CHAPTER TEN
Adream of flying, and when Molly opened her eyes – ignoring the throbbing pain at the back of her head – it had come true. Molly was drifting above a storm of crates and shock-loosened supplies. The ship's lantern flickered, adding to her headache, but showing Duncan Connor swimming across to her. She looked down. A belt had been stretched across her stomach and looped around one of the room's silver girders to stop her floating away in the ocean of cargo.
Molly rubbed her neck. 'I think I'm going to be sick.' Then she saw that Coppertracks' little drone was helping Connor move around, one iron hand on his ankle while another gripped one of a series of handles formed onto the wall.
'It's not so bad,' said Duncan. 'Aye, like falling with a sail-rider chute, but none of the wind. You had better get used to it. We've been without gravity for a couple of hours and I don't think we're getting it back.'
'Is Lord Starhome all right?'
Coppertracks' voice sounded remotely from the drone's voicebox. 'I am attempting to restore some of the steamman components that burnt out. He cannot even remember Jackelian. I am communicating in hexadecimal code, but our ship only seems to remember his creators' tongue.'
Lord Starhome's disembodied voice sounded in response, half a song and half an alien screech. A shudder ran down Molly's spine. It was nothing anyone on her world had ever heard the like of before, and Starhome sounded very annoyed.
'Our craft's surface has been badly ablated,' continued Coppertracks. 'Many of Lord Starhome's sensors and the external components he had grown on his surface were ripped off as we passed through Kaliban's defences. His shields held, though, or we would be dust upon the void.'
Another alien howl followed, the singsong static hectoring and strident. Molly let Duncan undo the strap he had secured her with. 'How dangerous is Lord Starhome right now?'
'Well, we're still floating about,' said Duncan. 'And I don't think that's entirely because of the damage. I'm not sure if he remembers who we are, or if he thinks he's got a wee infestation of rats aboard.'
Sweet Circle. Molly winced as she followed Duncan and the drone out of the cargo hold and back up towards the bridge, hand over hand on the holds in the wall. What was to stop Lord Starhome opening a door in his hull to suck them all out into oblivion? The cold gold band of her control ring was still on her finger, but it felt as useless as a broken pair of stirrups on an untamed stallion.
'You realize,' barked Lord Rooksby as Molly entered the command deck, 'that treacherous native Kal must have known that his home was defended by a killing shield, and you-' he pointed at Molly '-by your own admission carry around his knowledge inside your dim-witted little skull.'
They were all drifting around the open space, tethered by belts to various girders, handholds and seats – only Keyspierre's daughter looked comfortable. She moved across the air like a ballet dancer, gracefully arching her back and using a wall to kick off before gripping a seat on the other side of the bridge.
'I certainly didn't know about the shield,' said Molly, 'and I don't think Kyorin knew about it, either. Why trick a handful of us up here just to kill us?'
The commodore bunched his hand into a fist. 'You're a mortal nasty piece of work, Rooksby, and I've a mind to teach you a few manners.'
'You, sir, are not even meant to be here,' said Rooksby. 'If parliament's writ had been followed, you and your menagerie of freaks would be sitting back in the kingdom and letting a professional expedition venture forth to Kaliban.'
'Ah, my lord commercial,' spat Commodore Black. 'Parliament's writ runs a long ways distant from the strange shores we've set a course for, and if you keep on with your poisonous jabbering, I'll be minded to float over there and toss you and your rotten House of Guardians-given title out of this ship of ours.'
'Please,' said Coppertracks, his iron hand inside an instrument panel at the front of the craft. 'A little peace for me to work. I'm nearly done. I have stripped two of the three steamman logic drums used to rebuild Lord Starhome, replacing the components in the least damaged of the trio. Paul-Loup softbody, if you would pass me my magnetizer, I shall attempt to close the new circuit I have built inside here.'
Keyspierre took one of the instruments floating in the air and passed it across to Coppertracks, the steamman examining it and tutting. 'No, the circuit magnetizer, please, that one.'
Exchanging instruments, Keyspierre passed Coppertracks the magnetizer and Coppertracks gave a nervous squirt of steam from his stacks before closing the broken circuit. The ship's lanterns dimmed for a second, then returned to full illumination, followed a moment later by the weight of gravity – gradual enough that they all landed lightly on their feet – or in Coppertracks' case, treads – from wherever they had been anchored.
'That's better, now,' said the commodore, winking at Jeanne.
'A fine figure of my girth needs to feel the weight on his boots and know which way is up and which way is down.'
A disembodied sigh sounded around them, hopefully Lord Starhome finding his full cognitive abilities coming back to him.
'Are you recovered from the effects of the weapon?' asked Molly.
'Weapon?' said Lord Starhome, impatiently. 'An ineffective sort of weapon I would say.'
Molly rubbed the back of her bruised head. 'Not from where I'm standing. How far to Kaliban now?'
'I'm having to regrow most of my sensors,' said Lord Starhome. 'But let me see, I can still feel the unpleasant tug of gravity and – yes, we're almost upon the ugly red-looking place. Even more disagreeable than that water-soaked rock of yours where my magnificent form was trapped for millennia.'
'Then we shall land outside the face of Kaliban,' said Molly, 'and hope that we didn't set off any alarms by breaching the Army of Shadows' shield.'
'Land?' said Lord Starhome. 'I don't think I care to.'
'You don't care to…' Keyspierre's daughter drew a knife from her boot and threatened the ship's exposed console. 'You have your duty, compatriot, by alliance with the Commonshare.'
Lord Starhome's laugh echoed around them. 'Please, little ground hugger, please don't scratch me with your eight inches of sharpened steel. You might take some of the burnish off my hull.'
Molly brandished the control ring on her hand – and noticed that it was glowing a sickly yellow. 'By the loyalty you owe to King Steam, I command you.'
'My apologies,' the eerie, disembodied voice took on a dark tone. 'I don't really do landings. I spent far too many aeons interred under the surface of your disgusting dirtball to want to exchange my freedom for a similarly tedious experience beneath the sands of that sucked-out husk whose orbit we're coming into.'
'My people rebuilt you,' pleaded Coppertracks.
'Oh, but I have been rebuilding myself since we launched,' said Lord Starhome. 'Particle by particle, and doing a far superior job of it. There's very little of your people's art left within me now.'
Molly's control ring was giving up the ghost, smoking hot, too little left that was steamman for it to re- establish its hold. 'You shall land where I order you!'
'Oh, I think we can both get what we desire,' said Lord Starhome.
Coppertracks vanished in front of Molly as a hole opened up in the deck beneath his treads; Commodore Black, Keyspierre and the others yelled in alarm as similar apertures swallowed them up.
'Well, mainly me, actually. Out with the old…'
Molly tried to lunge towards the exposed control panel, but she was too slow, an opening taking her feet away from her. She found herself flying along a tunnel, squeezed by the living metal of the craft like a throat about to gob out a fruit pip. Out into the infinite night.
It was cold on the heath. Oliver watched Purity shiver as she was exposed to the chill autumn winds, the grass and bracken crunching underfoot as the evening formed a frost. He was used to the cold, though. There was always a chill at night. Where there were trees around them, they were losing their leaves, tinged as red as the baleful moon squatting unnaturally in their sky. Purity had fallen silent. Was she thinking about where he was
