Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

Security respected neither boundary nor conscience. Sweeping protesting Poor Children aside, they emptied the Faith City dormitories and searched the lines of faces for the features on their arrest sheets. The sanctuary of the Basilica of the Grey Lady was desecrated by a charge of gun-toting security men, but by the time Taasmin Mandella arrived from her meditations the Bethlehem Ares Corporation had swept through and passed like a typhoon, leaving a trail of devastation and mayhem.

The Company rampaged through Desolation Road, indulging any petty whim that took it. The civil authorities were powerless to assist. It became evident that there was a secondary, more sinister aspect to the violence. The homes and businesses of the founder members of Desolation Road were singled out for attack. As the smoke went up from the Bar/Hotel Annex, the offices of Gallacelli & Mandella Developments were destroyed by a colossal explosion. Just around the bend in the alley the Mandella and Das Hot Snacks and Savouries Emporium was broken into pieces before the proprietors’ eyes.

“Hope you’re satisfied!” shouted the Das half of the partnership. “I hope you’re goddamn satisfied!” Both partners gave clenched-fist Concordat salutes to the guards’ retreating backs.

“We is not property!” cried Rajandra Das. The security men came back and beat both of them to the ground with their weapons.

Five guards burst into the Mandella hacienda on the pretext of searching for Rael Jr. and turned the place upside down.

“Where is he?” they demanded of the saintly Santa Ekatrina, MRCW muzzle to her temple.

“Not at home,” she said. Out of frustration and petty vengeance they slaughtered every animal in the farmyard. They smashed every stick of furniture, overturned the pots of lentils and stew in the kitchen, destroyed the house solar collector lozenge, and made to break apart Eva Mandella’s tapestry loom.

“I wouldn’t touch that if I were you,” said Rael Mandella Sr. with the deadly calm a hunting rifle in the hand affords. The security men shrugged (old fool, old stupid man) and raised their MRCW butts. Rael Mandella let out a howl of slaughtered animals overturned pots smashed solar collector and threw himself between the guards and the loom. An MRCW missile blew his chest away and threw him across the tapestry frame, where his blood stained the half-done history melodramatic red.

In the smoke and blood and stench of burning flesh the small polite cough almost went unheard, but it was just enough to make the murderers turn around. Before them stood Limaal Mandella. In his hand Mr. Jericho’s needle-pistol. On his face a terrible terrible smile. Before fingers could touch firing studs they were all dead, a needle square between every pair of eyes, fired with the matchless speed and accuracy of the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known.

Even as his grandfather lay sprawled and dead across his grandmother’s loom and his father stood terrible and triumphant by his weeping mother with an Exalted Family needle-pistol cradled in his hand: even as all this came to pass, Rael Mandella Jr. in the company of Ed, Sevriano and Batisto Gallacelli were stealing a Bethlehem Ares Steel cargo ’lighter from the field behind Steeltown.

Preflight checks completed, Sevriano and Batisto brought the fans up to speed and readied to dump ballast.

“Child of Grace,” muttered Ed Gallacelli. Battle armoured security men advanced across the field toward the Wild Geese. Anxious glances were exchanged across the command board. Something must be done, but what and by whom was uncertain. Ed Gallacelli looked from face to face.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll get rid of them.” Before any word of protest could be voiced he had slipped out of the crew door onto the concrete.

“By the way,” he shouted, voice barely audible over the growing roar of the engines. “It was me all along! Me! I was your father!” Then with a grin to the control cabin he waved farewell and ran toward the approaching guards. He fished in his commodious pockets.

“Here, catch this!” He threw a mechanical dove into the air and it soared toward the Company men, singing its subsonic song. When he saw the security men double up vomiting and migraine-ridden he cock-a-doodle-dooed his inventiveness, threw up his arms, and released a swarm of robot bees into the air. Armed with laser stings, his tiny inventions warmed over the crip pled security men until one of their number with greater presence of mind than his comrades downed both sonic dove and killer bees with hypersonic bursts from his MRCW.

“Try this on for size,” shouted Ed Gallacelli. He heard the ’lighter engines roar into take-off and he suddenly felt happy for no reason that he could discern. From his sleeves issued a stream of dense black smoke. Before the cloud enveloped him he glanced over his shoulder to see the airship bank up and away from Steeltown, heading north.

They were gone.

He was glad.

Slipping heat-goggles over his eyes, Ed Gallacelli closed with the security men and ran around, kicking asses and balls in utter invisibility until an unscheduled wind blew and blew his smokescreen over the horizon.

“Oh, dear,” said Ed Gallacelli sheepishly. “I surrender.” He raised his arms. Instantly fingers were seen to tighten on MRCW firing studs. “Oops. Sorry.” He gave a clenched fist salute. “Long live Concordat. Amen!” He began to laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh because the smart security man had taken off his helmet and it was Mikal Margolis and he should have known all along and wasn’t it the best joke of all, better than the tricks he’d kept hidden up his sleeve and then the squad commander gave an order and twelve laser beams spat out and bathed him in flames and did not stop firing until the ashes began to blow away on the treacherous wind.

After the battle of Yellow Ford, Arnie Tenebrae built a pyramid of heads outside her command tent. The Parliamentarians had been routed, fleeing across rice paddies shedding weapons, helmets, uniforms, wounded in their panic to escape the tiger-painted demons loping tirelessly in pursuit. She had ordered her death’s head commandos to decapitate any dead or wounded and bring the heads to her. The pyramid was as tall as Arnie Tenebrae. She looked at the grinning heads of ploughboys, riksha mechanics, ’lighter pilots, tin miners, college students, insurance salespersons, and a certain unclean madfire blazed up in her. That night she painted her face in the semblance of the deathbird and as she injected herself with morphine from the medical supplies the deathbird of the dark places rose before her summoning, and told her in shrieks like those of a tortured man that she was the Avatar, the embodiment of the Cosmic Principle; Vastator, the Destroyer, Leveller of Worlds, Slayer of Gods, She who Cannot Be Predicted.

Yellow Ford, Hill 27, Elehanua’s Ferry, Harper’s Barn: the wings of the deathbird scattered the Parliamentarians like chaff.

“Boys against men,” she told her commanders. “Hundreds to one they outnumber us, yet we reap them like rice!”

She knew her captains feared her. They were right to do so. She was mad, she sought bodies to throw on the altar of destruction, she thought she was a god, a demon, a dark angel. They were right to think these things about her. They were true. Victory followed victory.

“Our field-inducer weapon systems makes us invincible,” she declared to her staff after the Battle of Sakamoto Junction. Her captains and lieutenants knew that she meant that it was Arnie Tenebrae, Vastator, that made them invincible. They began to fear that she was right about that too.