John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“Anything broken, mate?” Willow asked. Each word accentuated by the white puffs of his breath in the cold air.

Torrence thought about it. Decided Willow meant bones. He moved experimentally. The movements brought some aches and a whirligig of nausea. But none of the grating pain accompanying broken bones. “I think I’m all right. Just kinda… blurry.”

“You’ll be okay,” Carmen said.

Claire had stopped laughing; she sat rocking with pain, silent. Carmen put a tourniquet on Claire’s arm, and then she used a medikit to clean and close the wound. Claire made hissing sounds between clenched teeth. “It’s a nasty-looking cut, but it’s shallow,” Carmen said. “Artery’s intact. Nothing embedded. Looks worse than it is.” Torrence didn’t want to move. He wanted to lie there. Stay there. Sleep, maybe.

He must’ve mumbled something aloud about it, because Willow said, “We got a camp, up the crack. Sleeping ’ere’s not on for you, mate.” Willow helped him up. Torrence groaned.

“The jet…” Claire said huskily.

“Gone,” Carmen said. “I think it was damaged when the second chopper blew. But it’ll be back. They’ll be back. Trucks are gone. We can’t use the road. Steinfeld says we hide up in the mountain…”

Jack Smoke tapped the broad, wafer-thin computer screen and said, “They’re somewhere in here… about ten miles northeast of the Italian border.” The big, glossy-black crow perched on his shoulder fluttered a little when Smoke moved.

Witcher, standing beside Smoke, was frowning at the map on the screen. He nodded and tapped the terminal’s keyboards for zoom magnification on one small segment of the map. That part swelled to fill the screen. “There’s nothing much around there. No villages… just the pass…”

“And it’s a high elevation, not much cover except rocks. They’re exposed.”

Smoke and Witcher were in the Comm Center, at the place called Home: the heavily fortified New Resistance world headquarters on the island of Merino somewhere between the Antilles and Cuba. It was hot and oppressive between the thick, white-painted concrete walls, the gray concrete floor splashed with paint around the edges where the painter had been sloppy; white plastic, aluminum, and black plastic equipment crowded the room, and in some places you had to turn sideways and press hard to get through between the monitoring gear. Two technicians sat at satellite link monitors at the other end, recording information about SA, NATO, and NSR troop movements, and alert for information pertaining to Steinfeld. The technicians were a man and a woman; the man was black. Both were topless, wearing only shorts, because the room was stifling, turgidly hot. Smoke and Witcher each wore white shorts, sandals. Witcher wore a gold polo shirt, darkened by sweat to clay color under his arms. Smoke wore a flower-print Hawaiian shirt, mostly blue. And in a way he wore the crow.

Smoke was silently cursing Witcher’s fear of air conditioners. Mention air conditioners and Witcher’d mutter darkly about “lethal mutations of the American Legionnaire’s bacterium.” But Smoke had come to accept Witcher’s fits of hypochondria, his mercurial shifts from expansive openness to tight-lipped reserve. Witcher was the angel of the New Resistance, its billionaire backer, and if his eccentricity should shift him from supporting the NR, the resistance might well collapse.

They were too dependent on Witcher, Smoke decided. Perhaps Steinfeld should take steps to reduce their reliance on him.

“Smoke,” Witcher said suddenly, “what about the contingent at Malta? We could air-drop some assistance.”

Smoke shook his head. “That’d be just another group of NR trapped in the area. We’re too badly outnumbered to help Steinfeld that way. If we could get the men in, it’d have to be from a high-altitude drop. The airspace there is monitored by three armies. If we had some helicopters, something that could fly in under radar, but big enough to pick up forty men…” He shrugged.

Witcher grimaced. “We tried.” He’d dispatched a ship disguised as a tanker, with six copters; hidden in holds designed for oil. One of the NR’s American operatives had been captured, interrogated with an extractor. He’d known about the tanker, because he’d supervised the construction of its false walls. The extractor, a device using molecular biology to extract information from a subject’s brain, had told the SA about the tanker and its destination. The SA pulled strings, claiming there was a terrorist plot afoot, and NATO simply sank the ship, fifty-five miles west of the Straits of Gibraltar.

“Maybe we could stage a diversion, draw the SA away from him,” Witcher said.

“I considered that. But we’ve intercepted their field transmissions. They’ve ID’d Steinfeld. They’re certain it’s him. Getting him will be first priority.”

“So what do we do?”

“Hope Steinfeld finds a way out on his own.”

“You saying there’s nothing we can do for him?”

“It looks that way.” Smoke’s voice was flat, emotionless. But he reached up and stroked the crow, as if comforting it.

If was late afternoon when Torrence woke, but in the cave it was twilight. It was a shallow cave, only forty or fifty feet deep, with a high, cracked ceiling that effortlessly swallowed their campfire smoke. Torrence sat up and looked around.

He was in the back of the cave, sitting on a sleeping bag. Claire lay on a bag beside him, asleep. He wanted to reach out, stroke her hair, but he didn’t want to wake her. And they’d never made love; there was no real physical intimacy between them.

The fire popped and sizzled. It was a skewed pyramid of thin, twisted tree branches gradually collapsing into the wavery column of yellow flame. The wounded lay nearby, seven of them; one groaning, the others too quiet. Two of them looked like they’d died. On the far side of the flame the little Spaniard, Danco, sat with an old AK-47 across his knees, staring into the fire. Danco had a brown, saturnine face; bristling, arching eyebrows; a small, pointed beard; and the devil’s own red mouth. He wore fatigues, a watch cap, and a battered brown leather jacket.

Torrence looked at his watch and saw that the crystal had splintered into a coarse star; the digits were frozen.

He stretched, biting his lip at the pain. It felt like he had some cracked ribs, bruises, and a lot of little wounds.

He felt dull, creaky with aches, hungry. But the disorientation, the panic—all that was gone.

Scowling and muttering, Levassier came into the cave carrying a packet of freeze-dried soup mix and a bucket of snow for melting. Torrence tried not to stare at the food. They might not have enough for anyone but the wounded.

But everyone ate. Bonham sitting near Danco on the other side of the fire, eating greedily, staring at Claire and Torrence. Claire woke when she smelled the food cooking. By degrees, as the guerrillas talked over the mess kits of soup and canned stew, Torrence pieced the picture together. They’d found the cave a mile and a half up the mountain from the road. There were twenty-five of them intact enough to fight.

Two SA jets had gone over, probably looking for them. The sentries were fairly sure they hadn’t been spotted. There was cloud cover, blocking satellite reconnaissance. Steinfeld had used a pack-radio to try to reach the other SA units, and the Mossad, transmitting coded messages. No reply so far.

The SA was probably triangulating troops in the area by now. They’d be along soon enough.

So what do we do? Torrence wondered . It would be tough to run farther, with the wounded, and with scarce supplies.