A Song Called Youth (125 page)

Something gleamed on the horizon, a glittering oval. The transport VTOL Badoit had sent. They’d planned to meet it at the outskirts of the airport; Steinfeld had called it here by radio.

Hope lifted its head—and then ducked back into its hole.

The Second Alliance chopper was headed straight for Badoit’s VTOL, on its way to shoot their only hope of escape out of the sky.

Bibisch wailed in frustration, picked up the Stinger, and ran to the door.

Torrence, at the window, shouting at her, not even sure what was coming out of his mouth. Some way of saying:
Don’t!

Then she was outside, kneeling among the flowers, aiming the preloaded Stinger into the night sky.

Torrence gaped at her watching through a shattered window, seemed to see her in some kind of compositional frame then:
French Woman With Missile Launcher Amid Flame, Flowers, and Moonlight.

Torrence wanted to run to Bibisch, but he was afraid to take his eyes from her, insanely sure that if he looked away for a moment she’d be dead. So he stood there, firing furiously past her at the confused SA soldiers, trying to give her cover.

She braced to fire the Stinger . . . 

And she fell, as SA rounds found her. They shot her through the side, the hip, and a forearm.

Torrence yelped like a kicked dog. Should he run to her? What could he do for her, now?

And then she was up, gushing blood but getting to her knees. She raised the weapon, fired the Stinger. The rocket, before launching, flared a pool of mystic light around her. It arced into the sky . . . 

As she spun around, struck by another burst of enemy gunfire, smashed flat onto her back. Blood splashed, mixing with a sweet confetti of yellow flower petals.

Torrence found himself running toward the door, shouting wordlessly—shrilly and uncontrollably, because he couldn’t do anything else.

Then the Stinger struck home. The heat-seeking missile ignited the Second Alliance chopper, made it a ball of blue and yellow fire in the night sky, rivaling the moon.

Ran out the door, jumped down off the train. Metallic
smack
sounds as bullets hit the train near his head. Shouting, sirening his way to her, he kicked the Stinger launchtube aside. Bullets searing past him so close he could smell the friction of their passage in the air.

Glimpsed, in moonlight and fire, the slick blue and red of her insides showing through a hole in her belly.

Flashing red lights.

As he picked her up in his arms, ran back to the train. It seemed to take forever. The other resistance fighters giving him cover. He made it to the chrome steps. Going to make it inside.

Something smacked him hard in the back of his head. He was falling . . . 

Failing forward, toward the chrome steps of the train. Never hitting the steps: Falling right through them.

“I don’t know,” someone said in French. “Maybe trauma, cerebral hemorrhage, maybe only a bad graze. I have no equipment. Don’t know.” Levassier’s voice.

Daniel Torrence was surprised he could understand this Frenchman. He’d picked up a lot of French after all. He congratulated himself, feeling childishly proud. His mom would be pleased. Wait till he told Kitty, his sister Kitty, that he could understand French.

She’d be impressed.

He wasn’t sure if his eyes were open or not. After a moment, he decided they were. He was beginning to make out the ceiling of a train. What train was it?

I open my eyes in the morning, and for a minute or two I’m just here . . . and then I remember . . . you know . . . that I’m dying . . . 

The train. Bibisch. “Is she okay?” His tongue felt thick.

He could see Levassier now, with Steinfeld, bending over him. Steinfeld, from this angle, looked like he was mostly beard.

Torrence slowly began to get feeling in his arms and legs. He became aware that the world was vibrating, shaking—each movement rippling pain through his skull.

The train was moving.

“Bibisch . . . ”

“She’s badly hurt,” Steinfeld said. “But still alive.”

“Do not move,” Levassier said in English, tightening the bandage around Torrence’s head.

“The train . . . ”

“Bones contacted their computer, found a way to get the train’s power back on,” Steinfeld said. “Not for long, probably. But we’ve moved away from them. We disabled their trucks. They’re closing in on us, of course, but we’re going to—”

The train ground to a halt. Torrence heard Bones’s voice. “That wasn’t me. They overrode me.”

Steinfeld moved out of Torrence’s line of vision. “It’s okay—there’s the transport from Badoit.”

“How many did we lose?” Torrence asked. Shit-motherfucker, but it hurt to talk.

