A Song Called Youth (115 page)

“Anything?” Watson asked. Knowing full well from Giessen’s expression that they’d come up with nothing, but wanting to needle him.

The Thirst shook his head. Nothing.

Watson smiled to himself. It was perverse to be pleased when the New Resistance didn’t fall into a trap. But he’d told the fool it wouldn’t work. Giessen’s plan had been like a plot from a Dumas novel, or
Zorro
—in order to flush the guerillas, let them know you’re going to carry out a reprisal on a tenement full of Arabs. They’d be there to defend them, to avenge them. They hadn’t let anyone know which tenement it would be, or even what neighborhood—but they’d let them know it would happen. They assumed the New Resistance would watch the compound where the Jægernauts were kept, follow them to the attack site and then move in with Stingers or some other armor-piercing weapon—and hopefully this Torrence wretch would be there, directing the operation . . . 

It hadn’t worked out that way, of course. Steinfeld was no fool. And Torrence was no sucker. They would not be drawn so easily. Especially knowing that there was little that could be done against a Jægernaut. The reprisal against the building—said to harbor New Resistance civilian auxiliary—was useful in and of itself. That was the sort of thing they kept the Jægernauts for. Eventually, of course, they’d be used in warfare: advance phalanx when invading a city. When the time for expansion came . . . 

Giessen took off the headset, shrugging. “I wasn’t at all sure it would work. But I wanted to try a feint, see how they would react.”

Watson seethed inwardly. “I told you how they would react. Your lack of regard for my opinion is hardly flattering. Security is after all my specialty.”

“I have every respect for you, Herr Watson. But I have a need to explore this problem in my own way. My feeling is that some of the old-fashioned techniques will work. Executions in return for this Torrence’s activities—that is an ancient, time-honored method, and it will eventually provide us with informers, as well as put pressure on this man, force his hand. I intend to use some newer techniques also. We have some new surveillance technology . . . something that will be very useful in these Metro tunnels and sewers they are using.”

“What, precisely? Listening posts?”

“No. Bird’s eyes.”

“But they lose their guidance signal underground! And then they can’t transmit!”

“The new ones are internally guided. They don’t transmit, they record. They are equipped with infrared. They will explore the tunnels for us. They will find them.”

Torrence and Roseland, assault rifles cradled in their arms, stood with their backs to a stack of moldering cardboard boxes filled with books, keeping an eye on the door. The room was dim, dusty, chilly, and smelled of piss. The old furniture that had been stored in it was coated with powder from the insulation in the ceiling, shaken down during the shellings of Paris. Their only light was a guttering chemlantern and what came through the basement window. They’d left the old van parked around the corner, but the SA could notice it, might realize it hadn’t been there earlier. They might have seen them scramble into the building. They might be here any minute.

Torrence didn’t think so—the SA’s attention was focused on the buildings and streets closer to the one being demolished.

“We could have done something,” Roseland said, his voice lifeless.

He had gone into his monotone phase, Torrence noticed. Roseland, when he was coping, would joke around, use funny voices, toss out the one-liners. Letting off steam that way—for himself and everyone else. But when the emotional pressure was there, when he looked right into the face of the monster, his voice and personality became affectless, monotone. It was as if he’d slipped back into some sympathetic variation of the typical Detention Center victim, voice and eyes flat from despair, his bitter assertions made in a voice colorless as tin. “We should die with them. We deserve it, sitting here watching them die.”

“We couldn’t have stopped it,” Torrence said. “We didn’t know what building it was. And they’ve got the whole area staked out. We’ll be lucky if they don’t track us in here.”

He was, in fact, watching a handheld monitor that was supposed to show a blip if a bird’s eye or some other electronic surveillance device was near enough. The screens weren’t very reliable, though.

The building shook and a little white dust filtered down from the ceiling, as the Jægernaut made another pass over the tenement three blocks away.

Torrence glanced up at Norman Hand, who, with this technicki aide, was sitting on the back of an overturned sofa, which was stacked on another sofa, just under the basement window; they were getting digi-viddy out the window.

“You getting a good shot, Hand?” Torrence asked.

Hand nodded. His technicki was using a long-range, digitally enhanced camera scope. They didn’t have to get in closer.

