Ian McDonald - Ares Express

“Ahhh!” Sweetness Asiim Engineer shouted, skull assaulted by the heavy hammer of the Gatlings.

Devastation Harx seemed to be trying to bring his vessel about: sets of vanes stopped turning, others cranked up a gear, while little manoeuvring nacelles swivelled hither and yon, fans a blur. Sweetness imagined teams of grim-faced pedallists, fit thighs pumping double, treble time, sweat running down the backs of their purple cycle shorts. The cathedral turned like a weather system, trying to bring its big belly guns to bear on the attackers, but Cadmon and Euphrasie had the measure of their enemy now. They ran in close and fast, hugging the cathedral’s chaotic architecture, mast-tips pulled low to scrape below pods and vents and turrets, out of weapon arc. The guns dare not fire for fear of tearing apart the fragile skin of the big blimp.

“Go go go go!” Sweetness shouted, punching the air and leaping up and down on the hot, slipping sand as Cadmon and Euphrasie shot out from underneath the cathedral into clear air. They looped outward, upward. The guns spat tracer at them but they were already over the rim and cutting across the upper shell toward the glass nipple of the contemplatorium. Devastation Harx had clearly never expected vengeance to fall from the sky, his upper hemisphere was undefended. No turrets, no redoubts, not even a simple marksman with a fowling piece, sent precariously on to shell to snipe. And too close to risk the orbital weaponry. One decimal out and anarchists, Harx, purple people and all would go up in a rave of hyperaccelerated ions. Peering from beneath shading hands, Sweetness saw Euphrasie—his paisley sail identified him—raise an arm. A trail of smoke arced away from it. It struck just beyond the glass roof. There was a surprisingly large white flash. Seconds later, the boom shook Sweetness Asiim Engineer as she danced, jubilant, on her dune top. A ragged scarf of blimp fabric flapped in the wind. Smoke poured satisfyingly from the wound. The airship wheeled, trying to deny the attackers targets, but Cadmon and Euphrasie separated, banked hard and came screeching back on convergent courses toward the glass sanctorum. Two sticks this time. Double blast. One direct on the dome—shards of translucent plastic glittered in the magic hour light as they rained down, sharp knives, on the delicate upper skin. The other, longer-fused, rolled and went off a third the way down the canopy. Here the underlying structures lay closer to the surface: a gas cell ruptured with a gusher of shredded strut and packing tow that made the whole artifact wobble like an ill-set circumcision-day jello.

“Yay!” Sweetness cheered as the debris rained down over the red desert.

Devastation Harx’s cathedral had a pronounced list. Still it spun, trying to get purchase on its tormentors. Gunners fired wildly in the hope of hitting something. Sweetness dived for cover as a spray of tracer blew the top of her dune to spray. She heard two, three, four more explosions. When she poked her head up over the top, she saw the cathedral canted at an angle of twenty degrees. Its dipping port side was pocked with craters and blast-holes. An entire section of lower skin swung from the substructure like a partly ripped-off scab. Spars and struts showed through the ruptured canopy, a compound fracture of the flight organs. A steady rain of debris emptied from its portholes or slid off the canopy, pod struts bent and snapped under strange new strains. Sweetness could just make out frantic movement within, like spiders hatching, as the pedallo crews abandoned their positions. The anarchist airfleet worried the big church like pit dogs a buffalo. Explosions peppered the acned skin of the airship. Another cell blew; second by second, the big ship went down by the port side toward the hard ground. Unbelievably, two peripatetic artists with penchants for Big Domestic and explosives had the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family on the ropes. Their finest work, true anarchy in art, a hymn to chaos, with only a runaway traingirl to witness it. Too adrenalised on the spectacle to worry about Gatling fire, Sweetness danced and hollered on her dune top, cheering on the great capsize. In one of those brief instants when her booted feet were in contact with the sand, she felt it. She knew the feeling. Every trainkid learned it from the teat; the subtle vibration of the big thing coming. Impossible, insane, but soles and bones told her, train a-coming, deep down in the sand.

Devastation Harx had weapons other than partacs.

She turned to see two ripples in the sand racing toward her, like the bow-waves of some inverted or invisible ship that sailed a sea of sand.

Across the Big Red they arrowed, straight and true and perfectly parallel and terrifyingly fast. The tremble became a shudder became a quaking. The sand beneath Sweetness’s boots liquefied, she sank ankle, shin, knee deep. In instants the swift burrowers had crossed the open plain across which Sweetness had sailed that afternoon, and plunged into the dune on which she stood. Sweetness dived and rolled as the side of the dune exploded into twin geysers of sand. A glimpse was all she had. A glimpse was enough. Mantis beaked, twin-engined turbo-powered, all spikes, spines and sensor eyes. Hunting machines: fast and pointy. Very pointy: the drive canards carried twin impaling spines, glittering chromed steel in the blue of magic hour. The heads swivelled, the many eyes locked on. The twin hunters pulled a multigee turn into an ear-shattering climb.

Sweetness scraped sand out of her face, yelled the classic warning.

“Behind you! Look behind you!”

