The Rise of the Iron Moon (4 page)

Molly made to leap up from their projecting lantern, but the commodore pulled her back.

‘I’m going to go up there and shove my last tome of facile writings down his smug, grinning—’

‘Leave him be, lass,’ whispered the commodore. ‘Or at least, let’s be leaving the long-haired popinjay until later. A fight in here is what he wants, anything to embarrass our old steamer in front of his fellow scientists.’

She saw enough reason in the commodore’s words to shrug off his hands and sit down.

‘Nonsense is it?’ retorted Coppertracks, pointing an iron hand at Lord Rooksby. ‘Then by my cogs, how do you explain this?’ Commodore Black advanced to the next slide, an amorphous grey mass whose peripheries were tinged with red.

‘Sir, I do not even know what that unsightly mess you have so kindly brought before us is.’

‘That is because you do not have access to the transaction engines of the Steammen Free State,’ said Coppertracks. ‘Some of the most advanced thinking engines of their kind in the world. When the geometries and shadow lines are resolved and cleaned using the power of our transaction engines, we see instead…’

The commodore shook his head. That was a terrible mistake, reminding the Jackelian audience that their civil service’s great engine rooms beneath Greenhall had a rival high in the mountains of Mechancia – a rival with steam-driven thinking machines that made their own transaction engines look like wind-up toys sold over the counter at Gattie and Pierce.

‘…this!’

The commodore advanced to the next slide, the image of a stone-carved face filling the screen, a scale written across it indicating that the face was three hundred miles across in width, four hundred from neck to skullcap.

Coppertracks continued over the hush of the crowd. ‘This incredible carving is clearly humanoid – the features of the race of man, or something close to it. An artefact on a scale more massive than any we have attempted here on Earth.’

‘Clearly, sir,’ shouted Lord Rooksby, ‘you have taken leave of your senses. Give me but a lump of coal from your boiler’s furnace and I will whittle you a shape as pleasing to the eye with my penknife.’ Another member of the audience lifted a piece of coke from the boiler bin of the steamman sitting next to him and tossed it towards Lord Rooksby. The aristocratic scientist seized it and raised it towards the ceiling. ‘Behold, damsons and gentlemen of the Royal Society – I give you the miraculous face of the great Pharaoh of Kaliban. Give me but a hundred years of erosion, a real-box camera and the poorly written plot of a penny dreadful, and I shall carve for you an entirely new branch of science – and for my next trick I will find you the face of the Man on the moon and send an airship to converse with the ice angels of the coldtime.’

The crowd followed Lord Rooksby’s lead and began to bray Coppertracks down in annoyance.

‘You fools,’ cried Coppertracks, pointing to the image on the screen. ‘Can you not see the evidence before your eyes? There was once life on Kaliban, life capable of constructing canal works and carving vast effigies from their mountains.’

‘Celestial fiction, sir,’ hooted Lord Rooksby, sensing that now was the time to steer events towards the projects favoured by his own lickspittles. ‘This is pure celestial fiction.’

‘Life!’ called Coppertracks, beseeching the massed ranks of the Royal Society. ‘Life that might be able to converse with us, if we would but make the effort.’

A low wailing echoed about the assembly chamber now, Coppertracks struggling to be heard over the eerie heckling. ‘My proposal is to build a colossal transmitter capable of receiving and generating vibrations across the void. We have already seen that the vicinity of our sun is blessed with an uncommonly large quantity of celestial bodies, many that would appear to be candidates for bearing life.’

The commodore dropped the next slide down in front of the assembly, but it was too late, the scientists had become a mob. A piece of coal was thrown towards the screen, an explosion of black soot impacting the image of Coppertracks’ proposed large-scale transmitter schematics.

‘Give him the shoulder,’ someone hissed.

‘Ah, no,’ wheezed the commodore behind his magic lantern. ‘Not the high shoulder. Not poor Coppertracks.’ He glanced around the room, trying to see who would do it first.

Would they?

