you have a battery of rockets to kill them with?›

'No, I'm not in the Corps of Rocketeers any more,' said Duncan. 'You know that. But I might just have a bonnie cannon to do the job.'

As the cashiered soldier dropped his crate into the cart there was a massive explosion and for a second Duncan thought that one of the canal boats' cargoes had detonated – some explosive cache fused early – but the shower of leaves and loose pieces of timber was rattling off the forest canopy from above. Whatever had struck Highhorn Forest had fallen well wide of their canal path.

Duncan pushed the precious travel case under his cart in case they were being mortared, dipping his head out as Coppertracks came steaming past. 'I thought the first gunnery test was scheduled for next week, old steamer?'

'A message,' said Coppertracks. 'I received a message from one of my people seconds before the explosion. It said: "Coming in hard. Landing on my shields."'

'Hard!' Duncan blinked as a piece of blackened bark fleeted off his forehead. 'Even the dafties of Dennehy's Circus don't make landings any harder than that.'

'I believe the cannon's vital component promised to me by King Steam has arrived,' said Coppertracks. 'Though not in quite the manner that I had been led to expect.'

The steamman was the master of understatement. The task of unloading the components from the canalside forgotten, the project workers began to run towards an unexpectedly felled section of forest.

At its centre, the smoking, silver form of a shell-like capsule lay embedded in the super-heated mud. An imperious steammen voice roared out at Duncan and the others, as they stood clustered around the broken trees and boiling mud, looking at the crash site in amazement.

'Precisely which part of me being stuck in this foul gloop do you witless ground huggers think I'm enjoying? I am sure some of you possess the sentience to clutch a shovel and begin digging me out.'

Coppertracks rolled forward. 'Lord Starhome, I presume.'

Skyman First Class Hanning polished the glass face of his heliograph as he waited for fresh signals from the lamps of the lead aerostat in the Revenge's squadron. Mounted beneath the airship's chequerboard hull, lower than the gun ports, lower even than the fin-bomb bays, the h-station was a tiny domed nodule, manned by an adept in the code that allowed the Royal Aerostatical Navy fleets to move in synchronized flights.

It was a solitary calling, manning the h-lamps, but the job did have its consolations. Lamp men were always privy to the captain's orders from Admiralty House – at least when they were communicated in the field, rather than via the wax-sealed written orders handed to skippers before a stat pushed off. The quick wits needed for coding the messages – as well as their confidential nature – meant that h-operators were treated with the courtesies of a petty officer's rank, even when they hadn't passed the board exams for such: extra grog, PO's rations, and spared deck-scrubbing duties. And they got a better view of the scenery and the skies bar all but the wheelman on the bridge, or maybe the spotters in the crow's nest.

Right now, the skyman looked out on as respectable an assemblage of both soldiery and the fleet's sleek ships as anyone sitting on his wooden seat in the RAN Revenge's h-station had ever seen. Hanning let his eyes wander to the nearest of the Revenge's sister craft. There was the RAN Diligence, his first berth as a greenhorn, running proud next to the RAN Flying Fox – the Canny Fox, or Old Canny to her crew – said to be one of the luckiest hawks in the Fleet of the South; never brought down by squall, ground fire, or any of the foes she had ever been dispatched against by the Kingdom of Jackals. Just a couple of the hundreds of airships gathered here today, their shadows a reassuring sight for the earthworms of the New Pattern Army below. And the Circle knows, they were marching in numbers that hadn't been seen since the Battle of Clawfoot Moor, when parliament's forces had smashed the rump of the royalist army so many centuries earlier. There was the Heavy Brigade, their exomounts' green scales glittering in the sunlight; the Twelfth Glenness Foot and the Sixth Sheergate Rangers, redcoat columns two abreast in full marching order; the iron land trains of the Royal Corps of Rocketeers, steam from their black stacks obscuring the racks of Congreve rockets primed and ready for battery fire; the green uniforms of the Middlesteel Rifles, walking in ragged skirmish order at the head of the infantry columns. The tactics of the New Pattern Army hadn't altered substantially since they had been perfected by First Guardian Isambard Kirkhill centuries earlier, but then why improve on perfection? Besides, the earthworms in the regiments always relied on fighting in close coordination with the Royal Aerostatical Navy, and the Jackelians' monopoly on airship gas had served their nation well when it came to defence.

Occasionally, one of the clockwork-driven horseless carriages mounted with an oversized version of Hanning's h-lamp would flicker into life below, requesting an update from the flagship or reporting the findings of the army's mounted scouts. If the musings of the command staff from House Guards were found to be mildly pertinent they would be circulated lazily among the high fleet's airships a while later. They did worry and fuss so, the braided and medal-breasted generals of the army – but then, they weren't drifting hundreds of feet out of range of the effective fire of the foreign brigades which the kingdom's armed forces were called to suppress. Where the high fleet sailed safely and omnipotently above the fog of war – often adding to it by dropping fire-fins and gas shells onto the battlefield – the poor benighted scrapings of the regiments had to face every hail of shrapnel, hot shell and ball that the enemy tossed at them.