A Song Called Youth (9 page)

Men in place, moles in the Second Alliance, who hope to drive a wedge between the “colored” divisions and their white administrators. It wasn’t necessary to say it aloud now.

Steinfeld looked at Hard-Eyes a touch apologetically.

Smoke could see Hard-Eyes’ knuckles whitening on the big rifle.

Jenkins had picked up on the tension. He watched Hard-Eyes for a cue.

Voortoven and Willow and Yukio looked to Steinfeld.

Smoke prepared to throw himself aside. His preparation showed only in his reaching, almost languidly, to lay a hand on the crow, so it wouldn’t fly away if he had to throw himself down when the shooting started.

Steinfeld opted to go on as if nothing had happened. Continuing the lecture was a way to reassure them. A way to say,
Wait and see.

“Predinger is said to have died recently, though there are conflicting rumors about that. At any rate, Crandall and his sister have been elevated to supreme command of the SA—”

“
His sister?
” Hard-Eyes’ surprise drew tension out of the air. There was soft laughter from Voortoven and Willow.

“His sister,” Smoke confirmed. “Ellen Mae Crandall. Apparently she’s been a driving organizational force. She did all the dickering when he was first syndicated.”

Steinfeld nodded. “They come from a strict Southern Baptist family. Crandall’s the spiritual leader of the SA, but for the most part he no longer makes public appearances as a minister—outside the SA. Crandall is the SA’s Commander in Chief, though his main military strategist is a man named Watson. A former colonel who worked for the neo-racist underground trying to undermine post-Mandela South Africa . . . The SAISC had its first field-military testing in rural parts of South Africa. They didn’t prove out, there, but they learned from it. They’ve proven themselves militarily putting down insurrections in Pakistan, Ethiopia, Guatemala . . . ”

Hard-Eyes showed a touch of impatience, interrupting, “And NATO plans to turn most of Western Europe over to these people? This . . . this cover organization for neo-Nazis? Just like that?”

“They’re calling the SA a ‘non-Allied security force.’ They’re maintaining that—and some of them believe it—they’re simply hiring a large international security corporation to keep the peace until full political order is restored. They’re desperate for order . . . which is roughly why the National Socialists were able to come to power in Germany in the 1930s. People were desperate for stability. Hitler promised everyone economic growth. He promised an end to the political chaos of the Weimar Republic. He promised to reunite Germany.”

“Oh, you can’t really believe it’s . . . like that.”

“Not entirely. It’s a little cleverer than that. The men in European and American government—especially the Americans and the British—who support ‘the SA arrangement,’ are part of the new crop of anti-Semites and racists. It’s been a growing resurgence for decades. Apologists for fascism like the French New Right, the British National Front. In America, the Council of Conservative Citizens and the US Labor Party . . . the Unification Church . . . others. The SA has been using its media contacts—bought with Predinger’s money—for eight years to create an impression of a Jewish conspiracy on which to blame the world’s misfortunes . . . And they blame domestic crime on immigrants . . . ”

Hard-Eyes nodded slowly. “I saw some of that on American TV . . . None of it real obvious stuff, but . . . almost subliminal sometimes.”

Willow said, “Bloody SA’s ‘police force’ is in Italy, Germany, Britain, Belgium, Spain. France soon enough. And ’ere, mate. ’Ere.”

“And you think,” Hard-Eyes said, looking at Steinfeld closely, “that they and the NATO people who put them in place are setting up some kind of coup?”

Steinfeld nodded. “A military coup for the whole of Western Europe.”

There was silence, except for the creak of bodies shifting on chairs. Then, Jenkins asked, “Just how closely in Hitler’s footsteps you think these people are gonna follow?”

Steinfeld took a deep breath. “Where they are in place, they have already isolated Jews and blacks and Muslims into barricaded sections of the towns. Crandall is said to hate Muslims even more than Jews . . . ”

Hard-Eyes snorted and shook his head. “If it’s true . . . what do you think you’re going to do about it?”

Steinfeld shrugged. “You know already. A guerrilla war. You want to know more about our strategy?”

Hard-Eyes nodded.

Steinfeld shook his head. “No.”

And once again, the men in the room looked to their respective masters for their cues.