Euphrasie, balanced delicately on his board, turned, stick in hand. The lead hunter took him fast and clean on its port nacelle. The impact should have torn him in half. Layer upon layer of tough desert clothing saved him but he was pinned like a collector’s dust moth, the bloodsmeared spear run through him to two thirds its length. As if she too had been savagely impaled, a terrible, incoherent wail was driven out of Sweetness. She watched the hunter sweep Euphrasie high into the air. Captainless, the gravboard went spinning down to earth. Vertical now; and Sweetness understood the killing thing’s strategy. A backward roll at the apex of the climb and Euphrasie would slide down the spike, lubricated by his own blood, into a kilometre of airspace. But he still clung to the stick of explosive, and with a final, defiant snap at the hounds of God, he struck fire. Sweetness saw a thin wisp of smoke, then man and machine went up in a terminal blossom of white fire. Numb, dumb, she watched shattered scraps of meat and metal punch clean through the dirigible canopy in gaping, smoking holes to rain, smouldering, on the red sand.

Now Cadmon battled the second terminator. This was no swift, sharp victory. Seeing his enemy upon him, Cadmon thrust his boots deeply into the footstraps, seized the mast with all his main and went down over the edge of the canopy in a one-eighty vertical flip. The hunter pulled a high-gee horizontal roll, but those half-seconds were enough for Cadmon to lose it among the sensor booms and vent stacks and lattices of Devastation Harx’s soft underbelly. His sense for the wind enabled him to draw more speed from every flaw and fidget that fretted around the airship’s complex architecture. Sweetness’s cheering, amplified by the anarchic mathematics of chaos theory, spun breezes that breathed a few centimetres per second into his fractal-patterned sail. But he was man and nature against angel and machine. The hunter was forced to keep its speed down to avoid further damaging the ship canopy, but metre by metre, second by second, it was gaining.

“Right! Right!!” Sweetness shouted; then, as the terminator tore through a flapping curtain of blimp-cloth, leaving it in three shreds: “Left! Hard aport!” Cadmon obeyed, not because he heard her, but because the rim was nearing and, in open air, he was kebab. He pulled a one-eighty bank into the face of the hunter. Too fast: it managed a mere flick of the barbs, then they were past each other. The hunter tumbled end over end, reacquired its target, but Cadmon was ready. He had one-eightied again, and while the hunting angel was picking up speed, he jumped straight between the horns. He caught the edge of its shield, flipped up over the spikes and bosses to come behind the beaked head. It thrashed and gaped at him, trying to snip limbs with its vanadium mandibles, but Cadmon had struggled out of his desert duster and was wrapping the too-many-eyed head with it. The hunter jerked and tossed, flipped upside down, but Cadmon’s legs were locked around its chrome throat. The gravboard sailed on out from underneath the capsizing cathedral on a gently rising arc. Two gunners who had not yet abandoned their posts as the cathedral sank lower in the air found it in their firing arcs. Intersecting streams of white tracer shredded the board. But Cadmon the anarchist artist had his fist deep in the machine’s skull-wiring. He ripped up a fistful of cable. The hunter let out a scream that Sweetness could hear over the creaking and sobbing of the tormented dirigible. Riding it like a high-plains gaucho a canton rodeo llama, Cadmon tore out another bunch of wiring. Keening madly, the hunter spun like a carousel, trying to throw the anarchist free. His fingers clung like cargo hooks. Sapient enough to understand its end was close, and could only be meaningfully be bought at the price of its destroyer’s life, the machine dived blindly for earth. Belly gunners waved arcs of shells at it; Cadmon rode the hunter as he had ridden his board, heaving on the sensor head and rudder vanes to send the shrieking thing dodging between the bullets. Muscles straining like hawsers, he pulled the thing out of its death dive with centimetres to spare. The dune on which Sweetness stood loomed, soft sand as hard as rust. Sweetness saw a steel maw gape for her, then Cadmon pulled it up, up, up. At the last instant leaped from its back. He hit fast. He hit hard. He sent a great bow-wave of sand flying before him; all legs and arms and flapping coat tails, tumbling over and over and over. Blind, guidance wrecked, the hunter climbed on twin pillars of fire from its afterburner. It stabbed a terrible wound through the starboard quadrant of the flying cathedral. It burst from the upper canopy in a gout of engine parts and shredded gas cell. The maimed cathedral lurched lower. Fans beat uselessly at the air. She was going down by the side. Spinning like a fairground humjundrum, the outer sensor booms brushed the ground and snapped. Sweetness watched the thing wheel toward her, a crushing juggernaut. Ballast vents opened, Devastation Harx dumped tons of water on to the desert to try to keep airborne. The dying hunter-killer blazed starward. At the zenith of its climb, it faltered. Its engines choked, failed. Dead in the air, the hunting angel rolled on to its back. Spinning, it fell to earth, buried itself in the receiving sand, exploded in oily black flames. Sweetness ducked under the rim of the cathedral. It scraped her by a hairbreadth. The waterfall from the sky knocked her flat, drove the air from her lungs. Instantly saturated, bruised, she was swept down the dune side in a flash flood of water and sand.