Steinfeld said, “Too many. I should have sent only two or three with Hand, slip them out of the city that way. But I was afraid they’d get caught, and I thought if we escorted them, we could fight our way through . . . his information, his reporting to the world—it could be the difference between winning or losing. It may be our only hope. But it was a stupid decision. A decision out of fatigue. I should have sent you with them, alone, underground perhaps. But I thought the train . . . Stupid . . . ”

“How . . . many . . . ?”

“Hand is alive, and Barrabas and the American—”

“How many?”

“We lost all but seven, with four surviving wounded. Eleven left. The others are all dead.”

“They shot me in the . . . head?”

“Your head was turned when you were hit,” Levassier said. “I think it is just a graze. But you have concussion. Maybe.”

Torrence heard the thunder and shriek of Vertical Take-off and Landing engines—a big one. The transport. It might be able to get them out of the country. Or it might be shot down.

No. Hand had to get through. Tell the world.

Get up. Protect Hand. Bibisch.

Torrence turned slowly on his side, groaning, levering to get up. Levassier tried to restrain him. “Wait for the stretcher, imbecile!”

Torrence shook loose from Levassier. Nausea gushed up in him. He turned over and vomited.

And then fell forward in it.

• 10 •

FirStep, the Space Colony, Admin Conference Room.

“How are things going in Admin?” Stoner asked distractedly as they waited for Russ to get there.

Stoner wasn’t really interested, Claire thought. There was something else . . . 

“Lester’s faction is a serious pain in the butt,” Claire said. “They want to declare the Colony its own sovereign socialist state. Confiscate all UNIC funds for people living at the Colony. They talk about striking—but they’re a minority of the technickis. I doubt a strike’ll happen.”

“Lester’s charismatic,” Stoner said. Still sounding as if he were thinking about something else entirely. “That can make a minority into a majority. Maybe you should . . . ” He broke off, embarrassed. “Sorry. CIA reflexes. Old habits die hard. Never mind.”

What had he been about to suggest? she wondered. Assassination?

“Lester’s not angry enough to pull it off,” she said, chuckling. “We’re not mistreating the technickis enough.”

Stoner nodded, not giving a hot damn himself. Claire glanced at the broad, high-resolution screen on the left-hand wall, just now coded to
window
—it was a shot of space from the astronomical camera at the “north” end of the colony. It showed a fiercely bright field of stars, one of them a little bigger and more colorful.
Venus.
There was a fringe of glow on one side of the colony, from the sun just out of shot, and on the other a sort of violet and scarlet aurora, like a smeared crab nebula, that was the result of solar wind reacting with the anti-ionization shield of ice-fog they manufactured from the ice asteroid. It was a nonbreathable but protective atmosphere, of sorts, for the outer skin of the Colony on the sunward side. “Pretty view today. Looks almost like a real window, this new screen. Good resolution.”

“Uh-huh.” Stoner was drumming his fingers.

Russ came in then, looking just a little smug. All right, Claire thought, so he made her come twice the night before—did he have to be so pleased with himself? He sat next to her at the S-shaped table. Squeezed her hand under the table. She suppressed an urge to roll her eyes. He was a bit of a romantic.

He’d already proposed to her twice. Marriage? Ridiculous.

But Claire squeezed his hand back.

She wondered at herself. Since her life had changed so radically—forced out of FirsStep, guerilla fighting on Earth, all that she’d seen, she’d reacted by falling into her sexuality, as if it were a refuge. Dan Torrence, Lila—Lila!—Karakos, Russ . . . She’d thrown herself at Russ, almost literally. Not like her, all that sexual wildness.

Stress has turned me into a slut,
she thought ruefully. Time to tone it down . . . 

“I’ve been doing some surveillance on Witcher,” Stoner said. Adding: “With Steinfeld’s permission.”

“
Steinfeld’s
permission?” She looked at him in a way that made him shrink back in his seat a little. “Witcher is registered personnel on the Colony. How about
my
permission? How about Russ’s?”

Russ cleared his throat apologetically. “I’ve been working with him on this.”

She removed her hand from his. “Who the hell do you people think you are?”

Russ winced. “I’m still head of Security, Claire. I never had to approve every move I made with Admin before.”

“But this is bugging someone’s quarters.”

“Not exactly,” Stoner broke in. “We’re listening in on his unauthorized communications with Earth.”

“Still . . . ” She sighed. “You had a good reason?”

Both men nodded hastily. Like naughty boys.

“And what did you find out?”

