The Rise of the Iron Moon (42 page)

‘I saw the hangar,’ said Molly. ‘They have Starsprite up there. That’s where the bomb’s being taken.’

‘Let me have your memory,’ requested the female bandit, coming towards Molly. ‘I can jump you there.’ Molly flinched back.

‘Please Molly softbody,’ begged Coppertracks. ‘My people’s survival hangs in the balance.’

‘It won’t hurt,’ said the bandit.

‘The last time I believed that I ended up with an extra soul floating inside my head.’ But Molly let the bandit woman press a finger against her forehead.

‘I have it. A great chamber looking out onto the heavens – and, well take me for a fancy piece, we really are inside an iron moon!’ The look of wonder on the Bandit of the Marsh’s face turned to surprise as she looked down at the steel tip of a sabre rising up out of her stomach.

‘Oh!’

Keyspierre pushed the bandit’s murdered body off his sword and flashed the new pair of fangs hanging out of his mouth. ‘I thought it must be you when I heard the sirens go off. You Jackelians are so predictable.’

Commodore Black pulled Molly back and raised the sabre his daughter had given to him. ‘They haven’t changed you so much, shiftie. You were a filthy beast before and your dirty friends have only formalized things with your wicked new set of teeth.’

‘The masters trust only the hunger, as they should. I was coming down here to retrieve the little author’s slops so I could toss them as gravy into your cage. Then I was going to discover what a doltish fat Jackelian sailor tastes like.’

Commodore Black danced back as their sabres met. ‘You’ll be finding it a lot like biting on cold steel, you shiftie scum.’

‘Please, my people!’ shouted Coppertracks from the sidelines as the commodore met the full force of Keyspierre’s swinging sword. There was little subtlety in this duel. It was murder being done here. The commodore’s hatred of the secret policeman matched with the Army of Shadows’ hunger for human veins to rip into. Steel cracking as they smashed at each other, each trying to find a weakness in the other’s guard.

‘Go,’ spat the commodore through gritted teeth as he turned a sabre thrust. ‘I’ll take this filthy wheatman down. Get to the ship and stop the blessed bomb being pushed through into King Steam’s palace.’

Molly and Coppertracks tried to slip past, but the ballet of steel between Commodore Black and Keyspierre was impeding the only exit to the laboratory. Keyspierre hissed in derision at them. They were stuck fast.

‘Always choosing the side of the underdog,’ laughed Keyspierre. ‘How typically Jackelian. The Army of Shadows will take your land however you choose to die, and it will be my people feasting on your descendants.’

Molly cast around desperately. There had to be something, some weapon she could use. The duelling pair blocked her way to the scholar’s pistol, but there …
the dissection slab
. She slipped behind the console, trying to work its arms.

‘The feast at the revolution’s table is coming to an end,’ called the commodore over the noise of the sirens, stamping down and turning aside another thrust. But for all his bravado the old u-boat man was weakening. Keyspierre was younger, faster and had all the strength of the hunger, not to mention the training of expert duellists in the Quatérshiftian secret police behind him.

‘We shall see.’

‘You’ll find out what those sirens are sounding for, and it’s not for us. It’ll be the House of Ferniethian that brings your revolution to an end,’ wheezed the commodore, falling back. ‘
My
house.
My
daughter.’

One of the dissection array’s arms lashed out to the end of its reach as Molly struggled with its controls. Not far enough to touch Keyspierre, but the rotating head of blades sliced into Lord Rooksby’s cage door. With an eagle-like cry, the twisted Lord Commercial pushed free of the cage and snapped open his wings, gliding forward into Keyspierre, sending both of them sprawling across the laboratory floor.

Commodore Black was on top of them, trying to work out who was who in the struggle as they all rolled across the floor, the clawed fingers of the birdman matched against Keyspierre’s fangs.

‘You’re so proud of your hunger, you dirty wheatman, let me feed it for you!’ shouted the commodore as he thrust his sabre down into the shiftie’s mouth, sliding the sword out and then slashing back and forth across the body.

Molly grabbed the u-boat man as he cut down furiously at the corpse. ‘Jared! He’s dead.’

Sense returned slowly to the commodore’s eyes.

