A Song Called Youth (66 page)

There was a two-man EVA module, just a bucket shape with clawlike arms extended in front of it, drifting by the doorway, from Bucher’s right. It looked as if it were following the RM17. That was odd, because it didn’t appear on his duty charts.

He switched on his extra Launch Deck cameras and saw a flattened image of the RM17 drift by. And then, thirty seconds later, the EVA module, coming close on the RM17’s heels.

Russ stormed into Praeger’s office, pushed past the secretary—and stopped short when he saw Praeger looking up at him. He felt his courage draining away, leaking through the holes Praeger’s glare made in him.

“You have a reason to come barging in, Russ, you’d better give it to me
fast.
”

Russ’s mouth was dry. He could talk about the door’s attempt to crush him—but what really bothered him was the RM17. It was hard to put into words, though.

Sitting next to Praeger was Van Kips. Her normally immaculate flaxen hair looked a little mussed. Something odd about the way Praeger was sitting behind that desk too. And the room was dialed to dim illumination. It was almost dark in there. Could they have been . . . ?

No, ridiculous. Not in here, not now.

“Well,” Russ began. “My com was down and I wanted to talk about that personnel list of the . . . ” He stopped, his attention caught by the screen across from Praeger’s desk. It showed a TV image of the outer hull of the Colony, curving away like a metal plain. Four things crawling over it. No, two things, and their shadows. Repair Module 17—he could see the big numbers painted on the side—closely followed by a two-man EVA bucket.

“It’s already been launched?” Russ asked, his voice sounding hollow in his ears.

“Yes.” Smugness in Praeger’s voice. “Yes, why shouldn’t it? I was just monitoring it because . . . ” Parker could feel Praeger pause to make up a lie. Praeger went on: “ . . . ah, as you had expressed some concern about it. It seems to be just fine.”

“Isn’t it unusual for an EVA bucket to work so closely around the RM series?”

“Yes,” Van Kips said hastily. “We just put in a call to it. We couldn’t get through. That crazy interference again.”

“Well, we’d better try again . . . ”

Van Kips and Praeger exchanged glances. “Oh, leave it alone, Russ,” she said.

Russ started to tell them about the “glitch” that had trapped him in the doorway . . . but nothing came out of his mouth. He was staring at the image on the screen. The EVA module was moving in closer—moving in on the cylindrical fuel tanks on the underside of the RM17.

The arms on the EVA bucket extended, and punched through the metal of the fuel tanks.

A crackle of electricity along the arms, a billow of gas from somewhere on the front of the bucket . . . 

The RM17 exploded.

It was eleven o’clock and Kitty’s supervisor had sent her home early. She was riding in one of twelve small, rubber-wheeled cars pulled by something resembling an oversize golf cart. It made her remember being a little girl riding in a “train” not so different than this one at the Bronx Zoo, past a lot of tired, dull-eyed patchy-furred animals.

She sat across from a boy who held a smartfone on his lap. He was watching rock cartoons.

The people in the street-wide corridor—“Hollywood Boulevard”—were of all kinds. Unsmiling and dull-eyed, most of them, but there were people laughing here too. There was a group of boys wearing real-cloth jackets, covered with technicki patches, using markers to leave their gang tags on the walls. She couldn’t read the stylized graffiti writing. The train swept past them, rocking as it turned a corner, and she winced as the inertia chased a snake of nausea up through her. She’d almost collapsed at work today. The supervisor had said, “You’re past the time you can do this kind of work.”

It seemed her super could no longer pretend she didn’t know Kitty was pregnant. Kitty wondered if she’d reported it. They were supposed to report it in case the parents didn’t.

She sighed. She closed her eyes. She hoped Lester was behaving himself.

Her eyes snapped open when the device on the boy’s lap broke from its mindless minimono yammering to announce:
“Special news report from Colony Central. A repair module working outside the Colony has exploded, with all hands lost. However, no major damage to the Colony’s hull was done. Although not yet Admin-confirmed, RM17 was reportedly destroyed by an accidental collision with a drone EVA module. A list of casualties will be . . . ”

“Jeez,” the kid said.

