A Song Called Youth (72 page)

Flash of Angelo’s memory:
A big cop leaning over him, shouting at him, picking him up by the neck, shaking him. Fingers on his throat . . . 

When Angelo was a kid, some cop had caught him running out of a store with something he’d ripped off. So the cop roughed him up, scared the shit out of Angelo, literally: Angelo shit his pants. The cop reacted in disgust (the look of disgust on the two cops’ faces: “Makes me sick,” one of them had said).

So Angelo hated cops, and now Angelo was out of his right mind—ha ha, he was in Charlie’s—and so it was Angelo who reached down and found the boot knife that the two cops had missed, pulled it out, got to his knees in the capsule as the cop turned around (Charlie fighting for control—
dammit, Ange, put down the knife, we could get out of this with
—) and Charlie—no, it was Angelo—gripped the knife in both hands and stabbed the guy in his fat neck, split that sickening fat neck open, cop’s blood is as red as anyone’s, looks like . . . 

Oh, shit. Oh, no.

Here come the other cops.

The Island of Malta.

Same night, another time zone, another variety of darkness.

Daniel “Hard-Eyes” Torrence walked through a vast, wind-scoured darkness, unable to see his feet or his hands in front of his face, guided only by the distant swatch of light ahead of him.

It was near dawn in Malta. Torrence had just gone off watch on the approach road to the safe house. Danco, yawning and cursing, had replaced him, was making himself ersatz espresso in the little shack by the dirt road.

A cold wind blew the rich scent of the sea from the coast, a quarter of a mile south. Sounds seemed eerily detached and lucid out here. He could make out the smack and rumble of breakers carried on the sighing wind; his rifle creaked softly on its shoulder strap; his booted feet made grumpy trudging sounds.

He felt as if none of it had anything to do with him. At any moment the wind might blow his soul right out of his body.

He was glad when he got to the barn, walked blinking into its well-lit interior. Two choppers sat there, looking glassy and bulbous and out of place, as foreign to the dusty wooden walls as flying saucers, their blades folded back on hinges overhead. Torrence nodded at the guard lounging in the cockpit of the compact chopper by the stairs. The Italian, Forsino, an old-fashioned long-hair, a
hipz
in Stateside terms, looking put-upon and bored.

Torrence took the open stairs up to the dusty attic, hearing the old wooden barn creak in the wind, wondering if tonight was the night it would fall over.

Lila was on the radio in the attic, monitoring the military bands and anything else she found of intelligence interest, keeping a frequency open for communications from Witcher and New Resistance affiliate groups. Wires ran to the next room—an old olive storage bin—where sat-link antennas, looking like miniature radar scoops, angled out an open window, listening to the babbling emptiness . . . 

An electric light bulb burned naked in a white porcelain socket overhead; moths ticked at it, and it dimmed now and then when the wind blew particularly hard. Wearing a headset, Lila was seated at a table piled with a lot of arcane metal boxes that looked as out of place as the choppers in the rustic backdrop.

Lila was clear-eyed and alert, evidently ready for anything, even at this hour. She was so efficient it was maddening, Torrence thought. She took off the headset and looked at Torrence questioningly.

“I thought Claire was on tonight,” Torrence said.

Was there a flash of displeasure in her face? “I have relieved her. An hour ago.”

“Nice of you to relieve her early.”

Lila said nothing. She seemed to be studying the dust-heavy cobwebs overhead; they shook when the wind thumped the barn.

“Hear anything interesting?” Torrence asked, nodding toward the radio.

She shook her head.

He turned away, hesitated, then turned back to her. “Was she here alone, when she was on duty?”

Lila didn’t reply for a full three beats. She looked at him blankly and said, “Karakos. He was here talking to her when I came.”

Torrence felt a chill. He went to the table, flipped open the comm log, looked down the list of dispatches, messages received and sent for the week . . . nothing at all for that day. “Karakos didn’t transmit?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Any transmission has to have written clearance from Steinfeld. Claire would not have let anyone use the radio without clearance. There are only four people cleared to do comm duty, and Karakos is not one of them. Claire knows that.” A touch defensive on Claire’s behalf.

“What did Karakos want here?”

“Probably couldn’t sleep, wanted someone to talk to. How am I to know?”

