The Rise of the Iron Moon (38 page)

Purity tried to close her ears to the beanstalk’s song in the wind, a sickening alien sound as the billion carbonized tubes that made this towering monstrosity creaked above her head, pulled by the spin of the world. But Purity’s maths-blade showed her how to change its song, right enough, cause enough stress to fracture this hideous construction’s hold on the frozen north. Just sever the web of anchor cables on one side of the beanstalk, let the planet’s spin pull the roots of the remaining anchors out and send the beanstalk whipping up to cut the iron moon into rusty shards.

Samuel Lancemaster shouted orders to the volunteers to take their defensive positions around the beanstalk. This was Purity’s moment. Her task. She came to a mooring point, the first of the beanstalk’s white anchor cables as wide as a man and sunk deep into the polar bedrock through a solidified pool of some strange dark substance.

‘Swing your blade,’ sobbed Ganby from behind her. ‘Swing it at the anchor lines and let us quit this frozen hell.’

Purity turned the sword once, willing her blade to cleave a substance so strong that it could clamp the iron moon to their world. Then she yelled and struck down with everything she had. There was a terrible screaming sound as the fibres of the anchor line split apart and the first of the holding cables lashed away to the ground. She ran to the next mooring point and swung her sword in another testing arc. There must have been at least twenty anchor lines on her side of the beanstalk. Already Purity’s arm was aching with the effort needed to drive through a million diamond-hard threads bound together more densely than anything the race of man had ever encountered. She hove at the second one, feeling the flash of energy as the maths-blade converted the strength of the carbon into something more brittle and malleable. It went tumbling away. Purity ran to the next line, ignoring the shouts of the raiders calling to each other for more ammunition or screaming as the slats broke through and tore into them with rifle bolts and the force of their talons. Ignoring the blur of Jackaby Mention, darting between the attackers, sending slats spinning away into the snowstorm, and Samuel Lancemaster’s spear whirling around like a windmill. Purity forgot even the bite of the cold as the labour of chopping away the anchor lines began to tell. How many lines had she cut now? Half? She was losing count, having to take six or seven lunges at each anchor line to sever it.

‘Make speed,’ appealed Ganby, shivering from exposure to the freezing winds. ‘We don’t have long left. Damn this place, I can’t feel my fingers.’

But Purity felt the pulse of fire spurting along the ground behind her, accompanied by the screams of the Jackelians sent flying into the air on geysers of exploding rock and snow and blood. It was a flight of the slats’ aerial spheres, the leathery crafts’ wasp-hum cutting through the storm. Turned back by the destruction of the beanstalk’s defence perimeter, the air fleet were dipping in and out of the whiteout, their cannons wreaking destruction among the defending Jackelians. Jigger the beasts! They knew the tough anchor lines would withstand the blasts of their guns, near indestructible compared to the weak, soft bodies of those who had followed her to this place. But they had reckoned without Samuel Lancemaster. He sprinted out of the shadow of the beanstalk, casting his spear forward, his first throw passing through two of the slats’ globes, smashing their pilots and the organic machinery inside. Jackaby Mention was out there too, speeding to where the spear had been cast and hurtling it back to Samuel. Allowing him to throw it again and again, as if he had an unlimited supply of deadly javelins by his side.

The attackers’ cannons couldn’t home in on Jackaby, but they realized who their true enemy was soon enough, avoiding the missiles of their own broken craft falling out of the sky, blazing at Samuel with their guns. His silver cuirass deflected the first of the bursts of fire, then buckled under the continued fusillade, sending him stumbling back. He was on his knees moaning, trying to hold in his shattered living armour with one hand, the other stretched out imploringly for the blur of Jackaby Mention to bring him his spear. The spear appeared in his hand and he used it as a crutch to get to his feet and face the two remaining craft circling him.

‘Is that it?’ Samuel yelled. ‘Is that all you have?’

Both crafts’ cannons opened up on him and he cast out the spear at the closest in a chopping motion, driving his missile all the way through the globe and out across the rotating array of blades keeping it suspended, the craft’s flight mechanism chewed to pieces as the bandit’s projectile smashed across it.

The remaining sphere drifted behind Samuel, almost cutting him in half with its stuttering cannons, creating a gale as it hovered just above the ground, slats jumping down from a hatch in the craft’s side. Samuel Lancemaster stumbled forward empty-handed and, ignoring the rifle fire of the dismounting beasts, drove a fist into the front of the globe, lifting the craft up over his head and breaking the whirling array of blades as it dug into the frozen soil behind his back. Purity swore the slat troops actually flinched and stepped back as he roared at them, tossing the broken craft away to detonate across the frozen plain. Then Samuel fell face down to lie still in the snow, burning fluids from the smashed craft leaking across his body.