Russ sat on his bunk, in the darkness, listening to an audio called “Night Noises in the Desert.” Smelling the fragrance disk he’d put in the scent player: sage, wood smoke, mesquite. He was sitting on his hands. When he didn’t sit on them, he tended to pound them against his temples, and that hurt, so he had to sit on them.

This is stupid, he told himself. So he took his sweaty hands from under his haunches and tucked them into his armpits for a while.

Goddammit. Goddammit son of a
bitch.

They did it, all right. They had all the answers way too soon. Too pat. “Guidance mechanism on the drone EVA bucket poorly insulated, misdirected by RM17’s computer navigation signals.” They had it twenty minutes after the thing exploded.

He squeezed his eyes shut but still saw, against the darkness of his unlit chamber, the white flash, the fireball quickly snuffed out in the vacuum, the expanding ring of debris—

And twenty minutes after the RM17 exploded, Praeger was printing out a statement for release at 1800. The statement talked blandly of a poorly insulated guidance mechanism; the EVA bucket sent out to assist the RM17 was simply the wrong one, was the one that should have been in repair dock.

Some equipment dispatcher would get the blame. Maybe someone the SA wanted to get rid of. Just to put the cherry on the sundae. Get rid of one more, after killing all those men and women on RM17. All those troublemakers.

No, Russ told himself. No one’s going to take the fall for Praeger. Not that he could accuse Praeger. Yet. Too risky. Praeger would have him removed from his job before the accusation could become public. Praeger’s people—under Judith Van Kips’ supervision—censored all the Colony’s media now. Nothing went on the air or into printout without Van Kips’ approval.

Removed from his job? Praeger wouldn’t stop there. If Russ fought him, Praeger would simply have him killed.

And most of the SA guards were loyal to Praeger.

There had to be a way . . . 

Someone tried to talk to her. She was walking down the narrow corridor, in the dorms section where most of the technicki lived, seeing only what she had to, hearing nothing.

Kitty was trying not to think; to perceive as little as possible; to feel nothing. Because if she let herself feel the pain, it would fall on her like gasoline on a man smoking a cigarette; she’d be a human torch with it, she’d run howling with it . . . where? Where would she
go?
To her parents? How many thousands of miles of interplanetary space was she from her parents?

What else was there? Some peaceful spot on Earth where she could let herself feel, let her surroundings heal her. The state park her parents had taken her to, one of the only parks not ruined by the acid rain or global warming drought. How many thousands of miles of radiation-charged vacuum between her and that park? How many air locks and bulkheads and men with guns?

But still she felt the pain moving in on her, unreasoningly implacable.

The baby. Oh, Jesus. Living here
alone
with the baby. Oh, shit; she wished she were religious. The baby. Without Lester.

(Faces drifting by, like shapes in smoke. Voices speaking to her in a meaningless string of syllables.)

If she killed herself, she’d be killing the baby. Maybe that’d be better. It was only going to get worse and worse here, under the Fashes. They might kill her baby, anyway, because it was Lester’s.

And, of course, she knew they’d murdered Lester.

(Her hands moving automatically to tap the coded sequence on the lock unit, opening the door.)

It might be a blessing to the baby if she killed herself. At least then it wouldn’t be the Nazis (stepping into the apartment) who’d killed the baby, it would be . . . 

He was sitting on their bed.

“Hi, babe,” Lester said sadly, sitting up, yawning. “Damn, can you believe I missed out on that job? I got back from the Open too late, couldn’t get through the crowd around the assignment center, foreman said they’d overhired, weight limit wouldn’t let them put anyone else—hey . . . what’s the matter, Kitty? You okay?”

She moved across the room in a dream.
Touch him.

She touched his lean, muscular arm. He was real.

She melted onto him. He threw his arms around her. “Why you cryin’—oh, the job, yeah, well, I’m sorry, babe, I just . . . ”

“Lester, you didn’t hear about the RM17?”

“No—what the hell happened?”

“Lester, I heard there’s a way to get off the Colony. The New-Soviets let one ship through every two weeks. It’s almost impossible to get on it. But there must be a way. Lester, let’s get off this thing, please. I don’t care if we don’t have any money left. Let’s go back. Please. Please.”

“What happened to the . . . ”

“You won’t run out and start something if I tell you?”

“No.” But his face went hard. “Tell me.”

