Ares Express (29 page)

Devastation Harx had weapons other than partacs.

She turned to see two ripples in the sand racing toward her, like the bow-waves of some inverted or invisible ship that sailed a sea of sand.

Across the Big Red they arrowed, straight and true and perfectly parallel and terrifyingly fast. The tremble became a shudder became a quaking. The sand beneath Sweetness's boots liquefied, she sank ankle, shin, knee deep. In instants the swift burrowers had crossed the open plain across which Sweetness had sailed that afternoon, and plunged into the dune on which she stood. Sweetness dived and rolled as the side of the dune exploded into twin geysers of sand. A glimpse was all she had. A glimpse was enough. Mantis beaked, twin-engined turbo-powered, all spikes, spines and sensor eyes. Hunting machines: fast and pointy. Very pointy: the drive canards carried twin impaling spines, glittering chromed steel in the blue of magic hour. The heads swivelled, the many eyes locked on. The twin hunters pulled a multigee turn into an ear-shattering climb.

Sweetness scraped sand out of her face, yelled the classic warning.

“Behind you! Look behind you!”

Euphrasie, balanced delicately on his board, turned, stick in hand. The lead hunter took him fast and clean on its port nacelle. The impact should have torn him in half. Layer upon layer of tough desert clothing saved him but he was pinned like a collector's dust moth, the bloodsmeared spear run through him to two thirds its length. As if she too had been savagely impaled, a terrible, incoherent wail was driven out of Sweetness. She watched the hunter sweep Euphrasie high into the air. Captainless, the gravboard went spinning down to earth. Vertical now; and Sweetness understood the killing thing's strategy. A backward roll at the apex of the climb and Euphrasie would slide down the spike, lubricated by his own blood, into a kilometre of airspace. But he still clung to the stick of explosive, and with a final, defiant snap at the hounds of God, he struck fire. Sweetness saw a thin wisp of smoke, then man and machine went up in a terminal blossom of white fire. Numb, dumb, she watched shattered scraps of meat and metal punch clean through the dirigible canopy in gaping, smoking holes to rain, smouldering, on the red sand.

Now Cadmon battled the second terminator. This was no swift, sharp victory. Seeing his enemy upon him, Cadmon thrust his boots deeply into the footstraps, seized the mast with all his main and went down over the edge of the canopy in a one-eighty vertical flip. The hunter pulled a high-gee horizontal roll, but those half-seconds were enough for Cadmon to lose it among the sensor booms and vent stacks and lattices of Devastation Harx's soft underbelly. His sense for the wind enabled him to draw more speed from every flaw and fidget that fretted around the airship's complex architecture. Sweetness's cheering, amplified by the anarchic mathematics of chaos theory, spun breezes that breathed a few centimetres per second into his fractal-patterned sail. But he was man and nature against angel and machine. The hunter was forced to keep its speed down to avoid further damaging the ship canopy, but metre by metre, second by second, it was gaining.

