John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

He heard Torrence yelling at some of the refugees, telling them to get down. Saw the sun blazing off helmets of SA guards approaching cautiously, in a line of six, well behind the first autotank.

Torrence was drawing off the second autotank, thirty yards to Roseland’s right, dodging through the shacks, firing short, innocuous bursts at the unmanned killing machine to get its attention. Roseland was moving toward the other autotank, thinking, This is crazy, I ought to be running away from this thing.

But they couldn’t. They were surrounded. And Bibisch was busy with something vital…

Roseland was forty feet from the hulking robot vehicle now, imagining he could feel its camera watching him, feel the crosshairs of its machine gun sight in on his head. It shouldered through another shack, crunching and splintering, churning the debris with its treads, spewing dust, its machinery whining. He let go a burst from his Ingram autopistol at the tank, making a broken line of sparks across its beveled prow; accomplishing nothing except scoring the paint.

And making the thing notice him.

Its cannon and machine gun whirred smoothly around to sight in on him. He sprinted off to the left, farther from the sod hut. Heard a crack—and felt the air buzz—as one of the SA bulls took a potshot at him. He felt the faint pulse of the tank’s microwaves bouncing off his chest, targeting him.

Roseland dived behind something metallic and rusty. Thud. The ground erupted where he’d been a moment before. He shivered as the shock wave rippled past and dirt pattered down over him. He’d taken cover behind an old Audi hulk, just the rust-pitted body of the car remained, half-filled with trash and scraps of cloth laid out in an oversize bird’s nest for some refugee.

He heard the autotank whining toward the old car. Raising his head to look through the Audi, he saw the autotank framed in the farther car window. It was only about thirty feet away. Well beyond it, the SA bulls were hanging back, hoping the autotank would take the risks, do the work for them.

Halfway between Roseland and the tank someone was lying on an improvised mattress made of the front and back seats of the old Audi. The seats had been pulled from the car and dragged into the sun. It was a woman, hard to tell her age; all he could tell was that she was sick, maybe from cholera. Too weak to run for cover, just hoping the thing would pass her by. But Roseland had inadvertently drawn the autotank toward her: Whining, rumbling right at her, blaring its warning siren.

She turned and, mewling wordlessly, tried to drag herself out of its way. She didn’t have the strength to get to her feet. She crawled.

It was picking up speed.

It’ll go around her, Roseland thought. He was reluctant to give up the cover of the car.

It kept going, gaining on her—but looking for him.

It wasn’t going to go around her.

The guards will stop it, he thought.

It kept coming, she was in its shadow now, and her mewling had become yowling. Screaming.

“Goddamn it to fucking hell!” Roseland yelled, jumping up and firing at the tank turret. He sprinted to the left, trying to draw it away from her. Too late.

Without hesitation, it rolled right over her.

It broke her back, and broke her head, and churned her up, and spat bits of her out the back. This wasn’t some programmed-in cruelty, it wasn’t punishing her; she was simply in the way, and the device was not going to be diverted even for an instant from its objective.

Roseland stopped moving, froze, staring at it. One of the SA soldiers fired at him, the bullet kicking up the dirt close beside his left foot, but he didn’t move.

He stared at the autotank.

The autotank was the Second Alliance International Security Corporation. It was all fascists. It was all intolerance, all inflexibility, all racism, all xenophobia, all absolutism, all of it. In one machine. Programmed by the Fascists. Told to hunt down these guerrillas and don’t slow up for the civilians in the way. Simply move in and eradicate the little pocket of resistance.

It was a thing of hard angles and unforgiving edges. It was implacable. It was murderous, it was efficient; it was murderously efficient. It was the mechanical embodiment of his enemy.

He saw again the processing center. The electronic fences. The gray, septic hours packed in the misery of Processing Center 12’s little rooms. The breakout, the escapees mowed down as they ran. And her, Gabrielle, his friend: her head exploding.

He saw Hitler; he saw the Nazis. He saw the Holocaust.

All of it somehow compressed into this one machine.

Suddenly he was running at the thing, shrieking obscenities, firing past an oil barrel. The thing returned fire, the oil barrel catching its burst, spang-spang-spang-spang, bullets pocking the rusty metal. Roseland throwing his only explosive, a magnetized metal disk that stuck to the front of the autotank— whump as its cannon fired and crack-thud as his explosive went off. Its shells struck a shack just in front of him. Something picked him up and threw him down. Shrapnel raked his thigh and right arm.

Blank.

And then Roseland found himself on the ground in front of the autotank. Looking up through the smoke and dust as the autonomous weapon bore down on him.

The explosive hadn’t stopped it—maybe confused only its sensors a little and dented its hull. But it kept coming.

He got to his knees. That hurt. Getting up was like climbing a ladder made of broken glass. He raised his gun to fire, trying to shout, to let the pressure out, but his mouth was gummed with blood.

He felt the pulse of its aiming device; knew its crosshairs were centered on him.

He spat blood and yelled, “Fuck you ! I’ll meet you in Gehenna, you brainless pigs!” And he fired. And it kept coming, aiming at him, and, he fired and—

It stopped.

Clank: stopped. Humming indecisively to itself.

He blinked and coughed in the smoke, staring at it. Had he hit something electronically vital with a lucky round from his pathetic little machine pistol?

Through the smoke he saw the silhouettes of enemy soldiers, coming at him. Half a dozen of them.

Suddenly, the autotank’s turret whirred into an about-face, like an owl turning its head all the way around, looking behind itself. It fired its cannon three times in quick succession. SA soldiers were snatched clumsily into the air by fingers of chaos.

She did it.

Bibisch had interfaced with the Plateau. Found sympathetic wolves. Using the microchip unit in the sod hut. Got the access codes, the back door into the autotank’s computer. Transmitted new programming.

The guardsmen were running. The tank was firing on its partner. Wham. Hit the other autotank dead center, kicked it onto its side so its treads dug uselessly at the air.

Torrence, grinning, was trotting up to him, coughing through the smoke. A fire was spreading through this section of the camp. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Bibisch do that?”

“She fuckin’ did it!” Torrence crowed. “That’s my girl !”

“How’d she get control of it so fast?” Roseland asked as they hurried back to the sod hut. The autotank was opening fire on more SA. Driving them back. Killing half of them. It was a beautiful thing to see.

“She’s been working on it for a while, for days really—working with our people on the chips. Alouette—Smoke’s little whiz kid—she worked it out, along with some others. So Bibisch sent an inquiry just now, like, did they have the dirt on the thing yet, and, yeah, they had it. We just lucked out.”

“Hand probably pissed his pants.”