“I don’t rightly know,” said Mr. Jericho. “They’re something like the scout walkers ROTECH used to use years back. Tell you one thing, when the action starts, it’s going to get mighty hot around here. Those things are toting tachyon beams.”
The two men swung their shovels and pretended to dig while they watched the ungainly contraptions march around the desert without the slightest attempt at concealment, and they formed the mutual and inescapable conclusion that the end was nigh for Desolation Road.
In forward observation post 5 Arnie Tenebrae was reaching similar conclusions.
“Evaluation?” she asked her aide, Sub-colonel Lennard Hecke.
“Fighting machines, ideally suited to the terrain. I hate to say such things, ma’am, but they could step right over our mine defences.”
“That’s what I thought. Weaponry?”
“Ma’am, I hate to say this too, but…”
“But those tachyon beams could timeslip past our field-inducer defences and punch holes right through our canopies.” She left Lennard to inspect the invincible fighting machines and went in search of Dhavram Mantones. She wished to ascertain the state of her own invincible fighting machine. As she climbed the bluffs she passed the bodies of the two SRBC newsmen who had tried to fly a flag of surrender. Spreadeagled upside down on wooden frames, their bodies were beginning to turn to leather after three days in the sun and smelled abominably. Surrender was not just impermissible, it was inconceivable.
In forward command station Zebra, Marya Quinsana observed the mummifying bodies through field glasses. It was not the barbarism of the execution that shocked her; it was the familiarity of many of the stooped figures at work upon the terraces and fortification. Even the town of Desolation Road itself, that part of it sandwiched between the ugly concrete carbuncle of the basilica and the towering pipeworks of the factory, was unchanged, a messy conglomerate of wind-pumps, flashing solar lozenges, and red tile roofs. She wondered what Morton was doing. She had not seen him at work upon the bluffs, but there were other constructions under progress within the town. She had not thought of him in twelve years. She thought, too, of Mikal Margolis; poor stupid boy who let the wind blow him where it would. She wondered what had become of him after she had left him at the soba bar in Ishiwara Junction.
There would be time enough for reverie afterward. The Whole Earth Army defences looked strong but not so strong, she thought, as to defy her tachyon-beaming fighting machines. She had spent a lot of political capital in obtaining the specifications for ROTECH’s scout walkers from the wise ones of China Mountain and she was confident that the investment would be well spent. Her ground forces outnumbered the opposition three or four to one, her tachyonic weapons systems gave her the edge over the Whole Earth Army field-inducers… It was tempting to toy with notions of victory and ambition. She needed a clear head and a calm constitution. As she left command post Zebra she became aware of a faraway insect drone.
The same sound infringed upon the lunatic perceptions of Arnie Tenebrae while she sat at her desk toying with string. Her mind latched onto the insect drone and forgot to listen to
Dhavram Mantone’s report on the progress in deciphering Dr. Alimantando’s hieroglyphics. Drone, buzz, lazzzy beee in the bonnet of winter-she remembered flower-filled mornings splashing in the irrigation canals, days filled with sun and bee buzz.
“Pardon?”
“We’ve something you might like to take a look at.”
“Show me.”
The drone sat in her ear all the way to Dr. Alimantando’s house and up in the weather-room, thick with dust and littered with half-empty teacups left by Limaal Mandella, her attention kept wandering out of the four windows in airborne pursuit of the drone.
“This is it, ma’am.” Dhavran Mantones pointed to a patch of the faded red scrawling at the precise apex of the ceiling. Arnie Tenebrae stood on the stone table and peered with a hand lens.
“What is it then?”
“We believe it is the Temporal Inversion formula which will render the time winder and anything within its sphere of influence timeloose and chronokinetic. We’re going to try it out this evening.”
“I want to be there.”
Where was that droning coming from? Arnie Tenebrae was beginning to fear it originated from within her own head.
The sound even filtered down to the sub-basement of the Bar/Hotel, where a clandestine resistance meeting was in session. Five souls gathered around a brown wooden box: a radio transmitter built into a packing crate.
“Pray they don’t intercept us,” said Rajandra Das, mindful of crucified television news reporters.
“Have you got them yet?” asked Santa Ekatrina Mandella, dedicated anti-authoritarian. Batisto Gallacelli thumbed the transmit switch again.
“Hello, Parliamentarian forces; hello, Parliamentarian forces; this is Desolation Road, can you hear me, this is Desolation Road.” He repeated his incantation several times and was rewarded by a crackle of voice. The antiliberationists pressed close around the hand-set.
“Hello, this is Free Desolation Road, we warn you, exercise extreme caution, Whole Earth Army in control of temporal displacement weapon: I repeat, be alert for time displacement weapon. Urgent you attack soon as possible to save history. Repeat, urgent you save the future: over ..
The voice crackled an answer. Alone of the five, Mr. Jericho was not concentrating on the static syllables. His attention was fixed on some point beyond the roof.
“Shh.” He palm-downed for hush. ‘There’s something up there.”
“Over and, out,” whispered Batisto Gallacelli, and cut transmission.
“Do you hear it?” Mr. Jericho turned slowly, as if trying to maximize a little lost memory. “I know that sound, I know that sound.” No one else could even hear it through tile, brick and rock. “Engines, air engines… wait a moment, Maybach/Wurt engines, push-pull configuration! She’s come back!”
Heedless of pass laws and illegal congregations, the counter-revolutionaries boiled up out of the sub-basement into the sfreet.
“There!” Mr. Jericho pointed to the sky. “There she is!” Three pinpricks of light winked in midbank and swelled with a breathtaking shout of power into three shark-nosed propeller airplanes. In arrowhead formation the three airplanes pounded over Desolation Road, and as they passed the lead plane snowed leaflets. The streets were instantly full of running guerrillas. They separated the five counter-revolutionaries and drove them into shelter. Mr. Jericho glance-read a leaflet blowing past him in a cloud of dust and prop-wash.
“Tatterdemalion’s Flying Circus Has Come to Town,” it read. “Bethlehem Ares, Beware!” The innocence made him smile. Thirty years old and she still hadn’t learned worldly wisdom, God bless her. The flying circus looped over Desolation Road and came in at roof height. Six ripping explosions tore across the town. Mr. Jericho saw blue-white beams flash from the airplanes’ wingtips and he whistled in blatant admiration.
“Tachyonics! Where in the world did she get tachyonics from?” Then he was hurried into the Bar/Hotel and the soldiers took up rooftop positions to return fire.
As she led her formation in across the railroad lines for a strike at Steeltown, Persis Tatterdemalion realized she was having the time of her life.
“Angels green and blue,” she sang, “commence second attack run.”
There had been no escaping. Ed was gone and gone was Ed, but she could fly over the edge of the universe and never be far enough away to forget about him. Even in Wollamurra Station there had been no escaping. There had been a filling with craziness instead, a craziness that found her two crop-spraying punks out of jobs to fly the two stunters she’d bought from Yamaguchi and Jones, equip them with the very latest in military technology, and make a crazy, name-of-love attack first on a Bethlehem Ares Steel train chuffing across the High Plains and then on the slag-black heart of the dreamgrinding Company itself, fortress Steeltown. She waggled her wings and the flying circus closed behind her.