“Right! Right!!” Sweetness shouted; then, as the terminator tore through a flapping curtain of blimp-cloth, leaving it in three shreds: “Left! Hard aport!” Cadmon obeyed, not because he heard her, but because the rim was nearing and, in open air, he was kebab. He pulled a one-eighty bank into the
face of the hunter. Too fast: it managed a mere flick of the barbs, then they were past each other. The hunter tumbled end over end, reacquired its target, but Cadmon was ready. He had one-eightied again, and while the hunting angel was picking up speed, he jumped straight between the horns. He caught the edge of its shield, flipped up over the spikes and bosses to come behind the beaked head. It thrashed and gaped at him, trying to snip limbs with its vanadium mandibles, but Cadmon had struggled out of his desert duster and was wrapping the too-many-eyed head with it. The hunter jerked and tossed, flipped upside down, but Cadmon's legs were locked around its chrome throat. The gravboard sailed on out from underneath the capsizing cathedral on a gently rising arc. Two gunners who had not yet abandoned their posts as the cathedral sank lower in the air found it in their firing arcs. Intersecting streams of white tracer shredded the board. But Cadmon the anarchist artist had his fist deep in the machine's skull-wiring. He ripped up a fistful of cable. The hunter let out a scream that Sweetness could hear over the creaking and sobbing of the tormented dirigible. Riding it like a high-plains gaucho a canton rodeo llama, Cadmon tore out another bunch of wiring. Keening madly, the hunter spun like a carousel, trying to throw the anarchist free. His fingers clung like cargo hooks. Sapient enough to understand its end was close, and could only be meaningfully be bought at the price of its destroyer's life, the machine dived blindly for earth. Belly gunners waved arcs of shells at it; Cadmon rode the hunter as he had ridden his board, heaving on the sensor head and rudder vanes to send the shrieking thing dodging between the bullets. Muscles straining like hawsers, he pulled the thing out of its death dive with centimetres to spare. The dune on which Sweetness stood loomed, soft sand as hard as rust. Sweetness saw a steel maw gape for her, then Cadmon pulled it up, up, up. At the last instant leaped from its back. He hit fast. He hit hard. He sent a great bow-wave of sand flying before him; all legs and arms and flapping coat tails, tumbling over and over and over. Blind, guidance wrecked, the hunter climbed on twin pillars of fire from its afterburner. It stabbed a terrible wound through the starboard quadrant of the flying cathedral. It burst from the upper canopy in a gout of engine parts and shredded gas cell. The maimed cathedral lurched lower. Fans beat uselessly at the air. She was going down by the side. Spinning
like a fairground humjundrum, the outer sensor booms brushed the ground and snapped. Sweetness watched the thing wheel toward her, a crushing juggernaut. Ballast vents opened, Devastation Harx dumped tons of water on to the desert to try to keep airborne. The dying hunter-killer blazed starward. At the zenith of its climb, it faltered. Its engines choked, failed. Dead in the air, the hunting angel rolled on to its back. Spinning, it fell to earth, buried itself in the receiving sand, exploded in oily black flames. Sweetness ducked under the rim of the cathedral. It scraped her by a hairbreadth. The waterfall from the sky knocked her flat, drove the air from her lungs. Instantly saturated, bruised, she was swept down the dune side in a flash flood of water and sand.

She washed up against Cadmon. He lay flat, unmoving, wet beyond any decent notion of wetness in an arid desert. From his flatness, Sweetness guessed he was very broken inside.

“Oh man…”

Broken, maybe dead.

An eye opened.

“Get the hell out of here, girl!” Cadmon bellowed with all the strength of his lungs.

“You're all right!”

“No, I am not all right. I'm bloody dying, is what I am. At least I'll have some flowers around me. And you'll be sharing them with me unless you take the only traffic out of here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The ladder, girl! The ladder!”

He nodded with his chin. Sweetness followed the tilt of the day-old stubble up the slumped dune face to where the slowly rolling wheel of the stricken airship was dipping a paltry rope access ladder toward the ground.

“But…”

“Oh, spare me the indignity of a death scene. Just go.”

The ladder sagged to the ground, lowering itself rung by rung like a Belladonna veil dancer enticing a john.

“Why?”

“What? You're still here?”

Two rungs, three rungs, four rungs. Five.

“Why do you hate him so much? I mean, I know why I do, he's got my sister, except she's not really my sister, but I treat her like she's my sister, but what've you got against him? I mean, just because you fall out at art school, is that a reason to try and blow him out of the sky?”

Eight rungs, nine rungs. Very soon, the wheel would swing the other way. And the ballast shift was working. Very slowly, the dirigible was righting itself. The fans were picking up speed.

“Oh, for goodness sake. He is my brother.”

“This,” Sweetness said, “is a bit mad.”

“Cadmon Laventry Ophicleide Harx, dying before your very eyes, madam. Everyone has someone they have to kill, usually part of the family circle. Now go!”

The ladder was wheeling away from her, lifting up one rung, two rungs, three rungs, tantalising her. Still Sweetness hesitated.

“Oh for God's sake!” Cadmon croaked. “Why can't you just let it go as one of those things you'll never understand? It's the little mysteries that make life interesting. Leave me! Git!”