Molly looked to the open door of the laboratory. ‘They’re going to kill everyone in the Steammen Free State, Jared.’

Lord Rooksby pulled at his metal collar and made a croaking noise like a parrot, trying to form the words inside his mangled throat.

Molly listened intently to what Lord Rooksby was trying to say.

‘
Show. Ship. Way
.’

‘Thank you, Rooksby softbody,’ said Coppertracks.

It had taken the loss of Rooksby’s humanity for him to find it.

A twirling axe impaled the last slat defending the gantry and Purity ran out to stand underneath the dark rotating monster at the heart of the satellite. Half the Bandits of the Marsh had fallen fighting through waves of slats spilling out of the iron moon’s halls, barracks and breeding chambers to get her this far. Those remaining began barricading the corridor leading to the vast chamber. It would not take long for the slat legions to arrive in their thousands to protect their most precious piece of plundered Kal technology.

Purity stepped over a master’s body, the giant woman’s perfect eyes staring lifelessly across at the white-hot barrel of the pistol that had fallen from her hand.

Jackaby Mention was behind Purity, wiping the blood from a knife onto his trousers. Jackaby looked up at the immense monster twisting in the hollow heart of the iron moon, using a broken set of brass goggles taken from one of the dead masters to stare at its malfeasance. A stillborn star, crushed beyond collapse and folding time with its corpse. A horror.

‘That is it, my queen?’

‘Yes,’ said Purity. ‘It’s creating a window of time, punched through existence back into the past. The rift the Army of Shadows crawled out of.’

‘I understand,’ said Jackaby. ‘Destroy this and we seal the Army of Shadows in the past.’

‘It’s not quite as easy as destroying it,’ said Purity. ‘The maths-blade showed me that. It’s a dead star. Anything we throw at this thing will only feed it, make it stronger. Energy, matter, it will consume everything.’

Jackaby lowered his goggles. ‘Then how?’

Purity stamped on the gantry running like a hoop around the rotating beast. ‘There is a field of distorted time being created by this monster. We need to create another one in close opposition to it. One that will destabilize the first. The tides created by the two fields interacting with each other will rip apart the iron moon and allow the torn skin of time to heal itself.’

There were shouts coming out of the narrow corridor leading into the core of the moon, the thump of slat weapons and the cry of men and women dying to protect the entrance.

‘I believe I know what you will ask next.’

‘Know that I do not ask it lightly,’ said Purity.

‘I have never run that fast,’ said Jackaby.

‘The wind envies your heels, Jackaby Mention. Whisk me up a storm inside here, stir up the metre of time itself with your bare feet.’

‘There is a reason my body freezes when I run,’ said Jackaby. ‘It is how I stay alive at such speeds. But for this I will need to run far beyond the cold, the cramps, run straight into the fire.’

‘Fire behind us and fire in front,’ said Purity.

‘And ever was it thus.’ Jackaby lowered himself into a sprinter’s starting position, and then shouted at the other bandits protecting the gantry. ‘Roll all the bodies off the path. I will need a clear run.’

‘Thank you, Jackaby.’

‘No,’ said the bandit. ‘Thank you, my queen. It has been my honour to serve you a second time.’

Purity spilled one of her dead fighters off the walkway, taking the corpse’s trident first. ‘How much time will you need?’

Jackaby stared up at the dark rotating singularity. ‘About five million years’ worth.’

‘I’ll buy it in the blood of our enemies.’

‘Sell it dear,’ one of the Bandits of the Marsh was yelling. ‘Sell it dear!’

Purity hardly heard as she jabbed back at the snarling, hissing horde of slats breaking against the torrent of her fighters. This was violence in its rawest, dirtiest, most brutal form, curses and screams, spittle and wounds being given and received. Purity wept as she slashed and thrust her way through the melee. Here was war.

And through this channel of carnage the emperor came striding, surrounded by his personal guard of giants, all wearing the same armour – glistening black shells with massive rippling muscles – as if they had skinned slats alive to make it. The armour gave its wearers incredible strength, adding force to the giants’ already perfect flesh. The masters tore into the front ranks of the Bandits of the Marsh, shredding their own slat soldiers to get to the intruders, to protect the dark star ripping time to sate their race’s appetites.

