Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

“Go home,” he said. “Just go home.”

Then by a prearranged signal five transport ’lighters that had been hovering unseen over the drama dropped their invisibility fields and the invasion of Desolation Road began.

Taasmin Mandella, the digital huntress, pursued her prey deeper into labyrinthine Steeltown. She felt alive as she had felt only once before in her life, when the Blessed Catherine had visited her upon her dry desert pinnacle. This time the nature of the feeling was altogether different. The miracle-gun felt hot and hungry in her hand and her transformed garment clung silkily and sensuously to her body. She was enjoying herself. Mikal Margolis had fired at her twice with an MRCW he had obtained from somewhere: that had felt exciting and dangerous.

Anael Sikorsky helicoptered in over the Section 2 separator plant and reported.

“Target holding position on Level 17.”

She dispatched a holy command to Anael Luftwaffe and was rewarded by the immediate screams of jets and the savage hammer of his wing-mounted 35mm cannons over to her right.

“Come tools come toys come steel come iron,” she enchanted, and from the pieces of machine junk she called by name she fashioned a small gravitysled. The wind streamed back her hair as she rode the surf of industry, agile between pipes and girders and ducts. This is what she was made for, the wind in her hair and a weapon in her hand, zigzagging down Henry Ford Street between the blasts of Mikal Margolis’s missiles. She laughed and drove him from cover with a blast from her portable tachyon beamer.

“Take him, Luftwaffe.” The jet-powered angel swooped over her head and strafed the separator plant with its finger cannons. Explosions ripped the roof off the plant and peppered Taasmin Mandella with shrapnel but she did not care; she laughed astride her air-board and transmuted the hail of metal into further attachments to her arcane weaponry. Anael Luftwaffe climbed for a roll into another attack. At the apex of his climb a wedge of three MRCW heatseekers streaked out of concealment. Anael Luftwaffe exploded into smoking ruin and rained down on Steeltown.

There. Taasmin Mandella’s tachyon beam struck mere moments after the black and gold figure danced down a narrow gully between two airshafts. The Grey Lady gave a whoop and a cheer and a chase. She sniped at Mikal Margolis’s heels. She could have evaporated him at any moment of her choosing, but she wanted him in the open, in the desert, where it would be middleaged man to middle-aged saint.

Anael Sikorsky hovered close, harrying the prey. It was a very tight alley… Taasmin Mandella’s concentration was focused to its utmost point manoeuvring her sled around the valves and pipework.

“Sikorsky, get back.” A fan of laser fire raked the air. Anael Sikorsky swerved to avoid the ruby beams, glanced against a settling tank, bounced wall to wall to wall, and crashed in a blossom of flame.

So it was to be man to saint after all. She was pleased. In the distance the voice of holy conscience niggled her, but only in the distance. Her twin’s death was closer and more intimate. She could taste the darkness still. Mikal Margolis broke from the tangle of industrial plumbing and sprinted across the ’lighter field. Taasmin Mandella whipped him with a swarm of robot bees from one of the multitudinous muzzles of her God-gun. She willed her sled high into the sky so that she might dramatically swoop down upon her prey and cut him off.

Mikal Margolis released an arc of missiles from his MRCW. A pulse of power flowed along the printed circuits in her costume and transformed them into birds. Taasmin Mandella shrieked in delight. Her power had never been so great. Her halo glowed collapsar-black; twinkling with the swallowed white stars of conscience. She drew a ring of fire around Mikal Margolis with her flame-thrower and slid the sled to a halt before him. She put up her weapon before her face and willed the flames into extinction. Mikal Margolis responded in cautious kind. Behind him the smoke of Sikorsky’s burning went up into the sky together with the sound of a great despairing wail from Steeltown.

“Let me see your face,” said the Grey Lady. “I want to see how you’ve changed.”

Mikal Margolis removed his helmet. Taasmin Mandella was surprised at how little he had changed. Aged, wearied, tanned, greyed, but unchanged. Still the victim of circumstance.

“Please spare me any melodrama,” said Mikal Margolis. He dropped his MRCW. “I don’t suppose this would have worked against you anyway. And please don’t go on about your father and your brother. It’s pointless. I don’t feel any special remorse; I’m not that kind of person, and anyway, I was just doing my job. Now, get on with it.”

The dust blew in little eddies around his feet. Taasmin Mandella slowly channelled all her power into one God-bolt that would transform Mikal Margolis to carbon steel. She raised her left hand to strike and was suddenly, stunningly, embedded in a shaft of solid light.

A figure walked across the landing field toward her. Where it had come from, Taasmin could not see, but the figure was that of a small, slim, crophaired woman wearing a suit of glowing picture-cloth.

“No!” wailed Taasmin Mandella, the Grey Lady. “No! Not now! Not you, not now, of all times!”

“You may recall that part of the conditions of your prophethood was that you would be called to give an account of your stewardship of your power,” said Catherine of Tharsis. Mikal Margolis made to recover his weapon and leave. St. Catherine froze him into immobility with a gesture.

“Tight-focus timeloop,” she explained with a smile. “Soon as we’re gone he’ll snap out of it.”

“You have a lousy sense of timing,” said Taasmin Mandella, frozen in white radiance.

“Like the outfit,” said the Blessed Lady. “Like it a lot. Very becoming to you. We servants of the Panarch, incidentally, do not have to justify our comings and goings to you mortals. This is the appointed time, you must come with me and give an account of how you have used your privileges.”

The column of light began to spin about Taasmin Mandella, and she felt herself being stretched, pulled like festival taffy, transformed into something other than human. She felt the earth slip away from her. She was light; light…. She gave a final spit of disgust, then the Catherine-power enfolded her and, as she had once fantasized naked on the burning bluffs, she was transformed into a creature of purest light, white, shining light eternal, purest information, and fountained into the sky.

The small skinny woman which was the biological construct of the Blessed Lady of Tharis’s incarnation moved her hand in the special way that manipulates space and time and vanished.

Disguised as a Penitential Mendicant, Arnie Tenebrae spent five days wallowing in mud, flagellation, prostrate prayer and kneeling upon sharp stones submerged in sewage before she slipped away from the main pilgrimage by the Steeltown gates, concealed herself behind a domestic methane tank, and spoke the five words into her thumbcommunicator that gave the order for invasion. At her command the five transport dirigibles that had slipped with muffled fans into position over Steeltown shed their invisibility fields and began to broadcast messages of reassurance and liberation to the stunned faces beneath them. From their belly hatches Whole Earth Army shock-troops dropped suspended by LTA harnesses, field-inducers at the ready to pound the enemy into the red jam at the slightest display of resistance. The enemy were past resistance.