John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Claire shouted, “Don’t!”

But the thing in Molt’s hands—it looked to her like a little bicycle tire pump she’d had as a girl—hissed again and a hole appeared in the man’s back as he turned to run; the suit expanded; blood splashed out from the collar. The man tried to scream, but all that came out was a gurgle. And the blood kept coming.

She thought, It’s so red. There’s so much of it and it’s all so red. She looked away. The man scraped at something on the floor, moving spasmodically… wet sounds.

Then the room was quiet.

Molt’s heavy face was dead. His eyes were lifeless. He slurred as he spoke. “It worksh like you shed, Rimpler. Right through the shuit.”

Rimpler nodded, his head tilted to one side. “The only one in the Colony. Far’s I know. But maybe not: Praeger requisitioned explosive bullets. Not that all explosive bullets are necessarily fired from—”

“How can you talk that way! Like hunters over deer!” Claire burst out. Her stomach churned. She was shouting to keep from throwing up.

“It’s a way of adjusting,” Rimpler said, bending to make himself a drink.

A flash of heat went through her. She knocked his hand down, and his glass broke against the table. He stared numbly at the fragments.

“Dad, we have to go! Now! ”

“Oh, no. You and Molt go. I’ll report that this was done by rioters.”

“They won’t believe that. They’ll arrest you. They don’t extract, Dad. They torture. ”

He sighed. “I suppose… they won’t leave me alone.”

Molt was dragging the bodies inside. “They have a transmitter in the suit,” Molt was saying, pronouncing his words more carefully. “If it’sh cut off, it shets up an alarm, and they send someone to inveshtigate.”

Claire looked at the leaking suits, the bodies, then at her father. “So let’s go now, dammit!” She wanted more than anything to get away from there.

As they went down the hall—her father in his absurd shorts and sandals and bathrobe, Molt in a grimy technicki jumpsuit, she in her Admin jumpsuit—Claire knew that she wanted to go farther than simply away from this end of the Colony.

She wanted off, and down. To Earth.

The message encoder worked like this: Swenson sent a e-message from the SAISC administration to Purchase at Worldtalk.

It was a non-classified message re the acquisition of Worldtalk by the SA Corporation. The message was relayed in groups of signals, each group of signals representing a group of letters. The interval between the transmission of a group of letters was supposed to be uniform. But certain groups of letters arrived fractions of a microsecond later than they should have; a half-microsecond late corresponded with a certain word; one-tenth of a microsecond later corresponded with a certain letter; one-eleventh with another letter, and so forth. Purchase—having reception software equipped to listen for the encoded delays—received first the ostensible message; then—after securing his comm line—he told his console to listen for the delays, make the letter and word correspondences, and print out the decoded message. The message from the SA Second Circle to SA-initiate Purchase read:

Joseph Bonham, political liaison apprentice, arriving on treatied Russian exchange ship from Colony, transfer to SA shuttle orbit, L2, 2-10/0800 EST, arrival New Brooklyn seaport 01100 EST. Meet with double Security, supervise transfer of Bonham to Detention Unit Three for extraction and implantation.

There was a third message hidden within the second. After the second message was decoded, it was transmitted from the computer to the printout mechanism; another decoding unit in the printout mechanism—a unit known only to the NR—heard another set of fractional delays in the transmission of the group of signals, a kind of meaningful computer stuttering, and translated them into the third message, which it printed out after the second.

In the message from Swenson, the SA Second Circle operative to Purchase, the SA Second Circle operative, was a message from Stisky/Swenson, the New Resistance agent, to Purchase, the New Resistance agent.

The message read:

They are prepping me to give Senate testimony against reform of the Antiviolence Laws. Have asked me to stay on at Cloudy Peak. I cannot manage it much longer. Psychological pressure too great. Give me orders or get me out. They are trying to obtain memory extraction experts. They also plan to provide DoD with new submarine silencing techniques in exchange for covert federal backing of SA projects. Tell me what to do, let me do it, and get me out, repeat, get me out. They are going to hold a Service soon.

Purchase read the printout twice. On the outside, he looked like a businessman who was annoyed by a sudden burden of extra work. Inside Purchase, bridges were buckling, guy wires snapping, ceilings falling in.

He glanced abstractedly at his office door, as if simply letting his eyes wander. But looking to see if anyone was in the hall.

No one.

He got up and closed the door. He transferred the message to a high-priority garbled transmission unit, rerouted it through a coded modem—which he had to take from its hiding place in his closet and interface with his system—and relayed the message to Steinfeld, via Joseph Bensimon, the NR contact at the Israeli Embassy. Bensimon would relay the message to the Israeli Secret Service, the Mossad, who, if they could get through the various static blocks, would send it via satellite to Steinfeld.

There was another if : if Steinfeld was still in the Mossad’s good graces. The Israelis had had a generation of peace, after the Arab Spring and the Cairo 13 Treaty; Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt, Lebanon, the Saudis, Iran. and the State of Palestine signed the treaty, after Israel signed a pledge to accept a Palestinian state and after it ceased building new settlements. (Iran had come into the fold when the regime of the Ayatollahs had fallen to reformists.) Israel was neutral in the US/Russian confrontation, even when the war moved into the Middle East, as the Russians tried to capture oil fields in the few Arab nations aligned with the West. So far, the Russians had left Israel out of it. Israel’s frontiers were massively defended. The Knesset had gone from pugnacity to moderation, and Steinfeld was regarded by some Israelis as a firebrand, a fanatic who saw Nazis under every bed.

But Purchase sent the message, after which he detached the special external modem unit and packed it into a Styrofoam-and-cardboard container in his closet, so it looked like an ordinary extra kept in case of a breakdown.

Then he sat at his desk, drinking cold coffee from a plastic cup. There was a hairline crack in the cup; coffee leaked through in beads to run down onto his hand. He stared at it, thinking, By the time we get advice from Steinfeld it’ll be too late.

He sighed. Stisky had been his project. His enthusiasm. Witcher had said, “The guy’s almost too good to be true.” And Witcher had been right. Stisky/Swenson had sat in on the last planning session with Steinfeld, before they’d placed him in the SA’s Second Circle. That had been a mistake.

Stisky knew some things. He knew too many names.

And they had a memory extraction man now. They would do a routine extraction on everyone, and if they asked Stisky/Swenson’s memory center the right questions, they’d know about Purchase, and they’d know where Steinfeld was.

Swenson was your idea, he thought. Take responsibility.

He turned to the console and told the computer he wanted to send a message to Cloudy Peak Farm.

Rickenharp was trying to understand. Some of the talk at the conference table was in French, some in English, some in Dutch. He’d made out that the French resented meetings carried on in English, but Jenkins had pointed out that at least half the “active” members of the Paris NR—active meaning those prepared to take up arms at any time—were English speaking, and they translated everything. Then the French guy—actually an Algerian immigrant—had complained that this Steinfeld was recruiting all the wrong people and perhaps they should replace Steinfeld with a Frenchman.