She got, but with one backward glance. The deep-buried, swift-sprouting desert flowers, woken by unseasonal rains, had already surrounded Cadmon in a nimbus of green. Wreath indeed. Hers also, if she didn't get that dangling piece of rope. She remembered all those times she had had to sprint for the train, the last-second leap on to the bottom rung. No third whistle here.

“Aaah!” she yelled as she struggled over the wet, clogging sand toward the taunting ladder. Mother'a'grace, it was going to be close. One rung, no rungs. She leaped at the ladder as it lifted above her head, caught the bottom bar with one hand. She swung, kicking her legs, grimacing with strain as Devastation Harx's cathedral gained altitude. A second hand on the ladder. A first hand up a level. Another, then, agonisingly, another. Rung by rung, Sweetness Asiim Engineer hauled herself up as the wounded airship turned ponderously on its fans and took her away into the magic hour.

P
anic on the streets of Molesworth.

All night the rival political gangs, incensed by what they respectively interpreted as humiliation or jubilation, chased each other through the stone boulevards, party banners flying, flinging partisan abuse and bottles, bombarding each other with ripped-up paving setts and cafe chairs. Windows were smashed, those merchants incautious enough, or just too cheap, not to have bought security shutters were gleefully looted. Fires burned, Molotov cocktails showered down from balconies. Blouses and chemises set to dry now blazed merrily, lowest festoons catching from the fires in the streets and igniting those above. Burning tramcars, driverless but not powerless, careered along their tracks; vans and delivery drays were commandeered and swivelled into hasty barricades into and over which the respective party colours were set. Civic guards were mobilised, militias summoned from their beds and hastily armed. Military units at Gesserem and Shrelby were put on full alert; deep in their titanium-lined caverns under Chryse's laval shield, robot divisions opened their beady red eyes from eight hundred years of cybernetic slumber and lifted their heads. This was a big riot. Molesworthians took their politics seriously.

A combination of water cannon and wide-spectrum force-fields cleared most of the rioters and their barricades from the streets. Here and there, short shield squads baton-charged the mobs and fell enthusiastically to hand-to-hand. By morning most of the fires had been extinguished or had burned themselves out; the street was the province of ashes, charred shells of trams and trucks, those sweeping up broken glass and the occasional carload of young turks driving at mad speed along the splintered boulevards whooping and hooting and waving party flags from their windows and sunroofs.

Molesworth was a wreck, but the immediate crisis was over. The robot legions lowered their heads and closed their eyes.

In Rembrandt Platz the plane trees had all burned down but the early morning news vendors were sweeping away the broken glass and cinders and setting up their booths. Agency three-wheelers came scooting through the wreckage; newsboys in folded paper tricorns sporting the morning's headline sent bundles of daily news bounding across the debris before whizzing on to their next delivery. The gossip must get through.

Early starters picked their way cautiously past hissing, sparking tram cables brought down in the night, marvelling at the completeness of the destruction. Only one set of windows had escaped the crystal night, and those belonged to Torsten Toskvig's Salon Du Thé, the most venerable in Molesworth. The proprietor attributed this reputation to the excellence of his mint, picked by hand with the dew fresh on it from the family fields at Tullaswaygo, and he held that it was this, and this alone, that had protected his tea-house from the mob when Cossivo Beldene fell.

Here, on this morning, five people sat, taking their morning tea and reading the early editions. They were, left to right; a stocky young woman with spiky hair; a tall, wire-thin man with skin so black it swallowed light; a pale, languorous girl with the air of studied artiness and jewellery attached to every part of her body that would bear it; an older, square-faced man with greying hair whose over-grooming, stiffness of posture and plainly corseted belly advertised ex-vaudeville and a bare-armed, weasel-faced teen with deliberately anarchic hair and dreadful teeth. Skerry, Bladnoch, Mishcondereya, Seskinore and Weill. Together they called themselves United Artists. Same order as above, their arts were circus skills, observational comedy, performance artist in interactive micro-drama, dundered-in stand-up and anarchist. Their trick with the cake and the specially written song, hastened to the Glenn Miller Orchestra by express courier, had precipitated all the destruction which lay around their feet as they sipped their mint teas in the tea garden. Exactly as planned. This was no stunt. This was a precise act of political sabotage. These five people were secret agents, under commission from the Synod of Anarchs of Wisdom to seek out threats to their genial non-government and humiliate it with massive practical jokes.

