Desolation Road

by Ian McDonald

  “There!” Mr. Jericho pointed to the sky. “There she is!” Three pinpricks of light winked in midbank and swelled with a breathtaking shout of power into three shark-nosed propeller airplanes. In arrowhead formation the three airplanes pounded over Desolation Road, and as they passed the lead plane snowed leaflets. The streets were instantly full of running guerrillas. They separated the five counter-revolutionaries and drove them into shelter. Mr. Jericho glance-read a leaflet blowing past him in a cloud of dust and prop-wash.

  “Tatterdemalion's Flying Circus Has Come to Town,” it read. “Bethlehem Ares, Beware!” The innocence made him smile. Thirty years old and she still hadn't learned worldly wisdom, God bless her. The flying circus looped over Desolation Road and came in at roof height. Six ripping explosions tore across the town. Mr. Jericho saw blue-white beams flash from the airplanes’ wingtips and he whistled in blatant admiration.

  “Tachyonics! Where in the world did she get tachyonics from?” Then he was hurried into the Bar/Hotel and the soldiers took up rooftop positions to return fire.

  As she led her formation in across the railroad lines for a strike at Steeltown, Persis Tatterdemalion realized she was having the time of her life.

  “Angels green and blue,” she sang, “commence second attack run.”

  There had been no escaping. Ed was gone and gone was Ed, but she could fly over the edge of the universe and never be far enough away to forget about him. Even in Wollamurra Station there had been no escaping. There had been a filling with craziness instead, a craziness that found her two crop-spraying punks out of jobs to fly the two stunters she'd bought from Yamaguchi and Jones, equip them with the very latest in military technology, and make a crazy, name-of-love attack first on a Bethlehem Ares Steel train chuffing across the High Plains and then on the slag-black heart of the dream-grinding Company itself, fortress Steeltown. She waggled her wings and the flying circus closed behind her.

  She loved the way the soldiers ran like chickens from the snap snap snap of her tachyon blasters. She loved the purity of the blue-white beams and the bright flowers of the explosions as she destroyed offices, storage tanks, trucks, bunkers, draglines, solar collectors. She'd loved it from the instant she'd pressed the firing buttons and sent two Class 88 haulers, fifty wagons and two engineers up in a blaze of subquantal fusion.

  “Boom!” she sang, and pressed the firing studs. Behind her three parked cargo ’lighters exploded in gouts of fire.

  “Whee!” she cried, and banked the Yamaguchi and Jones for another pass. Her radio crackled and a familiar voice hissed in her ear.

  “Perssiss, dear, it'ssss me. Jimmmm Jericho, you know?”

  “Yah, I know,” she shouted. Her tachyon blasters cut long smoking gashes through Steeltown. Chimneys collapsed, pipework tumbled.

  “Immmportant infffformation. Desssolattttiion Road isss under occupattttion, repeat, under occupattttion, by the Whole Earthhhh Army Tactical Group, repeat, Whole Earthhhh Army Tactical Group. Company isss defffeated, repeat, defeated.” A fan of missiles broke from ground and homed in on her.

  “Kaboom!” she said and vaporized them. “Defeated?”

  “Yesss. Am sssspeaking to you ffffrom the Bar/Hhhotel on illegal rrradio sssett. Sssuggessst you attack military targetsss, repeat, military targetssss. Arnie Tenebrae in command.”

  She passed low over Desolation Road again and saw the trenches and dugouts. She flew over the bluffs and saw there the crucified bodies and the sunshiny helmets of the soldiers in their cliffside positions. Arnie Tenebrae? Here?

  “Angel Group, reform,” she ordered.

  “Good girl,” hissed Mr. Jericho, and broke transmission. Angels green and blue fell into arrowhead formation behind her. Good kids. She briefed them on the new situation.

  “Check,” said Callan Lefteremides.

  “Check,” said her brother Venn.

  Angel flight turned as one and closed on the Whole Earth Army positions. They flew scant metres above the desert. Wingtip tachyon-blasters snipped at the defences, missiles burst from the revetments toward them.

  “Angel green angel green, missile on your…” A Long Brothers Type 337 “Phoenix” surface-to-air missile, fired in panic by one Private Cassandra O. Miccini, caught Venn Lefteremides, and blew the tail clean off his Yamaguchi and Jones. Angel green rolled into a death spiral and crashed in the middle of the abandoned new housing complex beyond the railroad lines.

