John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Marshall was as black a man as Torrence had ever seen. He had an immaculate tie and diamond cuff links. Marshall had been sent to school in England after his parents had seized a diamond mine from its white owners in Zimbabwe.

Marshall looked at Torrence expectantly.

Torrence decided the guy was waiting for him to respond to the small talk. He said, “Yeah. It’s, like, humid.”

Marshall smiled. “An American. And one resonant with charming authenticity.” He put the tips of his fingers together, making a little cage with his hands and pressed his thumbnails against his lower lip. His diamond-crusted Rolex counted off the minutes and seconds. “The situation is somewhat precarious,” he began.

“Do we have the green light or not?” Steinfeld asked.

Marshall turned sideways in his chair so he could see Steinfeld. Or anyway, Steinfeld’s silhouette. Somehow even in the cramped space of the van’s front passenger seat Marshall managed to strike a modelesque pose.

“You have the green light if you turn up something that can be verified without question. If this is a red herring, the green light never existed. We’ll lie copiously and persistently, and the Ministry will believe us over you.”

“Clear enough,” Steinfeld said.

Torrence was thinking : Yeah, clear as mud. “You got people ready to take the stuff, make the ID and everything?”

“Yes. Quite nearby.”

“Why don’t you just get a warrant or some kind of surprise building inspection or something? Check it out yourself. Say it was the wrong address if it turns out bunk.”

“Political subtleties make it difficult. If we came up wrong, the SA’s supporters would put two and two together… A New Resistance sympathizer—yours truly—would be identified in MI6. And there’s no time to go through the courts.”

Steinfeld said, “Torrence, let’s go.”

Torrence nodded, took a headset from his jacket pocket, and put it on. He pressed the stud. “Let’s go, Blue Flag.”

He heard the reply in his headset as he reached back for his rifle and soundproof helmet.

Marshall was already on his way back to the limo. By the time that Torrence and the other guerrillas were moving down the street, Marshall’s limo was already gone from sight.

Torrence and Roseland went ahead of the main group. They kept in the lee of the seemingly broken-down, robot-driven semitruck which an NR operative had remote-stalled slantwise on the street an hour before. Orange lights blinked on the semi. The Second Alliance guards had long since looked it over and decided it was harmless. It was. Except it was crucial cover for the two guerrillas, enabling them to get within thirty feet of the side door without being seen.

There were enemy sentries on the roof, so there was no coming in on a helicopter. But this side door was remote enough from the others, they might not see what happened there if the truck did the rest of its bit.

The truck cab’s emergency lights strobed wobbly golden streaks on the rainy street. Torrence ran hunched over up to the semi’s cab; rifle tightly strapped across his back, noise grenades in one hand and ballistic knife in the other. Roseland close behind him. Torrence spoke into his headset, and the guerrilla on the roof of the building to his left responded, throwing a switch on a remote-control unit. The truck suddenly started itself up. The cameras on its robot snout swiveled as if it were coming back to consciousness and wondering just where it was.

Torrence was cheek by jowl with the truck cab when it began to roll toward the SA storage building. He ran along beside it in a crouch, the truck hiding him from the building as it drove past. Then he hung back when he was parallel to the corner of the building, let it go on, honking and revving, rolling past the SA guards—holding their attention, he hoped, distracting them as he sprinted to the side door. But the guard there saw him coming, raised a gun, and opened his mouth to shout.

The shout came out in a bubbling moan as the ballistic knife parted the man’s windpipe. The cry was lost in the roar of the truck vanishing down the street. Torrence finished the guard, then he and Roseland plunged through the unlocked door, Torrence hissing orders into his headset, blinking in the sudden light of the bright interior. He sealed the soundproof helmet, was now locked into silence, except for headset crackle—and he flung the first of the noise grenades at a group of guards at the end of the hall. They went down, thrashing, clutching at their heads. The noise grenades were designed to put them out for a while with a vicious sonic pulse. Couldn’t risk major explosions in here, where the virus was kept.

“Those things really work,” Roseland said over his headset. “I want some for next time I got to visit my relatives at Passover. Stun my Uncle Irving…”

Torrence kept going, in eerie silence. Not hearing the gunfire as outdoor SA sentries spotted the follow-up guerrilla strikeforce outside. They were intended to spot them; intended to think they were the point men.

Torrence ran down the corridor. Again he had a sense of seeing things as if through a camera, a length of the corridor panning past him. He wondered what that kind of distancing from the world meant psychologically. He unslung his rifle…

He caught peripheral flashes, Roseland firing behind him at someone at the other end of the hall. There: the door to the central storage room. Torrence burst through, tossing noise grenades. Like toys, with no explosion—but four men went down. There: the walk-in vault. And it was open. Torrence and Roseland opened their helmets as they jogged toward the vault… And then there were two more Second Alliance guards coming in through a side door a few yards away. Bullets sizzled the air. Torrence ran at the enemy, worried about bullets hitting viral canisters, but firing his weapon. The guards were armored, but the bullets made them stagger, cracked one of the helmets, and then Torrence was upon them, slapping the suction disks onto them. The guards screaming as the disks drilled and detonated in them. They fell, writhing, blood pooling around them; thrashed a bit and then lay quiet…

Roseland was already inside the walk-in safe, carrying out a crate of viral canisters.

There was gunfire outside, but it was becoming sporadic. And the guys in here who were stunned weren’t getting up. They were coming out of it—but they just lay there, staring up at Torrence’s rifle. Torrence stood guard over them, letting Roseland get the goods.

Roseland walked past him, carrying the crate, and said to the guys huddled on the floor: “Better lay still. My friend here’s from the Half-British Half-Japanese Liberation Front for the Free Distribution of Sushi and Chips to All Underprivileged Gaijin, and he means business.”

Torrence sighed. After Roseland was gone from the room, he allowed himself to laugh.

The gunfire from outside ceased completely, and in another two minutes Torrence heard Steinfeld’s voice in the hall. And then Marshall’s.

Jerome and Bettina held hands. That was one connection between them. The other one was on the Plateau.

They were remote-jacked into the consoles in Badoit’s suite in the New York Fuji-Hilton Hotel; most of the year, the suite was empty. Badoit kept it just in case he should need it.

The gear had been moved in this afternoon, all of it selected and tweaked to Leng’s specifications. It was ten p.m. Outside, there were sirens and traffic and the yellow guttering on the horizon of a fire in one of the rooftop shantytowns.

But here, the shades were drawn, the suite’s sound-block fields dialed to silence. And the two of them sat in a dark room, closed eyes sealing them into deeper darkness, consciousness turned inward, fixed on the particular continuum of sheer data and signification that was the Plateau. They roamed a cybernetic steppe where there was no night or day, and eyeless wolves stalked and sniffed, sensing everything. For Jerome and Bettina, there was only the Plateau and the communion.