John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“Down!” Hard-Eyes shouted. He and Claire flung themselves down behind an overturned lamppost.

Bonham threw himself flat just behind.

Kurland panicked, gaping around, shouting, “We gotta go back, we gotta…”

A burst of machine-gun fire caught him in the mouth, blew his upper teeth up, through his sinuses, through his brains and out the back of his head; and he fell like a puppet with its strings cut.

The machine gun was set up in what had been a magazine kiosk, its muzzle flaming over scraps of posters advertising Le Opéra. It was in a spot that would be hard for Yukio to hit.

“HEY, YOU IN THE MAGAZINE STAND!” Rickenharp’s voice boomed. He paused to giggle into the mike. An amplified giggle heard through the popping of gunfire. “HEY, YOU WITH THE MACHINE GUN! COME ON! GIVE ME YOUR BEST SHOT, YA NAZI COCKSUCKER!”

Hard-Eyes smiled.

The machine gun fell silent for a moment. The muzzle swiveled to the arch. Some officer shouted, “Ignore that arsehole, you bloody fool! Cover the—”

But the officer was too late—Hard-Eyes gestured for Claire to stay where she was, then he jumped up, zigzagging, running, thinking, Maybe this time I’ll find out what it feels like to get it in the head. Maybe it’s the biggest goddamn rush you can imagine.

As 72-mm rounds whined up, ricocheting from the street near his ankles…

But he reached the kiosk, circled it, found a hole in the side, shoved the muzzle of his assault rifle through, and squeezed out his clip, raking back and forth over the kiosk. The muzzle of the machine gun tilted back, leaking a little smoke. He signaled Claire. She and Bonham jumped up, sprinted to him. Hard-Eyes slapped another clip into the assault rifle. Yukio was firing to give them cover as they ran for the metro entrance. Blurred glimpses of SA soldiers… the whine of rounds sizzling the air around them…

And then they were down the steps, under cover.

“Oh, shit,” Bonham said, gasping. “The entrance’s blocked.”

“Looks like it but it’s not, really,” Hard-Eyes said. “We set ’em up that way… Dig there. The stone with the paint splash on it. Pull it out, start digging. It’s just camouflage.” Bonham and Claire began to dig.

Hard-Eyes turned and went back up the stairs, to look out over the metal-strewn battlefield to the arch, trying to see Rickenharp. There—a tiny figure on the crown of the arc, almost unseeable. But hearable. His voice and his guitar, kicked through those mean little Marshalls, were audible even over the gunfire. Some original tune now, Hard-Eyes suspected. He couldn’t make out the lyrics, but he knew what it was about. He’d heard a thousand permutations of it, over the years. It was an anthem, and it was about being young. A song called Youth.

And then the Jægernauts rolled in from the east and west, two of them converging on the arch. They came on like the neofascist war machine itself; they came on like mortality. Killing machines as big as five-story buildings, they cast shadows that drank up whole blocks… From here they looked like five-story spoked wheels, the spokes digging into whatever was in the way. There were clouds of dust, showers of bricks. The neofashes scattered, cheering, pulling back. Yukio kept sniping at the fascists, and more than one fell.

The echoes of his gunshots rolled like bass lines for Rickenharp’s electric wailing. Rickenharp had cranked the amps all the way up; he could still be heard over the squealing of the oncoming Jægernauts. The two sounds went well together.

It was monumental, that destruction. The two Jægernauts converged on the Arc d’Triomphe from opposite sides, began to grind gigantically away at it, spinning in place at first like the wheels of a mud-stuck Hummer, then biting into the corners, crunching down as the microwave beams took the fight out of the stone. Yukio’s bullets whined off the blue-metal scythes, the Jægernaut’s spokes. Metal bit down on stone with a screaming that was another kind of heavy-metal jamming against Rickenharp’s final chords: fat blue sparks shot out from the machine’s grinding spikes; cracks spread like negative lightning through the huge monument; the hundred-pound head of a Valkyrie snapped from her stone neck and tumbled, bounced from a shelf of stone to fall and shatter on the grave of the unknown soldier; the arch’s great crown bent, buckled inward… and all the time, the whole time, Rickenharp played on, a solo fast as he could play it, keening and ascendant, Rickenharp standing on an up-jutting stone, the last upper corner of the arch; a tiny figure of pure defiance silhouetted against the sky; Rickenharp the performer playing this one for all it was worth… the cracks spread farther… the microphones picking up the sound of the monument’s cracking, crunching, rending… a final furious and defiant guitar chord—one last thunderous guitar chord!—and a last burst of gunfire from the arch’s top—

And then the arch fell into itself—and was replaced, for a moment, by a great pillar of dust and a monolithic silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. No guitar. Silence.

Hard-Eyes thought, My friends are dead.

On the outside, he showed no flicker of emotion. On the inside, a raincloud was bursting.

The Jægernauts, walked over the rubble, stamping back and forth, grinding the remains of the monument into powder. Powder, and blood.

The Arc de Triomphe, the flag-ensign of the New Resistance, the symbol of the struggle against the neofascists—was crushed into gravel; was flattened. The Arch of Triumph was gone.

But Hard-Eyes knew who was triumphant. As he turned to go into the tunnel, he seemed to hear Rickenharp’s final chord echoing on, and on.

“I’ve got good news for you, Smoke,” Witcher said.

Witcher’s private jet had been circling Manhattan for half an hour as it awaited landing clearance for JFK International, in Queens. The interior of the jet was clean, and brightly lit, and new-smelling. The only passengers, aside from the staff, were Witcher, Witcher’s secretary—who was asleep in the bed compartment—and Jack Brendan Smoke. And Smoke’s crow.

Smoke was wearing a light cotton suit the color of ashes. They had picked it out for him at Freezone. Complete with fashionable notched turtleneck—an alternative to the gold choker.

Smoke was still gaunt. But they’d had him on a rehab diet, and his eyes were bright. They’d even cleaned his teeth, implanted new ones to fill out the gaps. He would be able to walk the streets of New York and pass as an affluent citizen. But he felt displaced. Lost. It seemed he identified with the wreckage he’d left behind.

There was a lounge, with a wide observation window, and Smoke sat at the bar, looking out the window at the island of Manhattan gleaming austerely in the ascetic sunshine of a cloudless winter day.

Witcher was in his late sixties, but he had a good glandularist, good enzymists, good telemerase virologists—and he looked about forty. He’d allowed a little silver to streak his shoulder-length, neatly clipped brown hair and his short, equally neat beard. He wore a brown suit with leather shoulder insets. He’d kept his wide mouth and flattish nose and deep-set brown eyes. He could have afforded something glamorous.

“What’s the good news?” Smoke asked, without looking away from the city.

“Have a look.” Witcher slid a glossy printout across the brass bar to Smoke. He’d just brought it back from his office, in the rear of the jet. Smoke picked up the printout.