  Persis Tatterdemalion thought she had seen the flutter of a parachute. So, Arnie Tenebrae, this is for you. She turned the nose of her airplane Steeltown-wards and thumbed the firing studs.

  Arnie Tenebrae watched the air strike from her window with curious admiration.

  “They're good. Awfully good,” she mused as the two survivors of Tatterdemalion's Flying Circus skipped in at rooftop height to launch another tachyon strike into Steeltown.

  “Ma'am, don't you think you should move away from such an exposed position?” suggested Lennard Hecke.

  “Certainly not,” said Arnie Tenebrae. “They can't harm me. Only the Avenger can harm me.”

  Out in the Land of Crystal Ferrotropes the Avenger Marya Quinsana watched the dogfight.

  “Whoever they are, they're very good. Get a check on the registration numbers. I want to know who's flying them.”

  “Certainly. Marshall, a communication from the town, from the hostages.” Albie Vessarian, a fawning sycophant destined never to stop a bullet, handed her a memo from telecommunications and hurried to comply with her order to identify the pirate aircraft.

  She scanned the communique. Temporal weapons? She threw the flimsy away and returned to the air attack in time to see Venn Lefteremides roll, crash and burn.

  “So,” she breathed. “This is it. Order the attack!” Fifteen seconds later the second attacker was shot down and crashed into the Basilica of the Grey Lady.

  “Order the attack!” shouted General Emiliano Murphy.

  “Order the attack!” shouted Majors Lee and Wo.

  “Order the attack!” shouted assorted captains, lieutenants, and sub-lieutenants.

  “Attack!” shouted the sergeants and group leaders, and forty-eight long-legged fighting machines took their ponderous first steps toward Desolation Road.

  “Ma'am, the Parliamentarians are attacking.”

  Arnie Tenebrae received the news with such phlegm that Lennard Hecke thought she had not heard.

  “Ma'am, the Parliamentarians…”

  “I heard you, soldier.” She continued shaving her scalp, scything away great meadows of hair until her head gleamed naked beneath the sun. She regarded herself in a mirror. The result pleased her. Now she was the personification of war, the Vastator. Avenger beware. She spoke unhurriedly into her whisper-mike.

  “This is the commander. The enemy is attacking with unconventional armoured forces employing tachyonic weaponry: all units exercise extreme caution in engaging. Major Dhavram Mantones, I want the time winder running.”

  Dhavram Mantones came on the thimble-phone, crackling and distressed.

  “Ma'am, the Temporal Inversion is untested: we're still doubtful about one of the operands in the equation; it could be plus or minus.”

  “I'll be there in three minutes.” To her forces at large she said, “Well, this is it, boys and girls. This is war!” As she gave the order to attack, the first explosions came from the perimeter positions.

  Gunner Johnston M'bote was one of those inevitable people whose lives are like steam trains, capable only of forward motion in a limited direction. Personifications of predestination, such people are doubly cursed with an utter ignorance of the inevitability of their lives and thunder past those countless other lives that stand by the side of the track and wave to the proud express train. Yet those standers by the track know exactly where it is that the train is going. They know where the tracks lead. The train lives merely hurtle onward, uncaring, unenlightened. Thus Mrs. January M'bote knew the instant the district midwife presented h
er with her ugly, nasty little seventh son that no matter what he made or did not make of his life he was destined to be a number two belly-gunner in a Parliamentarian fighting machine in the battle of Desolation Road. She saw where the tracks led.

  As a child Johnston M'bote was small, and he remained small as an adolescent, just the perfect size to be rolled up into the belly turret slung beneath the insect body of the fighting machine like a misplaced testicle. His head was round and flat on top, just the perfect shape for an army helmet; his dispositon darting and nervous (labelled “hair-trigger” by the army psychologists), ten out of ten for suitability; his hands long and slender, almost feminine, and quite the best shape for the admittedly tricky firing controls of the new Mark 27 Tachyon equipment. And he possessed an I.Q. of such fence-post density that he was unemployable in any profession that demanded the slightest glimmer of creativity. One of Creation's natural belly-turret gunners, Johnston M'bote was doomed to begin with.