The reporter hadn’t said a word since the demolition had begun. He was watching the little monitor in his hand, seeing, magnified, what the camera saw. Sometimes his jaw trembled a little.

Torrence was glad. Hand was affected by what he was seeing. He was seeing something that couldn’t be denied, couldn’t be shrugged off. With luck, he’d have the balls to translate his feelings about it into Grid reporting. He’d have the video as partial proof. Maybe they could round up some survivors to interview. At least the men, women, and children in that tenement hadn’t died for nothing. They’d die again on the Grid, where there would be millions more witnesses.

But Torrence felt foolish and helpless when he thought about what was going on right down the street.

Roseland was fidgeting. “We could snipe some of the bastards, at least.”

Torrence shook his head. “We can’t risk this Grid project. This coverage is a way of attacking them, it’s turning their own brutality against them, man. You know?”

“You’re going to just vid this thing and go home.”

“And use the images. Yes.”

“People will say it’s computer-fabricated stuff.”

“It can be tested for that. And—it has . . . it’ll just feel too damn real to deny.”

Roseland’s voice was especially flat when he said, “It isn’t worth it. I’m going out, to kill some of them.”

Torrence said, in the tone he’d learned since becoming a paramilitary officer, “No. No, you’re not.”

Roseland stood up and moved toward the door.

Torrence debated threatening to shoot him. He wasn’t at all sure that a threat would work.

He might have to kill him.

“Roseland,” he said.

Roseland put his hand on the doorknob.

“If you do it—”

Roseland turned the doorknob.

Torrence took the safety of his rifle off.

Then he said, “If you do it, I’ll kick you out of the NR. We’ll ship you to the States, and you can go live with your relatives happily ever after.”

Roseland hesitated, then slowly turned to him. “I’ve proved myself.”

“Sure you have.” Torrence put the rifle aside. “But I’d have to do exactly that.”

“You want to maintain your authority that much?”

“I want to keep the Resistance organized, Roseland. You do it and you’re out. Gone. You won’t be able to kill another Fascist. Not around here. And they’ll just go on . . . ”

Roseland stared at him. His eyes were lost in the shadows. He looked like the living dead.

Sounded like it, too, when he said, “Yeah. Okay.”

He went back to his spot on the floor and sat down. He hugged his gun and stared into space.

The building shuddered again. Hand groaned and, shoulders shaking, began to weep. Torrence felt sick.

Lab Six, Cooper Research, London.

“What do you mean you lost touch with her?” Cooper’s voice was stretched into a squeak with near-hysteria.

“Steady on,” Barrabas said. They were standing in the editing room with the door shut. It was close and stifling in there. “This is a cock-up, all right. But she’s going to get in touch with you. She needs us to pay for her erasure.”

“You don’t know that. She might have gone to the bloody radicals if she realized it was biowarfare stuff. To anyone.”

“She doesn’t know what it is.” But he wasn’t so sure.

“Right. This is what I want you to do for me—”

“Hang on,” Barrabas interrupted. He had been thinking things over. “I want a talk first.”

Cooper licked his cyanotic lips. “What, ah, did you want to talk about?”

Barrabas hesitated. It had occurred to him that he knew something about Cooper that could be useful leverage. He could get something in exchange for his cooperation in keeping it mum. Still, Cooper might not like being blackmailed, however subtly. He’d make a dangerous enemy. But Barrabas wanted the hell out of this project.

“I heard a bit of gossip, Dr. Cooper. To the effect you’ve been on balancers.”

Cooper opened his mouth to deny it, then thought better of it. “What of it?” he grated. “I got started before anyone knew how . . . ”

“How addictive it is?” Barrabas nodded. Balancers. Ironically named. A kind of drug spigot, an implant that doles out doses of stimulant in the morning, a certain amount of tranquilizer to take the edge off the stimulant, a high in the evening—sometimes a long, illegal rush of pure pleasure—and then a sedative. Keeping you stoned, feeling good, getting you off, but never giving you too much of one or the other . . . constantly balancing, with its micro bloodtesters, the levels of the drugs with your daily needs. Only, it didn’t take into account tolerance beyond a certain point, and it got more and more expensive; was more addictive than any one drug, and left you so sensitive to neurological change you couldn’t do without the implant for a minute, once you were used to it. And going without for even five minutes led to suicides . . . 

