Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

Molly didn't know whether to laugh or cry when the first of the transparent pipes pushed out of the wall and began filling her cell with a thick yellow liquid. Soon she was wading though the thick gloop, then it was up to her chest. Was this the traditional method of execution on Kaliban? Drowning in a cell little bigger than a cupboard? You would think Keyspierre could have tipped his new allies off about a nice clinical Gideon's Collar, a quick bolt through the neck from one of his nation's execution machines.

Molly was panicking and smashing on the transparent crystal panel set in the door, but nobody was coming. Finally the liquid flowed into the last inch of air remaining under the cell's ceiling and she was enveloped. She was drowning.

Duncan Connor turned over in the sand, the raging sun filling the sky and burning his naked body. There was Fayris Fastmind curled up on one of the dunes behind him, the great sage's pale wrinkled body free of robes too. Duncan stifled a gag as he smelled his hand. A right good reek. As if someone had pissed on him after they had beat him to insensibility.

Duncan could just make out the slope of the mountain in the distance, billowing columns of smoke coming from the hidden entrance they had used to enter the great sage's domain. Not so great now, unable to walk and moaning from the aches of age without the medical machinery in his chair to help coddle his ancient, creaking body. So much for the great sage's fake ant colony, too. Sealed shut on them, no doubt blasted away by the explosives of the Army of Shadows.

‹Papa, Papa!›

Thank the Circle! Hannah lay scattered across the dunes behind him, along with, he discovered, a tauntingly empty water canteen.

'Did the slats gnaw on you, lassie?'

‹They did,› Hannah cried. ‹There were monsters, terrible monsters. Chewing on my legs and arms. Some of them wanted to eat you too, while you were unconscious, but I told them they could bite on me instead.›

'You're a good lassie. You did the right thing, you saved my life. Brave wee thing, I'm proud of you. Now we can both get out of here.'

He broke the empty canteen's strap and used it as a harness to tie Hannah to his chest. Then he limped across to where the great sage lay.

'Leave me,' begged the ancient Kal, his mind-voice as faint as a whisper.

'Don't be a daftie, man.' Duncan bent down to scoop up the great sage's body, as light as a feather.

'We have been sprayed,' said the great sage. 'Sprayed with the pheromone of an ant queen. Leave me here and you might have a chance. They'll come for me first if I'm not moving.'

'Aye, I heard much the same story from Sandwalker when we were trying to reach you,' said Duncan. 'But those ants aren't so hard. I killed one when it tried to fly away with my daughter. Back in Cassarabia, the womb mages grew real kelpies inside the wombs of their slaves. You've never had a shufty at a sandpede or a Cassarabian flying lizard, have you? They're real monsters.'

'Who were you talking to over there, do you have a communications device inside your body?'

'It's called my mouth, man. Do you not have eyes to see? Hannah is coming with us too and I'll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head when you talk about my lassie. You've been in the sun too long, great sage. But I'll carry you out of here just the same.'

Clicking mandibles interrupted the great sage's bemused reply, a forest of fluttering antennae rising from behind the dune followed by the giant form of an enraged queen ant.

Molly's journey, nauseous-inducing and timeless in the grasp of the yellow gel, ended much as it had started, with a muffled shuddering, the oblong of light behind the cell door flickering with the violence of the craft's braking. Molly had realized what was going on soon after the gel had filled her nostrils and lungs – a brief sensation of drowning before she registered that the liquid she was suspended in actually allowed her to breathe. After all, this design wasn't so different from Timlar Preston's original plans for a shell to cross the celestial darks. But instead of Quatershiftian explorers wearing diving suits, insulated from the shock of launch and flight in water-filled chambers, the slats had obviously crossed to Molly's home cosseted in this strange umbilical fluid.

After holes opened in the floor and drained all the gel away, Molly waited, still sopping wet from the sticky protective fluid, shivering and trying to clear the gloop from her hair. She thought she heard the commodore complaining in the corridor outside, then silence as he was removed. Still they didn't come for Molly, but after an hour had passed, two slats unlocked her cell door.

One babbled at Molly in what she thought was the Kal language, and then the second beast stepped forward, towering over her. 'Speak new slave tongue. Come.'

It was disconcerting, no eyes to focus on, fangs sliding up and down as the slat spoke. Molly realized how much of communication came just from looking into another person's eyes.

'Where are you taking me?'

'Food not speak,' hissed the slat, clicking in annoyance. It jabbed her with its rifle barrel, a flared metal pipe with a shaped crystal set inside it. 'Food obey.'

'Food obeys,' sighed Molly.

No sign of her two friends outside. Circle, she hoped they were still alive. The tight corridor of the shell-ship opened up into a vast hangar, walls of rusting red metal rising above lines of capsules, hundreds of shells, some tended by slats with a few blue-skinned Kals overseeing the maintenance. The iron moon! They had sent her to the iron moon. And alongside the capsules they used to cross the darks was Starsprite; the half-steamman craft locked in a vice-like girdle while slats were crawling over her hull. Oh sweet Circle, they had found her ship. Found the looking-glass gate she would have used to jump across to the realm of the steammen. Molly tried to wave to Starsprite, but the slats pushed her brutally past. Failed. The expedition to Kaliban had failed in every way it could have done. She was on the iron moon and she didn't have the great sage's weapon. For the sake of a device the size of a marble she had lost the power to bring down the whole rotten edifice of the Army of Shadows.

As she was marched through the iron moon, Molly saw that its chambers and passages were a bizarre mixture of the advanced and the primitive. She was shoved into a cart pulled by six lizard-like things, the beasts dragging her through the iron corridors of the artificial satellite, past deep halls where legions of slats swung swords at rock posts or trained with their talons. Eventually, Molly reached a more advanced transportation station, a polished black carriage hovering above a rail outside a tunnel mouth. Then the railcar was accelerating her through the iron moon, some tunnels as black and sightless as the Middlesteel atmospheric, others transparent and showing chambers filled with strange glowing machines that swung around each other like the pieces of an orrery.

At one point Molly's tube ran along the outside of the iron moon and the awe-inspiring vista of her world filled the velvet night below. The bone-white cable of the beanstalk Molly had seen in the steammen's observatory pictures stretched all the way down to the surface, like the proboscis of a mosquito impaling its host.

Once back inside the alien satellite, the railcar slowed to a stop alongside a watercourse, a garden waiting on the other side of an ornately carved wooden bridge. It was a surreal juxtaposition: a sculpted green paradise sitting in an ugly rusting chamber. At the far end of the garden, a curving wall of glass displayed the view she had been ogling outside, the gem of her world seen from on high. Precious, fragile. Home. The slats pushed Molly though the garden, butterflies landing on her arm and fluttering away as the gurgle of a nearby fountain startled them.