  Little enough Johnston M'bote knew of this. He was having too much fun. Curled like a foetus in the clanking, swaying, oil-smelly metal blister, he peered down through the gunslits at the lurching desert beneath him and sent streamers of heavy machine-gun fire arching across the leprous sand. The effect pleased him greatly. He could not wait to see what it looked like when he used it on people. He squinted up at the views in the eye-level television monitors. A lot of a lot of red desert. Legs swung, the fighting machine heaved. Gunner Johnston M'bote spun round and round in his steel testicle and fought with the urge to press the little red trigger in front of him. That was the fire control for the big tachyon blaster. He had been warned against its indiscriminate use: it wasted energy, and the commander did not entirely trust him not to shoot the legs off the fighting machine by mistake. Stamp stamp, sway sway. His Uncle Asda had once owned a camel and the one ride he had taken on the bad-tempered thing had felt very much like the rolling gait of the fighting machine. Johnston M'bote strode to war in twenty-metre boots with the Big Swing Sound of Glenn Miller and his Orchestra blowing soul in both earphones. He rolled his shoulders and poked alternate forefingers into the air, up down, up down; the only kind of dancing possible in the belly turret of a Mark Four Fighting Machine. If this was war, thought Johnston M'bote, war was terrific.

  A military issue boot, made by Hammond and Tew of New Merionedd, pounded heavily on the ceiling hatch three times; thump thump thump, accompanied by a muffled half-heard stream of abuse. Gunner Johnston M'bote thumbed at his radio channel selector.“…to Baby Bear, Daddy Bear to Baby Bear, what'n'hellyouplayingatdowntheredon'tyouknowthere'sawaryoudumbstupidsonofa…target bearing zero point four degrees declination, fifteen degrees.” Tongue protruding in unprecedented concentration, Gunner M'bote spun little brass wheels and verniers and aligned the big tachyon blaster on the unremarkable section of red cliff face.

  “Baby Bear to Daddy Bear, I have the target all set; now what you want me should do?”

  “Daddy Bear to Baby Bear, fire when ready. Holy God, how dumb…”

  “Okay Daddy Bear.” Johnston M'bote gleefully pressed both thumbs to the much anticipated little red button.

  “Zap!” he shouted. “Zap, you bastards!”

  Sub-lieutenant Shannon Ysangani was withdrawing her combat group as per orders from Arnie Tenebrae from the perimeter positions (which smelled oppressively of urine and electricity) to the Blue Alley revetments, when the Parliamentarians vaporized the entire New Glasgow Brigade. She and her fifteen combat troops constituted the sole two percent that survived. Shannon Ysangani had been leading her section past the front of the Jolly Presbyter Pilgrim Hostel, when an unusual brilliant light from an unusual angle threw an unusually black shadow against the adobe walls. She had just time to marvel at the shadow, and the way the red and blue neon Jolly Presbyter suddenly lit up (a hitherto-undiscovered electromagnetic pulse side effect of the tachyon devices), when the blast picked up her body and soul and smashed her into the façade of the Pilgrim Hostel and, by means of a finale, brought walls, ceiling and fat neon Presbyter himself down on top of her.

  But for her defence canopy Shannon Ysangani would have been smeared like potted meat. As it was, she was englobed within a black bubble of collapsed masonry. She explored the smooth perimeter of her prison with blind fingertips. The air smelled of energy and stale sweat. Two choices. She could remain under the Jolly Presbyter until she was rescued or her air ran out. She could drop her defence canopy (possibly all that was keeping multitons of Jolly Presbyter from crushing her, like a boorish lover) and punch her way out with field-inducers on offensive. Those were the choices. She had fought enough battles to know that they were not as simple as they appeared. The ground shuddered as if one of the ineffable footsteps of the Panarch had fallen on Desolation Road; there was another, and another, and another. The fighting machines were moving.

  She could not believe the ease with which the Parliamentarians had broken through the perimeter defences. She could not believe so much death and annihilation could have been contained in such a short flash of light. The earth shook to a sustained concussion. Another flare of light, another annihilation. She found she could not believe in this new death either. War was too much like the Sunday night thriller on the radio to be credible for what it was. Another blast. The Jolly Presbyter settled with a heavy grunt on top of Shannon Ysangani. Someone must carry the news of the destruction back to headquarters. A voice she barely recognised as duty nagged at her. Do your duty…do your duty…do your duty…Shock. Explosion, close by. Thud thud thud, the metal boots of a fighting machine close by, what if one comes down on top of me, will my defence canopy hold up? Duty, do your…

  “All right! All right!” She knelt in the darkness beneath the smothering corpulence of the Jolly Presbyter, checking her fire controls by touch. She wanted to be sure, sure, and sure again. She would get only the one shot. Shannon Ysangani sighed a short, resigned puff of a sigh and collapsed her defence canopy. The debris groaned and settled. Creaking, crashing…she brought the field-inducer up and punched a full power burst through to the sunlight.

