John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Thinking all this, he was ripping at the ceiling panel with the teleclip, finding no exit that way. Try the door.

Torrence had a ballistic knife strapped to his right ankle, a hardened plastic blade, for getting past metal detectors. Tough as steel. He tossed the teleclip aside, felt for the knife, feeling sweat gather on the tip of his nose, his cheekbones. He found the knife, carefully disengaged the launch spring, then used the blade to pry at the door. Got it open an inch, got his fingers in there—pushed the doors apart without a little effort. Blank wall—between floors. There was maybe just enough space to shinny through, between this side of the elevator and the wall, down between two shaft buttresses. A washed-out blue light came from a skylight somewhere above. He thought he heard shouting somewhere below him. He put the knife back on its launcher, sheathed it, and began to wriggle downward, between the floor of the elevator and the wall, kicking his feet over to the metal rungs of a maintenance ladder off to the side. He missed the ladder; the leg wound was burning, throbbing.

And his chest was stuck. He wasn’t going to get through. He was fucking stuck. And they’d get the power back on and the elevator was going to squash him against the wall, crush his head against the cold concrete.

He swung a foot over, again—caught a rung with his toe. The ladder was about three and a half feet to the side. He hooked his foot on the rung and pulled himself downward, forcing his chest past the bottleneck. It hurt. Thought he felt his breastbone crack—

Falling through. Flailing at the rungs.

Ouch. Caught them but felt like his arms were wrenched from the sockets. He got his footing, took the pressure off his arms. His arms were still in their sockets. But maybe he had two more inches of reach he hadn’t had before. Roseland would make some lame joke, if he were here, about becoming a basketball player.

He climbed down the ladder, into deepening darkness.

A hundred feet below him, a square of light opened. Someone stuck their head from the square, looking up. He didn’t see the guy’s gun, but there must have been one, because a bullet whined and ricocheted, and the crack of the shot echoed up the shaft.

Torrence, holding on with one hand, drew his weapon and returned fire with the other.

Sedative gun was all he had. Shit. Like that would work fast enough.

But the guy was falling. The sedative did work fast.

What was the point of using a sedative to save their lives if they fell down elevator shafts?

He hoped the guy was Second Alliance and not just some Security guard. Either way, he was dead now.

Torrence kept going, fast as he could, his leg wound aching. Once he slipped, started to fall, caught himself, kept going.

Then he reached the open elevator door—tried to swing through.

Someone in the hall fired a shot at him and he lurched back, around the edge of the door, back onto the ladder—and dropped his gun, goddamn fuck it, in the process. He held on with one sweaty hand and grabbed the ballistic knife with the other as the guy in the hallway moved into a shooting angle, off to the side of the door, aiming carefully at Torrence’s head through the elevator doorway—Torrence fired the knife without taking time to aim. The spring hummed, the knife-blade whistled softly, the guy went down with the knife in his belly, screaming, his gun shooting holes in the ceiling tiles.

Torrence thought, Man, I hope they’re SA—not just family men hired on for this…

Suppressing the twinge of guilt as he swung through the door, he kicked the guy’s gun aside, ran down the hall to the stairway…

Should have taken the gun, he thought. I’m defenseless now.

He clattered down the stairs to the lobby—and then he was in the lobby. The lobby guard stood across from him with his back turned, cursing at the fone, trying to get it to work. Torrence ran quietly past on the balls of his feet, out the door—it was frozen halfway open—and into the crowd.

“Smoke’s not going to wait any longer?” Roseland asked.

Steinfeld shook his head. They were in the storage room they used for computer work, Steinfeld sitting at the console, Roseland looking over his shoulder as the decrypting program unscrambled the latest message. “He got worried. I guess Jerome-X talked him into going ahead. Not waiting for the whole Leng Entelechy thing. They’re going to do that later, but—I always thought it was pretty doubtful. Witcher liked it, he had a mystical streak, so that’s part of the reason he went along with Smoke on that—” He broke off, staring. “What the hell?”

An image of a man appeared in the corner of the screen, in a box, as the copy scrolled by—a digital image of Bones. “Steinfeld,” Bones said, voice coming from the computer’s speakergrid, “I didn’t want to use the fone—Um—I don’t know if you’ve gotten to that part on the copy but it boils down to this: Two hundred thousand people died in Berlin today. Witcher’s Sl-L pathogen. Not racially selective.”

“Oh, God,” Roseland breathed.

“I saw a picture of the agent who released the stuff. The agent was dead too, of course. It’s Pasolini. I guess she did it wrong, only got one of the canisters open. She had some ID and some racist pamphlet shit in her pocket, so the NATO authorities—she released this in the Berlin NATO offices—so they, you know, think she’s a Second Alliance agent. Fake name and everything. I mean, she did it to hit the SA, to set them up but—Christ, Steinfeld, two hundred thousand people are dead! I want to know, man. Did you authorize this?”

Roseland looked at Steinfeld. There was no use his answering now—Bones couldn’t hear him, this was a computer-animated recording of Bones, not a fone transmission. But Roseland wondered what the answer would be…

“I mean, this could hurt the enemy. Will hurt them. But didn’t you—or Pasolini, if she was acting alone—think that this might force their hand? They might decide to release the Racially Selective Virus ahead of time. Anyone think of that? Tell you the truth, hodey, I’m scared for my own ass now… That RS pathogen’s got my DNA written on it…”

He gave the reply code, and his image rezzed out.

Roseland looked at Steinfeld. “ Did you tell her to do it?”

Steinfeld, after a scary second of hesitation, said, “No. I didn’t tell her to do it. I had no idea she was going to do it.”

He just sat there, staring into the blank screen. Shoulders slumped.

Two hundred thousand dead.

Killed by an NR operative.

They were in the cool cinder-block rec room. Kessler and Bettina sat at the card table, Jerome on the ratty, legless sofa, Alouette on the floor. Kessler and Bettina were playing chess. Bettina was winning. She moved her rook, shifting her weight at the same time. Her folding metal chair groaned under her as she shifted; Kessler groaned at the same moment, seeing the chess move.

Jerome was drinking a San Miguel and watching console TV. Alouette was singing to herself, sitting Indian style on the floor, and drawing with colored pens in a sketchbook, complex geometrical designs executed with inhuman exactitude; she was using her chip for the straight-edged geometry, her right-brain for the design. The crow was perched on a high bookshelf, on a copy of Crandall’s bogus Bible, sleeping, its head tucked under a wing.

The satellite broadcast of Nicholas Roeg’s Performance ended. Jerome said, “What a fucking great flick. They don’t make ’em with that kind of detailed mastery this century, no way no mo’.”