Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

'You have travelled further than you know, I think,' said the sage. 'And it sounds as if you carry a heavy burden for your people, much as I have done for mine.'

Keyspierre stepped forward. 'We have not come such a distance to trade homilies, compatriot. You have a weapon to destroy the Army of Shadows. To keep my nation safe I must have it.'

'Oh yes,' chuckled the Kal, before he doubled up coughing.

Sandwalker was at the great sage's side, checking the readouts on the carriage. 'You are tiring him!'

Fayris Fastmind waved the nomad away, irritated. 'Do not fuss so, my friend. I haven't had anyone visit since I dispatched your brother to seek out Kyorin of the city-born. I will lose my reputation as a hermit if you keep on turning up like this, unannounced, with all your associates in tow.' The sage beckoned Molly forward. 'I felt the machine life bubbling inside your body when I unentangled Kyorin's memories from your mind. We are alike, you and I, both the last guardians of our land. But there is a way in which we must not be alike-' he stopped to rummage around inside his floating chair, withdrawing a golden sphere not much bigger than the tip of a finger. 'I have failed my land, so it falls to you to end the sickness of the Army of Shadows.'

Molly took the tiny sphere in her hand, smooth and slippery except where a single tiny black button broke its surface. 'What is it?'

'Why, you hold in your hand the weapon to destroy the masters.'

'Now, I don't mean any disrespect,' said the commodore, 'since it's your genius that's just saved my friend's precious life, but you must be out of your gourd if you think that mortal little marble is going to stop the Army of Shadows.'

'This is surely not the weapon?' said Sandwalker, as astonished as all the others by the sage's revelation.

'One of a pair, in fact. The other was destroyed when your brother's party was ambushed trying to take it to Kyorin. It will stop the Army of Shadows,' said the great sage. 'Starve them to death, in fact.'

Duncan Connor came over to inspect the weapon in Molly's hand. 'We point this at the Army of Shadows, press the wee button, and they all die?'

'More or less. Well, perhaps a little more, when coupled with the truth of the masters' nature. Their little secret.'

'What is it?' asked Molly.

'You have to carry my weapon onto the iron moon, the satellite currently fixed to your home in lunar orbit. The weapon only works inside the iron moon, but if this sphere is activated there, I promise you, the majority of the Army of Shadows will die, and nature will take care of the few that remain.'

'Getting onto the iron moon? That's quite a stipulation,' said Molly.

'The iron moon!' whined Commodore Black, as the shock of what this wizened little man was telling them sunk in. 'It will be full of the wicked slats and their masters and blue-faced vampires.'

'Full is a relative term,' said the great sage. 'There are by my estimate no more than a thousand masters left alive now, half of those biding their time here on Kaliban, half waiting for victory over your people on the iron moon. Perhaps twelve times that number of slats and a handful of Kal carnivores on the moon with the masters.'

'Against a handful of us,' said Molly.

'My plan involves infiltration, not assault,' said the great sage. At a touch of the console on his carriage, a section of floor disappeared and a line of black forms rose into the chamber. They looked like dissected slats hung over a fence post as a warning to any others that might trespass. 'These are slat suits. They will seal around your body when you step into them. Like the soldier ants guarding my mountain they are indistinguishable from the real thing – they smell the same, walk the same, emit sonar screeches from the throat, and will translate the slats' own tongue both ways.'

'An impressive feat, Fayris softbody,' said Coppertracks. 'But not as impressive as a moon-splitting weapon miniaturized down to the size of one of my iron fingers.'

'To understand my weapon you need the truth I talked of,' said the great sage. 'Before you arrived on Kaliban, you passed through a disruptive field of some sort?'

'That terrible wall of energy that nearly burst our craft apart?' whined the commodore. 'The wicked thing nearly did for us.'

'That was because you were passing through it the wrong way,' said the great sage. 'It was only intended to admit causal objects travelling the natural way along the timeline, from the past, forward to the future.'

'Timeline?' said Molly.

Coppertracks' skull blazed with light. 'Of course! All the stars, disappearing, being in the wrong place! Procession…'

'Procession? Are we to have a blessed parade now?' said Commodore Black. 'Talk some sense, Aliquot Coppertracks.'

'The field we passed through in the darks of space was no defence field of the Army of Shadows,' said Coppertracks. 'It was a time field. When my telescope back at Tock House was looking out onto the sky, the stars had appeared to move because the portion of the sky I was observing was sitting behind a field of time – I was staring at the right stars, but as they were in our past, rotated out of kilter by the dance of galactic procession. No wonder the Steamo Loas have been ignoring my calls, my rituals of Gear-gi-ju… it is not physical distance that led them to forsake me: my ancestors haven't even been born yet!'

'Quite correct,' said the great sage. 'The Army of Shadows aren't just invading your world from Kaliban, they are invading you from the Kaliban of your own past. As soon as I saw the heavens above Kaliban shifting around your celestial sphere, saw new stars appearing and other stars vanishing, I realized what the masters were doing. From the level of processional movement in the star field, I would estimate that your Kingdom of Jackals lies some five million years in the future of Kaliban as it sits now.'

'How can you be sure of this, man?' asked Duncan Connor.

'Because they plundered the equipment and the fuel source for their time field from a facility very like this one,' said the great sage. 'We only made one, you know. An artificial singularity heavy enough to distort time itself when it rotates, a stillborn star. It was mostly my research into the fifth dimension the masters stole. I had to watch the Army of Shadows plunder my singularity two thousand years ago. Then, a century ago, the masters constructed the iron moon with what was left of our land's mineral wealth, building it around the singularity. They launched it on a comet's trajectory through the solar system, set to pass your world every few millennia. A timer was set to open a gateway back here, a gateway that leads five million years ahead to our future. Our future, but your present.'

'But why did this dead star they stole from you need to be loaded onto the iron moon at all?' Molly asked.

'The only stable time field we found we could project was one that extends backwards, from the present to the past,' explained the great sage. 'We could use our technology to travel back in time, but not forward. Our time machine must already be sitting in our future in order to open up a passage to the present. But that is not a problem. A comet's trajectory keeps the iron moon and its chronological distortion mechanism safe from erosion and geological incident, safe from interference by sentient creatures. You can keep something as hardy as the iron moon spinning around the solar system for millions of years. You could launch the iron moon today, and if you can set the timer on its machinery accurately and it survives long enough, next week you can have the moon open a portal in time above your world, a doorway leading millions of years to the future.'

'But why?' asked Molly, her head spinning. 'Why would the Army of Shadows send their legions forward millions of years into the future, to invade us from our own past? Why not just invade our world as it is now, in your present?'