“Witcher made some contacts with certain people in the SA, through intermediaries,” Stoner said. “Making purchases from them. I don’t think they know who the buyer really is. The Second Alliance has some kind of viral genetic-engineering program going on in secret. A secret most of the officials in SPOES and the Unity Party and the rest don’t know about. Apparently they’re trying to develop a racially selective virus. I don’t know how successful they’ve been. They developed one that’s
not
racially selective—but does have one quality they were after. It dies out after it spreads in a roughly predictable epidemiological pattern. It’s called S1-L. Apparently, Witcher has purchased samples of S1-L. Seems he’s planning to use it some way.”

She blinked. “On the Colony?”

“I don’t think so. He seems to be deploying it for specific areas of Earth . . . We think he’s planning to use it on Earth while he’s on the Colony. While he’s safe here, you see.”

She shook her head in amazement. “I don’t believe it. That’s—beyond megalomaniacal. It’s crazy. He seems perfectly sane. A little neurotic maybe, but—Well, what the hell is he doing it
for?
Who exactly does he want to kill? The SA?”

“No, uh-uh,” said Russ. “Not specifically. The instructions he gave for distributing the things . . . I’d say he wants to kill a large part of the world. In general.”

“What do you mean, ‘a large part’?” Russ asked. “What exactly does that mean?”

“What it says. A majority.”

Russ said, “Holy shit.”

Claire stammered for a moment and then managed: “Well—alert people on Earth. Arrest him!”

“We need you to sign a warrant,” Russ said, taking a printout and a pen from his pocket.

She looked it over. And signed.

Stoner chewed a thumbnail. “But as for alerting people—our information is too nonspecific. It’s more or less hearsay. We’re going to inform people, but . . . how seriously they’ll take us”—he shrugged gloomily—“I just don’t know.”

The Badoit Complex, Egypt.

“I was shot in the leg?” Torrence said sleepily. “I thought I was just shot in the head.”

“No. Leg, too. Zuh head wound,” Levassier said, “zis is superficial.”

“I don’t remember that. Being shot in the leg. I didn’t feel it.”

“Zuh back of zuh left leg,” Levassier said. “Thigh.”

“Move the leg, Torrence,” Steinfeld said a trace mischievously.

Torrence tried. The pain expanded from the wound like a hot ripple in cold water, spreading through his body. “Ouch! Shit! Now I feel it. But at the time . . . nothing. ”

“It happens zat way sometimes,” Levassier said. “You still have head pain?”

“No. Long as I don’t move, I’m almost too comfortable.” The bed in the private clinic room was small but soft, tilted up a little. There was a TV, and a bathroom within hobbling distance. The room was the perfect temperature. His Arab nurse, he saw now, as she took his blood pressure, wore a veil and a long black gown, so he didn’t know if she was pretty, but otherwise it was ideal.

He didn’t like it that way. He understood Roseland a little better now. The shame of survival.

“Hand got through all right?” he asked.

“Yes. His assistant was killed. The technicki. A stray round. But Hand got through. With all the digi-vid, everything.”

“That’s something any—shit!” A white bolt of pain sizzled through Torrence’s head—and then vanished. He felt a little strange. Unreal. “I didn’t get any brain damage?”

“I do not sink so,” Levassier said, looking into Torrence’s eyes with a small, cylindrical optical instrument. “There was some danger of it, some concussion, but head wound,
c’est seulement un
—what word. A graze. A little trauma—we control it with some nimodipine. You feel . . . normal?”

“Mostly. A little out of it, maybe.” He’d only just woken, was still a little fuzzy—the trip to Malta and then to Egypt was all a fog. He was forgetting something. Someone. A sense of someone important, crying near him, whimpering with pain . . . 

Bibisch.

He grabbed Steinfeld’s wrist. Tightly. “Where is she?”

The weariness in Steinfeld’s eyes spoke before he did. “She’s gone, Danny. Died this morning in surgery. They tried everything. Badoit had the best people flown in, waiting for her. But she had six wounds . . . ”

Torrence’s eyes burned, but the tears didn’t come. Choking on the words, he said, “I don’t fucking think it’s worth it, Steinfeld. Chances are, we’re going to lose. We’re outnumbered. And a virus—what the hell do we do about that? It was all wasted. She’s wasted.” Feeling a great relief and at the same time a growing emptiness as he said it. “She was wasted. Rickenharp, wasted. Yukio, wasted. Danco, wasted. All the others. How many on that train? Forty? Fifty? We’re fucked anyway—we should just try to find some little corner of the world and live there . . . Until the virus hits . . . ”