Desolation Road (48 page)

"Let me see your face," said the Grey Lady. "I want to see how you've changed."

Mikal Margolis removed his helmet. Taasmin Mandella was surprised at how little he had changed. Aged, wearied, tanned, greyed, but unchanged. Still the victim of circumstance.

"Please spare me any melodrama," said Mikal Margolis. He dropped his MRCW. "I don't suppose this would have worked against you anyway. And please don't go on about your father and your brother. It's pointless. I don't feel any special remorse; I'm not that kind of person, and anyway, I was just doing my job. Now, get on with it."

The dust blew in little eddies around his feet. Taasmin Mandella slowly channelled all her power into one God-bolt that would transform Mikal Margolis to carbon steel. She raised her left hand to strike and was suddenly, stunningly, embedded in a shaft of solid light.

A figure walked across the landing field toward her. Where it had come from, Taasmin could not see, but the figure was that of a small, slim, crophaired woman wearing a suit of glowing picturecloth.

"No!" wailed Taasmin Mandella, the Grey Lady. "No! Not now! Not you, not now, of all times!"

"You may recall that part of the conditions of your prophethood was that you would be called to give an account of your stewardship of your power," said Catherine of Tharsis. Mikal Margolis made to recover his weapon and leave. St. Catherine froze him into immobility with a gesture.

"Tight-focus timeloop," she explained with a smile. "Soon as we're gone he'll snap out of it."

"You have a lousy sense of timing," said Taasmin Mandella, frozen in white radiance.

"Like the outfit," said the Blessed Lady. "Like it a lot. Very becoming to you. We servants of the Panarch, incidentally, do not have to justify our comings and goings to you mortals. This is the appointed time, you must come with me and give an account of how you have used your privileges."

The column of light began to spin about Taasmin Mandella, and she felt herself being stretched, pulled like festival taffy, transformed into something other than human. She felt the earth slip away from her. She was light; light.... She gave a final spit of disgust, then the Catherine-power enfolded her and, as she had once fantasized naked on the burning bluffs, she was transformed into a creature of purest light, white, shining light eternal, purest information, and fountained into the sky.

The small skinny woman which was the biological construct of the Blessed Lady of Tharis's incarnation moved her hand in the special way that manipulates space and time and vanished.

isguised as a Penitential Mendicant, Arnie Tenebrae spent five days wallowing in mud, flagellation, prostrate prayer and kneeling upon sharp stones submerged in sewage before she slipped away from the main pilgrimage by the Steeltown gates, concealed herself behind a domestic methane tank, and spoke the five words into her thumbcommunicator that gave the order for invasion. At her command the five transport dirigibles that had slipped with muffled fans into position over Steeltown shed their invisibility fields and began to broadcast messages of reassurance and liberation to the stunned faces beneath them. From their belly hatches Whole Earth Army shock-troops dropped suspended by LTA harnesses, fieldinducers at the ready to pound the enemy into the red jam at the slightest display of resistance. The enemy were past resistance.

"Do not be afraid," boomed the taped messages. "Desolation Road is being liberated from the tyranny of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation by the Whole Earth Army Tactical Group: do not be alarmed. We repeat, you are being liberated. Please remain calm and render all assistance to the liberation forces. Thank you."

Behind the methane tank Arnie Tenebrae slipped off the excrementsmeared burnoose that had for five days concealed her battle suit and combat pack. She painted her face in the semblance of the Deathbird and slipped on her microphone set.

"Group 19, to me," she whispered. "All other battle groups as ordered." In their prearranged positions around the perimeter of Corporation Plaza, a dozen similarly attired Penitential Mendicants threw off their disguises and moved through the crowd toward the Company offices. Even as the airborne troops touched down, released their harnesses, and moved to their planned positions controlling the power plant, the landing field, the station, the truck depot, the mayor's office, the police barracks, the microwave link, the solar power plant, the banks, the law offices and transport depots, Arnie Tenebrae rendezvoused with her battle group and stormed the sanctum of Bethlehem Ares Steel.

As old Mrs. Kanderambelow, who operated the telephone exchange, made tea for the six polite if rather frighteningly decorated young men in battle dress, and Dominic Frontera found himself staring down the emission heads of four field inducers, Group 19 rode up to the executive levels in the executive elevator. Miss Fanshaw, the Company Secretary of the Year, rose from her desk to protest the unwarranted invasion and was smeared all over the wall by a ram of gravito-strong force. Arnie Tenebrae blew in the black and gold door with its black and gold crest and strolled in.

