In best guerrilla fashion Shannon Ysangani’s squad tippy-toed through the alleys of Desolation Road. Occasional glass craters commemorated those who had trusted too much in their defence canopies. On the corner of Blue Lane a fighting machine came smashing its way through Singh Singh Singh and Maclvor’s Law Offices. As her troops faded into invisibility Shannon Ysangani found she and Trooper Murtagh Melintzakis separated from their comrades. Shannon Ysangani hid her invisible self in the porch of New Paradise Tea Rooms and watched the turrets swing left and right, left and right, searching out lives to extinguish. Evil machines. She thought she could even discern the helmeted crews at their battle stations. Her terror of the metal thing had paralyzed her military sense, she was no more capable of attacking it than of attacking a childhood iron nightmare. Not so Trooper Murtagh Melintzakis. His childhood sleep must have been untroubled, for he slipped out of invisibility, raised his field inducer to attack, and the turret muzzle which by sheer misfortune happened to be pointing at him spat point-blank subquantal fury over him. The novalight bleached every centimetre of exposed paintwork on the corner of Blue and Chrysanthemum. The neons on the empty hotels spasmed with brief luminescent rememberance and, lightscatter circuits temporarily overloaded, the remnants of Group Green appeared as vague translucent ghosts. Shannon Ysangani screamed a panicked order to split up and escaped down Blue Alley.
“Hey, nice shooting, Baby Bear! Like, nice shooting!”
Gunner Johnston M’bote grinned and spat simultaneously, a feat uniquely his by dint of no one wishing to duplicate it.
“Nothing really. Just pointing it the right way at the right time. Hey!” Wandering eyeballs registered movement on one of the tiny monochrome televisions. “Hey, there’s a bogie getting away!”
“Oh, let her go…”
“But she’s an enemy! I want to shoot her.”
“You go easy with the T.B., Baby Bear, you’ll shoot one of our legs off if you’re not careful.”
“The hell I will!” said Johnston M’bote huffily.
He vented his ill feelings on the facade of the New Paradise Tea Rooms with a handful of rounds from his 88mm cannon before Daddy Bear (in reality Sub-commander Gabriel O’Byrne) jawed him over the waste of ammunition. So he treated himself to a good scratch deep inside his fetid underwear and Fighting Machine T27, Eastern Enlightenment, lurched off to support the big firefight around the gates of Steeltown, in the process accidentally and without malice cleaving away half the Stalin household and the whole of the Stalin wife with one careless swing of its two o’clock foot.
“Hey, there’s a guy down there!” Johnston M’bote could see him through the gunslits in the belly-turret, a curiously foreshortened Mr. Stalin waving fists of impotent fury at the fighting machine that had just killed his wife of twenty years.
“A what?”
“A guy down there, Daddy Bear.”
“Looks like he owned the house you just smashed through, Daddy Bear,” chirped Mummy Bear from the glamour of the top turret. Johnston M’bote only knew Mummy Bear by his querulous voice on the interphone. He had never seen him, but suspected some kind of rivalry between number one bombardier and commander. Come to think of it, he’d never seen the commander either.
“A what?” said Daddy Bear again.
“A guy, down there, in a big big patch of beans,” said Johnston M’bote, ideally poised to witness what happened next. “You know, I think we should be kind of like… careful, you know, like you’re always warning me to be…. Oh. Well.”
“What, Baby Bear?”
“Nothing Daddy Bear.”
T27, Eastern Enlightenment Daddy Bear, Mummy Bear, and Baby Bear hot-legged it over to Green Street with Mr. Stalin an unfortunate smear on the two o’clock leg.
“Holy Catherine! Do you know what you just did?” shrieked Mummy Bear, and proceeded to tell his commander at such length and in such detail that Johnston M’bote patched out the recriminatory bickering and danced his little jigajig finger dance to “Tombolova Street Serenade” by Hamilton Bohannon and his Rhythm Aces. War was fun again.
Fun pounding at the sand-bagged emplacement with his cannon, fun straddling fleeing guerrillas and incinerating them with a “zap!” from his TBs, fun even when it was scary, when he heard the crew on T32, Absalom’s Peach, all die live on his earphones in a pother of confusion over targets.
“I tell you there’s no one there!”
“There’s got to be!”
“The computer says…”
“Stuff the computer!”
“Stuff you! Look, see! I was right, there isssgrzhggmmstphughzzsss…” And T32, Absalom s Peach, took a full field inducer burst from a Whole Earth Army boy soldier that spattered its Daddy Bear and Mummy Bear and Little Baby Bear up into the air in a fountain of metal shards and red rain.
Watching the death of Ahsaloms Peach, Johnston M’bote felt an unaccustomed sensation in his head. It was an original thought, an insight and a clear sign that his preordained existence was approaching the end of the tracks. It took him so by surprise, this original thought, that it was almost a full minute before he thumbed for Daddy Bear.
“Oh, Big Bear,” he sang, “I think we are dealing with an invisible enemy.” Daddy Bear sputtered and gurgled on the interphone, a commander promoted beyond the level of his competence.
“Well, has anyone got heat goggles?” Mummy Bear had left his with his stick of insect repellent in his tent. A bitter argument ensued. Johnston M’bote slipped his pair on and assumed the semblance of a dyspeptic owl. The fuzzy monochrome haze which he perceived paid almost immediate dividend.
“Hey! Daddy Bear! Daddy Bear! I’ve got a bogie! A real live bogie!”
“Where?”
“Port side, one hostile…” He liked using military expressions.
The name of the bogie was Shannon Ysangani.
“Come on, let’s get her, there she goes…… Dangling from the belly hatch twenty metres up in the smoke-filled air, Gunner Johnston M’bote steered the fighting machine with directions bawled into his helmet interphone. Faithful and obedient, the fighting machine stomped through the abandoned west wing of the Mandella hacienda, popping open like a peapod that most secret room which Grandfather Haran had locked and cursed never to be opened again.
Dust sifted down onto the heads of the Mandella dynasty hiding in the deepest sub-cellar. The rocks shuddered and groaned. Half delirious from his ride with Charley Horse, Rael Mandella Jr. hallucinated his days of leadership in the Great Strike and Kwai Chen Pak hurried to soothe his rantings with herb tea. Eva, working blithely at her loom, selected a pick of flame-red yarn from her combs and declared, “All this will have to go into the tapestry.”
Fighting machine T27, Eastern Enlightenment, stood at attention in the Mandellas’ central courtyard, spraying steam from its pressure valves. Smoke blew around the turret and endowed it with an otherworldly, malign intelligence.
“You see anything down there, M’bote?”
Gunner M’bote hung out of his belly-blister, probing with his goggles the great steam and smoke thrown up from the edge of Steeltown, where Parliamentarians and Whole Earth Army defenders had broken upon each other like clashing waves. A shimmering vagueness moved through the monochrome murk.
“Yep! There she is! Shoot her someone!” Mummy Bear swung creakingly around to comply; Daddy Bear raised the murderous two o’clock foot to stomp.
The nature of Shannon Ysangam’s belief in God had changed fundamentally in the past few minutes from Benign Big Softie who apportioned to some slightly more luck than justice demanded, to a Mean and Vengeful Old Fisherman who would not let a victim off his line. It had been luck when Murtagh Melintzakis was burned in place of her. It was vengeance now that she could not shake the agent of that burning off her. The fighting machine was playing with her. There was even some punk of a crewman hanging out of his turret tracking her every twitch with heat goggles. And her brilliant invisibility was as useless as her defence canopy. All that remained was for her to fight and die as Murtagh Melintzakis had.