A Song Called Youth (89 page)

And then he left Praeger alone with his thoughts.

When the NATO spacecraft came onto the screen, gliding sedately into position, Russ was almost disappointed. It looked sluggish and about as impressive and threatening as a tugboat. It was a cylindrical thing with a lot of spokes at one end. The New-Soviet ship was moving, too, jets firing here and there as it jockeyed about.

Russ was in the Colony Comm center, surrounded by banks of screens showing the Colony inside and out and views from the tethered satellites extending miles from FirStep’s hull. All the small views of various other environments in and around the Colony added up, on the banks of screens, to one collective video environment, a chamber of video swatches, checkerboard patterns of shifting grays and electric-whites and misty greens and the Bible-black of space; the room a place made of other places.

Faid and Lester sat beside Russ in bucket-seated swivel chairs. They were all a little drunk. The occasion seemed to call for it, so Russ had broken out his treasured fifth of Kentucky bourbon and they were sipping it from plastic cups.

“They really going to do it?” Lester asked, his voice slurring. “They going to fight it out?”

“Hell yeah,” Russ said. “And with this fight we’re either fucked or we got it made.”

They watched as the ships approached within two miles of one another. They saw the ships on separate screens, monitored their positions with instruments, Faid muttering, “If that ships are blow up, bloody ’ell, some debris could come here and be smashing us, mate.”

Russ nodded. “Or a stray missile . . . ”

With comical but inadvertent simultaneity, they took another sip of bourbon. All thinking:
Good chance we’ll be dead in five minutes.

The conflict took less than five minutes. Less than
one.
The ships seemed to be just looking at one another. Lester raised their radio frequencies, and they heard a babble of Russian and fragments in a Missouri accent (“ . . . we’ve got alignment but no . . . [crackle] reads five-seven-oh [crackle] . . . good thing you can’t smell anything through . . . you’re going to owe me that shortcake . . . ”) and then there was a flash, just a little flare on the NATO ship on screen 6, a matching flare on the New-Soviet ship on screen 7, and a pencil of light on screen 6 as the eight-megawatt Fluorine-based laser, near infrared and showing red tinged, lanced out and caught the New-Soviet missile. They couldn’t see the missile, but they saw the wink of light as it exploded.

And then a crackle and a confused shout on the New-Soviet frequency and a big smear of white filling screen 7. And, on the New-Soviet frequency, a nerve-wracking squeal. Four seconds of noise that expressed the murder of the New-Soviet ship’s electronics; implying the murder of more. Then static-edged silence.

Lester said, “Jesus. All those men are dead now. Just like that. Poof.
Shit.
”

“Blockade’s over,” Russ said. “Just like that, poof.”

Lester was looking at the instruments and the screens. “We’re okay. No debris coming our way. Nothing to speak of.”

Russ drained his cup and sloshed some more in. In a drunken mock of a high moral tone, Faid said, “We should not drink more, mate, now that we know we are not going to die, what?”

“We don’t need that excuse,” Russ said. “Hell no. We got plenty more reasons to drink. We’ll drink to the New-Soviets who died on that ship. Who called and asked if we were okay when our lights went out.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Lester said.

It was almost midnight on Merino, and they were still watching the television. Stoner was bleary eyed and blurry brained, from TV and from drinking, but they were afraid to silence the big flat screen. Too much was happening.

The Stoners and the Kesslers—Cindy asleep on the couch with her head on Janet’s lap—were slumped here and there about the dark room, looking ghostly in the-blue light of the TV screen.

They couldn’t look away from the war news; the sense that it was either going to end, or detonate into nuclear holocaust. The announcements of the arrests and indictments; the demolition of the American SAISC. The calls for the president’s resignation. NATO’s promised investigation into the European Second Alliance. The announcements of a new administration in the Colony and the arrest of Colony SA. The assassination attempt on Smoke. The announcement that he was off the critical list. (They’d sent a messenger to tell Alouette, with a note for her handwritten by Smoke.) The editorials, the interviews, rehashing all of it. The New-Soviet defeat in orbit, the New-Soviet withdrawal from blockade positions under renewed air attacks from NATO.

There couldn’t be anything more, Stoner thought. Time to try and sleep.

