John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

The pressures these people work under! Roseland thought with awe.

There was a terrible beauty in their sacrifice and in their contradictory mutuality. Roseland was an American Jew. Lespere was a French Catholic priest. Others here were Muslim; the historical conflict between Muslim and Middle Eastern Jew was still hot in their racial memories. But these Muslims, these Catholics, these Jews, were utterly convinced of the spiritual necessity of their work together. They were brethren in a moral imperative that plumbed a humanity deeper than all their differences.

Roseland felt an exquisite pain thinking about it. He was moved, and saddened for them all. Because what had brought them together was horror, and loss. He closed his eyes, seeing Gabrielle’s pretty mouth spitting blood and brains…

He made himself listen more closely to Torrence. “What all this means,” Hard-Eyes was saying, “is that you’re on your own in a lot of ways. If you’re captured, we probably won’t be able to help you. If you escape, you may not be able to find us again—because when someone is captured, someone who knows where home base is, we move on to another. And since you know about Lespere, we’d have to take him out of place, evacuate him. We’d lose him as an intelligence source. And there are other things you know, unavoidably, that we don’t want the Nazis to know. So… I can’t order you to do it, but…” He paused a beat, meeting their eyes, his own eyes smoldering with emotion. “Danco… Danco was the heart and soul of the Point Cadre. And…”

Danco had killed himself on capture, Roseland knew.

Slowly, Torrence unbuttoned his coat. He opened it, and they saw the explosives taped to his chest. “You have a choice. You’ll all be issued these. We don’t wear them constantly. It depends on the risk of capture. If I’m captured, I’ll use mine. Whether you use yours…” He shrugged. “We’re not the kind of people to indoctrinate you so much that you can’t make choices. You’ll always be able to think in the NR…”

“The best thing is if you never have to think!” the American told them. McDonnell shouted the words, hammering the verbs with window-shaking authority. “You shouldn’t have to make choices most of the time. Your training will make them for you. You’ll be so thoroughly trained, you’ll know what to do or who to defer to in each situation.”

The town hall was very old, with a blackened stone fireplace and a warped wooden floor. All but one of the windows had been dashed out by the bombing shocks and were boarded over. Butter-yellow sunlight, hinting seductively of fragrant summer fields and flower-lined roads, poured through the remaining window, but Barrabas was careful not to look that way. He was turned slightly away from it, in his wooden desk, third row back from the portable instruction screen McDonnell had set up. The screen was like one of those old blackboards that came in a wooden frame and on wheels. But the frame was aluminum, and a wafer-thin TV screen replaced the blackboard. McDonnell moved a control mouse and the video-animated outlines of men shifted obediently. McDonnell’s blaring declamation gradually broke down into an instructor’s drone. “Suppose the guerrillas are fanned out around us in these derelict buildings. Twenty of them, well spread out. They may or may not be communicating with headsets. Our patrol moves in here in an orderly column. The guerrillas open fire. Some will have armor piercing rounds. Your patrol captain gives you the Ambush Seven command, and you break up into four units of five men each, two units to each side of the street. You’ve got your helmet filters on; the gas operative has laid down the smoke-and-choke screen and you’re rushing the buildings; your unit’s APD operative does an AntiPersonnel Device sweep for mines, trip wires, as the rest of you lay down suppressive fire on the high ground. You enter the building behind the designated point man. Should the designated point man be injured and unavailable, the designated replacement point man will take his place.” The cartoonish SA soldier shapes moved across the screen into the down-angled view of the maze of buildings. “You’re communicating on your designated helmet frequencies, using the designated code of the day in case the enemy is monitoring you, so that you move in tandem with the other three units. It’s important for each unit to know as accurately as possible where the other units are at any given time for reasons of strategy and the avoidance of ‘friendly fire.’ Entering the building here, we see a scenario requiring that Unit Man Four and Two move to the right and left and One and Three move down the middle of the room, firing as they go…”

Roseland was scared of getting shot, and felt foolish for it, considering what he’d been through at the detention center. He’d been shot once already that afternoon, right in the heart. And it had stung, too. But it had left just a little welt—the round was only a wax ball containing red soap-liquid, fired by a CO 2gun. It was just to mark you, so you knew for sure if you were “dead.”

But he’d stood there, marked “dead,” looking down the barrel of the grinning Arab trainee he’d stumbled across, then looking at the wet red smear over his heart. And he’d felt his legs go rubbery. He’d had to clutch at the wall to keep from falling. A Jew—shot through the heart by an Arab.

The Arab had slapped him on the shoulder and said, “You’ll learn, you’re a smart one, I see that!” And offered him a smoke. But Roseland had been spooked ever since.

Alone now, his own CO 2rifle in his hands—they had about a dozen of them, scavenged from a bombed-out sporting-goods store—he moved down the corridor of dusty crates, squinting into the thick shadows. He paused to wipe sweat-fog from the inside of his goggles, then moved on. Froze at the sound of a scuffle, paint balls smacking some plastic surface about fifty feet away. Someone swearing, someone else laughing.

They’re just paint balls, he told himself.

But his mouth was bone dry as he went on, in a half-crouch, air rifle slipping in his sweaty fingers.

They’d been skirmishing for days like this, running short of paint balls. Roseland wondered more than once if all this meant anything in the real battlefield. The guys who wore the white armband were playing SA, but they didn’t have armor. A lot of the SA had armor though SA regulars went without much protection. The stuff was expensive. They kept it back for “elite” search-and-destroy and for sentries, who were vulnerable to snipers. But if you did come up against a squad in armor, what did you do when your bullets bounced off them? Laugh sheepishly and back away?

There were ways of getting past the armor, Torrence claimed. They’d get to that part of the training. But still, the odds were in favor of the armored soldier…

Next time, real guns. Next time, the SA. Next time, the stuff won’t be soapy goo. It’ll be warm and red, and there’ll be more of it.

The kid speaker was a special treat, they were told. Something inspirational. But he was getting on Barrabas’s nerves. Maybe it was an aftereffect of the drug.

They’d told Barrabas the Second Alliance didn’t use medication-spigots on their soldiers, as some of the NATO forces did. They didn’t drug them into kill-consciousness. Barrabas wanted none of that. He’d seen a bloke in a pub, ex-infantryman back from the war, strangle a barkeep into unconsciousness for calling Time. He’d seen the infantry bloke’s glazed eyes, the way he’d clutched at the spot on his thigh where the spigot used to be.

Not for Barrabas, thanks all the same. But now they were giving him a “harmless variant of vasopressin, just a memory kicker” so he could “soak up the tactical reflexes.” McDonnell had said it throwaway like that, like he was offering a cup of coffee.