Behind Purity a blur was whirling around the gantry, becoming a wall of fire underneath of the Army of Shadows’ dark rotating ball; the agonized doppler-shifted scream of Jackaby Mention a shocking drone echoing around the moon’s core.

Here
was war.

Commodore Black knocked the side of his stolen slat pistol against the hangar door, as if that would do any good. He had discovered that the weapon took three seconds to recharge between shots the hard way, and now he was limping where a wounded slat had torn at his leg.

‘They’re loading the bomb inside Starsprite,’ said Coppertracks, the sharp sight of his vision plate magnifying the scene inside. ‘If the slats have activated the gate …’

Then they only had mere seconds left to stop the slaughter of all the steammen.

Molly looked at the crystal rotating inside her pistol barrel, the air steaming around it. The Army of Shadows’ damn heat agitation guns were intended to be handled by something of a slat’s weight; she needed both hands to lift and point hers. Oh, for a good honest Jackelian purse pistol. Still, at least she was capable of holding one. Poor Lord Rooksby, with his broken, corrupted flesh, could only attack like a beast.

Molly pulled her heavy pistol up, looking at the force moving about their ship. ‘So many slats.’

And so much for surprise.

Coppertracks was powering through into the hangar, desperation and panic adding speed to his treads. Molly stepped out of cover and sent one of the slats tumbling off its feet with her first shot, counting the seconds to her next one.

The last desperate charge of humanity and its allies had begun.

Molly was halfway through the hangar, racing through a hail of fire-bolts with Commodore Black by her side, cursing, when a stray shaft of energy severed the stays tying a steep rise of crates to a wall. An avalanche of heavy cases came crashing down towards the four of them.

One of the Bandits of the Marsh seized the lever to seal the door into the core of the iron moon – whether to buy more time for Jackaby Mention or to shut out the final terrible screams of his death rattle was not certain. The man needn’t have bothered. The bandit Purity had released from a stone circle had gone beyond a blur, beyond a circling wall of flame, beyond the beat of time … and as two time fields that should never have co-existed collided, the rotating monster at the moon’s core was compressed, tentacles of dead star-stuff stretching far outside the range of the magnetic guns beating it into submission. Time tore in two competing directions at once, the passage to the past punched by the Army of Shadows’ singularity storming against the time field Jackaby’s streaking form was whipping up, both bleeding together in the present – a paradox too far for the poor mangled fabric of reality – and the passage’s door was sucked off into the core, walls of relativity and matter twisted beyond endurance.

Bandits, slats and their masters in the passage were drawn screaming into the raging maw at the moon’s core, hands and talons flailing and digging at the corridor walls, the field of war turned into a mad solitary scramble for survival in a single instant. They tried to hold on despite the terrible quaking as the iron moon’s orbit shifted. A flying body bounced off the opposite side of the passage, hitting the wall just above Purity’s head and scrabbled onto the same instrument panel she was trying not to lose her grip on. The force of the dead star dragged the figure fumbling down alongside her. It was Watt, the young cobbler’s face bleeding badly from a gash on his forehead.

‘I told you that you would have been better off staying on the u-boat,’ Purity called.

‘I bet they sunk it,’ Watt yelled back.

A struggling hissing slat flew past Purity and Watt; Purity’s fingers clinging desperately onto that instrument panel on the red rusted wall.

Sliding through the broken melee fell the emperor, his giant’s frame still enclosed by his slimy living armour. It wouldn’t buy him even an extra second in the maelstrom being worked inside the core, not now the deadly singularity his people had looted had been unseated. He was skating down the floor, his hands digging desperately into bandits and his own followers, only succeeding in loosening their holds and sending slats and men toppling towards hideous termination.

The emperor flailed past Purity and Watt, grabbing hold of the edge of a side corridor just down from their position, trying to scramble up into it, but the draw of the singularity was too great even for the emperor’s might; the incredible pressure drawing him back down. His bellow sounded over the roar of the singularity. ‘Is this how it ends?’

‘Every plague burns itself out in the end,’ called Purity. She reached out to Watt’s back and tore off the wax-paper wrapped parcel hanging there. Her shoes. And she hadn’t even got to see them. She held her hand out, aiming the parcel at the emperor. ‘Given
time
.’