John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

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?

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.