So they made it illegal. Meaning the price went up, way up, and if you didn’t want to rehab, you paid through the nose. Eventually you broke your financial back under the strain. Or learned, in Cooper’s case, to embezzle.

“My guess is,” Barrabas said, “you’ve been skimming the budget that’s supposed to be for the High Security mainframe, diverting the cred to pay your illegal balancer bills, and doing the calculations yourself on the cheap through the brain borrowers. You had the basic calculation program . . . ” Cooper’s pasty tongue made another swipe over his blue lips.

“You’re guessing. That’s a serious accusation. The SA doesn’t tolerate—”

“Right. Doesn’t tolerate much of anything. Doesn’t tolerate a cock-up that costs them money, most especially. Ay? And I’m not really guessing. I did a little . . . research.” Barrabas was bluffing about that.

But Cooper bit. “Right, then. What do you want?” Whining now. “You know I’ve no money.”

“I want a transfer. I want out. Transfer to some place . . . I haven’t decided. I’ll let you know. And a recommendation of a promotion. Those things you can get me.”

“Yes, yes, I suppose so. Righto. But listen, mate—” He was all matey and conspiratorial now, talking in a manner he fancied appropriate to Barrabas’s class. “You got to do a little something more for me. This has to get itself cleared up.”

Covered up, he meant, Barrabas thought. “I’m with you, ‘mate.’ But if you want me to find the girl . . . ” He shook his head. “Won’t be easy. She and I, we had a falling out.”

“Find her. Apologize. Do what you must. But find her and tell me where she is. Keep her there and I’ll come and . . . talk to her. All right?”

Barrabas chewed his lower lip. Talk to her? Cooper?

“Yes,” he said slowly over a churning in the pit of his stomach. “I’ll find her.”

Ten miles outside Paris, near Orly International.

The refugee camp had gotten worse for some and better for others.

Torrence and Bibisch and Roseland and Hand were trudging along the rutted mud path winding through the camp, squinting in the unobstructed sunlight, talking softly. Summer had finally come to north-central France. They weren’t dressed for the weather. Most refugees simply wore everything they owned. Torrence and companions dressed in the unwashed, haphazard clothing typical of the refugees: Roseland wearing a promotional sweatshirt for participatory movie-software, on his chest a grimed, grisly solar-activated videoprint touting
Psycho Sam, the Man With the Chainsaw Fingers
; Bibisch wearing a stained jogging outfit; Torrence wearing a thickly layered outfit of pieces of military uniforms, insignia removed, the whole too warm in the sunny afternoon but usefully concealing his weapons; Hand wearing a grungy blue sweater and torn khaki pants, mismatched Army boots.

They looked to be luxuriantly outfitted, Roseland thought, compared to the people squatting at the huts and shanties and tents around them. The starveling children, their faces dull as veal calves in an agribusiness pen, particularly depressed Roseland.

Children, he thought, were just adults that hadn’t come into focus yet, and it was probably stupid to feel more sentimental about them than about the adults who suffered here. Suffering was suffering. But inescapably he felt a special empathic sense of violation when he saw the children in the camps.

And there were so many homeless children in Paris; everywhere in Europe, children either dying before they were twelve or becoming murderous with their determination to survive. They were a rootless nation within a nation; a nation of the disenfranchised.

The camp stank, of course. At first there had been chemical toilets, brought by the puny efforts of the Red Cross. But when the Red Cross witnessed SA atrocities and complained, it had been excluded from the camps. The few sanitary facilities were overwhelmed by the numbers of the refugees, who had taken to digging open pits as privies. The flies were terrible, big and blue-black and so ubiquitous they seemed somehow spontaneously generated by the stench. That was a medieval notion, but then, Roseland reflected, medieval notions were apt here.

The refugee camp itself was a patchwork that refused definition by the eye. It gave the general impression of thousands of human beings living in a trash dump, occupying it like sea gulls on a barge. The path had been muddied during the rains, then hardened by the sun into something footprint-pocked, rutted, and cement-hard. Torrence and the others picked their way along the road, swiping at flies and trying to breathe through their mouths.