John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Karakos clapped Steinfeld on the shoulder. “Thank you, my friend. You will not regret it.” And then he went to do his radio duty.

Russ sat on the desk in the admissions area of Detentions and felt a foolish shiver of vicarious happiness as he watched Lester coming through the door, running to embrace Kitty Torrence.

Praeger was right, Russ thought. I’m too soft for this job.

Other prisoners were emerging. A group of women now: Judy Assavickian, Angie Siggert, an Oriental woman—Chu, or something—and the black twins, Belle and Kris Mitchell, hugging one another, crying with relief. Belle and Kris looking as if they’d been routinely beaten about the face.

A group of men came out, and then Faid, walking up to Russ in a tentative way, almost on tiptoe, and Russ knew he was carrying bad news.

“Chief—” Faid’s voice broke. “There are being only half as many prisoners as there should be…”

Russ went cold inside. “Did you talk to the guards who were here?”

“Not yet, but the prisoners say the bloody bastards took people away every day for the last week and they never came back and, chief, I don’t thinking they are letting them go—”

“No. No, I don’t think they did either.”

“I wonder,” Praeger said, “if you have even the slightest inkling as to what’s going to happen to you, Russ, eh?”

Russ leaned against the wall of Praeger’s cell with his hands in his pockets. Praeger looked small and pink sitting in the corner of his white-walled cell. A guard in full uniform—except, they didn’t wear the helmets now—stood at the door. He was one of Russ’s people.

Russ said, “I can’t believe you did it.”

Praeger acted as if he hadn’t heard. “UNIC won’t stand for it. NASA won’t stand for it. The European Space Agency won’t stand for it. The American government.”

“We’ve been getting transmissions again. The American government has big problems of its own right now. The president of the United States is going to be impeached.”

Praeger laughed softly. “A silly rumor. Nothing will come of it.”

“They seemed pretty certain about it, friend. How did you do it, exactly? Did you put them alive and kicking out into space, Praeger? Did you at least kill them with sedation first? Twenty-seven men and women taken from the cells and vanished.”

Praeger shrugged and said offhandedly, “I told them to do it the way they thought best. I know the bodies were jettisoned.”

“I feel like hitting you. Just holding you down and hitting you.” The desire to do it was a buzz going through him. “But what I’m going to do is, I’m going to try you for the murder of the people on the RM17, and for the murder of the prisoners in your charge, and, if the jury agrees, I’ll execute you. And Judith. A technicki jury. I think they’ll go for it.”

Praeger stared at the floor. He swallowed so you could see it, and said, “You’re getting yourself in deeper and deeper.”

“I was in deep a long time ago.”

“Not Judith, Russ.”

“Oh, yes. If anything she’s worse than you are. But the Second Alliance bulls, all of them, will be considered on a case by case basis. The SA leadership is going to be prosecuted in the US, it seems. If that happens, I’ll ship them down.”

“Chances are none of this will happen,” Praeger said rather distantly. “The New-Soviets will… ah…”

“They’re withdrawing. Most people think they aren’t going to fall back on nukes. We have too many missile-carrying submarines. They lost too many subs in the war. And anyway they’re scared of nuclear war as much as we are.”

Praeger said nothing.

“We’re overcrowded with prisoners, so I’m going to have some put in here. With you.”

Praeger shot him a look of pure venom.

Russ chuckled. “The idea of being in with the hoi-polloi repel you? Yeah, you’ll have to crap in front of them too.”

“This making you feel better, Russ? You think you can take this thing over and the people on Earth will shrug? Russ—the colony belongs to Earth. It belongs to those nations. They won’t take this.”

“Sure they will. We were about to go into the black, before the shit started coming down. We’re a moneymaking proposition. If we’re unanimous, if we’re united here, we’ll be making them an offer they can’t refuse. They need us, more and more they need us economically. Asteroid mining is beginning to really take off. And we’ll tell them what the Admin did. We’ll tell them about RM17 and about the other murders. And I think they’ll understand.”

“‘If we’re united here?’ You’re a Communist!”

“You say that like you mean I fuck my mother. No, I’m not a Communist. But I’m making Kitty Torrence and her husband the technicki reps. He for electrician ratings, comm ratings, and mechanics; she for the other labor levels. And they’re lefties. Me, I ain’t a lefty but I guess I’ve gone a ways to the left. And that’s your fault, Praeger, you did it to me, you pushed me to the left. I don’t like it over in the left: it’s cold over here.” He went to the door. Stopped just long enough to say: “And Praeger? You asked if jugging you with the scum was going to make me feel better? You know—I think it is.”

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.