Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

No wonder jack cloudies were hailed as the heroes of the nation and welcomed into every jinn house and drinking establishment with offers of a song and a round freely stood, while the earthworms had to be press-ganged into the regiments, or recruited from the ranks of those facing transportation to the colonies to an alternative service under the sharp tongues – and sharper floggings – of the army's sergeants.

Hanning's musings about the good luck of his employment were interrupted by a clatter of bony feet coming down the ladder to his little glass bubble of solitude. It was Ti'ive, the young craynarbian midshipman bearing a note scribbled in the captain's hand for him to translate into lamp flicker.

'Another one for the Thunderbolt, if you please, Mister Hanning.'

Hanning checked to make sure he still had line of sight to one of their flagship's h-stations (as a flagship, the Thunderbolt had the unusual honour of possessing four h stations – fore, aft, port and starboard), then the skyman flicked into action the flint igniter on the side of his lamp's gas assembly. Hanning looked at the note he had been handed by the officer and harrumphed. The skipper was asking permission for the Revenge to break east to make contact with the missing steammen army. The steamers were a day late for the planned rendezvous, and it seemed the skipper considered it unlikely that the Free State's usually punctual army would allow themselves to fall so behind schedule.

'I doubt if we'll cut any orders independent of the fleet, sir,' opined the lamp operator. 'None of our hawks have been taken since we've started sailing convoy fashion.'

'The captain's worked with King Steam's fellows before, and he's a sight more concerned by their non-appearance at the border than our flag officers seem to be at the moment,' said the young middie.

'And has he said anything on the bridge about the six missing brigades of Quatershift's finest that were meant to be waiting on their side of the border to join up with our earthworms?'

'Jon Shiftie?' Ti'ive said, fiddling with his starched officer's uniform. 'Only that they're not fit for much beyond the fine art of retreat anyway, and that it might be better all round if the shifties took to their boot leather now, rather than folding a flank under fire and leaving good Jackelians exposed to the Army of Shadows when things start getting thick down below.'

Hanning started to blink the message out to the Thunderbolt. 'I saw Jon Shiftie fight in the Two-Year War, and I'd sooner have a few regiments of their bluecoats to add to our number than not. Even if their backbone does owe a debt to political officers with pistols ready to cut down anyone who tries to run, I reckon their boys held their lines well enough under our hawks' shells last time around.'

Skyman First Class Hanning was trying to talk over his nerves. Everyone on board the Revenge had been nervous since they had crossed the border into Quatershift. It wasn't just the sight of the dead Cursewall that had once been raised to separate the two nations, now drained of the very power of the land that once fed it. Not just the missing brigades the shiftie attaches had promised and failed to deliver to the House Guards staff. Not even the uneasy alliance with their most ancient of foes. It was the fact that they were sailing into a war of aggression for the first time, breaching a covenant that was timeless for the people of Jackals. Jackelians kept to their borders and, as stalwart as they were in their nation's defence, they had no taste for empire. The very idea of crossing into another nation and taking the fight to an enemy they hadn't even caught sight of yet felt unseemly. And it was a wrongness that had seeped through the airships and unsettled every jack cloudie serving in the four fleets.

Hanning was still clacking out the message to the flagship when Ti'ive's sharp eyes spotted the Thunderbolt making a more basic communication, the craynarbian crying out at the sight of the all-ships command – a bright red pennant running up the flagship's spine ropes, flapping in the wind. Enemy sighted.

The flagship's h-stations flashed new orders for all to see, not bothering to single out any one ship of the line, and all the other airships picked up the message for general relay until the fleet fast became a sea of winking stars. Form line. Engage.

Hanning dashed out the orders on his pad, ripped off the top sheet and passed it up to Ti'ive. He might not have been sitting in the crow's nest up top, but the skyman could see the ruby-red storm front rolling in from the north. One minute it was sweeping in above the distant hills and the next minute they were swimming in it, thick, red, as if the blood of everyone in Quatershift below had been turned into steam and blown over the high fleet.

'Have you ever seen such a thing?' asked Ti'ive.

Hanning was trying to think what to say when a lance of light and fire jetted past the Revenge's aft, so hot that he could feel the glass of the h-station's dome burn with it, a sudden wave of thermals buffeting their airship and briefly clearing away the crimson fog. And beyond the Revenge, the Flying Fox, the lucky Fox – was revealed cut in two down her middle – the whole mid-section of the stat's hull vaporized in a cloud of superheated celgas. As broken now as her luck. Both the surviving sections of the airship tumbled away, spilling burning sailors and ballonets into the mantle of tumbling debris: the melted keel catwalk, exploding engine housings, celgas netting and flailing bracing wires, all steaming white hot from the enemy's strange heat ray.

Both sailors were struck dumb, but a voice sounded from the corridor above the tunnel that led down into the h-dome. 'They're above. They're above us!'

'What is it?' Hanning shouted up. 'Has the crow's nest sighted something? All I can see down here is-'

Seven or eight streams of energy similar to the last one jetted past, rocking the Revenge like a pigeon tossed by a tornado. Hanning fell off the operator's bench, Ti'ive sprawling about somewhere above him – his hard craynarbian shell cracking into the dome's glass.

Having lifted himself back up, dazed and bruised, Hanning blinked away the images torched on his retina to see a garden of bright red flowers – blooms of fire and smoke and blazing jack cloudies. 'Sweet Circle. How can they do this to us?'

Ti'ive tried to steady himself, as the airship and its h-dome rocked from side to side like a fairground ride. 'What's the matter with our damn airships today?'

Something caught Hanning's attention on the ground and he pulled his gaze away from the field of mushrooming destruction in the sky to look down upon the smashed ranks of the New Pattern Army in full ignoble retreat: the redcoats of the Light Infantry; the green uniforms of the Rifles; the cherry-trousered Hussars on their steeds, all retreating. Adding to the terror below was a rain of airship girders and the boiling ballast water falling from the Flying Fox. A few regiments of the infantry were trying to pull back in a disciplined line, but they were collapsing ragged against the sea of black – an undulating dark mass of the beast-soldiers of the Army of Shadows. Jackelian artillery units were attempting to set up their guns under the cover of the House Guards, each large cavalryman protected by an armoured gutta-percha cuirass, riding high and heavy on their exomounts; but the riders were encircled by a scattering of slats that had already broken through the collapsing squares of the West Pentshire Regiment. There were a few puffs from the heavy rifles carried by the House Guards before they were knocked off their mounts by streams of springing black creatures and torn apart.

The last glimpse of the ground Hanning had was the desperate uncoupling of artillery pieces from the trains of horses by their gunners before they too were swarmed over, then the unnatural cloud enveloped the Revenge and Hanning's dome was sealed once more inside a sea of dense crimson mist.