  It might have been a different world she stepped out into. The entire southeast end of Desolation Road lay in tumbled smoking ruins. Glowing glass craters, nine-rayed like St. Catherine's starburst, gave testimony to the punishing effectiveness of the Parliamentarians’ new weapon. They had passed this way in force, their behemoth fighting machines, creatures of childhood iron nightmares, stood astride streets and buildings, hissing steam from their joints and trading ponderous artillery barrages with crannies of Whole Earth Army resistance entrenched along First Street. The Parliamentarians’ passage through the outer defences had flattened the town like a rice field before a whirlwind. Yet their advance had not gone totally unopposed Like a dead spider beneath a boot, the command turret of a fighting machine lay smashed open in a tangle of metal legs. Shannon Ysangani flicked for her defence canopy, then paused. In this kind of war, perhaps invisibility would be a better tactic, operating on the principle of what can't be seen can't be shot at. She thumbed open her section's radio channel and called the survivors to her. The few were fewer. Twelve out of fifteen, crawling from the chaos in the wake of the battle. Sub-lieutenant Ysangani then thumbed the command channel and made a brief report of losses to Commander Tenebrae.

  Arnie Tenebrae sat amid her war staff, fingertips touched together in the attitude of meditative serenity. Ninety-eight percent casualties in the initial engagement and now the Parliamentarians were kicking at the skirting boards of Steeltown. Once ninety-eight percent casualties would have outraged her military sense and sent her shouting brilliant, inspiring orders to her troops. Now she merely sat, fingertips touched together, nodding.

  “Orders are revised,” she said when the Sub-lieutenant had finished. “Under no circumstances are troops to use defence canopies. Employ light-scatter and high mobility. You are guerrillas. Be guerrillas.” She cut communications with the defenders and turned her whole self to the complex mach
ine-thing humming on the tile floor. “How much longer?”

  “Ten, twenty more minutes before we get the power hooked up,” said Dhavram Mantones. “And we'll have to defend the power source.”

  “Order it done.” Arnie Tenebrae suddenly stood up and went to her room. She regarded her painted face in the mirror on the wall. Foolish vanity, she was Deathbird no longer, she was Timebird, the Chronal Phoenix. As she wiped the foolish paint from her face she reflected on the ninety-eight percent casualties on the perimeter dugouts. Meaningless. Plastic soldiers. The defence of the time winder was paramount now, and for it she would gladly embrace hundred percent casualties. Universal death. The concept began to appeal to her.

  In best guerrilla fashion Shannon Ysangani's squad tippy-toed through the alleys of Desolation Road. Occasional glass craters commemorated those who had trusted too much in their defence canopies. On the corner of Blue Lane a fighting machine came smashing its way through Singh Singh Singh and MacIvor's Law Offices. As her troops faded into invisibility Shannon Ysangani found she and Trooper Murtagh Melintzakis separated from their comrades. Shannon Ysangani hid her invisible self in the porch of New Paradise Tea Rooms and watched the turrets swing left and right, left and right, searching out lives to extinguish. Evil machines. She thought she could even discern the helmeted crews at their battle stations. Her terror of the metal thing had paralyzed her military sense, she was no more capable of attacking it than of attacking a childhood iron nightmare. Not so Trooper Murtagh Melintzakis. His childhood sleep must have been untroubled, for he slipped out of invisibility, raised his field inducer to attack, and the turret muzzle which by sheer misfortune happened to be pointing at him spat point-blank subquantal fury over him. The novalight bleached every centimetre of exposed paintwork on the corner of Blue and Chrysanthemum. The neons on the empty hotels spasmed with brief luminescent rememberance and, light-scatter circuits temporarily overloaded, the remnants of Group Green appeared as vague translucent ghosts. Shannon Ysangani screamed a panicked order to split up and escaped down Blue Alley.