Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

“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 sublieutenants.

“Attack!” shouted the sergeants and group leaders, and forty-eight longlegged 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 her 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’sawar—youdumbstupidsonofa… 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 facade 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.