John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

But he couldn’t hear her.

A thunk, and running feet, then the door swung in again, more cautiously this time. Claire and a heavily armed man in a cowboy shirt looked in at them from behind a transparent portashield down the hall.

Marion took her gun to the door, put it on the corridor deck, slid it well out of reach. Aria and Jeanne did the same.

Claire stepped out from behind the plastic wall. She looked drained, scared, lonely. Marion raised her hands. “You going to put us in some kind of brig, or kill us, or what?”

Claire sighed, stepping into the room, looking at Witcher’s body. Seeing the gun in his hand.

“We didn’t know what he was doing until just a little time ago,” Aria said.

Claire nodded. “If that’s true, no one’ll bust you. In fact…” She turned and headed out the door, off on some other mission. Saying almost as an afterthought, “If you want a job, you can stay here. We can use some more intelligent women.”

She knew that something had gone wrong when the signal didn’t come through. This Witcher was anal, fanatically punctilious. If his timetable was out of kilter, something had interfered with him.

Shit on his timetable, Pasolini decided. I don’t need it. I have my own agenda.

She turned away from the sat-link and walked out of the old tenement, carrying the pouch containing the glass canister. And carrying the ID and the bogus Nazi manifesto that would make her seem to be a Second Alliance agent.

She headed for the train station, for the one working train to Germany. To Berlin. To NATO command center, Berlin.

It was a warm night outside. The stars were pretty. She thought about a beach on Sardinia, and a little blue fishing boat, and a poem she’d once buried in the sand. Now the poem would come true.

There was a glass canister in the pouch, and in the canister was death, and in death was freedom, and the end of all loneliness.

Torrence hated being in West Freezone.

Part of it was the way this section of the floating artificial island reminded him of the USA. These truncated skyscrapers, only thirty or forty stories but the same kind of combination of tinted-glass monoliths and revisionist early-twentieth-century-style architecture, humorous and faintly deco embellished—with their excruciatingly well-planned little malls around the foundations.

It was a hot day, too, and the African coastal sun blazed from the ten thousand reflective planes. He was glad of his mirror shades, but they weren’t enough. Need a mirror suit, he thought.

What he was wearing, though, was the cheap blue printout jumpsuit of a delivery boy, and a hat, covering the bandage on his head. The hat said “West Freezone Messengers” on it. He was carrying a book-size package and a teleclip. The package in his hands, addressed to Freezone Savings and Investments, was standard FedEx cardboard envelope, supposed to be records coming from the East Freezone branch of the Bank of Brazil, one of the biggest banking multinationals. A standard delivery coming though a messenger service they used regularly. It should work. In case it didn’t, he had a pistol in a side pocket that fired sedative darts, and he hoped they were as quick-acting as Badoit claimed.

He rode up in an elevator. The Muzak was playing a treacly version of the Living Dead’s hit single, “My Death is Your Death Because It’s the Whole Fucking World’s Death.” An entirely nihilistic and anarchist-rooted song, subsumed, in equal entirety, in glutinous co-optation. We’ll be hearing Jerome-X on Muzak soon, he thought. Jerome won’t care as long as he gets the residuals.

He reached up and stroked his new ear. It had taken very nicely. His body wasn’t going to reject it. No.

You bitch, you just had to be a hero.

Then he was on the fifteenth floor, walking down the hall to the receptionist. Seeing that long hall as if through an old suspense movie’s long-shot movie camera. Hitchcockian, getting closer and closer to the secretary, as she looks up; the walk down the hall seeming to take forever. Maybe the limp from his wounded leg would make them wonder about him.

What am I nervous for? What’s this bimbo going to notice about a tallish half-Oriental delivery boy? She sees every mongrel kind of delivery boy every day. They don’t use the same one all the time. Nothing to worry about.

There was a guy standing behind her with a little plastic card clipped to his real-cloth gray jacket, looking at Torrence with the flat but interrogatory gaze of professional security. SA trained, probably.

This bank was owned by a Bolivian firm. Probably founded on last century’s cocaine money. Bolivian Nazi war criminal connections.

Maybe. So if the SA had those kind of connections with these people, then maybe the wipe wouldn’t stop the bank from giving them their money and all this shit was for nothing.

Or maybe it was a legitimate bank. In which case—

Don’t think about that stuff. You’re a delivery boy. Smile vacantly. Chew gum. Look like you’re in a hurry to go on your break.

“Gotta delivery for Yost,” he said, glancing the address. “Henry Yost. Vice manager of something-or-other-I-can’t-read.”

“You kind of old for this work,” the Security guy said. No particular accusation to it, maybe just thinking aloud.

“Yeah, by now I should have a job standing around noticing crap like that,” Torrence said.

“Oh, I see. You’re just stupid. Okay.”

Torrence gave him a fuck you look and put the package on the girl’s desk. She had the light-pen ready, absentmindedly scribbled her signature on the glass of his teleclip. “Here you go, then,” the secretary said. English girl. How come having an English girl receptionist was so damn de rigueur. It had been fashionable ever since he could remember. Some kind of unconscious class thing, he supposed.

Her signature vanished into the records. It was the only thing in the teleclip records, but they didn’t know that.

What if this security dude wants to look through the clip’s records, or wants to call the company, see if I’m on the level? Torrence thought. Why’d Steinfeld pick me for this? Fuck. I’m no actor. It should have been Roseland. More the show-offy type.

But the security guy was watching a woman executive walk by; watching her bare legs, the way her ass snugged into the West African business exec’s bathing suit. Bathing suits in the office. It’s a Freezone thing, he thought.

“There you go,” the secretary said.

“Thanks.” Torrence tried not to hurry to the elevator.

He was in, the doors shutting, when he heard the alarm go off. Goddamn it to hell, goddamn it to hell, Steinfeld told me the fucking thing was supposed to be insulated against detectors.

And then he felt the ripple. And the elevator stopped. The light went out. He was in pitch darkness, stuck between floors.

Oh, great.

The EMP had done its thing sooner than it was supposed to, which was good, maybe, because that meant that its work was probably done. The Electromagnetic Pulse generated by the gear in the package had wiped out their records, completely destroyed their computers. Fried their chips. They were limited to hard-copy records, and that would take time. The bulk of the SA’s assets—if Musa had done his own delivery-boy acting in Geneva—would be frozen, maybe indefinitely gone.

Very cool, only now the fucking pulse had wiped out the elevator’s controls and he was trapped in it and building security would be looking for him. They’d have it all sealed off downstairs.

No, wait. Fones would be out too. It’d take them time to get down the stairs by foot.