John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

The plane was angling up as steeply as the pilot dared. “We’re for it,” Hand said. “They’ll use hunter-seeker missiles. Exocets, whatever. Blow us out of the fucking sky.”

“Quite possibly,” Smoke said. He wondered if Alouette was taking good care of his crow.

Smoke looked at Hand, wondering if he was going to become hysterical. Hand sat there rigidly, staring out the window, watching for a missile. Obviously not the war-correspondent sort of reporter.

Trying to broaden his résumé, Smoke thought, and look what it got him.

Finally, Hand took a deep breath and relaxed. “Whatever happens, happens,” he said hoarsely, shrugging.

Smoke nodded, then held on to the seat as the plane banked sharply, its engines roaring now. “If it’s any comfort, this plane is augmented for defensive actions.” He could feel the inertia trying to pull his spine one way and his rib cage another. “Might surprise them.”

“Ohshee, cheh’dow,” the technicki said, staring out his window, his voice cracking.

Smoke looked over. The plane had banked so that the port wing was pointed almost straight down at the island. Alongside a surfline of blue-white butterfly-wing delicacy, a line of fireballs huffed, threw tons of sand into the sky. The sound and muted shock wave rolled through the plane, which shivered and rattled. Smoke saw the next wave of artillery shelling hit the NR’s little airport tower, blowing off its top and splitting it down the middle.

“Neb’zah?” the technicki asked.

Smoke shook his head. “No, nobody there. Evacuated in good time.”

“What the hell are those?” Hand blurted. “Look like flying saucers…”

Smoke didn’t have to look. “They are, sort of. Saucers about two feet across. They fly, or glide anyway, down behind us. We just let go a cloud of them.”

“Pulse camouflage,” the technicki said, saying it in standard English.

Smoke nodded. “Some of our defensive augmentation. They put out an electromagnetic pulse that distracts the missiles—”

“We got past two of them,” the pilot said.

“Two what?” Smoke asked.

“My guess is Patriot Fourteens. Very nice missiles with Multiple Target Capability. The defense industry’s finest. But that’s not saying much.”

Irony in the pilot’s voice. You deal with it how you can, Smoke thought.

“We lost them with the pulse cammies?” Smoke asked.

“Looks like. But we’ve got SPVs coming after us…”

“Stop with the goddamn acronyms!” Hand snapped at the intercom.

“Self Piloted Vehicles,” Smoke translated. “Drones. They can do things no human pilot can. Sometimes they make mistakes no pilot will, too.”

“They’re turning off for…” the pilot said. “Oh, waitaminnut. Here comes another, and it’s not taking the bait. Well, shit.”

Smoke closed his eyes. Assuming the pilot had seen a missile getting through to them. He waited for the impact, the noise, the crushing and tearing and screaming. The pain.

A dull, distant whud. “ They got Number Two.” The pilot’s voice was almost too soft to hear.

Smoke opened his eyes, relief and horror leapfrogging in his gut. He saw the fireball through the window. Trailers of vapor left by pieces of the disintegrating passenger plane, making it into an exotic flame-red and smoke-black flower against the sky. Sixty-four NR operatives, dead in an instant. Shot out of the sky. To the American media, it would be sixty-four Puerto Rican Terrorists shot down while en route to a bombing run over San Juan.

“Holy shit,” Hand breathed, face pressed to the glass. “Fuck. We’re next.”

Smoke shook his head, feeling tears on his cheek. “No, we’re probably out of range by the time they get their RPVs back in line. They haven’t got any human-Piloted vehicles.” He felt like he was locked up in a flying steel jail, while some fake Smoke was outside the jail cell, chatting with the warden.

“Are we really going to make it?” Hand said. “Get away scot-free?”

Smoke winced. Scot-free. Dozens of his brothers and sisters blown into meat scraps. Scot-free.

Smoke felt like he should have died back there too. Glad he didn’t and disgusted that he didn’t. Both.

“There’s a good chance we’re away,” he said, clearing his throat. “We… If we hadn’t got the jump on them, we’d be dead by now…”

“So where to now?” Hand asked. “What happens to me?”

“We’re going to a place in Mexico,” Smoke said distantly. Still seeing, as if projected on the blank screen in front of him, the chrysanthemum of fire and smoke as the second NR transport blew up, like the centerpiece of a funeral’s floral arrangement. “You can go on your merry way or go with us, see some things,” he said dully. He should try and talk Hand into going along. But he didn’t have it in him to say a word more than he absolutely had to.

He felt the old wrenching come back, the uncertainty about what was real and who was important and who he was; seeing, not so far away, the brink: beyond it, the madness that had held him at the beginning of the war. He had been fractured when the SA goons had taken him, tortured him; fractured still deeper when he saw the new Nazis tearing like jackals at the dying corpus of European civilization. Steinfeld and Hard-Eyes had saved him, welded him back together. But the fracture was still there, like a badly welded crack in a steel post. Maybe there was too much pressure on the post. Maybe it was going to break again.

Several of the others were sobbing. Some had lost friends, lovers, maybe relations on the exploded jet. Some simply wept after seeing sixty-four people expunged like flies in a cloud of insecticide. Instantly snuffed out, like pests.

Smoke got out of his seat. There was an NR doctor sitting two rows back; a stocky Filipino woman in glasses, a white dress, and anomalously, a flak jacket. She’d just finished throwing up into a vomit bag as Smoke labored up the aisle to her. Straining against the inertia of the accelerating jet, Smoke leaned against a chair back and said, “Give me something.”

(Steinfeld wouldn’t ask for a tranquilizer, Smoke thought. Steinfeld wouldn’t show his pain, not like this. He’d be moving around, comforting people, helping them get over this. He’d be tougher, more caring; he’d be what we needed now. I’m not Steinfeld.)

The doctor nodded, folded the bag up, dabbed her mouth, wiped tears from her eyes. She took a bottle of pills from her coat pocket, popped one herself, and gave one to Smoke. “Don’t take it if you have to do something in an intelligent way.”

“Who the hell knows what’s intelligent?” Smoke muttered, popping the pill and sitting down.

From the Second Alliance psych evaluation report on Patrick Barrabas, aged twenty-one, Citizen of the United Kingdom:

Barrabas has the usual British obsession with class issues. He is perhaps more obsessive about it than most. Angry about class barriers—cited the appeal of Nazi Party’s promise to dissolve society into one class of grass-roots Caucasians. Hypocritical about class: Seems to have been Cockney, worked hard to eliminate the lower-class accent, manages most of the time to sound upper middle class. Clear-cut and steerable convictions about the lesser races, but maintains: “Not that I believe in genocide, none of that. Repatriation, that’s my idea for them.” Probably salvageable aggression curve… Grew up in a poor London neighborhood where several ghettos intersected, was persecuted by a black gang: good resentment foundations there… two years with the National Front “skinheads,” for the sake of street protection at first, then politicized firmly. Gave up video technology vocational school after two terms due to inability to pay tuition. Minor digi-vee editing job experience at VidEx before the company became a war casualty: possible use in battlefield video-journalism but deep motivation speaks well for counter-insurgency assignment. No neuroses that are not utilizable. Recommendation: recruit for SPOES enforcement, front line.