Desolation Road

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.

A military issue boot, made by Hammond and Tew of New Merionedd, pounded heavily on the ceiling hatch three times; thump thump thump, accompanied by a muffled half-heard stream of abuse. Gunner Johnston M’bote thumbed at his radio channel selector. “…to Baby Bear, Daddy Bear to Baby Bear, what’n’hellyouplayingatdowntheredon’tyouknowthere’sawar—youdumbstupidsonofa… target bearing zero point four degrees declination, fifteen degrees.” Tongue protruding in unprecedented concentration, Gunner M’bote spun little brass wheels and verniers and aligned the big tachyon blaster on the unremarkable section of red cliff face.

“Baby Bear to Daddy Bear, I have the target all set; now what you want me should do?”

“Daddy Bear to Baby Bear, fire when ready. Holy God, how dumb…”

“Okay Daddy Bear.” Johnston M’bote gleefully pressed both thumbs to the much anticipated little red button.

“Zap!” he shouted. “Zap, you bastards!”

Sub-lieutenant Shannon Ysangani was withdrawing her combat group as per orders from Arnie Tenebrae from the perimeter positions (which smelled oppressively of urine and electricity) to the Blue Alley revetments, when the Parliamentarians vaporized the entire New Glasgow Brigade. She and her fifteen combat troops constituted the sole two percent that survived. Shannon Ysangani had been leading her section past the front of the jolly Presbyter Pilgrim Hostel, when an unusual brilliant light from an unusual angle threw an unusually black shadow against the adobe walls. She had just time to marvel at the shadow, and the way the red and blue neon jolly Presbyter suddenly lit up (a hitherto-undiscovered electromagnetic pulse side effect of the tachyon devices), when the blast picked up her body and soul and smashed her into the facade of the Pilgrim Hostel and, by means of a finale, brought walls, ceiling and fat neon Presbyter himself down on top of her.

But for her defence canopy Shannon Ysangani would have been smeared like potted meat. As it was, she was englobed within a black bubble of collapsed masonry. She explored the smooth perimeter of her prison with blind fingertips. The air smelled of energy and stale sweat. Two choices. She could remain under the jolly Presbyter until she was rescued or her air ran out. She could drop her defence canopy (possibly all that was keeping multitons of Jolly Presbyter from crushing her, like a boorish lover) and punch her way out with field-inducers on offensive. Those were the choices. She had fought enough battles to know that they were not as simple as they appeared. The ground shuddered as if one of the ineffable footsteps of the Panarch had fallen on Desolation Road; there was another, and another, and another. The fighting machines were moving.

She could not believe the ease with which the Parliamentarians had broken through the perimeter defences. She could not believe so much death and annihilation could have been contained in such a short flash of light. The earth shook to a sustained concussion. Another flare of light, another annihilation. She found she could not believe in this new death either. War was too much like the Sunday night thriller on the radio to be credible for what it was. Another blast. The Jolly Presbyter settled with a heavy grunt on top of Shannon Ysangani. Someone must carry the news of the destruction back to headquarters. A voice she barely recognised as duty nagged at her. Do your duty… do your duty… do your duty… Shock. Explosion, close by. Thud thud thud, the metal boots of a fighting machine close by, what if one comes down on top of me, will my defence canopy hold up? Duty, do your…

“All right! All right!” She knelt in the darkness beneath the smothering corpulence of the jolly Presbyter, checking her fire controls by touch. She wanted to be sure, sure, and sure again. She would get only the one shot. Shannon Ysangani sighed a short, resigned puff of a sigh and collapsed her defence canopy. The debris groaned and settled. Creaking, crashing… she brought the field-inducer up and punched a full power burst through to the sunlight.

It might have been a different world she stepped out into. The entire southeast end of Desolation Road lay in tumbled smoking ruins. Glowing glass craters, nine-rayed like St. Catherine’s starburst, gave testimony to the punishing effectiveness of the Parliamentarians’ new weapon. They had passed this way in force, their behemoth fighting machines, creatures of childhood iron nightmares, stood astride streets and buildings, hissing steam from their joints and trading ponderous artillery barrages with crannies of Whole Earth Army resistance entrenched along First Street. The Parliamentarians’ passage through the outer defences had flattened the town like a rice field before a whirlwind. Yet their advance had not gone totally unopposed. Like a dead spider beneath a boot, the command turret of a fighting machine lay smashed open in a tangle of metal legs. Shannon Ysangani flicked for her defence canopy, then paused. In this kind of war, perhaps invisibility would be a better tactic, operating on the principle of what can’t be seen can’t be shot at. She thumbed open her section’s radio channel and called the survivors to her. The few were fewer. Twelve out of fifteen, crawling from the chaos in the wake of the battle. Sub-lieutenant Ysangani then thumbed the command channel and made a brief report of losses to Commander Tenebrae.

Arnie Tenebrae sat amid her war staff, fingertips touched together in the attitude of meditative serenity. Ninety-eight percent casualties in the initial engagement and now the Parliamentarians were kicking at the skirting boards of Steeltown. Once ninety-eight percent casualties would have outraged her military sense and sent her shouting brilliant, inspiring orders to her troops. Now she merely sat, fingertips touched together, nodding.

“Orders are revised,” she said when the Sub-lieutenant had finished. “Under no circumstances are troops to use defence canopies. Employ lightscatter and high mobility. You are guerrillas. Be guerrillas.” She cut commu nications with the defenders and turned her whole self to the complex machine-thing humming on the tile floor. “How much longer?”

“Ten, twenty more minutes before we get the power hooked up,” said Dhavram Mantones. “And we’ll have to defend the power source.”

“Order it done.” Arnie Tenebrae suddenly stood up and went to her room. She regarded her painted face in the mirror on the wall. Foolish vanity, she was Deathbird no longer, she was Timebird, the Chronal Phoenix. As she wiped the foolish paint from her face she reflected on the ninety-eight percent casualties on the perimeter dugouts. Meaningless. Plastic soldiers. The defence of the time winder was paramount now, and for it she would gladly embrace hundred percent casualties. Universal death. The concept began to appeal to her.

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.

“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.