John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

The Inner Circle had come to Paris to discuss the crisis. None of them had been expecting this spontaneous—or perhaps not so spontaneous—eruption of the masses. It was Larousse who stepped out onto the front steps of the Hôtel de Ville, raising the bullhorn to his lips to speak to the sea of faces. Trying to tell them that the giggling, bloody-mouthed man the guards held beside him was the perpetrator of the great infamy, the terror carried out under the nose of the French government, concealed from Larousse, who had not been “in on the loop,” who’d not known what was going on in the processing centers or the Second Alliance labs… this man, this monster, this Colonel Watson was their villain…

Watson just stood there, giggling in his throat, blood bubbling from his mouth. Speaking blood, he thought. I’m speaking to them, speaking with deep sincerity, speaking the truth: Speaking with blood.

Larousse got only a third the way through his speech—which was lost under the noise of the crowd—before the gunshots rang out, and he fell, and the crowd surged forward, and the guards were trampled and crushed…

The rioters had Watson, then, had him down and underfoot; they kicked in his ribs, his skull, crushing ideas and being into meaningless pulp; wiping out information the old-fashioned way.

He was brain-dead, but life still pumped through him in a desultory, automatic way, until he was killed, almost as an afterthought, by an old Afghan woman wielding a pair of scissors,

She used the scissors working in the garment district every day. With the same methodical precision she brought to her craft, she used the scissors to snip Watson’s jugular.

Steinfeld was there, of course, at the edge of the crowd, sincerely trying to keep some order. Lespere—emerged from his deep cover—was with him, both men with Mossad-issue Uzis in hand. They were hoping to take the Inner Circle alive, make them stand trial, get the whole truth incontrovertibly out in the open. Shouting at their men to contain the crowd. But the New Resistance troops were pushed aside, were overwhelmed, unwilling to open fire on civilians. And the Muslim contingent was particularly inflamed, the Muslim world enraged by Crandall and Watson’s spurious Bible, the Bogus Jesus’ slandering of Mohammed. In the face of this outrage, military strategy became irrelevant.

“ Attente! ” Lespere shouted. “Wait!”

But hunger fed hunger: a hunger for revenge; outrage became true rage. The frustration of war, privation, and persecution erupted in one. The doors were smashed in, the crowd surged across the lobby, bullets and bricks smashed the painted moldings and knocked the ancient portraits down, shattered the receptionist’s computer console, exploded windows—and struck down startled guards. Most of the guards were armored, but it was no use against ten people prying at them, like psychotic starfish prising seashells, tearing the armor open, getting at the soft and vulnerable men inside; at men who wondered how they’d come here, to this, as they were clubbed to death…

The SA switched off the elevators, but soon the crowd boiled up the stairs onto the upper floors, smashing through the Comm Rooms, and through the rooms containing the controls for Larousse’s faux image. An assault, as W.S. Burroughs had longed for, on the reality-control room.

Here they found Giessen and Rolff.

Giessen they pulled from under a secretary’s desk. He spat insults at them until the first gunshot smashed into his gut, and then he folded up, all his brittle punctilio shattered by the bullet, and he cried out like a lost child, and took a long time crying and whimpering… Steinfeld and Lespere tried to get through to him, hoping to save him for trial, but the crowd shoved them back and bore Giessen up, toted him to the window…

He had been recognized. The Thirst. A man—a person whose interrogations Giessen had supervised… a torture victim… this man recognized him—and was the first to shout, “Throw him out the window!” Giessen went flying head first, trailing a streamer of blood, out the window and into the crowd chanting in the square.

In the hallway, trying to get to the roof, were several hundred Second Alliance, some in armor, some in fine suits. The rioters found them harder to get to. But partisans with guns were brought to the front of the mob and opened fire, killing methodically. Some of the fascists returned fire, rallied by Rolff, who came howling Aryan blood oaths down the hallway, firing a carbine, shrieking about Juden Swine …

Steinfeld and Lespere sighed as one, and—also as one—opened fire themselves. Steinfeld’s Uzi ripping into Rolff’s mouth, flinging his racist epithets back into his skull on a fist of bullets. A reply that couldn’t be argued with.

The ancient building was looted. Everyone found in it was killed including some who were relatively innocent. The place was sacked and burned to the ground.

Most of the top Second Alliance administrators died in the first twenty minutes, and died with great suffering.

Steinfeld was sorry he couldn’t bring them to trial somewhere. But as to their suffering—he didn’t give a hang about that at all.

The thing was won, so there was no reason, Torrence thought, for what Steinfeld did on the rooftop helicopter pad.

The Inner Circle SA were there—those four who’d survived thus far, including old Jæger himself—surrounded by the fanatic elite of the Soldats Superieurs and half a dozen Second Alliance bulls in full armor. They were entirely at the mercy of the uprising. They could be captured, or, if they refused surrender, their escape choppers could be blown up with grenade launchers. There was really no reason for Steinfeld to lead a charge into them. None at all.

But that’s what Steinfeld did. He ran at them, rather clumsily, since he usually left this sort of thing to Torrence. He charged them with an assault rifle in his hands, firing, the gun spitting the only kind of rhetoric that mattered today.

Torrence shouted, “Steinfeld, what the hell are you—?” Hobbling up behind him, trying to give him supporting fire, but moving slowly on his wounded leg.

Jæger went down, and another fascist too—and then the bulls opened fire on Steinfeld and Torrence. Steinfeld staggered as a dozen rounds tore into him. He spun and fell, still firing. Torrence blowing away the guy who’d shot Steinfeld.

Torrence got it then. Feeling a punch in the chest, another in the right hip. Going down.

Steinfeld, what the hell did you do that for? It was pointless. We had them. We had them. There was no reason…

“There was a reason,” Roseland said.

Roseland was sitting beside Torrence’s hospital bed in an overburdened government hospital run by the new French Republic. Four other beds were crammed into the room. Torrence didn’t respond aloud, because of the tube going down his throat, into his right lung—the lung the bullet had gone through—but he looked at Roseland in a way that meant, What the fuck are you talking about?

“He kept a personal journal, written in Hebrew,” Roseland said. Roseland looked as ill as Torrence, though he hadn’t been wounded. He looked as if he was having trouble sitting up straight. Hadn’t slept in a few days, Torrence guessed. “I found the journal in his stuff when I was getting it together to send to the Mossad. I couldn’t help it. I read it. Most of it wasn’t anything the enemy could’ve used for intelligence if they’d found it—all that part was real elliptical and general. It was mostly personal thoughts, ideas, feelings. And he talked about Pasolini at the end. Turns out he had been having Pasolini followed.

“Steinfeld knew she was in touch with some of Witcher’s operatives. He found out about the virus—had one of Witcher’s contacts picked up and extracted. He wrestled with himself about it. He knew she was the only one left with the non-racially-selective virus. Thinking that if she went ahead and did it, released it in Berlin with the fake manifesto recording, it would hurt the enemy bad, and in the long run that’d save lives. Then he decided he was being as bad as they were—that there was no excuse for allowing tens of thousands of civilians to die as part of some damn political strategy. He came to this, see, he really did. But by the time he’d made up his mind, it was too late. She was on her way to Berlin. He tried to find her, tried to stop her…” He shook his head. “I saw his face when we got the news about Berlin. I never saw such open emotion in the guy before…”