"Good afternoon," she said to the tear-stained, blood-stained, humiliated section managers, plant supervisors, financial directors, marketing chiefs and personnel consultants. "Where's the North West Quartersphere Projects and Developments Manager/Director?" A sudden shrill of energy answered her and stabbed a crater in Sublieutenant Henry Chan's stomach. He goggled at the unfamiliar sight of his spine and then collapsed in two halves. "Shields, boys, he's got an F. I." Defence canopies rang like temple gongs under the fieldinducer sledgehammers. The besarcasmed executives fled, shrieking, past the red crushed patch that had been the Model Secretary of the Year.

"Where the hell is he?" someone shouted.

"He has a lightscatter field up around him," said Arnie Tenebrae, relishing the tight tactical situation. "Everybody out. We'll only get in each other's way. I'll take him myself." She had a personal private interest in doing so. The troops withdrew to the elevator head to guard the executive prisoners.

"Hey, Johnny, where did you get the F. I.?" A howl of power blew a stuffed antelope's head to duff and sawdust. Johnny Stalin became visible for an instant, crouching behind the Manager/Director's chair. He vanished the instant Arnie Tenebrae blasted the end of the board table to Hinders with a beam of hypersound.

"Invisibility screen too. Not bad." She circled the room, fully visible, defence canopy up, senses pricked like a cat's ears. "Johnny," she sang, "I had to come to see you when I found out it was you. Remember me? The sweet little girl you kissed behind Rael Mandella's methane digester?" Her pulse of power screeched and howled off Johnny Stalin's defence canopy. He flickered into momentary translucency. "Come on, Johnny, make a decent fight of it. You know the kind of weapon you're using, you know you can't use it offensively and defensively at the same time, and I know that invisibility field's draining your power. How say you show yourself and make a decent fight of it?" A patch of air shimmered and Johnny Stalin shivered into visibility. Arnie Tenebrae was surprised at how he had changed: gone was the chubby, scared little boy, whining and obstreperous; the figure before her could almost have been the masculine counterpart of herself.

"You're looking well, Johnny." She checked her wrist gauges: 85 percent charge. Good. She circled to her left. Johnny Stalin circled to her right. Both watched for the tell-tale moment when the other's canopy went down in the instant before firing. Arnie Tenebrae circled, waited. The air grew stale within her defence canopy.

"Oh, Johnny," she said again, "remember, there's a dozen of them waiting for you if you get past me." She fired, plunged for cover. Stalin's return fire was slow slow slow. Arnie Tenebrae had all the time in the world to turn, aim, and punch a forcefield fist through his lowered canopy that smashed him apart like an egg.

Commander Tenebrae had her men search through the smoke and the rubble for some souvenir of Johnny Stalin that she might add to her collection of trophies, but they found only pieces of charred machinery. Then trooper Jensenn brought Arnie Tenebrae Johnny Stalin's head and she sat for a long time laughing at the wires and the complex articulated aluminium joints that served for cervical vertebrae.

"A robot," she laughed. "An olly-o, jolly-o robot." She tossed the head away and laughed and laughed and laughed so long and so hard that it began to scare the soldiers of Group 19.

Dominic Frontera was first to learn that the liberation of Desolation Road was actually an occupation and that all the rejoicing citizens who had carried the Whole Earth Army guerrillas shoulder high through the alleys were hostages to Arnie Tenebrae's dream of Gotterdammerung. He learned this at six minutes of six in the morning when five armed men took him from the cellar of Pentecost's General Merchandise Store, where he had been held incommunicado and stood him against the brilliant white wall. The soldiers drew a line in the dust and stood him behind it.

"Any last requests?" said Captain Peres Estoban.

"What do you mean, last requests?" said Dominic Frontera.

"It's customary for a man facing a firing squad to be granted a last request."

"Oh," said Dominic Frontera, and voided his bowels into his nice white ROTECH uniform. "Um, can I clean up this mess?" The firing squad smoked a pipe or two while the mayor of Desolation Road dropped his pants and made himself presentable. Then they blindfolded him and put him back in front of his wall.

"Firing party, shoulder arms, firing party, aim, firing party ... firing party ... Child of grace, what now?"

While feeding the chickens, loyal but unintelligent Ruthie had seen the soldiers take her husband and stand him against a wall and point weapons at him. She emitted a cry like a little astonished bird and chased pell-mell, helter-skelter all the way across to the mayor's office to arrive just as Peres Estoban was mouthing the order to fire.

"Don't kill my husband," she shrieked, throwing herself between executioners and executionee in a welter of flying arms and skirts.

"Ruthie?" whispered Dominic Frontera.