Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

Purity raised a laugh. 'We did the same thing back in the royal breeding house when we were put on short rations. Sucking the dishcloth.'

Molly looked at the tunnel hurtling past. 'What a pair we make, Purity Drake. The princess and the pauper. Well, at least we're not going to live to see them do that to Jackals.'

'No,' said Purity, the force of her voice surprising Molly. 'We're not going to give up. You and I. There's a way, there's always a way. The people of the kingdom will not crawl into the eternal night as slaves of these beasts. I failed once, but I'm never going to fail again.'

Molly was about to say she admired Purity's spirit, but then they came to it, a vast circular cavern that was so immense – many miles across – that it could only be the hollow core of the iron moon. In the middle something black and terrible rotated, twisting under the blazing red fire whipping from a series of vast magnetic guns that emerged from the chamber's curved walls. A titanic hoop-like walkway surrounded the rotating spider of darkness, the tiny figures of masters walking around and ministering to the monster's needs through their consoles and machines. Oh sweet Circle, this was it. The Kals' artificial singularity that the great sage had talked about. A demon more terrible than anything the Army of Shadows could have created on their own, caged and tamed by the Kals' plundered superscience. A comet moon given the power to punch a window five million years into the past. A rift to allow the Army of Shadows to farm worlds across the passage of eternity itself, feeding their dark, fierce hungers. If the great sage had been telling the truth, then the Kals had only created one of these monstrous singularities, but one was all the Army of Shadows had required.

Molly couldn't help it now, she was weeping. 'There it is. I'm sorry, Purity. This is what I should have destroyed. The Army of Shadows consumed everything in their age and now their armada are sailing through the seas of time to claim us.'

Purity turned her face away from the blaze as the magnetic cannons burned at her eyes. The giant masters on the walkway wore brass goggles to protect them from the glare. Molly noticed the determined look on Purity's face. She really didn't know when it was time to give up.

'Time. Yes, I know time. Time is our ally,' said Purity. 'The Bandits of the Marsh have rested in its halls. The bones of our land endure it, are shaped and healed by its flow. I'll save us, I'll save us all.'

'Will you? We've been royally betrayed by time now,' said Molly. 'They're us, Purity. That's the worst secret of them all. The Army of Shadows' masters are us. And they're coming home.'

The two of them fell to silence as the railcar bore them along the surface of the iron moon's core, painted by the violence of the energies of time itself being torn asunder.

It wasn't exactly a cell where Purity, Molly and Jackaby Mention were tossed, more the smallest of the feeding pens available. Only Commodore Black stood inside, no sign of Coppertracks, but Molly barely had time to say hello before she was hauled out again and separated from the group.

Purity's face pressed against the pen's bars, shouting at the slats and the giant woman leading her friend away. It was the scholar who had stood in the emperor's throne room, enraging the master of masters by her failure to retrieve the sword.

'Where are you taking Molly?' yelled Purity.

'Quiet, animal,' ordered the scholar, her beautiful features not improved by being twisted in contempt as she glanced back towards the feeding pen. 'Your turn will come soon enough. For dissection.'

The first thing Molly noticed about the scholar's laboratory was the large slab with a metal spider hanging above it, all blades, drills and crystal-tipped tubes dangling on iron arms. The second thing was poor Coppertracks, trapped in a vice-like machine, plates opened all over his body and leeched by cables running into the scholar's devices.

'Coppertracks!'

The steamman said nothing, locked into silence by the vice, his voicebox covered up.

'Save your distress for yourself,' advised the scholar.

'What are you doing to him?'

'Peeling its memories like an onionskin. Breaking the encryption on them, then storing them for analysis. This abomination you count as a friend is very clever. It might even be able to contribute to our own natural sciences. But that is of secondary interest to me. My primary concern is that this abomination doubtless controls the key to opening the looking-glass gate inside the craft you used to cross to Kaliban.'

The looking-glass gate! Their way home.

'Yes, we have your gate too,' laughed the scholar, seeing Molly's face. 'It will be most fortunate if, as I suspect, the gate opens out into the realm of the abominations. I have a very special bomb I would like to push through into the deep mountain stronghold of King Steam's palace. How ironic if the mountain walls the abominations think protect them instead become the walls of their tomb.'

'Why do you fear the steammen?' said Molly. 'They've never harmed you.'

'Harmed?' said the scholar, motioning her slats to secure Molly to the dissection slab. 'We once fought a bloody war against the abominations. It is not just your stunted little race that our kind acted as progenitors for. There is a reason why we create no machines able to think for themselves, why it is a capital crime to even manufacture machines with the ability to network with each other. Abominations such as your friend over there are that reason.' She tapped her head. 'Trust only the flesh. That which can be controlled, shaped by other flesh.'

Molly tried to break free of the slats' grip as they pinned her down on the dissection slab, but the monsters were too strong.

'You're the perfect example of why their kind can't be trusted,' said the scholar to Molly, walking to her console behind the dissection slab. 'You've been infected by the abominations, made a monster, nothing but a puppet of contaminated meat to advance their schemes.'

Molly kicked futilely at the slats. 'You use your machines to give birth to beasts like this and you dare call me a monster!'

'Oh, I'm exceptionally proud of my slats,' said the scholar. 'My grandmother created the slave labour assault troop pattern during our last wars on what is now your world, securing my family's high position in the observative sciences. The slats are the perfect soldiers, a blend of human, rodent, wolf and insect flesh. They fall out of their birthing tanks ready to function on instinct only. A superannuation date of five years ensures they are retired before the accumulation of memories and experiences outside the tank leads them to question their loyalty, and even if a few become separated from the pack, they can't breed without us. Obedient, hardy, deadly, controlled. Would that everything we made was such a success.'

Molly swore as the slats tightened leather straps around her limbs, cutting off her circulation.

'I don't expect much from you,' said the scholar, a forlorn look crossing her face. 'But I should at least be able to design a plague that will target those with your machine symbiote bloodline. I can't risk your kind polluting the farms' breeding stock.'

Molly yelled as a blade arm came falling down and skimmed above her belly and breasts; but the scholar was only starting by slicing Molly's clothes away.

'Your kind have almost been mongrelized beyond use,' continued the giant, pointing to the far wall of the lab where a transparent pane showed figures floating like pickled sweetmeats in a jar. Craynarbians, graspers, the race of man, their bodies skinned and muscles exposed. 'Look how many subspecies your stunted strain has branched into. You have surrendered your breeding to nature rather than science. This filth is the result. To think, there were those who argued that the timer on our comet should have been set to add an extra million years to the clock, to allow the ecos on our old world time to fully recover. I dread to think what we would have had to feed on if we had left your kind feral to jig each other stupid in the dirt down there for another million years.'