Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

“Haven’t seen what I’m looking for yet.” She had decided that today she would tell nothing but the truth. There was no satisfaction in lying when only she knew she was lying. “Today, Migli, I am going to tell you about the raid on the Cosmobad landing guidance system. Got enough tape? Enough paper? Batteries all right? Wouldn’t want you to miss any of this.” She sat back against the wall, closed her eyes, and began her tale.

“Orders came down from the regional command for a major offensive during the planetary assembly elections. After the battle of Smith’s Shack several of the Deuteronomy division’s command levels got knocked out-we didn’t have F. I. weapon systems yet-and I was left in charge of the fifth and sixth brigades. Because we hadn’t been issued the new equipment, we thought, I thought, we’d aim for a low-level target, namely, the landing guidance systems at Cosmobad. They drop off the Skywheel on remote, so if we knocked out the guidance radars, no shuttles would be coming in at Belladonna. We synchronized our action with the others in the sector and moved into position at Cosmobad.”

The raid had been adeptly planned and flawlessly executed. At twelve minutes of twelve the 65 radar beacons were destroyed by mines and the guidance computer scrambled with a hunter-killer program bought from the Exalted Families. All ground-to-orbit communications in the Belladonna landing sector were hopelessly scrambled. It had been beautiful, not with the beauty of yellow explosions and collapsing towers, but the intellectual inherent beauty of something done right. Platoon leaders reported all primary targets destroyed. Arnie Tenebrae gave the order to withdraw and disperse. Her own command group, Group 27, had retreated toward the town of Clarksgrad and ran straight into A and C Company of the New Merionedd Volunteers who had been on manoeuvres in the area. The firefight had been short and bloody. She remembered she hadn’t fired a single shot during the brief engagement. She had been too stunned by her own stupidity for not checking the military presence in the area to even raise her MRCW. Group 27 sustained 82 percent casualties before Sub-major Tenebrae surrendered.

“Next time I’ll make sure of my intelligence,” Sub-major Tenebrae said.

“There’s, ah, not likely to be a next time.”

“Whatever. Anyway, Group 27 was obliterated and now I’m resident in the Chepsenyt Regional Detention Centre, talking to you, Migli, and telling you your time’s up for today. What would you like to talk about tomorrow?”

Migli shrugged.

That night Sub-major Tenebrae lay in a shaft of bar-broken starlight, twirling a piece of string between her fingers. She thought starlight thoughts of fear and loathing. Since the morning she left Desolation Road on the back of Engineer Chandrasekahr’s terrain bike, a day had not passed that she had not woken fearful and gone to sleep fearful. Fear was the air she breathed. Fear came in greater or lesser breaths, like the bowel-loosening fear of foxhole Charlie with Hueh Linh bleeding himself away through her fingers, or the tense skyward glance of identification at the beat of an aircraft engine. She twined the bootlace around her fingers, round and round and round, and feared. Fear. Either she used fear or fear used her.

Her fingers froze in their dance. The thought struck her with irresistible profundity of divine law. Her aimlessness was illuminated by its holy glow. Until that moment fear had used her and had bequeathed her incompetence, failure, loathing and death. From this bootlace-twining moment forward she would use fear. She would use it because she feared fear using her. She would be more terrible, more violent, more vicious, more successful than any Whole Earth Army commander before her: her very name would be a curse of fear and loathing. Children yet unborn would dread her and the dead die with her name on their lips because either she used fear or fear used her.

She lay awake a long time that night, thinking in the slatted shaft of starlight.

On the fourth day, at twelve minutes of eleven, Group 19 of the Deuteronomy Division of the Whole Earth Army stormed the Chepsenyt Regional Detention Centre, eliminated the guards, released the prisoners and effected the rescue of Sub-major Arnie Tenebrae. As she buckled on the new field-inducer weapons pack her rescuers had brought for her and made her escape, a small, bespectacled young man, like a dirty-minded owl, jumped out of a doorway waving an immense Presney long-barrelled reaction pistol he clearly did not know how to use.

“Stay, ah, where you are, don’t, ah, move, you’re all, ah, under arrest.”

“Oh, Migli, don’t be a silly Migli,” said Arnie Tenebrae, and blew the back out of his head with a short burst from her field-inducer. Group 19 burned the Chepsenyt Regional Detention Centre behind them and rode off across the dull brown Stampos with the dull brown smoke hanging over them.

It was as if they had all been snatched up into the night: men, houses, big yellow machines, everything, all gone. That night there had been the worst storm anyone could remember and the brothers had laid in their beds feeling delicious thrills of scariness every time the lightning threw huge blue shadows on the wall and the thunder boomed so loud and so long it was as if it were in the room with them, in the bed beside them. They could not remember falling asleep, but they must have, for the next thing they knew their mother was pulling back the curtains to admit the peculiar sunshine you get only after huge storms that is so clear and light and clean it is as if it has been laundered. They tumbled out of bed into clothes through breakfast and up into the laundered morning.

“Isn’t it quiet?” said Kaan. To ears accustomed to months, years of the din of day-and-night labour, the quiet was intimidating.

“I can’t hear them working,” said Rael Jr. “Why aren’t they working?” The brothers hurried to the low place they had dug under the wire so that they could play in the most exciting of boys’ playgrounds, the construction site. They stood at the wire and looked at nothing.

“They’re gone!” cried Kaan. There was not one earth grader, concrete pourer, or tower crane, not a single site hut, not a dormitory, canteen or social, not one welder, mason, or bricklayer, not even a foreman, site supervisor, crane driver, or truck loader to be seen. It felt as if the storm had sucked them all into the sky, never to return. Rael Jr. and his young brother rolled under the wire and explored the new and empty world.

They trod gingerly through shadowy streets between the stupendous buttresses of steel converters. They shied at every desert bird that croaked and every distorted reflection of themselves in the jungle of metal piping. As it became apparent that the plant was utterly deserted, the boys’ daring grew.

“Yeehee!” shouted Kaan Mandella through his cupped hands.

“YEEHEE YEEhee Yeehee yeehee…” called the echoes in the settling tanks and ore conveyors.

“Look at that!” shouted Rael Jr. Neatly parked in laagers beneath the towering complexities of pipes and flues stood two hundred dump trucks. Agile as monkeys the boys climbed and crawled all over the bright yellow trucks, swinging from door handles and foot-steps, sliding down sloping backs into buckets big enough to hold the entire Mandella hacienda. Their energy led them from the big trucks onto the gantries and catwalks to play perilous games of three-dimensional tag among the pipes and ducts of the ore filtration system. Hanging by one arm over a shuddering drop into the bucket of a rear loader, Kaan Mandella let fly a whoop of glee.