“Okay.” He turned away. She seemed hostile to him, in a subdued way. Why?

He went down the creaking stairs, dust rising with his every step, thinking hard, wondering if his feeling about Karakos was simply jealousy.
Or is it what I think?

In forty-eight hours they’d hijack the
Hermes’ Grandson.
Karakos was to go along.

He stepped into the windy night, crossed to the house, called out the password at the back door. Someone shined a flashlight in his face. He blinked irritably till they were sure of him, and went into the house. It was quiet; most of the others were asleep. But there was a steady creaking noise from upstairs.

Moving on sheer impulse, not thinking, borne along by some inner charge of urgency, he climbed the stairs, went to Claire’s room—since their argument, she’d taken her own room. He knocked once, and before she’d finished calling out, “Who is it?” he opened the door and went in.

She and Karakos were huddled in bed, a candle fluttering romantically in a draft from the door. The two of them naked in the soft golden light.

Somehow it was the candle that hurt most.

“It won’t be tonight, Karakos,” he heard himself say, “but next time she’s on the radio, that’s when you’ll talk her into letting you take it over for a while, right? That it?”

“I’m surprised it’s the radio that’s on your mind,” Karakos said with a small laugh. “But what about it?”

“Dan, get out of here.” Claire’s voice was flat, dead.

He looked at her. A dozen bitter remarks rose up in him, vying for his voice, but all he said was, “Okay. Sure.”

He left, seared inside, thinking, Just jealousy?

Just jealousy? Just jealousy? Just jealousy?

He didn’t sleep that night.

And as soon as it was light, he carried his rifle to the beach for target practice.

• 08 •

The Space Colony. Bitchie’s After.

Kitty Torrence was squatting with her back against the wall, in Bitchie’s After. The room was dimly lit at her end, brighter at the other where the meeting was going on. The walls were metal patchy with posters and faded porn, stitched with graffiti.

Bitchie’s was an illegal after-hours club, in a double-unit that also functioned as a brothel on certain days. The back room was thirty feet by twenty, the floor space taken up by foam-rubber mattresses. She would have liked to lie down. Not here, though. The mattresses stank; she was careful not to touch them with anything but the bottom of her shoes. She wished they’d pick another place to meet—but Bitchie’s was one of the few places Lester’s loose organization of radics felt safe. Admin tolerated Bitchie’s as a brothel; they didn’t suspect it as a meeting place for reformists.

Lester and the new New Resistance rep and Hasid Shood and Ben Vreeland were sitting cross-legged in a circle, talking. Kitty could have taken part, but she felt like hanging back, staying out of it. She got upset when she took part in the meetings. Chu, the NR rep, was a serious, brittle-mannered Chinese woman in a dull blue Pilot’s Aide jumpsuit. She had short, glossy black hair, no makeup, a single silver hoop earring; carried a blue canvas pouch, zipped half shut, and she kept her right hand always on it. Somehow the pouch made Kitty nervous.

“If we call for an investigation, as a group,” Chu said dolefully, “we’ll tip our hand; they’ll know about us a group. If we demand an investigation as individuals, they’ll know about us as individuals.”

“They already know about us as individuals,” Lester said. “Russ Parker called me in. They been watching me.”

“They know about you, and maybe about Shood, but probably they don’t know about Vreeland yet, or about me. I have been very, very careful.” Her voice was almost a monotone. But there was an underlying intensity that kept Kitty’s attention riveted when the woman talked.

“I dunno,” Vreeland said. “I don’t think they got me ID’d. Unless maybe because Sonny was my brother . . . I dint get involved in nothing before now.” He was a great chunk of a man, short-legged but thick, wide-shouldered. He wore a ship tech’s white jumpsuit, grease-stained with insulation fluid, and a flattop crew cut divided into three technicki signification colors for his earth-home, profession, and seniority. He spoke Standard badly and laboriously. His brother had died on RM17.

“It takes not long,” Shood said. “They will identify us eventually. Me they maybe know, for Silla was very much loud in the Union . . . ” He swallowed hard after mentioning Silla. Shood was a compact, dark Pakistani with mournful black eyes, wearing a paper suit of tacky red and yellow stripes, faded from two days’ wear. He was a computer programmer, and “sharp as a razor,” Lester said. He’d lost his wife to the explosion on RM17.

