“God damn you, God!” she cried solipsistically as she scrambled toward Fortress Steeltown with the fighting machine smashing a path of relentless pursuit. “God damn you God damn you God damn you!”
The big guns were swinging, the ugly little monkey-man pointing, the foot was rising, and she did not, categorically not, never no way not, want to end in fire the way that ten-year-old boy-soldier had ended, a shriek of agonized plasma. As she raised her field-inducer to fight, she realised how weary she was of killing things. Tired, sick, disillusioned. Stupid monkey-man was gibbering from his hatchway and she did not want to kill him.
“I don’t even know you,” she whispered. Yet to do anything else would be to end in fire. The contact closed. The instant before her defence canopy dropped for attack a pulverizing steel kick drove her against the llama-shed wall. The shot shied wide, the defence bubble popped, and Shannon Ysangani smashed into the all-too-solid adobe masonry. Body-things cracked and crunched inside her; she tasted steel and brass. In a vague miasma of semi-awareness she saw that her shot had not missed altogether. She had blasted away the upper gun turret, gunner and gun. Steam and oil fountained from the metal wound like heartblood. She giggled a rib-gyrating giggle and went dark.
“Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit…”
Curled up for safety in his comfortable fun belly-turret, Johnston M’bote scarcely heard his commander’s execrations.
“I got you, oh, I got you, I got you you bitch bastard whore, I got you I got you…” Johnston M’bote’s tongue poked beneath his teeth as he whispered furious glee to himself and spun his little brass wheels and verniers. “Oh, I got you, lady!” He pointed his big weapon at the woman lying in a cracked pile of adobe bricks. “I got you…” What was Daddy Bear shouting? Didn’t he know how hard it was to shoot with the damn fighting machine swaying and heaving like a Saturday night drunk? Warning? What the hell about? Cross-hairs glowed, perfect target. Gunner Johnston M’bote pressed the little red button.
“Zap!” he shouted, and in a dazzling flash blasted the ten o’clock leg clean off.
“Damn it,” he said.
“You stupid bastard!” shrieked Daddy Bear. “I warned you, I said be careful…” T27, Eastern Enlightenment, tottered like a tree on the edge of a precipice. Metal shrieked and clanged, gyro stabilizers howled as they fought to hold the fighting machine upright, then failed, catastrophically, unequal to the test. With majestic, balletic grace, the fighting machine toppled, tachyon blasters firing wildly in all directions, steam exploding from the wrecked joints, and smashed itself open on the adamant earth of Desolation Road. In the closing seconds of his plummet Johnston M’bote was permitted to see that his whole life had been directed toward this moment of glorious annihilation. In the instant before the belly-turret popped and he was crushed beneath the weight of falling metal like a ripe plum, Johnston M’bote saw back to the moment of his birth and realized as he saw his perfectly shaped head emerging from between his mother’s thighs that he had been doomed to begin with. He felt a sense of deep deep disgust. Then he felt nothing ever again.
Oscillating across the boundary between pain and consciousness, Sublieutenant Shannon Ysangani saw the behemoth fall, brought low by its own weapon. She felt a great, agonizing, flesh-tearing fit of giggling boil up inside her.
Buried five levels deep beneath Steeltown in her time-transport centre, Arnie Tenebrae, too, saw the behemoth fall. To her it was a more colourful fragment from the mosaic of war. Her wall of television monitors presented her with war in all its many colours, and Arnie Tenebrae savoured each, eyes flicking from monitor to monitor to monitor; quick, brief encounters with war, jealous of losing so much as an instant of the War Between the Powers.
The Vastator turned her attention from the televised massacre to the time winder in the middle of the floor.
“How long now?”
“Two minutes. We’re hooking up the field generators to the fusion tokamak now.”
A cry came from the observers monitoring the monitors.
“Ground troops! They’re sending in ground troops!”
Arnie Tenebrae spun her attention back to the picture wall. A thin white skirmish line was slipping effortlessly through the trenchways toward Steeltown. The fighting machines’ artillary provided withering cover. She thumbed up the magnification and saw familiar bulky packs on white Parliamentarian shoulders.
“Clever clever clever Marya Quinsana,” she whispered, so that no one would hear and think her insane. “You’ve the measure of me pretty close, but not quite neat enough.” Weapons-fire reached her ears like the sound of childhood pop guns as skirmishers fell upon defenders. A pop-gun war, a liedown-for-twenty-seconds-you’re-dead war, and when it was all over everyone would get up and go home for their dinners. Field-inducers hammered at fieldinducers until the tachyon equipment on board the fighting machines spoke and declared game over for today and always.
“Ready to go!” shouted Dhavram Mantones.
“Then we’ll do it, shall we?” said Arnie Tenebrae, Vastator. She shouldered her battle pack. Dhavram Mantones threw the handswitch that diverted all the power from the Steeltown tokamak into the time winder. The eons opened up before Arnie Tenebrae like a mouth, and she threw herself into the chasm in a cascade of afterimages.
Then reality ended.
63
The first that Mr. Jericho and the refugees in the Bar/Hotel knew of the end of reality was when they found themselves bobbing against the ceiling. Though separated at the time of the air strike, they had all come together by means of the tunnels and caves that honeycombed the rocks beneath Desolation Road: no sooner had worried greetings been exchanged than they found tables, cups, carpets, bottles and chairs floating around their ears. Kaan Mandella chased after the beer-crate radio transmitter in a kind of unsteady breast-stroke beneath the roof beams. Rajandra Das anchored himself to the pelmet and peered upside down out of the window. Attackers, defenders, life-careless camera teams, llamas, pigs and pie dogs were floating around the eaves of the houses. Halfway down the street, gravity seemed to have reversed completely, houses, trees, animals, soldiers, earth and rocks were falling into the sky. In the other direction three empty hotels and the Excelsior Curry House were submerged in a huge red sand dune. A dark shadow fell across the free-fall street; something big as a barn, blocky and dirty orange, was flying over Desolation Road.
“What is going on?”
Mr. Jericho’s Exalted Ancestors had been arguing deep in his hypothalamus as he bobbed against the candle brackets. Their final conclusion was appalling.
“They must have got the time winder to work.”
“It wasn’t like this when Dr. A used it.”
Half the room could not understand what Rajandra Das and Mr. Jericho were talking about.
“Alimantando kept his Temporal Inversion Formula a secret: Tenebrae’s engineers must have guessed wrong. Instead of creating fluidity through time, they’ve created a zone of temporal fluidity here, now, and reality is breaking down. The laws of space-time are bending, and I think pieces of alternative universes are being superimposed onto this one.”