That’s when a man Smoke didn’t know came in. He was a slender black man who wore horn-rim glasses on his nose and field glasses around his neck. There was a submachine gun on a strap over his shoulder. He turned to Steinfeld and then realized that what he had to announce should be said to everyone. He looked around at them and then said carefully, “Jorge got it on the radio. The Russians have blockaded the Colony. The space Colony. Orbital battle stations have gone on full alert.”

And once more, every man thought the same thing, so that no one actually said it:
Maybe it’s finally coming.

There was always a feeling that any plans you made, any hopes you drummed up, were empty. Hollow. Like plucking fruit and cutting it open to find it dried out inside. Because it was assumed that, sooner or later, the conventional war would heat up into a nuclear war. And maybe that wouldn’t be the end of the world. But it would be close enough.

Steinfeld was the first to shake off the paralysis of despair. “Another escalation.” He shrugged. “But it’s just taking the conventional war to a new battlefield.”

Jenkins shook his head. “What’s the point? What’s the point of fighting for what’s going to be radioactive ashes in a few months?”

Hard-Eyes said, “Maybe it’s—”

He broke off, staring at the window. They all heard it. A jumpjet. Close this time.
Close.
The Armies.

Shouts from down the hall, and the roof. Steinfeld’s sentries shouting warnings. The jumpjet had come suddenly. That was the jumpjet specialty: One moment the sky was clear; the next a jet was ten feet overhead, hovering on vertical retros.

The room shivered with the jumpjet’s whine and grumble. Hard-Eyes moved toward the door.

The black sentry panicked, went to the window, put his hand on the latch—

Steinfeld stood, turning to shout at him, “No!” But it was lost in the roar of the jumpjet . . . 

As the sentry flung the windows open.

The room’s lamplight caught the pilot’s eye.

Reflexively, Smoke—and Hard-Eyes—paused at the door looked past the sentry and out the window. Everyone in the room was frozen with looking.

The Harrier jumpjet was a swept-wing fighter jet designed in the early 1980s, this particularly adroit model mass-produced only in the early twenty-first century. The two oversized jets on the underside of its wings, computer-controlled for precision, were swiveled to point down, forward, backward, to the sides, so the jet could go virtually any direction; refined computer control and Casimir force generators added extra maneuverability and lift.

It hovered like a helicopter, thirty feet beyond the window, tilted back a little so you could just make out the USAF insignia on the underwings. They could feel the monstrous
engineering
of it, the precisely machined
bulk
of it, its engine heat reaching them, the chemical smell of its burning fuel choking the room.

But looking at it, in that compressed moment, Hard-Eyes thought of it as a plasteel dragon. In Smoke’s mind, an insect. Dragonfly, to combine the two, a dragonfly from a Japanese horror movie. Sixty feet long, hovering, trembling as if with metallic rage, tilted up a little as if about to strike. Limned in starlight, glowing nacreously from the cockpit glass, the driver’s head was an insignificant arc of darkness within the lozenge of the crystal. Perhaps this was one of those computer-reflexed planes that brought the pilot along mostly for the ride, and just in case. And perhaps the plane made the decision and not the pilot.

The decision to fire. The 60-mm cannon emerged from the socket on the underside of the plane, swiveling to point squarely through the window—the plane pulling back so as not to get caught in the backblast.

In the room, the paralysis passed. Steinfeld scooped up the papers from the desk, and with the expertise of long practice swept them into a vinyl briefcase, vaulted over the desk, and was out the door. Willow and Voortoven were close behind, Jenkins crowding after. Hard-Eyes hesitated, shouting something to Smoke, and Smoke turned, seeing Hard-Eyes raise the Weatherby—

Smoke thinking, the madman’s going to shoot at that thing!

The Weatherby boomed. No ordinary rifle. Big motherfucker of a rifle. The so-called bulletproof glass on the jumpjet’s cockpit starring, the arc of helmet jerking.

The plane wobbling. Steadying, the 60-mm guns returning to their target. All of this, from Steinfeld’s grabbing papers to the gunshot, taking five seconds.

The crow flapped up, cawing, from Smoke’s shoulder. He grabbed at it, lost sight of it. Saw instead the sentry still in the open window staring in horror at the plane. The plane pilotless but operating itself cybernetically now. Hard-Eyes trying to pull Smoke back out through the door.

Smoke thinking, We’re not going to make it.

He never actually heard the blast.