It was too late. The mob of scientists had eagerly taken up the cry and at the other end of the hall the first boffin was already being boosted onto the shoulders of a colleague. Across the seats, the smaller, lighter members of the Royal Society were mounting the shoulders of their fellows, pointing and shaking their fists angrily at the steamman presenter. The energy under Coppertracks’ skull fizzed in disappointment and shame. In all the years of his long scientific career in Jackals he had never been given the high shoulder before. All scientists stood on the shoulders of giants when they undertook their solemn investigations, but now they were doing it to
him
, standing on the shoulders of those more worthy than the steamman, looking beyond his work. Coppertracks’ proposal had not even been judged valuable enough to come under the gaze of his colleagues’ scrutiny.

Commodore Black glanced furiously up towards the smirking Lord Rooksby, who was now pretending to pay attention to his two blonde dollymops rather than enjoying the moment of his adversary’s discomfort.

By Lord Tridentscale’s beard, thought the commodore, it didn’t take too much to work out who had prepared the others in the assembly to arrange this ritual howling down of his friend. Well, two could play at ambushes. The commodore’s eyes narrowed. There were a lot of dark lanes in the capital where an alley cat of Lord Rooksby’s reputation could run into a masked thug and come away from the fisticuffs with a few lumps and bruises and the silk shirt ripped off his blessed back.

Coppertracks was collecting his papers and speaking notes, gathering them up before the light hail of garbage being tossed in his direction grew into a storm. Commodore Black swept up the slides into the pocket of his greatcoat then sprinted up onto the stage with Molly and helped hustle the steamman off.

‘This is an outrage,’ spluttered Coppertracks, his voicebox a-tremble. ‘I show them hard scientific proof and they dare to throw coal at me! I should call on the Steamo Loas and ask Zaka of the Cylinders to shake the walls of this assembly down upon them.’

‘Let the spirits of your blessed ancestors rest in peace,’ said the commodore. ‘Those rascals and stuffed shirts are not worth the oil you’d need to shed to call your gods down. You’ve got all the discoveries of your people’s new observatory to take up your time, and you secured that without this crew of scoundrels’ help.’

‘Let’s get off the stage,’ said Molly, ducking a projectile, ‘Quick.’

They disappeared behind the curtain, a soggy ham roll bouncing off the back of the commodore’s naval greatcoat.

‘I simply don’t believe it,’ said Coppertracks. ‘If I had not seen the evidence of their disgraceful misbehaviour with my own vision plate … ’

Commodore Black led the two of them along a corridor and to the exit, ignoring the jeers of the crowd from the other side of the curtain. The commodore closed the door to the stage, cutting off the din of the mob. ‘Ah, your science is a fine thing indeed, but for all your years living in Jackals, your understanding of the nature of a hall full of your rivals is still a little shaky.’

The Royal Society organizer came up to them, leading the next presenter who was pushing a handcart stacked high with chemical spheres. ‘Well, that went, umm, well.’

Commodore Black smiled at the organizer, then slapped the chemist on the back of his tweed waistcoat. ‘Hear them cheering, lad? We’ve warmed them up for you good and proper. But no thanks now, we must be on our way.’

Molly didn’t look as if she was finding it as easy to put on a brave face. ‘All that time you spent putting your presentation together, old steamer, I’m so sorry.’

‘It is not beholden upon you to apologize for those louts’ behaviour,’ said Coppertracks. ‘The Jackelian Royal Society is obviously not the institution it once was.’

‘I’m going to wait here for Lord Rooksby to leave,’ growled Molly, ‘and when he stumbles out into the street with those two dollymops he had hanging off his arm, they can watch me break his fingers and—’

‘I really would not see you sink to the level of that softbody scoundrel on my account,’ interrupted Coppertracks. ‘And I believe the police still have a caution outstanding against your citizen record from your altercation with the last poor author you believed was plagiarizing your work. Please, let us retreat without creating any more gossip for the news sheets.’

Outside, the thick, marble-clad walls of the society’s headquarters muffled the noise of the harsh reception they had been given. There was a lone hansom cab waiting up the street, a single dark horse clicking its hooves in boredom. Commodore Black waved his swagger stick towards the cabbie and the driver flicked the reins to start the two-wheeled carriage rattling forward.

Coppertracks’ twin treads carried him towards the lane, every movement of his polished silver plates heavy with dejection. The commodore didn’t add to the steamman’s woes by referring to the proving tower Coppertracks had already constructed inside the orchard back at Tock House. That had already diverted enough of the coins from their finances without any degree of success being returned in the steamman’s direction.

