The Dark Symphony

manned one of the firing positions. He could almost feel the tension building along the beam as the humming tones of the shield and weapon met and fought. The air seemed to stir like a sentient creature just now coming to life. Abruptly, the shield of the cyclops' target bunked twice and was gone. The tension went with it The sentient air died. The beam now centered on the unprotected Musician blew him into a cherry dust.
    The cyclops swung his gun slightly and sighted on another shield. The beam lanced out, coursed over the Musician's armor. The atmosphere grew tight again. Seconds passed, and the shield remained intact. The cyclops was beginning to perspire. He knew that there was a chance both the gun and the shield would go, and no one had told him what that would do to him.
    The air sang.
    Guil stepped back a few feet.
    A bolt of pure orange light snapped back in an arc from the Musician's shield, exploded in the innards of the gun. The shield had been destroyed, but so had the sound rifle. And the Popular who had been firing it Guil turned away from the body.
    Here and there, the disaster was repeated as both shield and gun were wiped out in the backlash of the beam. But wherever this happened, some other zealous Popular would step into line with a new gun and resume the battle. Clearly, the greatest threat to the revolution's success had been met and surmounted. Only triumph could follow in this night of sound and fury.
    "Chances!" Strong's voice boomed among the thunder of the weaponry.
    "Ninety-four percent for success," Gypsy Eyes shouted back.
    Guil dropped back from the firing line as the last of the shielded Musicians was brought down. A desperate attack of unshielded Musicians had begun to the east end of the plaza. The Populars were happily swarming there, certain of their eventual triumph, fired by fanaticism, foamed into battle frenzy by Strong as he called scripture to them with supposedly holy words that promised divine blessings upon their actions and their souls.
    No matter that those words were written for ancient, long dead soldiers in distant battles in time.
    Grabbing Tisha's arm, Guil dragged her to the fringe of the war zone and to the west end of the plaza near the neon stones that still glowed, maintained by their own generators buried deep in the earth. "The pillar," he said.
    "Rosie?" she asked.
    "What about him?"
    "We can't just leave him here?"
    "He tried to kill me," Guil said.
    "He was upset."
    "He upset me, that's for sure."
    "He's my brother." There was an unrealistic feeling to the argument, for he did not really want to leave the mutant behind. Neither was he pleased with the prospect of trying to take him along. Rosie might still feel combative, might still feel that he could salvage the city-state by murdering Guil. Tisha was arguing the other side just as unsurely. "He's my brother," she repeated weakly.
    "Okay. Let's go. But well have to hurry."
    Hand in hand so they would not get separated in the push and shove of the action, trying to stay as much to the shadows and the clear areas as possible, they made for the Congressional Tower. When they got there, they found five guards at the doors with rifles. They had probably scored massive kill tallies as panic-stricken Musicians, seeing this structure still erect, tried to rush the entrance. Of course, with the sound rifles, there were no remains.
    Fortunately, one of the guards was the Cyclops who had fought the rats in Corridor F a week earlier. He remembered Guil and Tisha, or they otherwise might have been negated themselves. "What do you want?" he asked, his voice not as friendly as Guil might have expected.
    "Strong said I could have the pleasure of killing my false father, Grieg," Guil said. He did not know how transparent his deception was, but he hoped the line would seem logical enough to this brute.
    "We aren't supposed to—"
    "Strong ordered it!"
    The cyclops looked him over carefully. "Okay. But be careful. They won't know anything inside about what is going on out here. We don't want to alarm them."
    "I'm the one who told you that," Guil snapped, pushing through the milky doors into the tomb silence of the main foyer.
    In here, the Musicians that had apartments slept peacefully, lusting in their sensonics, oblivious to the uproar outside. Guil stopped at the central core to check on Franz. The teacher was still unconscious. Guil did not know why he worried for the old man's safety; the Populars would have him in