She loved the way the soldiers ran like chickens from the snap snap snap of her tachyon blasters. She loved the purity of the blue-white beams and the bright flowers of the explosions as she destroyed offices, storage tanks, trucks, bunkers, draglines, solar collectors. She’d loved it from the instant she’d pressed the firing buttons and sent two Class 88 haulers, fifty wagons and two engineers up in a blaze of subquantal fusion.
“Boom!” she sang, and pressed the firing studs. Behind her three parked cargo ’lighters exploded in gouts of fire.
“Whee!” she cried, and banked the Yamaguchi and Jones for another pass. Her radio crackled and a familiar voice hissed in her ear.
“Perssiss, dear, it’ssss me. Jimmmm Jericho, you know?”
“Yah, I know,” she shouted. Her tachyon blasters cut long smoking gashes through Steeltown. Chimneys collapsed, pipework tumbled.
“Immmportant infffformation. Desssolattttiion Road isss under occupattttion, repeat, under occupattttion, by the Whole Earthhhh Army Tactical Group, repeat, Whole Earthhhh Army Tactical Group. Company isss defffeated, repeat, defeated.” A fan of missiles broke from ground and homed in on her.
“Kaboom!” she said and vaporized them. “Defeated?”
“Yesss. Am sssspeaking to you ffffrom the Bar/Hhhotel on illegal rrradio sssett. Sssuggessst you attack military targetsss, repeat, military targetssss. Arnie Tenebrae in command.”
She passed low over Desolation Road again and saw the trenches and dugouts. She flew over the bluffs and saw there the crucified bodies and the sunshiny helmets of the soldiers in their cliffside positions. Arnie Tenebrae? Here?
“Angel Group, reform,” she ordered.
“Good girl,” hissed Mr. Jericho, and broke transmission. Angels green and blue fell into arrowhead formation behind her. Good kids. She briefed them on the new situation.
“Check,” said Callan Lefteremides.
“Check,” said her brother Venn.
Angel flight turned as one and closed on the Whole Earth Army positions. They flew scant metres above the desert. Wingtip tachyon-blasters snipped at the defences, missiles burst from the revetments toward them.
“Angel green angel green, missile on your…” A Long Brothers Type 337 “Phoenix” surface-to-air missile, fired in panic by one Private Cassandra 0. Miccini, caught Venn Lefteremides, and blew the tail clean off his Yamaguchi and Jones. Angel green rolled into a death spiral and crashed in the middle of the abandoned new housing complex beyond the railroad lines.
Persis Tatterdemalion thought she had seen the flutter of a parachute. So, Arnie Tenebrae, this is for you. She turned the nose of her airplane Steeltownwards and thumbed the firing studs.
Arnie Tenebrae watched the air strike from her window with curious admiration.
“They’re good. Awfully good,” she mused as the two survivors of Tatterdemalion’s Flying Circus skipped in at rooftop height to launch another tachyon strike into Steeltown.
“Ma’am, don’t you think you should move away from such an exposed position?” suggested Leonard Hecke.
“Certainly not,” said Arnie Tenebrae. “They can’t harm me. Only the Avenger can harm me.”
Out in the Land of Crystal Ferrotropes the Avenger Marya Quinsana watched the dogfight.
“Whoever they are, they’re very good. Get a check on the registration numbers. I want to know who’s flying them.”
“Certainly. Marshall, a communication from the town, from the hostages.” Albie Vessarian, a fawning sycophant destined never to stop a bullet, handed her a memo from telecommunications and hurried to comply with her order to identify the pirate aircraft.
She scanned the communique. Temporal weapons? She threw the flimsy away and returned to the air attack in time to see Venn Lefteremides roll, crash and burn.
“So,” she breathed. “This is it. Order the attack!” Fifteen seconds later the second attacker was shot down and crashed into the Basilica of the Grey Lady.
“Order the attack!” shouted General Emiliano Murphy.
