John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Crack: a shrieking soldier silenced.

More gunfire now, on the perimeter of the little square, as the vehicles the guerrillas had driven up to block the street came under fire from advancing SA. There were only about a dozen Second Alliance, so far. They were containable: Torrence’s backup team were holding them back with rifle-launched grenades and firebombs.

The greater threat was from the north: Second Alliance reinforcements in large numbers were moving in with armored cars, maybe only blocks away.

But the Jægernaut was there: he felt the ground shudder under him, glimpsed a gargantuan shifting, as if a tower of steel were stretching itself after a long hibernation. Voices in his headset: “ Swineherd, we’re making contact with the trotters.” The Jægernaut hijack unit was moving the gargantuan machine into place.

What potential power there was in controlling a Jægernaut, Torrence thought…

He noticed Roseland running from building 13, white-faced. Panicked, maybe. Looked like he was going to lose it, after all. They might have to—

But then he saw Roseland rummaging in the cab of the evacuation truck, coming out with insulated wire clippers, swearing to himself as he turned and raced back into the building. Torrence went in to see what was holding up the evacuation.

Upstairs, past the rubble, he found Roseland in a large stinking room that had been made when the walls in the original apartments had been knocked down. He was using the clippers to cut away plastic restraints from the necks and wrists and ankles of the prisoners. Every one of them had been bound in the stuff, tied together, squeezed in so tightly there was barely room to move or breathe. Torrence recognized the hard but prehensile gray plastic, as sparks shot from the clippers, severing it. Restrain-o-Lite, it was called. Used by British cops to hold large numbers of prisoners after a riot; the stuff absorbed static electricity and gave it off whenever you moved. Sit still and it didn’t hurt you; squirm and it gave you a nasty shock. The condition of the prisoners…

Torrence, who’d thought himself inured to horror, had to turn away till his stomach quieted down.

About a fourth of them had died in the restraints; were hanging there, rotting. Some had rotted free, slipped to the floor. The others were starved, bruised, cold, semiconscious, drained of dignity. Looking like plucked game birds hanging in a string.

And there were more, hundreds more on the floors above. Torrence took a breath and turned around, began to shout orders, commencing the evacuation. Glad Claire wasn’t here to have to see this. And yet wishing she was at his side…

Colonel Watson, Klaus, and Giessen stood at the monitors in the Security Center, watching the shaking TV image shot from the underside of the chopper approaching Processing Center 13.

“How did they get hold of a Jægernaut?” Giessen asked, not troubling to conceal his disgust. “That is supposed to be impossible—”

“I know it is,” Watson snapped. “And I don’t know how.”

“How many gunships can you muster?” Giessen asked. “Air support will compensate for the Jægernaut…”

“Only about three, at the moment,” Klaus murmured, as he stabbed a number on the fone.

“I’m afraid I cannot commend your planning, Herr Watson,” Giessen said.

Watson turned to look at him, knowing he’d made a mistake in bringing Giessen in, and wondering how big an error it had been. Giessen—“The Thirst”—could have been a tax investigator. He was a prim, ferret-faced, sartorially elegant little man who had been, inexplicably, excused by Rick Crandall from wearing a uniform. He wore a real-cloth suit two hundred years outdated, a Victorian outfit, ludicrously anachronistic (“looks like a bloody actor in a Public School revival of an early Shaw play,” Watson had muttered), modeled on an old tintype of a certain Dr. Gull, who’d been “seen on der fringes of der Ripper investigation.” But Giessen’s methods were very up-to-date. He’d patched into the Crime mainframe on the plane from Dresden, and fed in a collation program of his own design. Already he’d confirmed Watson’s guess: that the assassin of Le Pen was most probably the New Resistance officer known as Daniel “Hard-Eyes” Torrence.

“You’re not here to second-guess my planning or policing tactics,” Watson told Giessen. He couldn’t exactly upbraid him: Watson’s post was something like an Internal Affairs officer. Watson didn’t outrank him, or vice versa. Giessen’s was a post independent of rank, but reeking of authority.

Watson saw digital-compressed mayhem from the corner of his eye.

“Bloody hell,” he muttered, turning to the monitor in time to see the hijacked Jægernaut reducing a convoy of armored cars and I.S. vehicles to scrap metal. It simply rolled right over them. “How did they get it? Who did they bribe? Those men are supposed to be our most loyal…”

“There is a report of a black market in drugs,” Giessen said, clearly making a conscious effort to control his accent.

Watson glared at him as Klaus foned in orders to the chopper to ignore the Jægernaut and concentrate on Processing Center 13. Why was this fetishistic lunatic maundering in non sequiturs? “There’s always a black market in drugs!”

“Not always in der—in the military,” Giessen said. “Sometimes ja, sometimes no. Now, we haf a—we have a trade in US Army experimental fighting-drugs. Oxycontin, stimulants, tranquilizers. I have reason to believe that some of our sentries are using them. I also suspect that these resistance terrorists are selling them under some sort of… cover. You see, there were sniping attacks on SA sentries around the Jægernauts and other installations. They seemed to reach a peak intensity about two weeks ago and then stopped when so-called ‘street people’ began coming around to sell zese—to sell these drugs.”

Watson stared. The man had been here only hours! How had he found out so much? He must have had some preliminary studies done. Must have realized he was to be called in.

Watson cleared his throat and lied rather clumsily, “Well, of course… we knew about that.”

Giessen allowed himself a self-satisfied smirk. “Yes, most certainly. The connection is clear: through the sniper attacks the resistance deliberately built up in the sentries a constant fear for their lives, then through intermediaries they offered them drugs, knowing they were very much ready for them. They introduced the addiction into the Army to poison it, to weaken it—and to obtain access to sensitive areas. A man becomes addicted to something, he will sell secrets, he will allow access—even to the Jægernauts, ja ?”

Watson swallowed. “This is Steinfeld’s doing. The man is devious.”

Giessen nodded. “I have come to the same conclusion. He would be a better target than this Torrence—but, not likely to be as emotionally vulnerable.”

Watson blinked. “You’re going after Torrence through his emotions?”

“ They’ve got some kind of surface-to-air missile…” crackled a voice on the emergency frequency. Chopper Two, at center 13. “ Evasive—”

No good. The dancing digital image blanked out. The guerillas had blown the chopper from the sky.

“What about Chopper One! ” Watson roared.

“Engaging a rooftop machine-gun emplacement,” Klaus said.

“Get it away, that’s a decoy! Deploy to the street, stop those bloody trucks!”

“The Jægernaut is on the scene, it’s blocking the chopper. They’re increasing altitude but—”

“ Microwaves—” Chopper One. “ Microwave beam from the fucking Jæger—”