Ian McDonald - Ares Express

“Let’s go!” Skerry said, somersaulting to the ground.

Mishcondereya tacked the sky yacht hard aport and by sheer millimetres missed clipping the pin-feathers of the Winged Edsel. She swore her finest ladies-finishing-school oaths as she fought to control the skittery little machine in the chaotic turbulence cast up as cloud boiled into phantasm and back again.

“I’d like to see what the manufacturer’s manual has to say about this,” she hissed as she righted the ship and immediately pulled it into a fan-shredding climb as Cheraph PHARIGOSTER came howling up at her, fiery scourges raised. The things were no more substantial than the mist from which they were constructed but you could hardly fly through them. Necessary illusions must be maintained. “Where’s he gone now, the bastard?” Radar lock had been long abandoned. Mishcondereya kept track of the labouring cathedral, sometimes invisible within the thrashing cloud of Saints and Angels, by line of sight, seat of pants, twitch of ovary and luck. She momentarily caught Harx’s fortress in her peripheral vision, enveloped in the tentacles of PREMGEE, the World-Devouring Squid.

“Woo hoo!” she whooped and threw the airship into an immediate rolling dive after him. Lift bags boomed, struts complained, spars groaned. Tremendous fun.

“Bearing two oh two oh niner,” she called to Bladnoch, circling discreetly in UA2 on the trailing edge of the maelstrom. “Delta vee, about twenty squared.” She knew he flew the thing on autopilot and liked to intimidate him with technicalese.

“Moving in,” Bladnoch said, calmly. From the high steering turret he watched Mishcondereya plunge into the heart of Gotterdammerung. He wondered what the people on the ground were making of it all and what lies the media were being fed to explain just why the Rider of the Many-Headed Beast had chosen this day and their neighbourhood to duke it out with the Seven Sanctas. Whatever, he felt a glow of proprietorial pride. One of his better efforts. Oh definitely. He could almost feel good about it. Bladnoch tried to work out how he could slip it into his cv, then raised control on the communicator.

“Yuh?” Weill said, delighted by the tag-team wrestling match between the Two Lone Swordsmen and several scaley members of the Circus of Heaven unfolding like a summer squall over Nanerl Canton. Who would have thought the forces of divine order harboured such spectacular anarchy?

“Weill, I have to have more weather.”

“I’m giving you all the weather I can, man.”

“We lose cloud, we lose everything, friend. We’re bollock naked.”

“Have you any idea how much this is costing?”

“Since when have you been concerned about the taxpayer’s dollar?”

Seskinore took over the line. In addition to his preperformance rituals, he had popped a tab of tephranol filched from Weill’s supplies and was now as convinced of his own omnipotence as the Panarch himself. More so. He could order the Panarch about: look, there He goes. Loop-a-da-loop, Ancient of Days.

“Whatever it costs, you will have it,” he said, plummily. There was nothing he could not do now, no benison he could not grant, he held elemental forces in his hands and made them dance and sing. A million people were watching the products of his genius, gobemouche with wonder, and they loved him, they loved him. Even if they did not know who he was, they loved him. A stage! A stage worthy of the great Seskinore at last. He tabbed up Mishcondereya. “My dear, timing! Timing! The very soul of comedy!”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, you’re a little bit late on your shadowing. Skerry has to get back out again.”

“Ses, they’ve got Gatlings down there and they’re not averse to using them,” Mishcondereya said, thinking, pillock, but she took the little ship in close through a phalanx of Spiritual Spearmen. The proximity alarm and Weill’s shouted warning blasting her eardrum came simultaneously. By instinct alone, Mishcondereya threw the sky yacht out of the way of the six blinding streaks of light that burned over her head and in the same instant were gone.

“Bladnoch, what the hell you playing at?” she yelled as she fought to avoid ramming the Great Pantechnicon amidships.

“Not mine, Mishcon. Those were hundred percent corporeal. Solid.”

“I’ll tell you what they were,” Weill said grimly. “Waves five and six. Our Mr. Harx has just upped the ante.”

Sweetness and Pharaoh ran pell-mell up the gently curving corridor that Sweetness’s infallible train sense told her led to Devastation Harx’s presence chamber. Hell and urine, it was only a few days since she had last been here. Full days admittedly, but how much can you forget? She stood before the double doors, hand resting on the door pad.

“This is the place,” she said.

“Definitely?” Pharaoh asked, faithlessly.

“Hundred percento,” Sweetness said and palmed the door release. “See?”

In those few days since she had last stood in the presence chamber, much had befallen that beautiful room. The wooden cressets had tumbled, the horse-shoe table smashed in the middle by a falling beam, the thirteen chairs scattered and broken-backed. Sweetness walked to the centre across a carpet of glassite shards. She looked up through the shattered dome, shading her eyes against the white glare of the fog.

“What the…?”

Pharaoh was working at the door, wedging the handles with broken chair-backs. He looked up at Sweetness’s exclamation.

“What is it?”

“I thought I saw…I don’t know, couldn’t be, an angel. Looking right in at me.”

“Nothing would surprise me about this place,” Pharaoh said. “Or you. There. That should hold them for a while.”

Sweetness surveyed the grandeur of the devastation of the beautiful room.

“Mother’a’mercy, those boys could chuck dynamite,” she opined. “Where do you start in this mess?”

“Lid like a winged helmet,” Pharaoh said.

“Yuh.”

“It could be over there.”

The wooden altar piece had been added to the furnishings after Sweetness’s visit and had been miraculously spared the destruction, as they often are as a sure sign of their divinity. A lot of purple acolyte hours had been put into it, the triptych of St. Catherine on Motherworld, St. Catherine planting the Tree of World’s Beginning with pressure-gloved fingers in the regolith of Chryse and St. Catherine the Mortified as a translucent woman in a floaty frock was vigorous if naive. The five radiating arms bore miniatures from the Reality Wars, teen cybersoldiers with mirror shades and wires in their heads, fleets of logic bombers dodging slashing lasers, grim-faced space-marines hacking their way into orbital habitats with power axes. They were more crudely rendered but had the energy and zeal of the eye of faith guiding the hand of paint. Crucified to the central spine, haloed by festival fairy lights and stick-on fake jewels was the Catherine canister. It could not have been more obvious if it had had a banner hanging over it announcing Catherine of Tharsis , right here, right now.

“You know, I’m having second thoughts about saving you,” Sweetness said as she started to climb the rickety edifice. Her desert boots dislodged self-adhesive cabochons, flaked chips of lovingly applied paint. “You are too damn smart for your own good, son.”

“Then you be spread all over Canton Semb like cashew butter,” Pharaoh said.

“I’d’ve been all right, I’m a story,” Sweetness said, reaching for the reliquary.

“Yeah? Happy ending or sad ending?”

At which moment, Pharaoh’s barricaded door quivered.

Outside, in the curving corridor, Skerry cursed.

“Agh!” She beat her palms against it in frustration. “When will something go right today?” She stepped back, too short a run, put her solid shoulder to it. The double doors bulged. Wood splintered.