As the 60-mm cannon fired. It was as if the noise was too profound for his auditory nerves, registering as a squeal like guitar feedback and an ugly metallic ringing. Then heat from a sheet of fire expanded to fill the room; a spatter of warm wetness: blood from the sentry as he was blown apart. All this just the background sensation. The primary sensation was the hardening of the air itself around the blast center. The soft damp air had become a slab of chilled steel that slammed him back into the wall. It
SLAMMED!
him. He could feel his body imprinting its shape in the plaster; feel things straining inside him, buckling—and then giving under the strain, bones creaking and then cracking, all time sadistically slowed so he could savor the hideously lucid sensation of his right arm popping from its socket and his pelvis cracking . . . breastbone cracking . . . cracking . . . 

A white-hot freight train of pain roaring down on him.

And—

He woke, thinking,
Where’s my crow?

He tried to say it, and a steel hammer struck a gong in him and he reverberated with pain. He tried to see, but his eyes were covered by a swarm of black bees.

“Give him more morphine,” said a dream-voice. Steinfeld’s voice.

Smoke never felt the needle. But its load drew a blanket of translucent numbness over the breakage in him; the pain still glowed, beneath, but muted like coals in a fog.

He opened his eyes: it was like lifting a window that had been painted shut; like it strained his back to open his eyes.

Saw through a feverish mist—a corner of a basement room; part of Yukio walking past; heard Hard-Eyes’ voice.

“ . . . we want a guarantee of passage out of France whenever we choose to take it.”

“If you’ll take my word as a guarantee. That’s all I’ve got to offer.” Steinfeld’s voice. “But you’re not fooling anybody. You could have split off from us when we ran, and we wouldn’t have stopped you. You shot at the jumpjet to give Smoke time to get out. Who’re you kidding? You’d have been safer away from us and you knew it! But you stuck with us.”

Hard-Eyes is NR now, Smoke thought. I’m probably internally hemorrhaged, probably die, no doctors, no surgeons. The black bees swarmed over his head again. Stinging. The last thing he thought was, Where’s my bird?

• 05 •

Benjamin Brian Rimpler, Ph.D., the sixty-two-year-old Chairman of the FirStep Project, L-5 Colony One, was on his knees, on the white real wool rug in the bedroom of his plush quarters, worshiping a black rubber goddess.

Her name was Hermione, Herm to her friends, Mistress Hermione to Rimpler, when they were role playing. He paid her two hundred newbux an hour to give him relief.

She was well-padded, a tanned Amazon with dyed-coppery hair and white lipstick, white eye-shadow, which contrasted with the head-to-toe skin-tight black-rubber mistress’s costume, breast tips and crotch of the outfit cut away to expose opulent rouged nipples—one of them flawed with a curling black hair—and her labia, also rouged.

Her breasts, each separately encased in its own form-fitting sheath of rubber, quivered with her slightest motion, and fairly rollicked with the stroke of the car-radio antenna—fitted with a black plastic handle—that she gripped in her studded right hand. The studs on the back of her hand were implanted into the skin in a connect-the-dots skull. Rimpler loved those little cartoon touches. Hermione was a better actress than the other girls from Bitchie’s. But her Queens accent somehow undercut the required imperiousness when she gave him orders.

But when she hit him, Queens reediness didn’t matter. The flash of pain sizzled away the illusion’s seams. She hit him again, hard. Rimpler made an inarticulate whimper this time, and, feeling nausea building behind the flash, he muttered, “Wait.” She was a pro, and she held off. Because there was no question about who was in charge here, really.

Rimpler. Smallish, pallid, blue-veined, bald—shaved bald—just a shade paunchy, his eyes squeezed shut now.

Unlike most of the Colony quarters, Rimpler’s Admin Central flat had more than two rooms. It had three, counting the bathroom. He had, too, the condo in the Open. But he didn’t use it anymore.

Here he’d dialed the bedroom walls to lozenge-shape. He’d switched off the images of Big Sur which usually glowed from the walls, and he’d dialed the light low, adding a sensuous dollop of red tinge. Penderecki’s
The Passion According to Saint Luke
moaned from hidden speakers. “Okay, go ahead . . . ”

Hermione looked at her watch and grimaced. When was the old bugger going to get it over with? He was mewling at her crotch, nosing at it like a pathetic blind puppy as she swacked his knobbed back, spat on his egg-head, told him he was cockroach dung—and he was still only half-tumescent!