On the screen a political analyst was droning about the likelihood of the opposition candidate’s winning the next presidential election. Comparisons with Watergate, the Iran/Contra affair, the failed attempt to oust Clinton. “But of course this is something far worse: what we have here, at least in the minds of many, is treason on the part of the president herself . . . ”

Stoner was just getting up and stretching, ready to go, when the political analyst was pre-empted, and an excited young announcer came on and told them . . . 

“ . . . The New-Soviet Union has expressed its desire to call a ceasefire to the war in order to negotiate a peaceful end. Secretary of State Carnegie has said, and I quote, ‘We feel that the end of the war is at hand. The New-Soviets are indicating they are ready to surrender.’ ” The newscaster cleared his throat. “Ladies and gentlemen . . . ” His voice choked with emotion. For once the cookie-cutter newscaster was gone, the man behind the glossy image emerging, moved by the emotional electricity of the moment. “Ladies and gentlemen—ladies and gentlemen,
the Third World War is over.”

Cloudy Peak Farm, Upstate New York.

“The crisis is very real,” Watson said, “and it’s going to mean drastic retrenching. But it’s only a setback on one front.”

Sackville-West shook his round head so that his jowls waggled. “It’s not a
setback
on this front. It’s a
complete defeat.
The president will be forced to resign. Our American bank accounts are already frozen. CIA Domestic is under investigation by the Justice Department and our enemies in Congress—and our people who were in the Justice Department are under arrest. American public opinion is ninety percent against us. Even the Fundamentalists. They’re pretending they’re horrified, had nothing to do with us. Worldtalk’s assets frozen. Worldtalk Grid projects seized. Indictments and more indictments. The Colony fallen, Praeger taken. Most of it happened through the media, the underGrid, social media, the networks . . . ”

“You sound bitter,” Watson said coldly, “and that’s ironic.”

There were four men in Cloudy Peak Farm’s comm center, in person, including Carlton Smith, the SA’s Special Education Coordinator, tall and bushy-browed, with short, receding brown-blond hair; always the pipe and the faint smile as if the biggest problems were just a matter of father and son talking it out. He was the father of Jebediah Smith.

Watson and Sackville-West were there, and Klaus; as Watson’s bodyguard, he went everywhere with him. Klaus was slated for a major promotion . . . 

There were others on the video conference lines, four SA chiefs in various parts of the country, and in various states of panic and disgust.

Watson, Smith, Klaus, and Sackville-West were seated around a small, round conference table Watson had brought in.

Watson went on. “I mean, Sacks, you really sound as if you’re angry about all that’s happened. As if you’re angry with other people. But you, Sacks, you were in charge of security, you were the one who allowed yourself to be recorded in conversation with the president, recorded and photographed discussing a very sensitive matter. You were the one who let Stoner get away. So you won’t be surprised when I tell you that you are being replaced.”

Sackville-West’s head jerked up. Jowls jumping again.

His eyes went piggish, his skin vermilion. “Replaced by whom?”

“Klaus, here. I have looked at the matter from every angle. He has been extractor-approved. He has an extensive background in security.” He added a lie: “He was in charge of my station security in France.”

Sackville-West turned to the screen. “Gentlemen—the buck is being passed here, I am a . . . a scapegoat for . . . for . . . ” But after that, all that came out was inarticulate fragments and sputters. Perhaps because of the way the men on the screen were looking at him. Watson went to the door and called, “Ben.”

Ben came in and stood behind Sackville-West’s chair. The young man seemed mildly embarrassed. “Sir. Come with me, please.”

“And where might that be?” Sackville-West demanded.

“Debriefing,” Watson said smoothly, sitting down. “And retirement. Ben . . . ?”

Ben nodded. He put one hand on his gun and the other on Sackville-West’s shoulder.

The old man shuddered and sat there a moment, breathing through his mouth, sweat glossing his forehead. Then he stood up, upsetting his chair, and walked with a kind of roly-poly dreaminess out of the room, Ben close behind him.

Ben shut the door behind as they went out.

