Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

'Jared, those are supplies we need,' said Molly. 'Compasses, pistols, tinned food, blue skin paint so that we can pass for native Kals.'

'No, lass,' said the commodore, unstoppering the bottle. 'This is what we need. A toast to Duncan and his skill, swooping here and there like a blessed hunting hawk. I've had my fill of being treated like a wave-tossed cork by fate. Fired out of uncommonly sized cannons, living in the belly of steammen vessels crossing the celestial darks, cast away like a plummeting stone over the enemy's stronghold.' He took a swig from the bottle and offered it to Keyspierre but the shiftie scientist looked disgusted. 'No? Suit yourself. Ah, it's good. This'll put hairs on your chest. No, it's the solid land for me from now on. My boots firmly on the ground, even if the land is that of wicked Kaliban.'

Rooksby yelped as they started to roll again, Duncan grunting and pulling the craft back on course. His face was beaded with sweat and his lips pulled so tight he was drawing blood with the force of his concentration.

'Your piloting is magnificent,' announced the young Starsprite. 'It is like having an organ for atmospheric flight inside me. I can feel what you are doing. How you're using the side sails to brake and turn us. But we're going to pass through a wall of turbulence at the borders of the troposphere, I can feel it flowing ahead of us.'

Molly had to stop herself from yelling as the battering outside renewed itself with fresh vigour. As if sensing the fear inside her passengers, Starsprite formed a series of pews topped with railings to hold onto across her deck. Molly clutched at one until her knuckles stood out on the back of her hands like white stones on a Spumehead beach. Then they were slipping towards smoother currents, the shaking abating.

'Can you not increase the size of the main sail triangle?' called Duncan from his position in the nose.

'I do not have enough material,' replied the craft. 'I know the proportions of the sail are wrong but my hull is already as thin as I dare squeeze it.'

'We're gliding too heavy for a brake and tug landing,' said Duncan, banking the craft. 'I'm going to try and spiral us down, long wide figures of eight all the way to the ground. Keep your eyes open for a straight stretch of sand for our final glide in.'

Molly moved to the front and stared out of the elongated porthole. She could see the face of Kaliban, the carving no bigger than her thumbnail. Lord Starhome had been as good as his – her? – word, after all; dropping the expedition down on top of the monumental carving like a sycamore seed sinking to the ground. Shadows of canyons and mountains crisscrossed the land below – if summits were visible at this height, they must be on a scale that dwarfed the craggy ranges of the Jackelian uplands. Molly closed her eyes and waited for the jumbled headache of Kyorin's memories to cast adrift a suitable landing zone. There. To the south of the carving, long undulating dunes of dust-thin sand. She could see them in her mind's eye, blowing and shifting in front of a sierra eroded by the fierce sands into a forest of toadstool-like capstones.

Molly pointed out the stretch to Duncan. 'Place the tail of your last loop in the shadows of the carving's chin, there's sand enough to skim down for a long, low landing.'

Duncan grunted in affirmation, not taking his concentration away from the porthole for a second. 'Aye, I see it, I see it.'

Molly's head was throbbing now. It was painful, accessing the jumble of memories that Kyorin had dumped into her. Increasingly so, each time she tried it. What, she wondered, did the pain mean?

Someone was behind her. Jeanne and her father. The young shiftie seemed fascinated by the crimson vista circling in front of the transparent material of the porthole. 'Those lines out there. They are the same canals the steamman presented at the Royal Society.'

Who had told her? Coppertracks was humble about his achievements and Lord Rooksby had no reason to talk about his rival's findings.

Molly nodded, warily.

'A remarkable achievement,' said Keyspierre, his mood improving now they had hope of a landing. 'The Kals surely must have organized themselves as a commonshare and laboured mightily to achieve such a network.'

When it came, the final meeting with the ground was blis-teringly fast. The craft tore through the barrage of rolling dunes with whip-cracking explosions of red sand as each impact slowed Starsprite a little more. Then there was a long tearing sound as her belly caught the sand, sliding for what seemed hours before they stopped. Molly was shaking as she got to her feet. She hadn't realized how terrified she had been during the long fall towards Kaliban and now the shock of their arrival was catching up with her. For a moment she wondered if the impact had affected her eyes – everything seemed to be turning red. But it was Starsprite. Their craft was changing the colour of her hull, the texture becoming grainy red rather than silvery smooth – camouflaging her lines – blending in with the sand in which she had settled.

'Open the door,' said Molly. 'Let's see where we are.'

'I haven't ordered that,' Rooksby practically shrieked, his nerves in shreds.

Molly pointedly ignored him and jumped out of the hole rippling open in young Starsprite's stern, landing ankle deep in the ruby sands. She felt light on her feet, springy. The pull of this world was only two thirds what she was used to back home. Then the intense wall of heat struck her. It was like walking into an oven, thick, cloying. Circle's teeth! Molly noticed how near they had come to a canyon drop starting only ten feet away from the Starsprite's nose. No hint of this in Kyorin's memory of the landscape. Ten feet from a plunge to – she looked over the edge – the walls narrowed down to an impossibly deep death, as if Kaliban was an apple and someone had run a knife around its circumference in an attempt to cut it open. The floor of the ravine was filled with a stream of dark thrashing flesh. No accident of geography, then – she was looking at more of the Army of Shadows' slave machines. Mining worms.

Molly turned away from the foul sight, allowing herself a brief snatch of exhilaration. They had actually done it. All the times Molly Templar had written of explorers landing by airship on one of the moons, finding bizarre alien lands, and now she was actually following in her literary creations' footsteps. Molly looked around, drinking in the strange sights. No greens, no blues, everything tinted by the colour of blood, a wasteland of endless deserts. Her euphoria dwindled. How she wished one of her novels' clever, fast-thinking heroes or heroines were here instead of her. Jack Riot or Emma Cochrane. Either of them would have been able to make a much better bid of their desperate last attempt to save the Jackelian people than her.

There was a thump behind Molly as Coppertracks and the commodore exited the craft. The steamman slipthinker's two wide caterpillar tracks made for an effortless passage across the fine sands.

Commodore Black peered over the edge of the ravine and shook his head in repugnance. 'Look on the canyon floor down there. Those are the black slug machines of the Army of Shadows, the same wicked things I saw infesting Quatershift. Thousands of the foul creatures wriggling around down below like a river of terrible worms.'

'There's nothing left,' said Molly, sadly. 'They must be cutting new ravines like this all across the world, but they've sucked the place dry. No more minerals, no more gases and oils, no more deep-water aquifers. Kaliban really is dying.'

'We see before us how our world will look in a couple of thousand years,' said Coppertracks, 'if we fail to turn back the Army of Shadows.'

'Then we won't fail, Aliquot,' said the commodore. 'For even a Cassarabian tribesman would turn their nose up at this wicked empty heat-blasted land. It's certainly no place for any honest Jackelian.'