A Song Called Youth (48 page)

“No. Where’s this thing headquartered? The Second Alliance I mean.”

“The military headquarters? Main one is supposed to be in Sicily.”

“So why don’t you hit the island?”

“Not enough manpower—or seapower. NATO’s guarding it. NATO thinks—or claims it thinks—that the SA is just a privately owned peacekeeping force like it pretends to be. Sort of high-quality mercenaries subcontracted by the UN and NATO. So we got to get past NATO too. And those guys aren’t our enemies. But Steinfeld was working on a way to get in, before they found him.”

“He’ll try it, sooner or later.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I want Praeger,” she said, her voice chillingly flat. “If we can get to the Second Alliance’s command, we can bring Praeger to justice.”

“Who’s Praeger?”

“We get out of Paris alive I’ll tell you about it.” Daylight wasn’t long in coming. Hot-metal blue edged the ragged, truncated skyline when they heard the first amplified note pealing over the square, that bizarre church bell again, declaring a new and electric morning.

They heard, from ten yards away, the captain of a passing neofash patrol burst out, “What the bloody ’ell is
that
?”

Claire almost wept with silent laughter. She whispered, “What kind of music’s he going to play?”

“It’s mostly retro-rock, twentieth-century stuff . . . but it’s more than that,” Hard-Eyes murmured.

Rickenharp began with a bash-out of the Blue Öyster Cult’s “Cities on Flame with Rock ’n’ Roll,” slammed on to The Clash’s “London’s Burning,” and then segued into Lou Reed’s solo version of “White Light/White Heat.” Rickenharp had jacked a mike into one of the amps and he bellowed the lyrics in a voice that made Hard-Eyes sure Yukio had given them the shots. Rickenharp was coming on to his last high. The digital rhythm box started, thudding out a martial backbeat that shivered like controlled thunder from the faces of the wrecked buildings around the Étoile.

It was still dark enough for Hard-Eyes to lead the others through the shadows around the perimeter of the Étoile, in the ruins, and over the dead fountains, toward the Champs Élysées.

Now Rickenharp was segueing from a Sisters of Mercy cut to a Nine Inch Nails tune: “Head Like a Hole.” He yowled,
“Head like a hole, black as your soul, I’d rather die than give you control!”
his voice echoing thinly up and down the Champs-Élysées. And then an updated “Street-Fighting Man.” Each chord peacock-tailed out into beautiful distortion, echoing around the wide, breezy, broken space of the Étoile.

Hard-Eyes chuckled and hefted his assault rifle, muttered, “Christ. He’s pulling it off!” They were crouched behind an overturned troop transport truck. He peered out between a bent-out fender and the grille at the entrance to the street. Dozens of SA entrenched there, staring up at the arch, mouths agape. Maybe Rickenharp had been wrong about how they’d react . . . If they didn’t take the bait, Hard-Eyes and Claire were fucked . . . 

Rickenharp, banged through some mid-1980s tunes. The Clash, Dead Kennedys, The Fall, New Order, U2, The Call, and Killing Joke’s “Requiem.” Into the nineties with Panther Modern’s “Sometimes It’s Better to Die.”

He paused, made a chord oscillate drunkenly, and yelled,
“Hey! You pathetic wimps frightened of a guitar?”
Bellowing it so loud his voice fuzzed in the amp. But they understood him. Louder now: “YOU! YOU LIMP-DICK INTESTINAL WORMS! YEAH, YOU, THE BRAIN-WASHED, PECKERWOOD BIGOTS! RIGHT: THE SHIT-EATING DUMB-FUCK RACIST PRODUCTS OF BACKWOODS COUSIN FUCKING! LET ME BE MORE EXPLICIT! I’M TALKING TO THE FAGGOT SA NAZIS SUCKING THEIR THUMBS OVER BY THE METRO SIGN!
YOU PUSSIES SCARED OF A GUITAR?
COME ON! COME ON, YOU COWARDS!”

There was another minute of debate amongst the SA. Then the fash commander gave the order—and the SA charged the arch, spraying its crown with automatics. Dust and chips of stone flew from the top, where Rickenharp howled on at them. “COME ON, YOU PHILISTINE PECKERWOODS,
LET’S GO!
”

Yukio waited till the neofascists were halfway there before opening up on them. He’d set up two grenade launchers, already had them cranked for range.

Three explosions burst before the arch like giant flame-hands flashing open. Fragments of concrete and metal rained. Dust bloomed . . . and cleared.

As Rickenharp played the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy” . . . 

Twelve of the Second Alliance assault force were sprawled there, broken and unmoving.

Six more kept coming—Yukio stopped them with short, precise machine-gun bursts. Another wave of them came on, took cover in shell-holes, began returning fire. Yukio kept moving, kept low, kept firing. He had a better angle for shooting than they did. And all the time Rickenharp’s guitar wailed and roared . . . 

Yukio fired an M-83 round across the Étoile; it blew up in the commander’s tent, setting it on fire. Another M-83, and another. The SA ran helter-skelter for cover, their lines in confusion.

Beyond the burning tent, forty yards beyond, Hard-Eyes could see the metro entrance he wanted.

“Come on!” he shouted.
“This is it! Run like a bastard!”

He took Claire’s elbow and—Bonham and Kurland close behind—they sprinted across the open side-street. They were almost there before the regrouping sentries spotted them.

“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.

• Epilogue •

The frightening thing about racism is that it can be made to sound rational.

—Jack Brendan Smoke,

Essays for the Year 2040,
“Too Long Anno Domini” (Witcher Press)

“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.

The plane tilted a little, and Smoke’s glass of club soda slid away from him. He let it go. The bartender caught the glass before it fell.

Witcher glanced at the bartender, then said, “Go ahead on up to the bed compartment and have a rest, Jerry, if you would.” When he was gone, Witcher said, “The hell of it is, Jerry’s been with me twenty-two years. Loyal as they come. We should be able to say anything in front of him—but with extractors . . . ” He made a dismissive gesture. “Loyalty means nothing.”

Reading the printout, Smoke took a deep breath and let it slowly out. Then he smiled. “Steinfeld, Hard-Eyes, Carmen, Willow, Levassier, Hernandez . . . Who are these others?”

“Refugees from FirStep, apparently. The girl claims to be Professor Rimpler’s daughter, Claire Rimpler. She’s joined the NR. She says her father was murdered on the Colony. We’ve had no confirmation of that from Colony Admin. The other guy—this Bonham—has some kind of deal he’s trying to make with us. I’m not sure what it is, yet . . . There’s a story behind this Colony refugee thing. We can use it at the news conference.”

Smoke turned to the crow in its cage on the floor. “You hear that? Steinfeld, Hard-Eyes, some of the others—they got through!” The crow tilted its head and seemed to shrug as it ruffled its feathers.