Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

“What, Baby Bear?”

“Nothing Daddy Bear.”

T27, Eastern Enlightenment Daddy Bear, Mummy Bear, and Baby Bear hot-legged it over to Green Street with Mr. Stalin an unfortunate smear on the two o’clock leg.

“Holy Catherine! Do you know what you just did?” shrieked Mummy Bear, and proceeded to tell his commander at such length and in such detail that Johnston M’bote patched out the recriminatory bickering and danced his little jigajig finger dance to “Tombolova Street Serenade” by Hamilton Bohannon and his Rhythm Aces. War was fun again.

Fun pounding at the sand-bagged emplacement with his cannon, fun straddling fleeing guerrillas and incinerating them with a “zap!” from his TBs, fun even when it was scary, when he heard the crew on T32, Absalom’s Peach , all die live on his earphones in a pother of confusion over targets.

“I tell you there’s no one there!”

“There’s got to be!”

“The computer says…”

“Stuff the computer!”

“Stuff you! Look, see! I was right, there isssgrzhggmmstphughzzsss…” And T32, Absalom s Peach , took a full field inducer burst from a Whole Earth Army boy soldier that spattered its Daddy Bear and Mummy Bear and Little Baby Bear up into the air in a fountain of metal shards and red rain.

Watching the death of Ahsaloms Peach , Johnston M’bote felt an unaccustomed sensation in his head. It was an original thought, an insight and a clear sign that his preordained existence was approaching the end of the tracks. It took him so by surprise, this original thought, that it was almost a full minute before he thumbed for Daddy Bear.

“Oh, Big Bear,” he sang, “I think we are dealing with an invisible enemy.” Daddy Bear sputtered and gurgled on the interphone, a commander promoted beyond the level of his competence.

“Well, has anyone got heat goggles?” Mummy Bear had left his with his stick of insect repellent in his tent. A bitter argument ensued. Johnston M’bote slipped his pair on and assumed the semblance of a dyspeptic owl. The fuzzy monochrome haze which he perceived paid almost immediate dividend.

“Hey! Daddy Bear! Daddy Bear! I’ve got a bogie! A real live bogie!”

“Where?”

“Port side, one hostile…” He liked using military expressions.

The name of the bogie was Shannon Ysangani.

“Come on, let’s get her, there she goes…… Dangling from the belly hatch twenty metres up in the smoke-filled air, Gunner Johnston M’bote steered the fighting machine with directions bawled into his helmet interphone. Faithful and obedient, the fighting machine stomped through the abandoned west wing of the Mandella hacienda, popping open like a peapod that most secret room which Grandfather Haran had locked and cursed never to be opened again.

Dust sifted down onto the heads of the Mandella dynasty hiding in the deepest sub-cellar. The rocks shuddered and groaned. Half delirious from his ride with Charley Horse, Rael Mandella Jr. hallucinated his days of leadership in the Great Strike and Kwai Chen Pak hurried to soothe his rantings with herb tea. Eva, working blithely at her loom, selected a pick of flame-red yarn from her combs and declared, “All this will have to go into the tapestry.”

Fighting machine T27, Eastern Enlightenment , stood at attention in the Mandellas’ central courtyard, spraying steam from its pressure valves. Smoke blew around the turret and endowed it with an otherworldly, malign intelligence.

“You see anything down there, M’bote?”

Gunner M’bote hung out of his belly-blister, probing with his goggles the great steam and smoke thrown up from the edge of Steeltown, where Parliamentarians and Whole Earth Army defenders had broken upon each other like clashing waves. A shimmering vagueness moved through the monochrome murk.

“Yep! There she is! Shoot her someone!” Mummy Bear swung creakingly around to comply; Daddy Bear raised the murderous two o’clock foot to stomp.

The nature of Shannon Ysangam’s belief in God had changed fundamentally in the past few minutes from Benign Big Softie who apportioned to some slightly more luck than justice demanded, to a Mean and Vengeful Old Fisherman who would not let a victim off his line. It had been luck when Murtagh Melintzakis was burned in place of her. It was vengeance now that she could not shake the agent of that burning off her. The fighting machine was playing with her. There was even some punk of a crewman hanging out of his turret tracking her every twitch with heat goggles. And her brilliant invisibility was as useless as her defence canopy. All that remained was for her to fight and die as Murtagh Melintzakis had.

“God damn you, God!” she cried solipsistically as she scrambled toward Fortress Steeltown with the fighting machine smashing a path of relentless pursuit. “God damn you God damn you God damn you!”

The big guns were swinging, the ugly little monkey-man pointing, the foot was rising, and she did not, categorically not, never no way not, want to end in fire the way that ten-year-old boy-soldier had ended, a shriek of agonized plasma. As she raised her field-inducer to fight, she realised how weary she was of killing things. Tired, sick, disillusioned. Stupid monkey-man was gibbering from his hatchway and she did not want to kill him.

“I don’t even know you,” she whispered. Yet to do anything else would be to end in fire. The contact closed. The instant before her defence canopy dropped for attack a pulverizing steel kick drove her against the llama-shed wall. The shot shied wide, the defence bubble popped, and Shannon Ysangani smashed into the all-too-solid adobe masonry. Body-things cracked and crunched inside her; she tasted steel and brass. In a vague miasma of semi-awareness she saw that her shot had not missed altogether. She had blasted away the upper gun turret, gunner and gun. Steam and oil fountained from the metal wound like heartblood. She giggled a rib-gyrating giggle and went dark.

“Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit…”

Curled up for safety in his comfortable fun belly-turret, Johnston M’bote scarcely heard his commander’s execrations.

“I got you, oh, I got you, I got you you bitch bastard whore, I got you I got you…” Johnston M’bote’s tongue poked beneath his teeth as he whispered furious glee to himself and spun his little brass wheels and verniers. “Oh, I got you, lady!” He pointed his big weapon at the woman lying in a cracked pile of adobe bricks. “I got you…” What was Daddy Bear shouting? Didn’t he know how hard it was to shoot with the damn fighting machine swaying and heaving like a Saturday night drunk? Warning? What the hell about? Cross-hairs glowed, perfect target. Gunner Johnston M’bote pressed the little red button.

“Zap!” he shouted, and in a dazzling flash blasted the ten o’clock leg clean off.

“Damn it,” he said.

“You stupid bastard!” shrieked Daddy Bear. “I warned you, I said be careful…” T27, Eastern Enlightenment , tottered like a tree on the edge of a precipice. Metal shrieked and clanged, gyro stabilizers howled as they fought to hold the fighting machine upright, then failed, catastrophically, unequal to the test. With majestic, balletic grace, the fighting machine toppled, tachyon blasters firing wildly in all directions, steam exploding from the wrecked joints, and smashed itself open on the adamant earth of Desolation Road. In the closing seconds of his plummet Johnston M’bote was permitted to see that his whole life had been directed toward this moment of glorious annihilation. In the instant before the belly-turret popped and he was crushed beneath the weight of falling metal like a ripe plum, Johnston M’bote saw back to the moment of his birth and realized as he saw his perfectly shaped head emerging from between his mother’s thighs that he had been doomed to begin with. He felt a sense of deep deep disgust. Then he felt nothing ever again.