Accrington LeCerf, phoney faith healer and abstracter of wealth from pensioners, had received his comeuppance when a curtain at one of his healing meetings had dropped, revealing the supposedly “healed” sitting backstage smoking and chatting, actors one and all. A mob of incensed old ladies had beaten him severely with his own collection bowl. He had been hospitalised for three months. United Artists arranged for that curtain to drop.

United Artists had set it up so that Ramon Drube, the corrupt Indian politician and the heart of the Cash-for-Sugar row, took a timely pratfall into a keg of eels when he bestrode his next electoral platform.

Gyorgy Krinz, a powerful lawyer with contacts among the Exalted Families, was also a notorious seducer of young boys in public conveniences, until United Artists, in a complex sting operation, converted an innocent WC into an all-singing, all-dancing musical extravaganza featuring the Cottage Boys in gold lamé and urinals fountaining flames like coloured roman candles. It was broadcast live on three networks. Viewing figures went through the roof. Gyorgy Krinz went off the roof. Convictions against the Exalted Families became more regular.

Mavda Quinsana, daughter of the more famous mother, ran a small but effective money-laundering empire from a few artificial atolls in the Syrtic Sea. Conventional justice failed, until United Artists slipped her a mickey in a margarita and convinced her, through clever suggestion and set design, that she had died and gone to hell, whereupon she fessed up all her known crimes and a wodge more nobody had even suspected. The walls of the fake hell opened, the shirrifry marched in, the real hell began.

Shareholder meetings of several big companies with pie-flavoured fingers were spectacularly disrupted by Amanda the Corporate Crime-busting Armadillo, frequently provoking shareholder riots when the extent of board-member remunerations were made public. United Artists, again.

Last night, United Artists had arranged for a very large chocolate cake to be delivered to the Gubernatorial Pleasance in Molesworth. Ooohs, ahhs. As the new Gubernator leaned forward with his cutting knife, the top had blown off and out leaped Seetra Annulka, Cossivo Beldene's former mistress, dressed in a spangled bikini, silver bootees and hoolie-hoolie feathers. As painstakingly rehearsed, she strutted up and down the stage to the whoops and cheers
of the guests, singing a specially commissioned song. The whoops and cheers had grown louder as the audience became aware of the lyrics which had to do with nipple clips and glue, poultry, hooks in the ceiling, orphan girls in pristine white panties and stuffing the state jewels of Canton Chimeria into orifices not designed to show them off to their fullest glory. By the third verse there was not a whisper in the great Festhall.

To a riot of laughter and outrage in equal measures, Cossivo Beldene, his entourage and his guests were off stage before the final chorus. Shortly after the first chair was thrown and the fight broke out that was to spread from the
Rathaus
to the entire city.

Now, in the early light, with the smoke of burning washing still on the air, United Artists were reading their reviews.

“Gobbling Gubernator Feast-Farce,” Skerry read, fresh and tight after her morning run, which she did for ten kilometres every day, riot or no riot. Whatever, wherever, whoever, she always showed a lot of healthy, glowing skin.

“A bit overdone on the alliteration,” the solemn black man, Bladnoch, said in his soft, low voice. The best comedians seldom laugh. He had been the comedian's comedian; so funny he backed into being not funny at all. “Ball-clamp Beldene in hiding,” he read, from his copy of
The Chimerian
, then flipped the paper over to the sports section.

“As in, hiding out, or a good hiding?” the languid, over-pierced woman said. She was Mishcondereya, bad daughter of a very good family, and even drinking morning tea she radiated a hunting-cheetah grace and lethargy that was at once attractive and extremely irritating. She was natural-born aristocrat. Of course, she had the quality daily,
Landing Times
: “Anarchy Rules Molesworth: Mobs Run Riot as Beldene Falls. That should please you, Weill.”

