Comet has disappeared!’
‘Maybe that wicked flying star has finally burnt itself out?’ said the commodore.
‘That’s not how the mechanics of a comet work,’ chided Coppertracks. He returned to the telescope, placing his vision plate on the rim of the device, swivelling the assembly’s axis across different portions of the heavens. ‘It is not one of your night’s fireworks. Where have you gone to, now, you erratic little—’ Coppertracks emitted a startled fizz of static from his voicebox. ‘This cannot – this is impossible!’
Coppertracks abandoned the telescope, his diminutive drones already rolling out large tracts of paper on the table behind their master, pencils in their hands, scrawling at a frantic pace – filling the cream vellum emptiness with calculations and equations. Molly pressed her right eye to the telescope. Against the inky canvas sat a tiny crimson dot so small it might as well have been a fleck of brick dust blown off Tock House’s walls.
‘You’ve located it again, then?’ said Molly. ‘The comet looks so small now.’
‘It should be far smaller,’ said Coppertracks from the table, the fire under his skull-top pulsing with the energies of his vast intellect. ‘And more to the point, the comet should be in a totally different quadrant of the sky.’
‘Those calculations you received from King Steam’s new observatory must have been off by a margin, then,’ said the commodore. ‘Sure and it’s happened to me often enough, plotting a course underwater with only the stars and the maths on an old transaction engine to see my u-boat through the straits of the ocean. That’s a shame, but these celestial games of yours seem a complex and deep matter, everything so far away in the darkness with only a polished lens and a length of copper to peer out at them.’
‘King Steam himself assisted in my initial calculations,’ said Coppertracks, irate at the commodore’s lack of faith in his people’s infallibility.
‘He’s young metal.’
‘His body might be young, dear mammal, but his mind is the latest incarnation of a long line of ancient wisdom. King Steam does not make mistakes, and neither do I.’
The sinking feeling in Molly’s gut was getting worse. ‘It’s coming back towards us, isn’t it?’
Lifting the equation-filled paper from the hands of a mu-body, Coppertracks scanned the maths, and then nodded. ‘Yes, you are quite on the mark. Ashby’s Comet is returning. Given its present size and position, there is only one explanation that fits the mechanics of the situation. Ashby’s Comet must have used the gravity well of Kaliban to slingshot around the celestial body of the red planet, and, as you say, come back towards us.’
Molly tried to keep the panic out of her voice. ‘Returning towards us to ram into the Earth?’
‘No,’ said Coppertracks, ‘my calculations suggest the comet will not collide with us, but pass near enough by that it will be captured by the gravity of our world. I believe, dear mammal, that we are soon to have an extra moon sitting in our sky.’
‘Please, now,’ wheezed the commodore, his breath misting in the cold air of the chamber. ‘This is a huge great comet in the heavens we are speaking of, not a billiard ball knocked around across our table of velvet downstairs.’
‘I do believe you are closer to the truth than you realize,’ said Coppertracks. ‘Ashby’s Comet must have impacted with another minor celestial body after it passed us by, its trajectory nudged into the gravitational pull of Kaliban and set on a new course back towards us. A billiard table is exactly what our celestial bodies’ dance of orbits and velocities have become.’
‘Is that it, then?’ said the commodore. ‘A cruel chance meeting of vast stones in the heavens and now we are to have a new moon.’
‘How long?’ asked Molly. ‘How long before Ashby’s Comet returns to our skies?’
‘My estimation at this point would be in the order of five days.’
Five days! The Broken Circle cultists would have a field day when the comet they believed augured the end of all times returned and set up permanent residence in the heavens.
The force commander looked out across the plains of Catosia: green fields irrigated by aqueducts that ran out from the city behind her like spokes on a wheel. All except the sparring fields, of course, which were dust, rock, trenches and cover. No olive groves or rows of corn there. That was where the civilized cities of the Catosian League settled their differences using free companies such as hers. Professional fighters and citizen soldiers with a taste for it who would flourish their drug-swollen muscles – so large in some cases that their war jackets could barely contain their flesh – before commencing the ritual of battle. Fighting in front of the judges from the nearest city both sides could agree as neutral in whatever dispute had sparked the fight. That was the way the civilized people of Catosia made war. Unlike, of course, the other nations of the continent. The fat, complacent Jackelians, who relied on their cowardly monopoly of airships and fin bombs to preserve their freedoms, or Kikkosico to the southeast, with the god-emperor’s shiny legions trampling across the pampas.
Which made it all the more painful to the force commander that her sparring fields lay empty. No judges in purple togas. No audience behind the observer wall, cheering their citystate’s women into battle from the relative safety of angled viewing slits. Instead, the city-state of Sathens’ towering walls were reconfiguring for a full siege; the pneumatic pumps hissing as her battlements raised themselves to full combat height. Seven-inch thick steel plating gliding up and into position, clanking as the walls moved forward to create buffer cavities that began to fill with sand-like compounds piped up from the underground silos ringing the city. The streets of the city were being reshaped in the opposite direction, tall towers sliding down into underground holds, doors and windows disappearing behind blast plates as the lower rise buildings rotated to present a blank face to their thoroughfares.
Inside the Catosian city, a state of change had infected the population too. After the people of Sathens had taken in the survivors from the city of Unarta, the normally turbulent currents of their city’s anarchy had converged into a single focused stream of purpose. Survival. Survival against the terrible horde their neighbour’s survivors had nicknamed the Army of Shadows. Every voter of Sathens had filed past the crystal head of the goddess their city state had been named for, filed past long into the night, dropping in their pebbles. White for war. Black for peace. When the sun rose over the central square, the crystal goddess had stood proudly as a mass of shimmering white in the sunrise. Not a mere sparring war against civilized neighbours, where the citizens would go unhurt and the city’s infrastructure would be spared. Total war. Absolute war. The sort of war barbarian nations such as the Kingdom of Jackals and Quatérshift still foolishly practised against each other. The sort of war that nobody had been unwise enough to wage against any city-state of the Catosian League in a long, long time. Leave your sword at home or your corpse in Catosia was the adage that was often directed towards foreigners.
Jackelians might look down on the Catosian League because they treated war with the codification of a duel, but that was only between the city-states. For foreign barbarians, the Catosians practised a different sort of war altogether. Even the men would fight, those who weren’t guarding the children in the city vaults. Ever since the population had voted, the drinking water of Sathens had run crimson with the holiest and rarest of their drugs, the
