“Find him!” cried Taasmin Mandella, and the angels howled off along the steel canyons of Steeltown to comply. Taasmin Mandella’s halo flashed again and it seemed to the watching eyes that her cumbersome dress melted and changed shape, clinging close to her thin form, and that as she leaped from the platform to give chase herself, her mask flew to her hand and transmuted into a potent weapon.
Pandemonium reigned in Corporation Plaza. Leaderless, the demonstration surged and panicked. The Pilgrimage of Grace was a rabble. Its fury and terror had defeated it. Armed security men appeared on rooftops and walkways and drew a hail of stones. They readied their weapons but did not open fire. Rael Mandella Jr. made to stand and calm the boiling crowd but JeanMichel Gastineau pushed past him.
“They’ll shoot you like a dog,” he said. “This is my moment. This is what I was commanded to do.” He took a deep breath and released all his mutant sarcasm in one searing satire.
Though not directed at them, the people nevertheless felt the edge of his tongue. Some screamed, some wept, some fainted, some vomited, some bled from guilty wounds the sarcasm had opened up. He swept the beam of his satire across the security positions and there were moans and cries as the armed men realized what they were, what they had done. Some could not bear the shame and threw themselves off their high watchplaces. Others turned their own weapons on themselves or their comrades; others broke down into hysterical weeping at the words of the Amazing Scorn. Some shrieked, some gibbered, some vomited as if by vomiting they could spew out all the self-hate the little man on the steps made them feel, some voided their bowels and their bladders, some fled screaming from Steeltown into the desert and were never seen again, some collapsed in blood and broken bones as the sarcasm ripped them open and shattered their limbs.
Having humbled the armed might of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation, the Amazing Scorn turned his tongue toward the high balcony, where the directors of the Company hid themselves away. In an instant Fat Director, Thin Director and Middling Muscular Director were reduced to shuddering blobs of remorse.
“Oh stop stop stop,” they pleaded, choking on their own bile and vomit, but the satire went on and on and on, slashing and cutting at every dark and shameful deed they had ever done. The satire ripped clothes to shreds, slit bodies open in long deep bleeding gashes, and the mighty Directors screamed and howled but the words cut cut cut at them, cut and slashed until there was nothing but dead, slashed meat and blubber on the horribly expensive carpet.
Johnny Stalin’s robot proxy watched the quivering heaps of meat with contempt mingled with puzzlement. He could not understand what had happened save that the Directors had been weak and found wanting in some incomprehensible way. He was not weak, he was not wanting, for being a robot, he was immune to sarcasm. It was intolerable that the Directors of the Company could be so weak when he and his kind were so strong. He put out a neutrino-pulse call to his machine comrades to call them together at their earliest convenience for an emergency meeting to save the Company from itself.
On the steps jean-Michel Gastineau fell silent. His mutant sarcasm had humbled the Bethlehem Ares Corporation. The people rose from their crouches, shaken, stunned, uncomprehending. He looked at the children dressed in virginal white, the poor, idiotic Dumbletonians, the shaken artisans and shopkeepers, the reporters and cameramen whose lenses had been cracked and microphones shattered when he released his full mutant power; he looked at the bums and the goondahs and the poor foolish people, and he felt pity.
“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.
58
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.