John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“Yeah. Fine. Fuck off.”

She turned on her heel and ran into the tube.

He wanted to go after her and couldn’t.

There was a monstrous roaring in his head. But it was only a train, roaring by on the elevated tracks. Stopping on the platform, up the staircase from him. His train. After a moment, he dragged himself to it.

The Jægernaut crunched down the street, making the buildings shake, so that loose bricks and bits of cornices rained onto the sidewalks and Watson was glad he sat in the armored protection of a bus-sized Internal Security Vehicle. They had driven in only a minute ahead of the Jægernaut, and now they watched its approach on the monitors inside the ISV—cameras were safer than windows—and it felt something like watching a missile test in a military ICBM-launch installation: The monitoring equipment bleeping to itself, the impassive technicians wearing their headsets as they helped direct the Jægernaut and scanned for saboteurs. It was distanced just enough by the screens—watching it from the street nearby, exposed, was a little too awe-inspiring. Too unnerving. It was like watching a volcano erupt—or watching as some contorted, massive-girdered suspension bridge pulled itself up from its moorings and went for a vindictive walk…

The Jægernaut—this model remote-controlled—came on with the methodical pacing of automation, not gracefully but without hesitation, making directly for the old tenement building. Watson was glad they’d got the address right. It was a bit dismaying when they crushed the wrong house, since they usually killed several hundred of the wrong people. And that was perfectly awful public relations.

Some of the tenement’s residents had felt the Jægernaut coming, and a few had made it out the door. But most of them hadn’t had time.

Others came to the windows to look for escape. But then the hammer came down. The Jægernaut’s smashing scythe of impervious girders, aided by a tight microwave beam to soften the building’s stone, bit deeply into the roof of the tenement, crunching through tile and roof like a beak crushing the shell of a snail.

And the building’s people were like the slugs that squirmed in snail shells, Watson thought. They stood in the windows, screaming and waving their arms as if that’d stop thousands of tons of crystallized alloy bearing down on them.

Bloody stupid of them, really. If you know you’re going to die, Watson reasoned, die with a little dignity. What was the use of hysteria?

The Jægernaut bit more deeply into the building; Watson could feel the vibration of its impact as it shivered through the street, quivering through the ISV. In less than a minute, an eight-story building was imploded, a crushed shell, a spindly, collapsing thing in a hood of smoke and dust. The screaming was now drowned out in the steel-foundry roar of the Jægernaut’s grinding progress. When the scythe rotated up, like the blade of a Rototiller coming around again, it was edged in dripping red.

Watson would have enjoyed this more under normal circumstances. But Giessen—The Thirst—was here, looking as usual for all his dramatic nom de guerre, like a prissy Royal Tax Accountant, and the bastard was spoiling Watson’s fun.

They were sitting side-by-side in the cramped control deck, just behind the driver and to one side of the forward gunner, whose head was entirely concealed by the complex machinery of his video targeting ordnance. Watson sipped tea from a plastic cup; The Thirst drank coffee with a little schnapps in it. He was listening on a headset to the rooftop surveillance crew and the chopper.

“Anything?” Watson asked. Knowing full well from Giessen’s expression that they’d come up with nothing, but wanting to needle him.

The Thirst shook his head. Nothing.

Watson smiled to himself. It was perverse to be pleased when the New Resistance didn’t fall into a trap. But he’d told the fool it wouldn’t work. Giessen’s plan had been like a plot from a Dumas novel, or Zorro —in order to flush the guerillas, let them know you’re going to carry out a reprisal on a tenement full of Arabs. They’d be there to defend them, to avenge them. They hadn’t let anyone know which tenement it would be, or even what neighborhood—but they’d let them know it would happen. They assumed the New Resistance would watch the compound where the Jægernauts were kept, follow them to the attack site and then move in with Stingers or some other armor-piercing weapon—and hopefully this Torrence wretch would be there, directing the operation…

It hadn’t worked out that way, of course. Steinfeld was no fool. And Torrence was no sucker. They would not be drawn so easily. Especially knowing that there was little that could be done against a Jægernaut. The reprisal against the building—said to harbor New Resistance civilian auxiliary—was useful in and of itself. That was the sort of thing they kept the Jægernauts for. Eventually, of course, they’d be used in warfare: advance phalanx when invading a city. When the time for expansion came…

Giessen took off the headset, shrugging. “I wasn’t at all sure it would work. But I wanted to try a feint, see how they would react.”

Watson seethed inwardly. “I told you how they would react. Your lack of regard for my opinion is hardly flattering. Security is after all my specialty.”

“I have every respect for you, Herr Watson. But I have a need to explore this problem in my own way. My feeling is that some of the old-fashioned techniques will work. Executions in return for this Torrence’s activities—that is an ancient, time-honored method, and it will eventually provide us with informers, as well as put pressure on this man, force his hand. I intend to use some newer techniques also. We have some new surveillance technology… something that will be very useful in these Metro tunnels and sewers they are using.”

“What, precisely? Listening posts?”

“No. Bird’s eyes.”

“But they lose their guidance signal underground! And then they can’t transmit!”

“The new ones are internally guided. They don’t transmit, they record. They are equipped with infrared. They will explore the tunnels for us. They will find them.”

Torrence and Roseland, assault rifles cradled in their arms, stood with their backs to a stack of moldering cardboard boxes filled with books, keeping an eye on the door. The room was dim, dusty, chilly, and smelled of piss. The old furniture that had been stored in it was coated with powder from the insulation in the ceiling, shaken down during the shellings of Paris. Their only light was a guttering chemlantern and what came through the basement window. They’d left the old van parked around the corner, but the SA could notice it, might realize it hadn’t been there earlier. They might have seen them scramble into the building. They might be here any minute.

Torrence didn’t think so—the SA’s attention was focused on the buildings and streets closer to the one being demolished.

“We could have done something,” Roseland said, his voice lifeless.

He had gone into his monotone phase, Torrence noticed. Roseland, when he was coping, would joke around, use funny voices, toss out the one-liners. Letting off steam that way—for himself and everyone else. But when the emotional pressure was there, when he looked right into the face of the monster, his voice and personality became affectless, monotone. It was as if he’d slipped back into some sympathetic variation of the typical Detention Center victim, voice and eyes flat from despair, his bitter assertions made in a voice colorless as tin. “We should die with them. We deserve it, sitting here watching them die.”

“We couldn’t have stopped it,” Torrence said. “We didn’t know what building it was. And they’ve got the whole area staked out. We’ll be lucky if they don’t track us in here.”