John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Steinfeld raised a hand, and the laughter died down.

Rickenharp felt a strange combination of mortification and deep relief.

“Does anyone else sponsor our young singing poet here?” Steinfeld asked.

“Yes. I do,” Yukio said.

“Yeah,” Carmen said, with a sigh. “What the hell. Me too. I mean, if Yukio does.” Shrugging.

Rickenharp was limp with relief at that.

“The sponsors will be responsible for this man’s further indoctrination, briefing, and training,” Steinfeld said, all business now. “Just see to it he isn’t prone to being a dilettante, or being a, what’s the word, a grandstander. In fact—I wonder if he’s aware…” He looked at Rickenharp. “That if he tried to go to the States and tell the media all about his heroic ‘journey’ with the resistance, and write songs about it, and draw attention to us. We’d kill him.”

Rickenharp looked back at Steinfeld, and swallowed. The guy was not kidding.

Steinfeld kept looking at him, eyebrows raised. “Well?”

“I do understand that,” Rickenharp said. “I wouldn’t do that anyway. I understand why you think I would.”

The NR leader looked at Rickenharp for another long, assessing moment, then nodded. Steinfeld took out a handkerchief and mopped his brow. “It’s hot in here. Now, first the good news—I did bring a little coffee and a few other items back for the actives.”

There was a general murmur of pleasure at that.

Steinfeld gestured to the doctor, who translated for those whose English was shaky. “ Il fait chaud ici…” Levassier began.

“Just the important stuff, Claude.” Steinfeld said.

The doctor nodded curtly and translated the part about the coffee. More murmurs of pleasure. He waited, as Steinfeld went on.

“But as for our steady supplies…”

Steinfeld told them that the food ration would be reduced by one-third, but it would be twice a day. They were running out of furnace oil. There would be measures taken to conserve all supplies…

And he told them that the Russian/NATO front was holding steady forty miles north of Paris. Both sides were showing great restraint in the use of tactical nuclear weapons, which meant that fallout dangers were minimal just now.

The seat of France’s right-of-center government had been moved to Orleans, about one hundred fifteen miles south of Paris. The government currently had very little influence on affairs in France outside Orleans and the provinces of Guyenne and Provence. Of the other provinces, those not controlled by the Russians had fallen under the authority of local petty demagogues whose power was in actuality reliant on their working relationship with the Second Alliance. The badly decimated, desertion-plagued French military was chiefly occupied in maintaining logistics for the NATO forces at the Front, or in protecting the government at Orleans. The few French soldiers remaining in Paris were attachés to the police department and were effectively absorbed into the Second Alliance, since the SA had been given authority over the police. As a sop to the hard-line nationalists, Le Pen had been appointed Minister of the Interior, his principal responsibility now the administration of the police.

The police and SAISC troops were largely occupied in rounding up anyone the SA’s intelligence branch designated as a “criminal or disruptive element,” i.e.: Communists, dark-skinned immigrants (for whom suitable crimes were invented), left-of-center Jews, and dissidents of any kind. And, as an afterthought, looters and conventional outlaws.

Steinfeld went on, “The line will hold steady in France for a while, I should think, unless the Russians manage to take out Milstar 2.”

Milstar 2, the USA’s orbital military warning/communications/ observation system, was protected by a series of orbital battle stations and watched over by a “fence” of tethered satellites. The Russian disadvantage in space technology had so far kept Milstar 2 safely insulated.

“Our source in the Pentagon informs us,” Steinfeld said, “that the Russians are about to launch new anti-sat weapons, specifically to take out Milstar. If they’re successful, NATO will find it more difficult to watch its back: and as we found out at the beginning of the war, its back is space. The Russians could shuttle troops in behind NATO lines…” He paused for the translator. Then: “The city would once more become a battleground. More accurately, it would quickly become rubble. If that happens, the SA will dig in behind NATO lines. We will follow the SA, wherever they go, to disrupt them in any way we can. In the meantime, we—”

“ C’est suffit! ” the Algerian said. “I am need to know this: What have we been waiting for? We do nothing but print posters… C’est merde. Why do we not fight? We do not use the explosives, the guns, we keep them like a greedy child hiding his toys! Only a little, we use, here and there. Nothing. Why are we wait? Eh? Why we wait for big push?”

“It’s very simple.” Steinfeld said with a wintry smile. “You’ve been waiting for me. The waiting is over. I’m here. And now, we go on the offensive.”

Corridor D was choked with debris, with bad smells and the atmospheric tension of relentless jeopardy. Belle had told Claire, “We call it Alphabet Town. After a neighborhood in old New York, where the avenues were named A, B, C, D…”

Claire sat with her back to the wall, behind the barricade, supposedly on duty. There were four others on duty. Two technicki men, up above on ladders, looked through the notches atop the barricades. Angie and Kris below, in the truck cabs, were looking down the empty corridor in front of the barricades. And Claire knew Angie was quietly, urgently hoping to see someone coming. Someone to shoot at.

Claire was supposed to act as a messenger and gofer for the barricade guards. Mostly, she brought coffee. The corridor here was a litter of trash, trampled beyond recognition; the news sheets were still soaked from the riot hoses the SA bulls had used before the barricade had gone up; empty emergency ration canisters clattered underfoot whenever she went back to the corridor rest station to try and find a toilet that wasn’t stopped up. And the air filtration was working at one-quarter efficiency. It smelled like a maggot’s belch.

At the back of her throat, the odor was met by the smoke from the empty, rusting lubricant drums fulminating under the vent behind the barricade. Technicki rebel bravos stood around the barrel warming their hands, spitting into the flame to watch it hiss, laughing and bullshitting. The air vent sucked at the black smoke but much of it slithered away and coiled near the ceiling, increasing her sense of choking submergence…

“Wonderful,” Claire said, now, tasting her own bitterness as she stood up, looked through a crack between boxes, down the corridor at the sacked shopping mall: the shop doors slack-jawed on their hinges, department store mannequins with heads twisted to look over their backs tangled in torn-down, charred drapes. Shards of plate-glass windows on the floor were a fallen, frozen mockery of the stars outside. She muttered, “The only thing they haven’t done is take shit from their diapers to draw pictures on the walls.”

Goddammit, she’d grown up in the Colony. True, she wanted to leave it—she realized now she’d always wanted to leave it—but in some way it was part of her. It had been her home for years. It was a frontier outpost for mankind. It shouldn’t be treated like this.

D was one of the main corridors. It was twenty-five feet from the floor to the glowing strip along the ceiling’s center, and fifty feet wide. Before the barricade, D had been busy with jitney traffic or small electric trucks towing a train of supplies; with bicycles and tribikes, and electric mopeds. There were two trucks here now, nose-to-nose across the corridor, part of the front-side barricade. The barricade was reinforced by ore crates filled with crushed asteroid rock hijacked from the storage bins at the south end’s smelting works, moved into place with forklifts and stacked to within a foot of the ceiling. The truck cabs doubled as lookout stations. The armed lookout would open the driver’s side door and climb in, lean on the window frame of the passenger’s side door, to watch the corridor through the door window. A rear barricade blocked off access from the corridor’s end, sixty yards behind them.