John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“Claire?”

After a moment Torrence realized he was lying facedown across her, his body making an X with hers. And he was holding his breath. He let it out, becoming aware of a whirlwind of noise and motion, of people running nearby, fire chattering in their hands. It seemed to him that it was all mixed up now; it wasn’t the enemy over there, NR here—the enemy had overrun them, were all around; the NR was there, too, emerging and sinking in smoke. He saw two SA regulars running up the slope toward him. He rolled off Claire to his rifle, rolled into prone sniper’s position, popping the gun into the hollow of his shoulder, firing instantly, and one of the SA fell. The other one was still coming, pointing a submachine gun right at Torrence. Any second he’d feel the slugs. But the submachiner seemed to gush fire and he fell, writhing in flame, shrieking… somebody’d hit the guy with an incendiary grenade… after a moment the soldier lay still, facedown, quietly burning. But the New-Soviet choppers were looming like great golden dragons overhead as they descended, rotors whipping the smoke.

“Dan?” Claire’s voice. “Let’s get up, let’s get under cover.” Sounding weak. But she was all right.

But… Fuck, the New-Soviets are going to take us, Torrence thought. Fuck that. They’ll torture Claire and then they’ll execute us. That’s what they do. Wring you for information and kill you for convenience. I got to kill her myself. Save her from torture.

Rifle in hands, he got to his knees beside her. She was turned on her side, away from him, starting to get up.

He pointed his rifle’s muzzle at her head. So they don’t torture her.

He pulled the trigger.

Nothing.

No ammunition.

He tossed the rifle aside, looked around for another gun.

And then Steinfeld was kneeling beside him, pulling him up.

“Got to kill her before they…” Torrence said. Or tried to say, he wasn’t sure which. He felt like he was made of soggy cardboard. His lips didn’t want to work; his tongue felt thick. He managed, “They’ll take her…”

The choppers were settling down in an open space just ahead of him. The SA had taken cover, driven back by cannon blasts from the New-Soviets.

Steinfeld said, “They’re not Russians. That’s cover. Kind of camouflage. That’s the Mossad. They got transmission. They’ve come to get us out.”

Torrence must have lost consciousness for a while. But not more than a few minutes. Because when the fuzziness around him resolved, he saw he was inside a helicopter, hearing Steinfeld say, “They’ve gone into the cave. They sent in ten regulars, it looks like… I doubt they send in any more. Go ahead, Danco.”

Torrence heard Danco chuckle as he reached for the remote-control detonator.

Torrence found himself wanting to say, Don’t trigger the detonator. Don’t kill them. I know what they are. I know they’re enemy, I know they killed my friends, I know they’re some kind of Nazi and I know what that means, but it’s enough, it’s too much now, so let them go, just let them go, please let them go, it’s all too fucking much…

Torrence was distantly aware that there was a field IV plugged into his arm, a Mossad medic kneeling beside him holding up a plastic bottle of plasma, Claire sitting up across from him, her leg bandaged, staring into space, but she was alive, Lord, she was alive…

He heard Danco laughing. “Hey, pendejos, vaya con Dios!” as he threw the switch on the detonator. And the cave blew, taking ten SA with it.

Torrence thought: I’m glad they’re dead. I have to be glad of it or nothing means anything and everything I’ve done and everything that happened—all of it was meaningless. Accept it. They needed to die.

He felt the acceptance lock into place in him; he turned away from the thought that just a little more of his humanity might’ve gone when the acceptance came.

Ten more of the enemy were dead. That was all.

He smiled and went back to sleep.

Jean-Michel Karakos stood at the window looking at the prisoners in the detention pens below. On either side of him stood the pale Dr. Cooper and the pink Colonel Watson. Behind Karakos loomed an enormous Second Alliance guard—the man must have been close to seven feet tall. Karakos could feel the man back there, hulking over him.

Karakos’s hands were cuffed together, and the cuffs were locked to a chain around his waist.

Karakos, Watson, and Cooper were looking through the polarized window at a nightmare concocted with the simpleminded efficiency of a high-school science fair project.

Cooper was about forty, Karakos guessed, though it was hard to tell with an albino. He was stooped, potbellied; he had one pink eye and one blue eye, hair that looked like mold, and an unsettling waxiness to his skin. It looked as glossy as a balloon. He wore a blue lab smock over a tweed suit.

“It’s an interesting experiment,” Watson was telling him. “It was Cooper’s brainchild.” Watson was a tall, thick-bodied Englishman in his early fifties, with a round, weathered face, a brickish complexion, and poker-chip blue eyes. He wore a black-and-silver Second Alliance officer’s uniform but stood in a kind of boyish slouch, as if to defuse the harsh punctilio implied by the regalia. He was the Chief of Tactics, a title that encompassed a great many public and private responsibilities. Some said he was the number-two man in the Second Alliance.

“Oh, well,” Cooper said with a modesty that was clearly insincere, “the experiment is actually an old sociobiological concept—we’re merely bringing it to life.”

“You are a sociobiologist, then?” Karakos asked, as if he were a magazine interviewer and not a prisoner.

“A sociobiologist? No, we’re beyond that here.” They were standing at the second-story polarized window that looked out over detention pens ten, eleven, and twelve. Karakos didn’t know where he was; he’d been brought here in the back of a big windowless truck, packed in with seventy others. The trip had taken only half an hour—he was sure only that he was still in France. The building was big, drafty, echoey, built of a dull white alloy that looked like plastic, but was in fact alumitech.

Watson had the air of a proud man of property giving a friend the tour, telling Karakos they’d put the place together from its component parts in two weeks, once the foundations were sunk. There were fifteen “pens,” most of them not visible from here; pens ten and eleven were side by side under the window; pen twelve was as big as ten and eleven together and ran alongside them to the right. Each pen was separated from the others by two chain-link fences, and each fence’s crown of thorns was concertina wire. Between the two fences was a five-foot concrete path patrolled by helmeted SA guards.

Karakos was deceptively brutish-looking. He was stocky, brown-eyed—his eyes were sunken now, from poor diet. He had thick lips, a wide mouth full of widely spaced teeth from which the gums were beginning to recede; oily, stringy brown hair; and eyebrows that grew together. He wore a detainee’s polyplas bright orange overalls—for maximum visibility in case of escape—and a yellowed T-shirt. He had ten days’ growth of coarse brown beard, and in the months he had been in detention, he had been so long without a bath that he could no longer smell anything but himself. He was not an elegant figure. But as Watson had written in his Extraction Experiment 5F evaluation for Sackville-West, “Karakos was one of the NR’s most effective propagandists. His scathing attacks on the SA (for the banned newspaper Égalité ) were noteworthy for their eloquence and sheer panache, and it is said he worked closely with Steinfeld planning the NR’s first field campaigns.”