'Its twin resides in the deep halls of Mechancia,' said Coppertracks. 'Within King Steam's palace. The sphere sitting beneath the mirror contains a grain of contra-matter that can open the doorway, though not for more than a minute – so great is the tension between the two membranes. The energy needed to equalize each brane-field quickly destabilizes the mirror and destroys it beyond use. We may travel through it only once.'
'This is how King Steam intended for us to get home,' said Molly.
'Rooksby and those two shifties mustn't ken about this until we're ready to tell them,' said Duncan. 'They would want to use the doorway immediately, go back to King Steam's land for a properly resourced expedition. I don't trust any of those three dafties not to abandon the voyage and leave the rest of us to hang.'
'Not that they could, now,' said Coppertracks. 'I have just finished encrypting the ignition mechanism of the sphere. Only Duncan softbody and myself can activate the looking-glass gate.'
Molly pointed to herself. 'And me, I need to know the key.'
'That may not be prudent,' said Coppertracks.
Molly was shocked. 'What do you mean?'
'You have received an uninvited infusion of knowledge into your mind from a native of Kaliban,' said Coppertracks. 'There are some among the Free State who would consider that a transgression, a virus.'
'Dear Circle,' swore Molly, 'you sound like Rooksby now. That virus you're so glib about has seen us well on our way to Kaliban.'
'Kyorin may have been a pawn of his masters, dear mammal. Have you not considered the possibility this whole voyage to Kaliban might have been a test? To see whether we possess the abilities to directly threaten their home – a test that if passed, may decide whether we are all to be exterminated rather than merely enslaved and farmed.'
'You really think that's the case?' asked Molly.
'King Steam's council considers it a possibility, however remote, along with a hundred other options that do not match Kyorin's story and explanation for seeking our help. We know so little about our attackers, beyond the ease with which the Army of Shadows has vanquished all our attempts to resist their advances. It is possible they may even have used your bond with the Hexmachina as the mechanism to trace and imprison it within our world. We carry with us a gate that leads straight to the heart of my people's kingdom. I hope you understand King Steam's caution in how we exercise its activation.'
'You know me better than that,' said Molly.
'You I do know,' agreed Coppertracks. 'Kyorin and his race, however, are a different breed of softbody. We have yet to see the Army of Shadows' true masters with our own eyes. How can we be so sure that Kyorin and his blue men are not the masters of Kaliban's vicious soldier race?'
Their argument about Kyorin's intentions was cut short by Lord Starhome's intervention. 'There is something coming towards us.'
Molly looked at the hull of the craft. 'Surely we are not at Kaliban yet?'
'No, that we are not. But there's something forward of my sensors, coming up fast and it's like nothing I have ever seen before.'
Molly frowned. Now what were they facing? 'Could it be a fleet of the shells that the Army of Shadows used to travel across to our world…?'
'It's nothing physical,' said Lord Starhome. 'More like a wall of energy, a wall that resembles nothing which I am familiar with.'
'Aye, it may be a Kaliban weapon,' said Duncan.
'I am conversant with the screens and shielding of countless void-faring entities,' said Lord Starhome. 'And I can assure you that this is no such primitive deflection mechanism. I'm trying to resolve its nature, but it is actually defying my sensors: there are fundamental fluctuations moving along the stuff of existence; I can detect positrons moving backward in a storm above the field's surface. It appears immensely strong, yet I can hardly get a lock on it; even now we're this close. You're lucky I didn't just fly straight through the field unawares.'
'I trust your own shielding is fully activated now,' said Coppertracks, nervously.
'Naturally,' boomed Lord Starhome's disembodied voice. 'At my current most impressive velocity you would be dead from micro-dust impacts and radiation poisoning many times over if my shields were not functioning. I can shelter next to the skin of a sun if I have to. Still… a haze of positrons moving backwards, I have never seen such an outlandish sight, not once while traversing two galaxies.'
Molly dug deep in the confused jumble of memories and recollections that Kyorin had left to her, but there was nothing forthcoming from the residue of the slave's soul to suggest he had any inkling of a wall of exotic energy protecting Kaliban. But her gut spoke volumes. 'Pull away! Pull away, Starhome, I have a bad feeling about this.'
'Pull away?' said Lord Starhome in derision. 'Do you think that I am one of your clockwork-driven horseless carriages that can be swerved into a side road at the tug of a lever? I have been accelerating up towards light speed – it will take me the rest of the journey to brake. This field is too wide to avoid, you may only make a slight modification to the speed at which you wish my bow to cross it.'
Duncan Connor ran over to his precious battered travel case, as if he could use its weight to smash through the unknown obstacle. Coppertracks stopped fiddling with the looking-glass gate they had stowed away. Was the steamman now suffering from the temptation to activate it and leap through to safety in Mechancia before their ship struck the barrier?
'It's coming up fast,' said Lord Starhome. 'Brace yourselves for a collision.'
Molly's hand struck out for one the girders supporting the store room, gripping hold of the cold silver surface a second before the ship's lanterns went dark, gravity lost in a storm of crates, overwhelmed by a roaring explosion and a scream of agony from Lord Starhome. Then they were lost in a spinning, careening mass of metal that had been their craft.
It was time. The Hexmachina had finished modifying the workings of her internal components as best as she could. It was hard to tell whether her plan would work. Trapped inside the centre of the world in a cage that could modify and adapt itself in response to all of her attempts to escape. A cunning cage built for only one purpose. To contain the Hexmachina while the power that fed the god-machine was bled away, slowly starving her to death. But would the cage be clever enough to detect what the Hexmachina had done to herself? The cage was cunning, but not self-aware; the Army of Shadows had stopped short of giving it a soul or real intelligence. But that did not mean it was stupid. A mousetrap was a dumb machine, but no mouse in its right mind wished to be caught by one.
She could not escape, the Hexmachina, not in any form that would be recognizable as her. But her lover the Earth knew the god-machine well, and the Hexmachina could feel the throb of the world's pain outside her prison: the planet's soul, its very lifeforce, leeched away by the invaders from Kaliban. And the Kingdom of Jackals. Jackals was part of the Earth. Its soil and stone both ancient and true. Jackals, so ran the whispers of the lava outside, now lay ready. With a moment's fierce concentration, the Hexmachina forced open a pinprick-sized tunnel in the unnatural lattice imprisoning her form, flipping the cage's molecules to a liquid state before firing a stream of her essence out through that pin-sized channel.
The lattice that imprisoned her instantly detected the change of state in part of its structure and moved to contain the Hexmachina, modelling the altered laws of physical stasis used by the god-machine and overwriting the infected mathematics to close the tiny tunnel that had been hacked into the cage's fabric. The minuscule channel was closed, cutting off the stream, leaving the depleted, shrunken form of the Hexmachina inside. Depleted, but elated – for outside, a wave-front of energy was passing through the magma at the speed of sound, ready to be caught by the kingdom and stored in the old way. Stored in stone, just as the druids had once done. After all, the Hexmachina was at heart a device for opening and closing doors. For keeping dark gods out of the world. And there was an ancient door that badly needed opening, while yet another had to be shut on the Army of Shadows.
The Hexmachina's prison was complete again. The tiny breach had only lasted a second and the cage had learnt that trick and put in place a series of running equations to prevent another such hack against the fabric of matter. Yes, the enemy knew her well. But then, that cut both ways. She knew them, and their filthy kind should have burnt themselves out like a spent plague long ago.
Now it was up to the land above. And the last queen of Jackals.