Jackaby Mention coalesced into solid form in front of Purity. ‘Samuel has claimed his fifty corpses, my queen. This is the last anchor line. Sever it, sever it now!’

Purity was dizzy, swaying on her feet. She hacked wildly into the anchor line like a drunken woodsman, dozens of blows needed to break its tightly woven bonds. Purity lined up her final cut, the last cable screeching like fingernails on a blackboard as it subsumed all the stress of the anchor filaments she had already severed.

‘Quickly,’ begged Ganby. ‘There are hardly any of our people left now. The slats are overrunning us.’

‘Be quiet, druid.’ Jackaby was panting from his exertions. ‘Let our queen concentrate.’

Purity let swing at the anchor cable and chipped out perhaps a tenth of it.

‘Pick me up,’ Ganby pleaded with the only other surviving bandit. ‘You can run me out to one of the hills over there. We’re almost done here.’

Purity took another fatigued bite out of the anchor line.

Jackaby shook his head, rapping the layer of frost that had formed across his marsh leathers. ‘I can’t run any more, cramps from the cold. When we’ve cut the last line I’m going to have to walk out of here.’

Purity was so tired, she almost ignored the sense of confusion coming from her maths-blade as she raised the sword to hack again, but the information came flooding through anyway. It was the blade’s stress model. This shouldn’t be so much work; with half the anchor lines already severed; this last line should have been half-pulled apart by the drag of the world on the beanstalk. What was going on here?

Purity looked back over their snow tracks. The cables she had already severed were reaching out like snakes to their mooring points, little black threads extending from each sheared line to the stations left embedded in the rock. Tendons of a regrowing muscle.

‘Hell’s teeth,’ howled Ganby. ‘It’s repairing itself, the beanstalk can repair itself!’

‘Strike now!’ shouted Jackaby. ‘Strike, my queen, while you can.’

‘Believe in yourself,’ whimpered Ganby, making himself small on the ground as bolts of fire spun past from the dark, splashing against the beanstalk.

Purity swung the maths-blade over her head, trying to use the cold bite of the snow against her bare toes to focus, concentrating on the anchor line’s alien material, altering it, allowing her sword to slice deep. She struck. The sword stopped, held tight by the anchor line – the blade was stuck. She tried to yank it out, but the anchor line’s material was flowing over it. Repairing itself. Purity’s sword was as stuck as it had been before she first drew the blade from the stone circle back in Jackals. But Purity couldn’t afford to fail. The entire nation was riding on this. The lives of all the people she had led here sacrificed for … nothing?

Ganby was still on his knees, weeping. ‘We can come back. If we just escape now. We can come back and mount another attack later, factor in the healing time of the anchors, maybe come up with a way to stop the mooring lines repairing themselves.’ Then the terrified druid was on his feet, lunging out of the shadow of the beanstalk, trying to escape.

‘Ganby!’ bellowed Jackaby Mention. ‘Come back here, you craven druid’s whore.’

Jackaby tried to grab at the fleeing bandit’s back but fell over, the cramps in his muscles toppling him moaning into the snow. As the druid was swallowed by the snowstorm there was a succession of thumps, the volley of slat rifles slapping into a soft human form.

Ganby’s smoking corpse appeared a minute later, dragged forward by a line of slats. The Kal at the front of the line looked at his soldiers picking through the slumped bodies of the last of the kingdom’s raiders, taking in Purity Drake, shedding cold tears as she lay collapsed over the anchor line, her hand still resting on the grip of the embedded maths-blade. Jackaby Mention lay semi-paralysed on the snow, gazing hatred back at the line of the Army of Shadows’ fighters.

Smirking, the Kal went over to Purity and pulled her up by the hair. Then he breathed on her icy cheeks through those monstrous fangs, meeting her eyes. ‘When, many generations hence, your ancestors are penned up, soiling themselves in their food cages, the suffering you experience for this day’s trespass will still be legendary among them.’

The last legend told by the Jackelians.

M
olly recovered her senses with a start as she was dragged out of the tight confines of the tunnel. There was a clear, pain-free lucidity to her thoughts. The realization that she appeared gloriously free of the burden of Kyorin’s memories battled for attention with the fact that it was one of the giant ant’s forelimbs currently dragging her out of the dark shaft.

Then she was free on the chamber floor and about to go hell for leather as the ant pulled back, but she heard a familiar voice calling from behind the insect. Sandwalker! The Kal nomad, still in his white sand robes. Molly’s eyes danced between the nomad and the insect, and as Sandwalker rested a hand on the ant’s thorax, the dim chamber began to lighten. Molly realized that these walls were far too smooth to belong to any ant colony worthy of the name.

‘We are deep within one of our mountain shelters,’ said Sandwalker. ‘And as I promised, the great sage has cured you. Kyorin’s memories have been taken out of your mind. It was an operation of great sophistication to unentangle your patterns.’