Russ lay on his back, smelling sagebrush, listening to the maracas of desert insects, the fluting of the desert owl.

And seeing two things in his mind’s eye, alternately. First, the explosion on the screen. Ball of white fire, expanding ring of char. Second: Van Kips leaning over Praeger, the light from the screen image of the explosion lighting up their faces in that dim room . . . exposing, somehow, a febrile delight in Praeger’s face . . . and Van Kips’ hand moving under the table. He couldn’t see what she was doing, but . . . 

Van Kips had her hand on Praeger’s crotch. Was fondling him while the two of them watched the explosion.

They were that . . . what was the word?
Perverse? Demented? Inhuman?

Efficient?

Yes.
(Russ laughed bitterly.)
Efficient. Extract the maximum from everything. Pleasure, too.

And, Jesus forgive him, he was one of them. He was on their side.

And he had to be. Sure he did.

Or, anyway, he had to sit back and let it all happen. He had to try to get involved as little as possible.

But he remembered something his mother had said: “If you don’t choose a side, the side will choose you.”

The Island of Malta.

The ship is my best opportunity,
Karakos thought.

The ship would have a sat-link he could use. In all the confusion, he could slip away from the other hijackers, get to the radio room.

Ten p.m., and they were in one of the top-floor bedrooms of the old manor house. It was an old, mildewy room, with peeling rose-patterned wallpaper, an empty wooden wardrobe standing open beside the wall’s single decoration: a framed, yellowing photo of a droopy-mustached man in front of the Maltese capitol building in Valletta.

Eight guerrillas were seated in a semicircle around Steinfeld, shifting to ease the discomfort of the wooden seats, as Steinfeld tapped the map. He talked of currents, sea lanes, New-Soviet surveillance routes, the probability—or improbability—of interference from New-Soviet or NATO submarines, the temperature of the Mediterranean this time of year, and the projected route of the target ship.

“The ship will be coming from Málaga, on the coast of Spain, then east along the North African coast and through the Strait of Sicily, rounding Sicily on the eastern coast,” Steinfeld had said. “It will be unescorted and without cannon, so as not to draw the attention of the New-Soviets, but it’ll be accompanied by at least twenty-five SA infantrymen. They’ll be heavily armed.”

It wouldn’t be easy for the NR to hijack the ship, Karakos thought. During the skirmishing there might be time to radio the location of the NR stronghold to Watson.

Doing it aboard the ship was risky. But he wasn’t authorized to use the NR’s radio, and there was always someone on radio watch. Fone transmissions were barely workable, in Europe now, and the few that went out were easily noticed and traced. He’d decided against trying to get access to another shortwave elsewhere on Malta. It didn’t seem possible without drawing attention to himself. If he was caught wandering around the island alone, trying to locate a radio, they’d become suspicious. And there wasn’t a land line he could use: the international fone links had been destroyed by the New-Soviets, just before they pulled out of the area.

Karakos felt odd when he looked around the circle of faces. He felt . . . constricted. As if something were tugging in his brain and tightening in his throat.

But it was not as if he’d lost his resolve. Not at all. He knew that the only way to truly liberate Greece was to unite his homeland under a one-party nationalistic rule. Nothing else would render Greece strong enough to survive its endemic factionalism, the incursion of Communists, the predations of the New-Soviets and the Turks, the sedition of the Jews. And the only means to ensure a strong nationalist state in Greece was the Second Alliance.

Watson had shown him by direct brain transferral—had poured truth into his brain electronically and electrochemically—and it had been as if someone had turned on a light, blazing away the fog of ethical and political gray areas, leaving only the stark clarity of a single steely principle: “Strength is Security. And the Alliance gives strength.”

But still . . . 

Sitting here with the others—including Danco, who’d fought beside him in the first campaign against the SA (incredible now to suppose he’d actually fought his homeland’s greatest benefactors!); the woman Lila, surely the finest woman soldier he’d ever met (impossible not to notice the way Lila was looking at this Claire Rimpler); Willow; and the others—the ghost of the old camaraderie made him tingle, made him shiver, just a little. It was as if his new conviction was an upright edifice, a tower of stainless steel in the expanse of his mind. But it was a haunted tower . . .