John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

The cops knew what it was. They knew it when they heard it.

One cop said to the other (as he took out the handcuffs, and Charlie had become a retching machine, unable to run or fight or argue because all he could do was retch), “Jeez, it makes me sick when I think about it. People shooting up some of somebody else’s brains. Don’t it make you sick?”

“Yeah. Looks like it makes him sick, too. Let’s take him to the chute, send him down for the blood test.”

He felt the snakebite of cuffs, felt them do a perfunctory body search, missing the knife in the boot. Felt himself shoved along to the police kiosk on the corner, the new prisoner-transferral chutes. They put you in something like a coffin (they pushed him into a greasy, sweat-stinking, inadequately padded personnel capsule, closed the lid on him, he wondered what happened—as they closed the lid on him—if he got stuck in the chutes, were there air holes, would he suffocate?), and they push it down into the chute inside the kiosk and it gets sucked along this big underground tube (he had a sensation of falling, then felt the tug of inertia, the horror of being trapped in here with Angelo, not enough room for the two of them, seeing a flash mental image of Angelo’s rotting corpse in here with him, Angelo was dead, Angelo was dead) to the police station. The cops’ street report clipped to the capsule. The other cops read the report, take you out (a creak, the lid opened, blessed fresh air even if it was the police station), take everything from you, check your DNA print against their files, make you sign some things, lock you up just like that… that’s what he was in for right away. And then maybe a public AntiViolence Law beating. Ironic.

Charlie looked up at a bored cop-face, an older, fat one this time. The cop looked away, fussing with the report, not bothering to take Charlie out of the capsule. There was more room to maneuver now, and Charlie felt like he was going to rip apart from Angelo’s being in there with him if he didn’t get out of the cuffs, out of the capsule. So he brought his knees up to his chest, worked the cuffs around his feet, it hurt… but he did it, got his hands in front of him.

Flash of Angelo’s memory: A big cop leaning over him, shouting at him, picking him up by the neck, shaking him. Fingers on his throat…

When Angelo was a kid, some cop had caught him running out of a store with something he’d ripped off. So the cop roughed him up, scared the shit out of Angelo, literally: Angelo shit his pants. The cop reacted in disgust (the look of disgust on the two cops’ faces: “Makes me sick,” one of them had said).

So Angelo hated cops, and now Angelo was out of his right mind—ha ha, he was in Charlie’s—and so it was Angelo who reached down and found the boot knife that the two cops had missed, pulled it out, got to his knees in the capsule as the cop turned around (Charlie fighting for control— dammit, Ange, put down the knife, we could get out of this with —) and Charlie—no, it was Angelo—gripped the knife in both hands and stabbed the guy in his fat neck, split that sickening fat neck open, cop’s blood is as red as anyone’s, looks like…

Oh, shit. Oh, no.

Here come the other cops.

Same night, another time zone, another variety of darkness.

Daniel “Hard-Eyes” Torrence walked through a vast, wind-scoured darkness, unable to see his feet or his hands in front of his face, guided only by the distant swatch of light ahead of him.

It was near dawn in Malta. Torrence had just gone off watch on the approach road to the safe house. Danco, yawning and cursing, had replaced him, was making himself ersatz espresso in the little shack by the dirt road.

A cold wind blew the rich scent of the sea from the coast, a quarter of a mile south. Sounds seemed eerily detached and lucid out here. He could make out the smack and rumble of breakers carried on the sighing wind; his rifle creaked softly on its shoulder strap; his booted feet made grumpy trudging sounds.

He felt as if none of it had anything to do with him. At any moment the wind might blow his soul right out of his body.

He was glad when he got to the barn, walked blinking into its well-lit interior. Two choppers sat there, looking glassy and bulbous and out of place, as foreign to the dusty wooden walls as flying saucers, their blades folded back on hinges overhead. Torrence nodded at the guard lounging in the cockpit of the compact chopper by the stairs. The Italian, Forsino, an old-fashioned long-hair, a hipz in Stateside terms, looking put-upon and bored.

Torrence took the open stairs up to the dusty attic, hearing the old wooden barn creak in the wind, wondering if tonight was the night it would fall over.

Lila was on the radio in the attic, monitoring the military bands and anything else she found of intelligence interest, keeping a frequency open for communications from Witcher and New Resistance affiliate groups. Wires ran to the next room—an old olive storage bin—where sat-link antennas, looking like miniature radar scoops, angled out an open window, listening to the babbling emptiness…

An electric light bulb burned naked in a white porcelain socket overhead; moths ticked at it, and it dimmed now and then when the wind blew particularly hard. Wearing a headset, Lila was seated at a table piled with a lot of arcane metal boxes that looked as out of place as the choppers in the rustic backdrop.

Lila was clear-eyed and alert, evidently ready for anything, even at this hour. She was so efficient it was maddening, Torrence thought. She took off the headset and looked at Torrence questioningly.

“I thought Claire was on tonight,” Torrence said.

Was there a flash of displeasure in her face? “I have relieved her. An hour ago.”

“Nice of you to relieve her early.”

Lila said nothing. She seemed to be studying the dust-heavy cobwebs overhead; they shook when the wind thumped the barn.

“Hear anything interesting?” Torrence asked, nodding toward the radio.

She shook her head.

He turned away, hesitated, then turned back to her. “Was she here alone, when she was on duty?”

Lila didn’t reply for a full three beats. She looked at him blankly and said, “Karakos. He was here talking to her when I came.”

Torrence felt a chill. He went to the table, flipped open the comm log, looked down the list of dispatches, messages received and sent for the week… nothing at all for that day. “Karakos didn’t transmit?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Any transmission has to have written clearance from Steinfeld. Claire would not have let anyone use the radio without clearance. There are only four people cleared to do comm duty, and Karakos is not one of them. Claire knows that.” A touch defensive on Claire’s behalf.

“What did Karakos want here?”

“Probably couldn’t sleep, wanted someone to talk to. How am I to know?”

“Okay.” He turned away. She seemed hostile to him, in a subdued way. Why?

He went down the creaking stairs, dust rising with his every step, thinking hard, wondering if his feeling about Karakos was simply jealousy. Or is it what I think?

In forty-eight hours they’d hijack the Hermes’ Grandson. Karakos was to go along.

He stepped into the windy night, crossed to the house, called out the password at the back door. Someone shined a flashlight in his face. He blinked irritably till they were sure of him, and went into the house. It was quiet; most of the others were asleep. But there was a steady creaking noise from upstairs.

Moving on sheer impulse, not thinking, borne along by some inner charge of urgency, he climbed the stairs, went to Claire’s room—since their argument, she’d taken her own room. He knocked once, and before she’d finished calling out, “Who is it?” he opened the door and went in.