John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“How… how many of us?” Claire asked, arms propped on her knees, face buried in her arms.

He said, “Looks like we’re down to about thirty-two.” She said something more, but he couldn’t hear it because of the bark and chatter and scream of gunfire from the front of the fissure. Steinfeld and Levassier were just turning a corner farther down the crevice, moving up to deeper cover. Cursing as they slipped on patches of snow and uneven rock, other guerrillas carried wounded, and a few crates of weapons, food, guns. They hadn’t gotten away with much.

The wounded were giving out short, sharp cries of pain with each jolt as they were moved.

Some mocking inner voice told Torrence: You wanted to be where the conflict was real. This real enough for you?

The remaining autochopper opened up with long, blanketing bursts of its miniguns at the four guerrillas drawing fire at the opening of the fissure.

Torrence saw the rough V of the fissure’s opening blur with dust and rock chips and smoke and spattered blood. He saw the bodies of the four volunteers jerking, slamming against the stone with the impact of the bullets: four people, gone instantaneously. Each one had a life history; parents, family, friends, perhaps children. The ribbon of each one’s life history—summarily snipped.

He saw the Heeldog hovering fifty feet up, wind from its rotors swirling dust and smoke and snow. Like an opaque-helmeted SA security guard, it had no face. It was computer-driven; it was a machine for hunting, for killing, and nothing more.

The jet was coming in from the opposite direction looking for targets. Claire had gotten her breath. She stood and they followed the others back into the fissure, feeling like small animals running from an exterminator.

They turned the corner in the fissure just as the rock behind them erupted with a cannon shell from the jumpjet. The ground seemed to ripple; the shock thickened and distorted the air, and the ground seemed to leap out from under Torrence… till he found himself lying facedown, his ears ringing.

Thinking, Have I been hit? Someone was pulling at his arm, shouting over the screaming roar of the jet, the thump of the autochopper blades, “Get up, damn you, Torrence!” Claire’s voice. “Come on, Danny!”

Torrence? Danny? He remembered the names, remembered everything that had brought him here. It seemed nonsensical now—even as he forced himself up, got his rubbery legs moving, as he and Claire stumbled back into the crevice: it seemed absurd, a meaningless exchange of chaos. They throw chaos at us, in flying bullets, shrapnel, explosions; we throw chaos back at them. Waves of chaos heaved back and forth, driving me up a mountain for two days, then on foot into a mountain fissure. Waves of chaos driving us like field mice before a thresher. Small animals under the jackboot again… The Jægernaut that had killed Rickenharp as he played his guitar … The ideological origin of the conflict was an excuse. The conflict, the killing, had a life of its own.

And he wanted out of it, just then. In that exhausted, meaning-drained instant he wanted to hide in a hole till the wave of chaos passed him by; till he could crawl back down the mountain, find his way to the sea, to a ship or a plane, back to the USA and the walled-in enclaves of safety his parents lived in…

But then he looked at Claire and saw no despair in her. He saw fear and anger, but no tears. He felt her hand in his, and the sensation was somehow the organizational locus for meaning. In that instant all meaning proceeded from her touch. Steinfeld, the New Resistance—all that was distant just now. Now they were running, struggling to survive, together; and that together, by itself, had to be meaning enough, paltry though it was. It was like using a small, leafless tree as your only shelter against a raging desert sandstorm.

There were three more volunteers up ahead, where the fissure widened for a short distance. They were setting up a missile launcher, which wasn’t much more than a ten-foot tube of olive-drab metal on a tripod. A rifle fitted with a grenade leaned against the stone wall to one side. The jet and copter were converging overhead.

Torrence had a choice, then. He could pick up the rifle, join them in drawing fire away from Steinfeld, and be killed. Or he could tell himself: I’m a captain, officers are necessary, important to the Resistance, I’d be squandering a resource if I sacrificed myself. And Claire is with me. I brought her into the NR. I feel responsible for her. Tell himself all of that… and use it as an excuse to scramble for safety.

Some irresistible clockwork mechanism of his personality made the choice for him. He pulled away from Claire as they came up to the volunteers, shouted, “Go on, join Steinfeld, I’ll be there in a minute!”

“That’s bullshit, Torrence! Come on !”

But he’d grabbed the grenade rifle, was wedging it in the hollow of his shoulder (wondering if she was going to get killed because she wouldn’t leave him here, killed because of his gesture, his gesture of selflessness ultimately selfish because it sacrificed her too), aiming at the autochopper… its blades blew grit in his eyes… he saw the jet loom up, its wings vibrating from its hover-retros; he felt it emanating heat, poised over them like a monstrously oversize sword of Damocles… he shifted aim and fired… the grenade arced toward the jet and—didn’t explode. A bum charge. Fuck! He was going to die for nothing…

The chopper’s miniguns opened up, but it was a few yards too far south, and most of the rounds rang off the rock overhang; a ricochet caught one of the volunteers in the eye, a young black woman who clutched at her bloody socket, screamed and crumpled as the other two fired the missile. The launcher belched: white flash and a white rope of smoke behind the missile. It struck the sidewinder tubes on the right side of the autochopper. At the same moment the jet’s cannon fired—its aim thrown off by the shockwaves from the exploding autochopper, its shell struck the rock wall over the two surviving volunteers.

Torrence seemed to see an orchid of fire that blossomed gigantically to consume his field of vision, and he felt himself flying backward—

Torrence came to himself sitting with his back to the curved stone, a patch of snow chilling his tailbone. His head seemed to reverberate with a metallic singing. Red and blue smoke swirled. The red smoke wasn’t real; it vanished. The blue smoke remained, so he decided it was real.

Claire?

He turned his head, and winced. Saw her sitting beside him, laughing to herself. Her upper left arm was laid open, thickened blood making the cloth of her coat indistinguishable from the torn flesh of her wound. Her hysterical laughter was almost lost to him through the roaring, metallic ringing in his ears. He looked up (flinching with head pain) and saw that the sky was clear over the fissure. Where was the jump jet?

The natural stone wall across from him was painted uniformly red. The paint was still wet. He looked at it for a long time before he knew it was blood.

A man’s raggedly severed arm lay nearby in an iridescent patch of snow; the fingers were curled as if the hand were playing the piano. The skin was blue-white.

All the time there was the hissing, roaring, in his ears, an aural motif for the scene.

And then Willow and Carmen were there, bending over him. Their faces seemed fish-eye distorted. Willow was a gaunt, straw-haired Brit, with bad teeth and a perpetual air of quiet suspicion; Carmen was a lanky punk in an Army surplus ski trooper’s jacket, waterproofed green canvas with a hood; the hood was thrown back to show her ring-clustered ears, her black hair shaved on the sides and the back of her head, spiked like a paradoxical anarchist crown atop.