John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

They were Admin, and educated in standard English. But they were strongly sympathetic to the technicki cause.

They wore black exercise leotards, fencing masks, corrugated chest protectors. They looked like umpires for a woman’s baseball team, Claire thought. Only, Angie and Judy carried nunchuks.

Angie had always looked at Claire with a kind of your-time-will-come disdain; she took off her mask just to let Claire see that expression now as Claire took charge.

“I’m going in first,” Claire said. “I’ll leave the door unlocked. When you hear me shout, come running.”

Judy shook her head vehemently. “I think we’d better go in with you now.”

“I don’t want to provoke them. It’ll be better if I can get Molt on sheer authority. If I can’t, you’ll hear from me.” She tapped the comm button on her collar.

Feeling a little dizzy, she turned to the door.

This is rarefied air for me, she thought. Goddammit, Dad, if you were here…

She took the code key from her pocket, looked at the coordination indicator: Level 03, Corridor C13. She was near the outer shell. She could feel it—the gravity was faintly greater near the outside of the Colony.

The codekey looked like a small handgun with a crystal muzzle; she turned the two dials at the back of the key to read 03 and C13; then she pressed the codekey to the lock panel and the door opened.

She expected to see a guard on the other side, but there was no one. A sheet of transparent plastic wall blocked her way, forty feet farther on. But she knew what it was, one of her father’s security precautions, and she’d come prepared.

She dialed the codekey, and pressed it to the bulkhead. A small red arrow lit up on the bottom dial, pointing upward. She kept the key pressed to the wall, and moved the key upward; it chimed. The codekey communicated with the regulator on the other side of the bulkhead, and the plastic wall slid up.

She walked on, heart pounding, feeling like a burglar.

A door was open on the right. From inside it came a single drawn-out note, and after a moment she recognized it as sound made by a human throat: a high, fluting note, curling from fear to despair—and abruptly cutting off.

And then a voice, someone else’s voice: “The simple thing would have been to get a neurohumoral extractor up here, take it all right out.”

“Scanlon had a requisition in for one, Doc.” Another voice.

“But you can’t get anything through the blockade, and they’re hard to get anyway. Illegal as hell. Problem with customs.”

“Is it illegal now? I’ve been up here too long—I didn’t know.”

Claire made herself walk up to the open door and look in.

There were three of them who were like that. Faceless in helmets. And the horror of their faceless heads was tripled: one would have unsettled her, but three splintered her will. The helmets they wore, blanking out their faces with opaque blue-green visors, looked like things made of beetle wings. They were NA “security bulls.” And she thought, security bulls is wrong: they’re like insects, insects big as men.

They were bent over the man strapped to the bed. Molt. She saw what they’d done to him. She bit her lip. To one side, a white haired, white-coated doctor looked faintly querulous as he glanced up at her from his instruments. Like something startled from feeding.

Claire stepped back, turned, pressed herself against the corridor wall, beside the door, and stopped thinking. She shouted into her comm button. She heard footsteps inside the cell, and a helmet-muted voice saying, “I don’t know but we’re sure as hell gonna find out who she is.”

Claire was remembering a time as a little girl when she’d walked in on her parents and her dad had been all tied up in thin white ropes and her mother was standing over him with a whip and Daddy’s face was all welted and, not understanding the sexual game, she’d thought, If Mommy could do that to Daddy, she could hurt me, too. It had turned her world view upside down. And she felt the same way now.

The Colony was something maternal to her, and now, beyond all reason, the Colony was hurting its children.

A sudden, cruel pain in Claire’s right shoulder and she looked around to see the blank beetle-wing face distorting her reflection. The pain was his hand clamped on her. She pictured an insect claw clamping her shoulder, and she bit off a scream; and then the helmeted head tilted up to look past her, and magically, the carapace cracked down the middle.

Angie had come.

Angie followed up with a karate kick. The man staggered back, letting go of Claire’s arm. The other women closed in as the second and third of the helmeted guards stepped out the door, electric stun batons swinging.

Judy pushed Claire out of the way; Claire fell back, and as she fell she saw something strange: Judy and Kris slapping the back of the beetle helmets. It seemed strangely like the sort of helpless-female gesture they abhorred, that slapping motion—and then Claire fell onto the floor. She lay still for a moment, trying to get her breath, then sat up and stared: the bulls were slapping at themselves, were screaming, writhing on their hands and knees, trying to claw their helmets off. Judy and Kris had—with what resembled ladylike slaps—attached high-frequency warblers to the helmets. Pain-inducing sound waves reverberated inside the helmets.

Then Judy and Angie and Kris stood around the fallen men and worked them over with nunchuks, whipping the chained clubs to strike in the unprotected places between the armored segments built into their flat-black uniforms. In their fencing masks and chest protectors, pounding mechanically with the nunchuks, the women looked as inhuman as the Security bulls…

Claire yelled, “Stop it stop it stop it!”

Then Angie was looking down at her, through the fly’s-eye grid of the fencing mask. “What was it you said about using your ‘sheer authority’?” she said.

Judy said, “Shut up, Angie.” She helped Claire to her feet, and Claire made herself go in to help them take Molt off the bed. She didn’t look at the unconscious men on the floor.

When they stepped into the room, Molt saw them and screamed, clawing at his straps, trying to get away from them.

It would be a real mistake to underestimate Ellen Mae Crandall, Swenson told himself, as he watched her talking to the Los Angeles SA recruiting staff on satvid. She likes to play shrinking violet, take-me-in-your-strong-hands, but for her it just might be a game, almost as vicarious as reading a romance novel. Or maybe that’s wrong. Maybe when she changes, when she gets soft and pliable, she means it.

Maybe she’s both people.

“Just make absolutely completely sure there’s a clear division of intel awareness between the first two levels and the third. Need-to-know is the axis of the organization,” she told the man on the screen.

Swenson, sitting hunched over the report spread out on the long wooden table, looked up again at the stainless-steel cross on the antique cabinet across the room. His eyes were drawn to it, again and again, and he knew that was dangerous.

It’ll suck me right out of character, he thought. I could become Father Stisky.

He’d half expected to find swastikas on the walls at Cloudy Peak Farm. Portraits of Hitler. Something. But there was only the small German “iron cross” insignia, hardly noticeable, engraved into the intersection of the three-foot Christian Cross on its maplewood stand.

The long, narrow, book-lined room was log-cabin styled; halflogs on the inside and outside concealed the wall’s electrical and electronic guts. There were tinted-glass Tiffany lampshades over the imitation gaslamps curving from the walls. An enormous flagstone fireplace hulked at one end. Swenson had looked twice to be sure the logs burning in the fireplace were real. In the acid-rain states it was illegal to cut trees for firewood. There just weren’t enough trees left for that luxury.