Molly raised a confused hand to point at the giant ant calmly watching her through its compound eyes.

‘Machines shaped in the form of our predators. What better place to hide from the slats’ long-range patrols than a false ant colony in the side of a mountain.’

‘I thought I was about to be eaten,’ said Molly, finding her voice.

‘For that I am sorry, although I believe you now know what it has been to live as one of my people for the last couple of thousand years,’ said Sandwalker. ‘Come, Molly Templar, my tribe’s sage is eager to meet you and your friends.’

The nomad led Molly through empty corridors and chambers that had the reek of ages about them. Dusty machinery lay about the place – instruments as large as buildings – most looking scavenged, with plates removed and cables hanging out like torn intestines.

‘This was a centre of science, once,’ said Sandwalker. ‘Built very far from the inhabited lands of my people – to protect against the exotic nature of the experiments that were once conducted underneath our feet.’

Molly was escorted into a large circular room where her friends were waiting and overjoyed to see her recovered, Commodore Black pumping her hand while Coppertracks sped past Keyspierre and Duncan Connor to speak to her. Molly was a little overwhelmed by the greeting so soon after waking. Surreally, bright panels displaying scenes and sounds of Kaliban as it had once existed surrounded them. Lush green forests filled with the familiar blue faces of the Kal, as well as long-extinct creatures she didn’t recognize; nothing like the killers that were stalking the wastes now. Images so realistic she might almost have been looking through a window.

‘I told you she would be fine again,’ said Sandwalker, proudly. ‘The medical devices we still have here date back to before the occupation.’

‘So you say, lad,’ grinned the commodore. ‘And you’ve lived up to your word right enough. You’re blessed lucky to still be with us, Molly. Your heart stopped out there in the desert during your last few minutes. How do you feel now?’

‘Clear headed.’

‘As you should,’ announced a voice behind her. Molly turned. More mind-speech. So, this was
him
! The great sage, Fayris Fastmind, as old a creature as Molly had ever seen. A pale blue body borne along on a floating ceramic carriage, his legs hidden, his face covered in silvery metallic tattoos that glowed with energy pulses as he spoke. ‘The magnetic resonance scanner I used to operate on you is the last functioning one we have in this facility. Probably the last one on Kaliban, now.’

Coppertracks looked at the Kal, the energy waves under the steamman’s transparent skull circulating in excitement. ‘Why, you are a metal-flesher, a man-machine hybrid.’

‘’Pon my soul,’ said the astonished Kal, returning the steamman’s gaze. His mind-voice was like the unrolling of an ancient parchment. ‘And you are sentient? Self-aware? After all these years, a self-replicating machine entity. I haven’t seen such as you for two millennia.’

‘People similar to mine once existed on Kaliban?’ asked Coppertracks.

‘Oh yes,’ said the great sage, his carriage gliding around the commodore and Molly. He gestured to the far wall and a panel shifted view to a lightless hall full of black cabinets. Something told Molly she was seeing one of the chambers under the mountain, a view of dust and decay now. Row after row of dead machines.

‘Artificial life that was pure intellect, crushed by the Army of Shadows. Burnt out by the machine plagues the masters sent before they invaded in force.’ The Kal pointed to the silvery etching glowing around his face. ‘It was hard to tell where your kind began and ours ended, once. Now both our races have ended our days on Kaliban. How sad.’

‘You are the intellect that was signalling to my world from Kaliban?’ asked Coppertracks.

‘Not I,’ said the great sage. ‘We dare not send such messages for fear of being tracked down. We still have a few ancient communication devices in orbit, broadcasting the original warning of the Army of Shadow’s invasion out to anyone who might be able to help. You must have heard one of those.’

‘We’ve travelled a long way to reach you,’ said Molly. ‘I owe you my life for healing my mind, but I have an entire world still to save.’

‘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?’

‘You must trust me on that matter, it is better that you do not know,’ said the old Kal, avoiding her question. ‘I am aware I am asking a lot of you, attacking the iron moon. Even though your people find violence easier than mine, but there are things that you are far better off not knowing if you are to succeed.’

‘They’re a strange evil crew,’ said the commodore. ‘I don’t care that they’re from our blessed past, it’s enough for me that you say that little marble in your hand will stop them.’

‘I’m sorry, young Sandwalker,’ said Fayris Fastmind looking at the nomad guide, tears in his ancient eyes. ‘Do you understand now why this weapon won’t help our people? Why I couldn’t give it to you when you asked me for it. My little weapon contains the fragment of a cosmic string that can be set vibrating at a frequency that will destabilize the singu-larity’s rotation and collapse the time field, destroying the iron moon in a tide of tremendous violence.’