A thin slick of rain had fallen during the presentation, the drizzle still tinged crimson even now, weeks after Ashby’s Comet had passed through the wet Jackelian skies. Also braving the day’s showers was a Broken Circle cultist labouring under the weight of a wooden placard proclaiming the final hours of the world. He was from a splinter group of the mainstream church that believed the cycle of existence could be broken, a belief that, in the commodore’s humble opinion, rather went against the central thrust of their church-without-gods. There had been many more of his ilk parading the streets as the comet passed; but they had thankfully grown scarce when, as usual, the world had not ended. What did they do, the commodore wondered, in the years between centennial celebrations, the years that were dry of comets and dark signs in the sky? Why, they bothered him and his friends, of course. As usual, the cultist seemed curiously attracted by the pull of Molly’s gravity.

‘It’s not too late,’ cried the would-be prophet, his beard tinged crimson from standing in the rain too long.

‘It is for you, lad,’ said Commodore Black. ‘Your boat sailed from port a long time ago, I think.’

The madman ignored the aging u-boat officer and reserved his spittle for Molly. It was as if he understood there was something special about her. ‘The portents, are you blind to the portents in the heavens? A rain of blood on the blessed land of Jackals, our green hills and valleys soaked with it. It is the age of the Broken Circle.’

‘The comet’s gone, old timer,’ Molly said kindly. ‘It passed us by.’

Commodore Black muttered a sailor’s curse and waved his cane – a spring-loaded swordstick concealed inside, in the event this lunatic turned violent – motioning their hansom cab to make haste.

‘Gone?’ moaned the cultist, as if the news was a revelation to him. ‘It is gone? No. It will come back to us. Make a furnace of destruction of Jackals and all who live in our land. We must meditate now for salvation. Come with me and meditate in my lodgings, lady. Come meditate with me before the world ends.’

‘I hardly think so,’ said Coppertracks. ‘Ashby’s Comet is heading towards the sun, I have been following its passage with my own telescope from the top of Tock House.’

‘The portents!’ wailed the cultist, trying to infect them with the deep despair he obviously felt. ‘The Broken Circle.’

‘I am afraid it is your logic that is broken,’ explained Coppertracks. ‘In my experience, the great pattern of existence carries a substantial weight with it. More than enough to survive a few knocks and jolts of celestial mechanics. Now be a good mammal and run along, I rather fear your proximity to us is putting off the driver of the licensed carriage we have hailed.’

Molly watched the man shamble off, his wooden placard swaying above his shoulders, and she smiled as she noticed the sudden distractions that seemed to engage everyone else walking along the street as the cultist approached them.

‘In the desert,’ noted Molly, ‘there are nomads who believe people like him are holy, connected to a deeper truth through their affliction.’

‘And in the lanes of Middlesteel there are people like me who believe he has been connecting with a pint too many and an ounce of mumbleweed smoked on the top of it,’ said the commodore. ‘Don’t you go paying any attention to his ramblings, lass.’

With the placard waver now sermonizing his beliefs further down the street, the hansom cab pulled up before them. Commodore Black opened the door and Molly stepped around a pile of manure that a previous cab’s horse had deposited on the cobbles.

It was then that the vision struck Molly’s skull, entering it like a spear. The layers of the capital peeled back to be replaced by a white, featureless vista. Of her friends from Tock House there was no sign. Breaking the dimensionless purity, the only landmark in this strange new realm was a brilliantly glowing sphere hovering above the ground. It was the size of a bathysphere, with a single silver eye sitting on its top. Molly picked herself up off her knees, her skin tingling with the familiar presence of the thing. The Hexmachina! Sometime saviour of the Kingdom of Jackals – of the entire world.

‘Operator,’ said the Hexmachina, a gentle child’s face forming across its surface. ‘You can hear my words?’

‘Yes,’ said Molly, stumbling through the white void, trying to reach the safety of the Hexmachina. Of course she could hear its words. She could wield the machine like a god-slaying sword if she could only get close enough to pilot it.

‘This realm is not real,’ warned the Hexmachina, sensing her intentions. ‘You cannot pilot me here. This is a construct, a simulation I am using to communicate with your mind.’