“Order the attack!” shouted Majors Lee and Wo.
“Order the attack!” shouted assorted captains, lieutenants, and sublieutenants.
“Attack!” shouted the sergeants and group leaders, and forty-eight longlegged fighting machines took their ponderous first steps toward Desolation Road.
“Ma’am, the Parliamentarians are attacking.”
Arnie Tenebrae received the news with such phlegm that Lennard Hecke thought she had not heard.
“Ma’am, the Parliamentarians…”
“I heard you, soldier.” She continued shaving her scalp, scything away great meadows of hair until her head gleamed naked beneath the sun. She regarded herself in a mirror. The result pleased her. Now she was the personification of war, the Vastator. Avenger beware. She spoke unhurriedly into her whisper-mike.
“This is the commander. The enemy is attacking with unconventional armoured forces employing tachyonic weaponry: all units exercise extreme caution in engaging. Major Dhavram Mantones, I want the time winder running.”
Dhavram Mantones came on the thimble-phone, crackling and distressed.
“Ma’am, the Temporal Inversion is untested: we’re still doubtful about one of the operands in the equation; it could be plus or minus.”
“I’ll be there in three minutes.” To her forces at large she said, “Well, this is it, boys and girls. This is war!” As she gave the order to attack, the first explosions came from the perimeter positions.
62
Gunner Johnston M’bote was one of those inevitable people whose lives are like steam trains, capable only of forward motion in a limited direction. Personifications of predestination, such people are doubly cursed with an utter ignorance of the inevitability of their lives and thunder past those countless other lives that stand by the side of the track and wave to the proud express train. Yet those standers by the track know exactly where it is that the train is going. They know where the tracks lead. The train lives merely hurtle onward, uncaring, unenlightened. Thus Mrs. January M’bote knew the instant the district midwife presented her with her ugly, nasty little seventh son that no matter what he made or did not make of his life he was destined to be a number two belly-gunner in a Parliamentarian fighting machine in the battle of Desolation Road. She saw where the tracks led.
As a child Johnston M’bote was small, and he remained small as an adolescent, just the perfect size to be rolled up into the belly turret slung beneath the insect body of the fighting machine like a misplaced testicle. His head was round and flat on top, just the perfect shape for an army helmet; his dispositon darting and nervous (labelled “hair-trigger” by the army psychologists), ten out of ten for suitability; his hands long and slender, almost feminine, and quite the best shape for the admittedly tricky firing controls of the new Mark 27 Tachyon equipment. And he possessed an I.Q. of such fence-post density that he was unemployable in any profession that demanded the slightest glimmer of creativity. One of Creation’s natural belly-turret gunners, Johnston M’bote was doomed to begin with.
Little enough Johnston M’bote knew of this. He was having too much fun. Curled like a foetus in the clanking, swaying, oil-smelly metal blister, he peered down through the gunslits at the lurching desert beneath him and sent streamers of heavy machine-gun fire arching across the leprous sand. The effect pleased him greatly. He could not wait to see what it looked like when he used it on people. He squinted up at the views in the eye-level television monitors. A lot of a lot of red desert. Legs swung, the fighting machine heaved. Gunner Johnston M’bote spun round and round in his steel testicle and fought with the urge to press the little red trigger in front of him. That was the fire control for the big tachyon blaster. He had been warned against its indiscriminate use: it wasted energy, and the commander did not entirely trust him not to shoot the legs off the fighting machine by mistake. Stamp stamp, sway sway. His Uncle Asda had once owned a camel and the one ride he had taken on the bad-tempered thing had felt very much like the rolling gait of the fighting machine. Johnston M’bote strode to war in twenty-metre boots with the Big Swing Sound of Glenn Miller and his Orchestra blowing soul in both earphones. He rolled his shoulders and poked alternate forefingers into the air, up down, up down; the only kind of dancing possible in the belly turret of a Mark Four Fighting Machine. If this was war, thought Johnston M’bote, war was terrific.