John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

They were ready. Jessie transmitted the bait.

Alerted to an illegal use of implant chips, the trashcan was squeaking down the hall, scanning to precisely locate the source. It came to a sudden stop, rocking on its wheels in front of their cell. Jessie reached through the bars and touched its input jack.

The machine froze with a clack midway through a turn, and hummed as it processed what they fed it. Would the robot bite?

Bones had a program for the Cyberguard Fourteens, with all the protocol and a range of sample entry codes. Parallel processing from samples took less than two seconds to decrypt the trashcan’s access code. Then—

They were in. The hard part was the reprogramming.

Jerome found the way. He told the trashcan that he wasn’t Eric Wexler, because the DNA code was all wrong, if you looked close enough; what we have here is a case of mistaken identity.

Since this information seemed to be coming from authorized sources—the decrypted access code made them authorized—the trashcan fell for the gag and opened the cage.

The trashcan took the five Eric Wexlers down the hall—that was Jessie’s doing, showing them how to make it think of five as one, something his people had learned from the immigration computers. It escorted them through the plastiflex door, through the steel door, and into Receiving. The human guard was heaping sugar into his antique Ronald McDonald coffee mug and watching The Mutilated on his wallet TV. Bones and Jessie were in the room and moving in on him before he broke free of the television and went for the button. Bones’s long left arm spiked out and his stiffened fingers hit a nerve cluster below the guy’s left ear, and he went down, the sugar dispenser in one hand swishing a white fan onto the floor.

Jerome’s chip had cross-referenced Bones’s attack style. Bones was trained by commandos, the chip said. Military elite. Was he a plant? Bones smiled at him and tilted his head, which Jerome’s chip read as: No. I’m trained by the Underground. Radics.

Jessie was at the console, deactivating the trashcan, killing the cameras, opening the outer doors. Jessie and Swish led the way out, Swish whining softly and biting her lip. There were two more guards at the gate, one of them asleep. Jessie had taken the gun from the guy Bones had put under, so the first guard at the gate was dead before he could hit an alarm. The catnapping guy woke and yelled with hoarse terror, and then Jessie shot him in the throat.

Watching the guard fall, spinning, blood making its own slow-motion spiral in the air, Jerome felt a perfect mingling of sickness, fear and self-disgust. The guard was young, wearing a cheap wedding ring, probably had a young family. So Jerome stepped over the dying man and made an adjustment; used his chip, chilled himself out with adrenaline. Had to—he was committed now. And he knew with a bland certainty that they had reached the Plateau after all.

He would live on the Plateau now. He belonged there, now that he was one of the wolves.

At the broken heart of Paris is the Île de la Cité, an island in the River Seine. On the easternmost tip of the island is a memorial to the Jewish victims of Nazi occupation. The current government did not keep it in good repair. The Cathedral of Notre Dame on another tip of the island was also in ill repair, as the Unity Party had no great liking for the Catholic Church, which did not support its racist agenda, and blocked the Vatican’s access with a thousand bureaucratic obstacles. North of Notre Dame lay the ruins of old buildings in the Rue Chanoinesse, the Rue Chantres, and the Rue des Ursins. On the Rue des Ursins was a war-damaged police station, a gendarmerie, long since abandoned. Though not thirty yards from it was an official rationing station, where, every day, the disenfranchised lined up, sometimes for days, to receive pathetically inadequate government rations of freeze-dried and canned goods and petrosynthetics. Groups from a mere cluster to a crowd could be expected here at any time, so it was good cover for the New Resistance. An NR operative approached the rationing center as if he were part of the crowd waiting for a handout; simply entered the ruined building next door, as if to find a spot for a quick pee. He passed through several woebegone, debris-cluttered rooms, and then into an alley, blocked at both ends. Here was a boarded-over back door to the erstwhile police station. The door swung aside if pulled just right. And if the NR operative made the appropriate hand signal as he entered, the guard wouldn’t blow his brains out.

Best to be updated on the hand signals.

If you make it past the guard, you go down a clean but unheated drab-blue hallway to a metal door opening on a row of cells. If you said the right words at the metal door, the guard behind it wouldn’t blow your brains out, either.

Instead, she’ll slide the door open for you, and you’ll go to the cell where your debriefing takes place.

Steinfeld, Pasolini, Dan Torrence, and Levassier sat around an old Formica table in a chilly metal room, formerly a big holding tank used mostly for drunks. There was a sat-link terminal in the corner, gathering dust, because they didn’t have a secure way to use it just now, and there was a plastic flagon of hot coffee on the table. There were rifles stacked against the wall. There was the smell of dust and sewage: the toilets didn’t flush. Sewage had to be carted out in buckets.

Torrence was sitting on a wooden bench that rocked on its uneven legs whenever he shifted his weight. His hands clasped the tin coffee mug for warmth.

He felt like shit.

“Danco is dead, Cordenne is dead,” Torrence said, “and that’s bad. But I’ll tell you what’s worse. Six civilians were injured, three are dead.” He turned to stare at Lina Pasolini. “And the fucking Fascists have a major propaganda victory. We go from being freedom fighters to being terrorists.”

Lina Pasolini was dark, her black hair cut short, her thick eyebrows two bars of black emphasis over her hooded eyes. Her face was carved out of deep shadows and strong planes, a handsome face that hid its sensuality under a burden of quiet suspicion. She wore khaki trousers, sneakers, a grimy sweatshirt. There was a .44 stuck in the waistband of her pants. She didn’t need it here.

She lit a stubby Russian cigarette and looked at it, caught like a pointer between her thumb and forefinger, as she spoke in her careful, trained English. “Showing they have the will to kill anyone necessary has worked for many guerilla groups. The crowd was in support of the fascists… And—you know—bad propaganda can be good propaganda if it is followed up, redirected.” She’d grown up in Sardinia, but she had a master’s in international poli-sci from Columbia, and more than once Torrence had heard her speak of having lit a cigarette with the burning diploma.

Torrence thought she was dangerously certain of herself and, worse, unbearably pretentious. And as if to confirm that, she went on:

“Terror is the only statement that, once heard, is never forgotten.” Her voice was deep but without much inflection; her Italian accent was almost imperceptible. Torrence thought of Italians as noisy and assertive. But Pasolini was always laidback, maddeningly calm, methodical. As if she was absolutely certain that everything she said was inarguable fact.

“You’re saying you did it on purpose?” Torrence asked. “You meant to kill civilians?”

“Not precisely—there were fascists after me, I was trying to kill them. But if it happens that we sacrifice so-called civilians—if there is such a thing—it becomes part of our statement. A declaration of commitment, you see.” She gave him a gauzy look from somewhere deep inside herself. “There really are no civilians, ‘Hard-Eyes.’” A little mockery in the use of his long-discarded nom de guerre. “Everyone must be in this war, children and adults, women and men, and if I knew how to bring their dogs and cats in, I’d do that too.”