Watson sighed, rubbed his hands together, and said, “Now. The New-Soviets have removed their blockade from the Atlantic ports. They’re talking ceasefire and negotiation, and all this is generally being taken as a sign they are close to surrender. Thanks to the crisis here it behooves us to remove ourselves and our projects from the US, to take them overseas.” He smiled at Smith. “Yes, even the people of Colton City. And all the kids in your charge. We’ll transplant the town to Britain. We’re strong there now, and, after all, the roots of the Caucasian Prime are in Europe. In a way we’ll all be going home. In a month, we’ll be ready to announce the formation of the Self-Policing Organization of European States.”

He paused dramatically, looking at Smith and Klaus, and looking into the camera that conveyed his image to the men on the screens.

Watson wasn’t as good at this sort of thing as Crandall had been, but until the new Crandall was video-fabricated, he’d have to deploy all the leadership faculties at his command.

“Rick is in seclusion, as you know, but he has asked me to be his spokesman—I believe you all got his signed statement to that effect—and I have the joy to inform you that we have some very good news indeed to offset all the bad news that’s plagued us lately. The good news is: Europe is essentially ours, though NATO is withdrawing its support. We will get no more help or credibility from them. But it doesn’t matter a bit. We are being incorporated into the military infrastructure of our adopted European nations. The government of every European nation where we maintain a presence is a government we have established. And in a month they will announce SPOES, essentially a ‘united states’ of Europe, united for reasons of defense, and by philosophical alignment. But not a democracy. Anticommunist, anti-immigrant, nationalist-central and of course a strong advocacy of racial purity. And yes, it’s that simple.”

Tamping his pipe, Smith nodded, like a TV father hearing Abraham Lincoln quoted. But he said, “If we could hear it from Rick, I mean, in person . . . ” He lit the pipe; its aroma slithered through the room.

“You will, shortly. He’ll be taping an announcement. He’ll be announcing the retirement of Sackville-West, Klaus’s stepping into the job, our move to Europe, and the formation of SPOES.”

“ ‘Formation of SPOES,’ ” Jaeger said. “You do make it sound very easy.” Jaeger spoke from his screen. He was a stocky, pug-nosed, thin-lipped man, an ex-football player who’d failed in three bids for the US Senate. His munitions company had designed the Jægernauts.

“Resistance on the legitimate political level is almost nil,” Watson said. Not a lie but surely an exaggeration. “And as for the fringe groups, like the NR—well, they’re being taken care of. Klaus?”

Klaus cleared his throat and threaded his fingers together. He wasn’t used to having to deal with people this way. “Yes—it is all coming together very nicely.” Klaus rumbled. “Our man in the NR, on Malta, has warned us that they are about to relocate, so we have moved up the date of our surgical strike against them.” He glanced at his watch. “Twelve hours from now, the majority of our Sicilian air unit will carpet bomb the area. Our troops will move in by helicopter to do the mopping up, I think you call it. We expect the strike to destroy Steinfeld himself and the core of the NR leadership.”

Smith nodded. The smile was still there, but he was pale, and the hand bringing the pipe to his mouth was leaving a crooked trail of smoke. “I see. And as for the relocation—you feel we will be, um, allowed to leave?”

“We’ve got a lot of friends still. They’re lying low, of course,” Watson said, “but they’ll help us. Friends in immigration, customs especially. We’ll get everyone, ah, significant out. And most of Colton City. You can be sure we’re going to take good care of Jebediah.” He smiled at Smith. “You should be very proud of that young man. He’s our future. I can tell you that Rick is thinking of Jebediah in terms of his successor. One day, ten years from now, after he has been properly prepared . . . ”

Smith’s smile became genuine. He fairly glowed.

Watson congratulated himself on winning Smith over. The others seemed ready to go along. They were desperate, after all . . . 

Things were going badly, in one sense. But in another way, everything was falling into place.

Watson and Klaus were alone. The screens were blanked. Smith had gone to call his family in the privacy of the guest room.

Watson leaned back in his chair in the silence, and wondered how long he could keep the rest of them from knowing that Crandall was dead. And wondering who he should tell.

Klaus lit a cigarette and said, “This SPOES State . . . Jaeger is right. It’s not going to be so easy. There is probably going to be a reaction, a resentment against the new governments by the regional nationalists. They will know that the figureheads are being manipulated by foreigners. You think the Basques in Spain were a problem—just wait. Many new such organizations will emerge. And there are still opposition parties, still political resistance, especially in Germany and Italy . . . ”