And I came so close to losing Lester, Kitty thought. And why? Because Lester went to meetings like this one.

“The longer we stay unidentified as activists, the better,” Chu said.

Lester shook his head. “That’s why they got away with murdering everyone on that repair module. Because most of them weren’t publicly declared. So not enough people smell a rat. Well, a lot of people suspect, but most of ’em aren’t sure it was murder because they aren’t sure the people on the ship were anti-Admin. If the people who were killed had declared their stand publicly, the Second Alliance wouldn’t want to kill them; they’d be afraid it’d cause more riots.”

“Perhaps. But for what we have to do,” Chu said, shrugging, “secrecy is the only way. It is hopeless to ‘demand an investigation.’ Nothing will come of it. And the SA will take note of who is doing the demanding. No. There is only one way:
to take power.
We know the Second Alliance plans for the Colony. The SA plans to man the Colony with their people only. The rest of us will be deported or . . . who knows? If the New-Soviets surrender to NATO—and it seems possible that soon they will either launch a first strike or surrender—the fascists will transform the Colony into their headquarters. Rick Crandall himself will come here. It will be his . . . his ivory tower. He will tolerate nothing less than complete dictatorship here. We must prevent that or we lose it all. We begin like this: to stock arms—with great secrecy, with caution—and to make plans to use them. And then to use them, when they are not expecting it. We must take control of Admin Central. There is nothing else to do.”

Shood looked at Chu and then, to Kitty’s surprise, he nodded. “We must take by force.”

Lester looked uncomfortable. He glanced over his shoulder at Kitty. Then looked at Vreeland. “What you think?”

Vreeland said, “It’s suicide. But standing up to ’em
any
kinda way is suicide too. So fuck it. They gonna pay.”

“Yes,” Chu said. “Standing up to them in any way is equally dangerous. Suicide? I think not, not if we plan very carefully. It would take very few people placed in the right nerve centers to take over the Colony. Getting there is the hard part. But once we’re there, once we have control of Computer Central and Life Support, the people will rally behind us.”

“What if they don’t?” Kitty said, standing. Her legs were going to sleep. Her back ached. She did a few knee bends, grimacing. “What if . . . what if everyone’s too scared. They won’t know who you . . . ” Who
you
are? Or who
we
are? Diplomatically she chose the latter. “ . . . who we are. If people think we’re terrorists, they won’t trust us at the Colony’s control system. The people won’t back us.”

“It’s a risk we must take. One of many. I take a risk coming here at all, meeting with Lester and Shood. I risk my cover. But
I must
risk it now.”

Lester said, slowly, as if thinking aloud, “I think they’d back us.”

And as he went on, Kitty thought,
God damn you, Lester, we have to get out of this thing, not get locked up in it deeper! We have to get out for the baby!
But aloud she said nothing.

“People are pissed off,” Lester was saying. “A lot of them suspect the explosion was rigged. And we haven’t got the housing reforms they promised. And the air’s getting bad in the technicki section; it’s still fairly clean in the Admin section. The food’s been shitty, and there hasn’t been enough of it. The curfews—people are going stir-crazy. Claustrophobic. New-Soviet blockade’s preventing Earth visits, and the curfew’s keeping them in their units during off-time. We almost got busted coming over here . . . ”

Chu looked sharply at him. “Almost? How?”

“A guard stopped us. We had a permit to go to medicenter for Kitty, so he let us go. But he did it like he didn’t want to.”

“Did he run an ID check?”

“Yeah, I think he did. But he let us go . . . ”

Chu stood. “You are a known agitator. Your permit is for your wife; they would not have let you go, too, at this hour, unless . . . ” She looked at the door, spoke with brisk authority. “We must go. Everyone go, quickly. I will be in touch.”

They stood, everyone suddenly uncomfortable, as she got up and walked hastily across the mattresses to the door, stooped, and stepped through. They heard the outer door creak and clang shut behind her. She was gone. Just like that.

“She spooks easily,” Lester said.

“Maybe we better go, too,” Vreeland said uneasily.

Kitty’s stomach churned with tension. Nausea welled up in her. “Lester, I think I’m gonna be sick. Is there a toilet here?”