John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“Over there. Crammed down behind those seats. We put baggage around them, to protect them.”

“Maybe we could…”

The rest was drowned out by the tympanic drumroll of the chopper gunship as it barnstormed the train, firing its 16mm Jæger-sevens to announce that the NR’s two minutes were up.

The windows imploded. Glass made a jagged snow-flurry in the car. Someone’s head vanished in a welter of blood.

Torrence instinctively shouted orders, firing a burst through the window to suppress the soldiers on his side. He tried not to worry about Bibisch.

The guerrillas fired at the soldiers, the SA/SS fired back. Exchanges of chaos; gunfire and ricochets making a wall of sound; the noise of a hundred iron foundries compressed into a few railroad cars. Bullets smashed through the windows on the west side, passed through the train, smashing through the opposite windows, pocked the concrete wall.

The resistance fighters took the worst of it. Once they were activated, the SXs “smart” rifles were devastatingly accurate. Men and women fell, writhing, screaming; or lay silently where they’d fallen, looking as limp and inconsequential as discarded clothing. One-armed Dr. Levassier and the young Lebanese woman who was his medic scurried to the wounded, crouching as they went to stay below the lethal hailstorm that came through the windows.

An enemy commando stuck his head too far above the protective barrier to take aim—and Torrence dropped his crosshairs on the blurred oval of the man’s head, squeezed off a burst—the head vanished; the body staggered back and fell. Torrence fired at someone else but knew he hit the barrier. He wasn’t likely to hit many more of the enemy. Torrence shouted over the noise at Steinfeld. “They’re chewing us up! We’re just wasting ammo!”

Steinfeld shook his head, yelling, “If we stop, they’ll charge us!”

“No, not for a while! It’ll give us a chance to—” He broke off, exasperated with trying to explain under these conditions; he saw another guerrilla shot in the face—his teeth flying out through the back of his head. Heart hammering, Torrence felt like he was exploding himself. Bibisch. Claire.

Steinfeld changed his mind. “Hold your fire!”

It took a full minute for the word to pass down the train. The guerrillas stopped firing. The Second Alliance barrage continued—and then stopped, the enemy waiting to see if the resistance fighters were about to surrender.

The train car was cloudy with gunsmoke, turned violet in the red emergency lights; it stank of cordite and blood and the burning smell of metal sparking metal. Bodies strewed the aisle; men and women begged for help and raised a dissonant chorus of moans.

Others crouched just below the windows, their faces white with fear and anger, quivering with suppressed emotion, knuckles white on their guns.

All of them were looking to Steinfeld and Torrence.

And Torrence wondered what to do next; and wondered if Bibisch were still alive. She might be lying in that next car, hugging herself. Gut-shot.

The bullhorn was booming out some sort of demand, garbled and echoey, mostly lost in the battering noise of the chopper gunship hovering over the train.

What next, what next, what next ?

Torrence wanted to scream it.

Instead, he turned to Steinfeld. “I’m going to see what’s happening with Bones and Bibisch—maybe they’ve got something set up.”

Steinfeld nodded and went to the window. He crouched out of the line of fire, tried to stall the enemy, shouting, “We cannot surrender our entire force! But we will negotiate something!”

The bullhorn replied with a demand for unconditional surrender. Steinfeld shouted back, suggesting they were considering it—another time-wasting tactic.

Torrence worked his way past sodden bodies and the shaking, squirming wounded. Past sobbing men and grim-faced women. He sprinted between cars.

He found Bones and Bibisch hunched by the rear door of the car; Bones was aiming the transmitter antenna of the radio programmer out the doorway at a slant, holding its metal box in his hands. His face was lined with concentration, eyes squeezed shut, headset jacked into the transmitter box; using the transmitter to get to the Plateau—he couldn’t augment directly into it from their present position. Bibisch hunkered beside him, her submachine gun still smoking. Tears streaking her face.

She saw Torrence, scrambled to him on her haunches; came into his arms. “We all of us die now.”

“Did you link up? Did Bones get there?”

“He linked, sent two transmissions, but I don’t know if it’s—” She broke off, tilting her head to listen.

He heard it then. The hum and rumble.

Looked out the window and saw it—the autotank they’d stolen from the refugee camp; the autonomous weapon they’d hidden in the abandoned factory. It was responding to Bones’ chip-implanted control and Bibisch’s recording, rumbling up the gravel utility road that ran between the train tracks and the flower fields.

The Fascists cheered, thinking that they had robotic reinforcements.

Maybe they did, Torrence thought with a chill. Maybe this wasn’t the one he thought it was. Maybe—

The autotank opened fire at close to point-blank range…

It opened fire on the SA, from behind them, blasting with cannon and machine guns.

The autotank fired the cannon again and again, like a semiautomatic rifle; thud thud thud thud thud thud, blowing soldiers and broken Eagle-Feather deflectors into the air, strobe-lighting the countryside with muzzle flashes. Steinfeld bellowed an order and the guerrillas resumed fire, catching the panicked SA in a cross fire. Torrence popped up like a jack-in-the-box, firing with the AMD-65, using up his clip, instantly ducking down and attaching a rifle-propelled rocket-grenade. Popping up, firing the grenade at a high angle so that, on its way back down, it detonated in the midst of the SA. Bullets sucked air around him. Crouching, he attached another grenade, hands trembling but efficient. He fired. Attached another. The train shook as the enemy gave up trying to keep it intact, fired rockets into the third car. The whole train shuddered, rocked as the car was torn from its coupling. Tilting off the track, falling half onto its east side, smashing into the concrete wall. The west-side windows tilted up so the Second Alliance helicopter gunship could fire into them, 16mm rounds ripping the inside of the third car. Men screamed…

And then the Bell-Howell armored car swung away from the front of the train, jouncing and clanking over the tracks, its cannon swiveling smoothly, computer microprocessors aiming it precisely—at the autotank. A flash as it fired; a thud as the round impacted dead center in the autotank—stopping it, totaling its engine and wheel system. Leaving the turret and command center intact. The autotank fired back, four times in succession.

Exploding, the Bell-Howell blossomed like a heavy-metal flower, flame its stamens. A man on fire, a figure made of flame with a human core of shadow, streaked from the burning wreck with a high-pitched wail that was all one long note. The French SS fired an armor-piercing round and the autotank heaved itself into scrap iron and an oily twist of smoke. Shivering stalks of flame from the burning wrecks and burning sections of train cast a jittery light, made the battlefield quiver, made the bodies lying on the blasted turf seem as animated as the living soldiers: the dead doing a hideous horizontal dance among the cloying, blackening flowers.

Something gleamed on the horizon, a glittering oval. The transport VTOL Badoit had sent. They’d planned to meet it at the outskirts of the airport; Steinfeld had called it here by radio.