Route 666

'Leave them be,' Jazzbeaux said, finally. 'Trash their chariots.'

Andrew Jean, taking a broad interpretation of orders, shot Akins and Finnegan in the heads, finishing their business. A party of 'Pomps filtered – attacked the Josephites' ve-hickles. If she were thinking straight, Jazzbeaux would have ordered the girls to scav usable spare parts.

'Akins, Finnegan, Dzundza,' Elder Seth said. 'Remember their names, daughter.'

'I told you,' Jazzbeaux shouted, whipping the barrel of the LadyKill across the man's face. 'You're not my daddy.'

He spun away from her but did not fall. Wiggs held him up. She should have crushed a cheekbone, but only raised a bruise which sweat red droplets.

He had not needed to remind her. She never forgot the names of her dead.

She holstered her gun unfired, and unhooked the Elder's shades from her chain-link garter.

His eyes fell on her.

'People like you have been looking at me like that all my annos,' she said, twirling the sunglasses. 'I can hear you thinking, 'one-eyed skank', 'lowlife panzergirl', 'ratskag slutwitch'. I've heard a lot of names.'

She put on the shades. Strangely, they didn't make things darker. They must cut out glare or something. Maybe if she had two eyes, she could see a difference. No one could blame her for her anti-social attitudes; she was monoscopic, handicapped. Society was piled up against her. Of course, she'd had two good, green eyes back when she'd done for Daddy. But Daddy was another sort of handicap.

The Psychopomps weren't just a gangcult; they were a Support Group for Survivors of Severe Abuse.

The 'Pomps were finished with the convoy now and back in formation. Varoomschka straddled her cyke like a cover girl, an outstretched boot-toe near Akins' head. To move out, Sleepy Jane would have to pizza-plough over the deadfellas. Fine. It would underline the point.

So Long Suin hunched impatient on her cyke. Her lips were pursed and her eyes were slits. She had a determined look that told Jazzbeaux she'd be filing an official complaint with the Den Mother about this. That was another hassle she'd have to deal with.

Elder Seth still looked at her. He wiped blood from his cheek with a kerchief and seemed to wipe the bruise off his face. It was quite a trick; one she'd have loved to learn.

Surely a Josephite wasn't likely to have bio-amendments. Most of these revivalists expended a lot of energy condemning ungodly tinkering with the divinely ordained human form. There were always scandals when televangelists raised money they sneakily used to have the Zarathustra treatment. But Elder Seth struck her as a very different stripe of preachie from the likes of Reverend Bob Jackson or Harry Powell. It must be a trick of the eye.

Jazzbeaux took off the shades but found herself blinking and put them back on.

'Cool as snazz,' she said. 'I think they set off my outfit.'

She rejoined Sleepy Jane in the Tucker, feeling headachy and unsatisfied. Suddenly she wanted to be in a nice, clean gangfight, biting and scratching and stabbing and gouging until the insect buzz in the back of her head was blotted away.

Petya Tcherkassoff sang 'Purging My Love' on the radio. It always struck her as deeply chilling.

Through the windscreen, Jazzbeaux saw the Josephites standing like trees in the Petrified Forest. Elder Seth was the tallest tree in the pack. His hat-brim shaded his eyes with darkness.

'This was his lucky day,' Jazzbeaux said.

She had let him live. She had taken his dark glasses and let him live. Two mistakes, she thought.

Bad ones, her phantom father whispered.

'Wagons roll,' she said.

VI

9 June 1995

More damfool deadfolks, Tyree thought, surveying wreckage. Well, arguably folks. And, until bagged and tagged, only arguably dead.

Burnside, always a backdrop buff, was struck silent by Canyon de Chelly. No matter how many times he patrolled Monument Valley or the Painted Desert or the Petrified Forest, the trooper was compelled to waste valuable minutes staring. He should buy a book of postcards and get it over with. He kept on his skidlid, glareproof visor down, as he looked up at the free-standing column. Despite the technology wrapped around his head, he shaded his eyes with his hand.

As Burnside gazed up at the wonders of nature, Tyree rooted down in the dirt for the detritus of man.

'The place scans like an amnesty point for robo-bits,' she said into her intercom. The Quince, a few miles back in the cruiser and gaining, grunted at her commentary.

Turning over a durium arm with her boot, she continued her report.

'We've got brand-new prostheses scattered like seashells. I'm no expert, but I think some of the smaller contrivaptions are doodad hearts and kidneys and the like.'

She picked up a glass eye. Its pupil dilated and she dropped it like a slug.

'And we have abandoned ve-hickles, some with trace blood in their treads. Plus what looks to me like explosive charges wired around the base of a national monument.'

The cruiser was in sight now, growling up an ill-maintained access road. Few tourists ventured this way nowadays. Out in the Des, you were more likely to pick up a permanent disability than a novelty hologram. Besides, once you've seen one acre of sand…

'Looks like a bird of prey,' Burnside said, pointing out a circling black bird, 'a hawk or something.'

'Probably a vulture,' Tyree said. 'A disappointed vulture. There's no meat around here, just metal.'

Burnside tore himself away from the grandeur and started poking around amongst the robo-junk. Some remains were almost complete, like empty suits of armour.

Dried smears of oily substance were all over the show, coating the abandoned doodads but also streaking the sand and rock. It had a faintly nauseating odour. Tyree had no idea what the stuff might be, but didn't care for it.

Quincannon ambled over from the cruiser, Yorke trotting behind like a faithful terrier. They looked like a father-and-son team; the young trooper trying to copy the older, bulkier sergeant's Cav swagger. Yorke was OK for a kid.

'Have you pulled wires on the infernal devices?' the sergeant asked.

'We thought you'd like to take a scan, Quince.'

Quincannon raised a disapproving eyebrow at the arrangement of detonators and charges.

'It's just demolition equipment,' he said. 'You couldn't even call it a bomb.'

Tyree agreed, but it was never a good idea to perform surgery on Blastite without a second opinion. 'Burnside, disable and collect the fireworks.' Burnside saluted and snapped to, scurrying around the base of the column to unfasten the packages.

'We'll put 'em under Captain Brittle's desk for the Fourth of July,' Quincannon said.

The Sergeant squinted at a decal on one of the abandoned cykes. It showed Pinocchio making obscene use of his liar's nose. 'Knock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots,' Quincannon said. Tyree agreed. Yorke needed the full explanation. 'A cyborg fraternity. Renegades from GenTech BioDiv's New Flesh programme. They aren't really even a gangcult. There's a semi-official Hands Off note posted on them. BioDiv wants to observe them in the wild, see how they survive the environment.'

'Not too snazz, I guess,' Tyree said.

'Good call, Leona. Scans like a back-to-the-old-drawing-board situation to me.'

Canyon de Cheliy was an android graveyard. Maybe the 'bots always crawled here to die. In the future, poachers would recover a fabulous fortune in circuit boards and brain-chips from the shifting sands. All they had to