Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

'This-' Coppertracks looked again at the images '-this cannot be Ashby's Comet? Where is its ice, the rubble, the-'

Hardarms extended a weak manipulator arm towards the ceiling. 'Burnt off, fallen away. And that which remains beneath is what we once mistakenly thought was a comet. As you can see, our foul new satellite is an iron moon.'

'Then, dear fellow, Ashby's Comet was never a natural phenomenon?'

'And its path around Kaliban and back to Earth no random accident of celestial mechanics,' said Hardarms, his voicebox losing volume as he spoke. 'King Steam's scholars have revisited all our theories of astronomy and can come to no conclusion save that this iron moon is some monstrously sized tool of the Army of Shadows.'

'But the Army of Shadows appeared well before the iron moon was captured by our world,' said Molly. 'I saw the enemy in my vision from Kyorin. The slats were crossing the celestial darks in shells that ride beams of light all the way across to our home.'

'I have no answers for the iron moon's presence or intent,' said Hardarms. 'But I don't need to see its corroded red alloy to know that fell, evil moon was created above Kaliban by our enemy. See here the last image taken at the observatory before we left for the Kingdom of Jackals and mark it well.'

Coppertracks held up the final image, a snapshot of a long silver thread extruding from underneath the iron moon down towards the bottom of the picture. 'Like the thread from a spider.'

'And growing longer each day,' said Hardarms. 'Extending down towards our world's surface! King Steam's scholars believe the enemy means to use the cable to anchor the iron moon to our world, somewhere towards the Army of Shadows' stronghold in the polar wastes. The iron moon is slowing, now. Soon, the moon will orbit no longer, but will be joined to us in a stationary position.'

'Anchored to what end?' asked Purity.

'None that is good,' said Hardarms.

'A lifting room!' exclaimed Molly. 'I cleaned enough vents in the capital's pneumatic towers to know what you can use a cable like that for. You run supplies and material up and down its length.'

'A lifting room that can travel high into the heavens and beyond,' said Purity in disbelief. 'Now there's a thing for one of your novels, Molly.'

'Such a colossal undertaking,' said Coppertracks, allowing a tone of wonder to sound from his voicebox. 'The minds that are capable of such a feat of engineering… we must appear as savages to them.'

'They may have arts that are not yet known to us, brother slipthinker,' said Hardarms, 'but it is they that are the savages. I have seen these slats. Bestial things with no sense of living within the harmony of the great pattern. They have no code, they have no honour. They are naught but a dark flame that will burn all of creation to stay afire.' The knight extended a trembling manipulator hand out to Coppertracks and the steamman bent close to hear the warrior's whispered words.

'How can we fight them?' said Molly, the desperation of their pathetic little cannon put into perspective against the incredible might of such an enemy. 'How can we fight creatures that can construct moons out of iron and craft bridges between the celestial spheres themselves?'

'With what makes us alive,' said Hardarms. 'With passion and imagination and the compassion we feel for our fellow living creatures in the great pattern. With what makes us different from them; and with her.' The dying steamman warrior pointed at Purity. 'That was the message King Steam asked me to relay to you three softbodies. That you will save us, Purity Drake, and that you, Oliver softbody, are the key.'

'But I'm a nobody,' said Purity. 'I've a price on my head. I could barely survive an attack by a couple of slats.'

'You are Jackals!' Hardarms' vision plate briefly flared with his old light. The steamman seemed to shrink back in his bed. 'Pray – the Loas grant that be – enough.' At last he fell silent, that great steamman warrior, Hardarms, captain of the Pathfinder Fist; the visor above his darkening vision plate slid down to seal his skull in the final reflex of a creature of the metal.

Purity looked at Coppertracks. 'What did he whisper to you?'

'He gave me his true name for his funeral rites,' said Coppertracks. He looked at Molly. Had his keen vision seen her receive the ring from Hardarms? 'And he said that we should not trust Lord Starhome. He is only partially a steamman and his systems will revert to feral ways with each week he spends outside the Chamber of Swords beyond the civilizing influence of the people of the metal.'

'You have to let me come with you now,' demanded Purity. 'You heard what King Steam told us. If there's a way of beating the Army of Shadows on Kaliban, I can help us find it.'

'We'll see,' said Molly, trying not to sound dispirited. Oliver was the key, Purity was their last hope. And Molly? She was a riderless knight who merited only King Steam's sympathy now. 'We have to get our damn cannon working first.'

Before Lord Starhome went wild. Before the Army of Shadows came across the country's borders and found them defended only by private fencibles old enough to be Molly's grandparents.

Before the end.

Duncan Connor took the heavy riveting gun from Commodore Black, the submariner looking perfectly at home among the other burly navvies and hulking engineers putting the finishing touches to Timlar Preston's cannon. The strange gargantuan snail-shell, cast from iron, wound its way around the forest floor amid the flash of welding torches and the hammer of machines. There was no rifling inside the iron tubes welded together to form the cannon's massive spiral. Instead, its barrel had been lined with rubber panelling to form a vacuum, steam engines drawing out all air from inside.

Timlar Preston's plan was for Lord Starhome to be loaded onto an ammunition cradle above the heart of the spiral and then slid down into a breech to be injected inside the airless cannon. Once inside, the steamman craft would be fired out with a great detonation – the cannon's power augmented by an additional series of blasts from firing rings, chasing the craft all the way around the spiral. Pressure from the blast would build up in the barrelling behind Lord Starhome at an exponentially increasing rate, riding the vacuum in ever wider slingshot circles around the cannon, until, finally, the shell would pierce the membrane at the muzzle of the barrel with a velocity so fearsome that Lord Starhome would be flung free of the pull of the Earth – into the dark void in which the steammen swore their strange artefact could fly. All the way to Kaliban and the homeland of the Army of Shadows.

It was a mad, daring dream. Yet Duncan had faith in Timlar Preston's plans. Decades before, during the Two-Year War, Preston had hit upon the same innovation that was to cost Duncan his position in the Corps of Rocketeers. No more explosions through the crude mixing of explosive fuel, but a controlled detonation, spraying the highly corrosive and combustible blow-barrel sap into a mixing chamber using hardened glass nozzles. Where Duncan had envisaged a new generation of long-range rockets being developed by the state armoury of the kingdom, Preston had refined the notion of a wave-front cannon, a simple iron tube that could accelerate a shell so fast it could escape the very grasp of the world itself. Preston had originally dreamed of using his creation to send a party to the moon, with explorers wearing diving costumes and brass tanks of air inside water-filled shells to survive the detonation of the cannon. But the Two-Year War had put an end to Preston's peaceful ambitions as surely as Duncan's radical ideas of warfare had derailed the career of the once lauded Connor of Cassarabia.

Duncan Connor pushed the head of the heavy riveting gun against the iron face of the barrel and squeezed the trigger, the coiled pipe back to the pressure drum jumping off the dirt like a snake that had been stepped on.