John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Only, a little too soon, someone noticed that Colonel Watson wasn’t on a private train, he was in the Second Alliance Comm Room.

“ Fuck me,” Watson breathed when they told him. “They have to be on that train. How did they do it? How did they get clearance for it to get past the—Bloody hell. They had to have gotten into our computers. Take ’em all off-line before they—”

Walking, the two of them, Martha’s small hand in Steinfeld’s, through the peach orchard on the banks of the Jordan. Very early. Morning mists. Both hungry for breakfast but in the kibbutz, this time of year, with the fruit heavy on the trees, there is little time for lovers. She is so small, Martha, her hand like a mouse nestled in his palm, but he had seen her strength… Now she turned to him and said—

“—they know we’ve got in,” Bones shouted, shaking Steinfeld’s shoulder. On the train. Steinfeld had drifted off. “What?” The dream of Israel. Martha. How long had she been dead now? “What—what is it, Bones…?”

“They know we—”

Then it sank in, and the last vestiges of the nostalgic dream dispersed. The time had come—perhaps they’d waited too long. There had been risk, in waiting before activating the virus that Jerome-X and Bettina had planted through the Plateau—it might’ve been discovered, rooted out. But it had made sense to wait for the strategic moment. The maximum advantage.

Maybe they’d waited too long. Maybe it was too late. Thinking all this, he was saying aloud only: “Then do it! Transmit! Tell the bug to spread!”

…And Watson had the report back in five minutes.

The computers were blanked—years of intelligence gathering, erased. Most of the Unity Party’s banks wiped too. The Sicilian center’s database—ditto. Erased.

It didn’t matter. It was an inconvenience, but it was all right, of course, they naturally had everything on backup, copies in the Sicilian Intelligence Center.

And then his minitranser beeped.

The message was too long for the small screen; he tapped its little keyboard so it’d transmit to the printer. It was a transmission from Sicily asking why they’d been ordered to destroy the backups and hard copy. Virtually all their intelligence data, antisubversive information, everything on the NR and related groups, plus a great deal of logistical information. Gone for good. The incendiary bombs had been set off, the work was done, and they’d had two confirmations from the central computer that they were doing the right thing. But when the SA major in Sicily had tried to call Paris to ask, What’s going on? there was some sort of restricted access to fone communication, the computers that made the connections wouldn’t let them through, apparently. So they followed the orders that had come in over the computers, kept trying the fones. No soap—except, after repeatedly trying, they were able to send a call directly to his transer interface through the fone relays. And the message asked, essentially, Why did we destroy the backups and documents? Are we about to be invaded here?

“FUCK MEEEEEE!”

Watson in a rage, backhanding the aide who’d brought the printout, literally knocking him down, kicking him. “THEY’VE BUGGERED OUR FUCKING COMPUTERS! FUCK MEE-EEE-EEE! ”

As behind him, Giessen said calmly to Rolff, in German: “It appears to be up to us. I suggest we stop that train.”

The train track’s electric power was shut down, and the track was blocked—and it was blocked by a Bell-Howell four-man Antipersonnel Forward Offensive Armored Vehicle equipped with 23 × 152mm automatic cannon, two 7.62 × 63mm H & K machine guns and a NATO heat-seeking missile launcher.

“That,” Dan Torrence muttered, “is a problem.”

So were the two hundred SA soldiers scrambling from trucks to the west side of the train. And there’d be more on the way.

The east side of the train was just seven inches from the concrete outer wall of a storage warehouse. There was no getting out on that side. The enemy had picked the spot carefully.

The train was not quite dark inside; the only light a red glow from the emergency-battery bulbs above the luggage racks. It was hard to make out faces. It could have been the inside of a wrecked submarine.

“Come on, Bibisch…”

Torrence and Bibisch found Bones in the next car back. Torrence ran up to him, gear clacking, shouting, “Bones—got some transmission for you! Bibisch has the transmitter if you can do the control and calculations. She’ll give you the frequency. Basically aim the transmitter back the way we came…”

Leaving Bibisch with Bones, he ran to find Steinfeld.

Up and down the three-car train, the guerillas, with the train to themselves, were deploying weapons, taking up firing stations at the windows and door. Their faces were bleak. They expected to die here.

Steinfeld was up front, peering out a window like a commuter trying to figure out why his train was delayed—looking like that except for the Israeli carbine in his hands.

He was thinking how vivid the dream of the kibbutz had been; the dream of Martha. Maybe a kind of omen. He had come to believe in them. Maybe Martha, on the Other Side, saying that the transmission to the Badoit Arcology was going through… That they wouldn’t have to die here…

He shook his head. Funny, the ludicrous things you think, right before you die…

An announcement through a bullhorn from a Second Alliance official with a German accent blared and rattled in the windows, his English largely unintelligible in its particulars, but clear enough in general:

You have two minutes. Surrender or we’ll kill you.

“Two minutes,” Torrence muttered.

Torrence hurried up to Steinfeld. “Where’s Pasolini? She should be on radio call. We should be trying to—”

“She’s in Paris. Left her in authority.”

Torrence stared at him. “Pasolini? In charge of Paris—? Steinfeld, she’s—”

“She’s the most qualified, apart from you. And I need you. I’ve taken care of the radio call to…” He swore in Hebrew, hearing the sound of a helicopter gunship. “That’s too soon to be our people.”

Torrence looked back along the car. Everyone was crouched, guns at ready. No one was making a move to bolt. He didn’t see Roseland. Probably left behind in Paris, in the old Metro station Steinfeld had picked as an emergency safe house. “I figure we’ve got maybe sixty people…” He shook his head, peering out a window. He could see them out there in the dull-red light from the train and in the headlight shine of the armored trucks behind them. And around them…

“Christ,” Torrence muttered. “Flowers.”

They were stopped beside a field of flowers. It was a flower farm. Rows of verdant red and yellow carnations—cultivated in straight lines till they came to the shell holes left from some New-Soviet assault on the area. The rows curved neatly around the shell craters. Tenacious farmers.

The Fascist soldiers were digging in, in beds of flowers.

The carnations’ color seemed flat and dusty in the dim light. As he watched, the SA switched off the truck lights—after a moment he could make the troops out as gray silhouettes in the moonlight. A mix of Soldats Superieurs and SA armored troops. The French Soldats had carried Eagle-Feather Brand fences of foamed kevlar from the back of the trucks, set them up around the truck in seconds. They kneeled behind them, to aim their weapons through the gun notches in the white fences.

The stuff looked—and weighed—like Styrofoam, but deflected most calibers of bullet, once its grippers were dug into the ground.

Torrence wondered why Steinfeld hadn’t ordered his people to open fire immediately. Now the sons of bitches were dug in behind their cheap bullet-proof walls. He looked at Steinfeld and guessed the reason. He’d needed time to get Hand and Jo Ann Teyk and Barrabas under cover. “Where’s Hand?”