The little skinny anarchist merely picked pieces of mint off his teeth. The over-tall, over-loud, over-coiffed and over-corseted middle-aged man in his trademark too-small silver suit commented from behind his
Impartial Reporter
, “I thought better of the
Times
's editorial than to let an oxymoron like that on to the front page. You know, I remember when I was on the riverboats, I once met a newspaper copy-editor. Or was it a typesetter?” Seskinore's reminiscence was submerged by a chorus of derision from his fellow
artistes. He added, lamely, “They're trying to get Glenn Miller to release it as a single with vocals by Seetra Annulka. We could be in for royalties.”

“I'd buy it,” Weill the anarchist said.

“Steal it, more like,” Mishcondereya sniped. “Did you pay for that
Harbinger
?”

“Of course not.” In twelve months training and thirty-six as roving agents of the Synod of Anarchs, Mishcondereya had not yet learned that Weill took her blunt little sarcasms as compliments. “No one buys when Babylon burns. This capitalist rag gives us a decent write-up.”

“Is it top of the hour news yet?” Skerry asked.

“Seven bells,” Weill said, nodding across the ruined plaza at the municipal clock on the tram-halt. Every piece of glass had been reduced to sugar cubes, but the naked hands told the time, slowly, steadily, for Molesworth. “Looks like it. Is there a wireless in this place? Well, look who it is.”

A lady in widow's black was crossing the plaza, stepping resourcefully over the wiry piles of charred tires, ignoring the paperlads' entreaties. She held her hands folded decorously and did not look in the least out of place in the aftermath of Mob.

Seskinore folded down his paper, raised his eyebrows.

“Ah, our interestingly pedigreed trainlady.”

“What the hell is she doing here?” Skerry demanded, sliding on a pair of dark glasses. “You know, Weill, sometimes you piss me right off. In fact, most of the time. Okay, she did us a favour, the little old dear's got some kind of weird shit trainpeople magic thing—enough inbreeding, you can do anything—but you shouldn't have invited her to the show. Least of all, our own table. I worry about your sense of security, comrade.”

“At least I have a sense of decency,” Weill said. “I don't know about you Tharsians, but in Grand Valley, even us anarchists treat our grandparents with due respect.”

By now Grandmother Taal had arrived at the tea party on the verandah. The past ten hours had been a whirring daze of some notion or other. Forty-something years, and life can still knock you silly. The strange doings with that cake in the back alley, the unexpected invitation to the Pleasance, the very fine food and wine as she sat with these odd people—the last one would
imagine on the guest-list for such a lofty event: then everything being thrown up in the air to hang a fearful minute while the girl in the silver spangles sang the satirical song, only to come crashing down in a rush of reporters, a lightning storm of camera flashes and a broadside of chairs flung toward the stage. She had followed United Artists as they fled, skulking along the lines of tables as the fighting broke out overhead, thanking her newly young knee and back bones. Her first thought had been to go with the band, but all she saw of the King of Swing was his tour bus driving away at speed, chased by a pelt of bottles and hurled imprecations that the Glenn Miller Orchestra would never sell another record in
this
town again, buddy. The fighting had by now transferred to the streets; she was alone in the great
Rathaus
. Plenty of places to sleep. It would not be the first time, Grandmother Taal thought as she swept broken glass from the plush sofa, wrapped herself up in table cloths and bedded herself down for the night. Nor, she sensed with grandmotherly insight, would it be the last. Outrage, riot, confusion, and then the dream.

She had woken with a shock, convinced that she was back in her mahogany cubby on the train, that Sweetness was a three-year-old again, banging on her door when her mother and father were sullenly arguing again. Her eyes told her no, you are on a bench in the Members Bar in Molesworth
Rathaus
; her ears told her, through the distant shouting and sirens and gobble of burning, there is a riot outside. The dream had been so vivid, so insistent; the dark cloud and her granddaughter standing under it in a deserted stone square; with none of the skewed logic or narrative absurdities of dreamspeak. Meaning was not veiled in metaphor or subconscious sexual imagery. No trains entering tunnels, no umbrellas or daggers or pointy airships. This was classically structured, with a clear and precise message, if packed overdensely with important points and presented in Sweetness's characteristic all-in-one-breath delivery. This was no dream. This was a sending. Grandparents believe in such things. She wrote down the gist of it on a napkin, studied it for a time while listening to the ebb and flow of riot outside, then slept again without further dream or sending.