A Song Called Youth (117 page)

The interference-camouflage Bibisch was using wasn’t working. Maybe corrosion from exposure to the damp had got to it. Something, some damn thing: the Fascists had located them; had traced the signal.

Had to be. Because Roseland saw them now. There were two autotanks, converging from opposite directions. Coming straight for them.

London.

After two days of watching the place, Barrabas found Jo Ann in the warren of junk shacks and shops crowding Portobello Road. She was trying to line up a cheap seat on a flight to New York—negotiating for the ticket in an antique shop.

It wasn’t an antique ticket. It was black market. In the wake of the war, trans-Atlantic flights were still few and far between, and were mostly for the use of Officials on Official Business. Clerks in the Foreign Office could sometimes get seats when some O on OB had crapped out of the trip; the clerks sold tickets on the black market, it was said. Supposedly.

Barrabas stood at the edge of the crowd filtering up and down the sidewalks, watching from the shade of an awning as Jo Ann bargained with a gray-haired fat man who had tiny eyes and a great potato of a nose. Jo Ann was about thirty feet away, in the antique shop with her back to him; he knew she wasn’t buying antiques, and this was the bloke rumored to be selling the black-market tickets. She’d mentioned, that drunken night at the bar, that if Cooper didn’t come through for her she’d try to buy a black-market ticket. Looked like the price was too steep for her, judging from the way she was shaking her head, angrily spreading her hands.

It was a warm day, a Sunday, and the Portobello was experiencing a rebirth, the shoppers and strollers out watching jugglers and musicians, browsing through open-front shacks of merchandise and ancient shopfronts, window-shopping for goods ranging from the exquisite to trash-with-a-price-tag. For most of the war the Portobello had languished, doing poor business. Now the New-Soviets had been driven back over their borders and commerce was beginning to flow again. It wouldn’t be long before the airlines were back, jets crowding Heathrow like cars on a rush-hour freeway. But Jo Ann, Barrabas knew, was sick to death of London. And of waiting.

She was opening her carrybag. Time to step in.

Barrabas plunged into the crowd, drew some sarcastic remarks as he elbowed through and stepped into the shop. Musty, dark, crowded, all of which meant old-fashioned; not like the new shops, where campy antiques were bathed in mellow stage lighting and arranged in postmodern, irony-pungent composition. This one had been here since the middle twentieth century probably, accumulating dust and questionable profits.

“I wouldn’t, Jo Ann,” Barrabas said.

She stiffened, then shot a glare at him over her shoulder. “Leave me alone.”

“If you can afford the ticket, then the ticket’s no good,” Barrabas said. “They usually aren’t any good no matter how much you pay for them.”

“Now see ’ere,” the man behind the counter said. “I’ve been in business ’ere for—”

“Shut your hole,” Barrabas snapped.

Jo Ann turned to face him, her cheeks mottled from anger. “You still trying to impress me by bullying people?”

Wrong move, he thought, and told her, “You’re right.” He turned to the shopkeeper. “Sorry, mate. Been worried about the girl. Didn’t mean to take it out on you.” Thinking: I’d like to kick your fat arse up around your ears.

Jo Ann was looking at the ticket on the counter, frowning. “Goddamn you, Patrick.” She closed her carrybag with an angry jerk of her hand and stalked past Barrabas toward the door.

“ ’Ere, now, miss!” the shopkeeper began.

Barrabas grinned at him. “Better luck next time.”

He followed her into the street. She shouted something over her shoulder at him. A one-man band, clashing cymbals together with his knees, playing banjo, blowing a mouth harp on a rack, and banging a bass drum with his foot pedal, was adding his racket to the street’s hum of electric cars and rumble of methanol lorries and hissing fuel-cell SUVs, and Barrabas couldn’t hear what she was shouting at him. But he got the gist of it.

“Right, I’ll fuck off, right out of your life, I promise!” he shouted, catching up with her. “If you’ll just have a cup of tea with me. Maybe some chips. What d’you say? And then I solemnly pledge to be gone forever, if you still want. I’m sorry about what I did the other night. Please.”

She stopped, turned, and shouted in his face, embarrassingly loud, “I don’t truck with racists!”

“Look—it’s just the way I was raised, you know? I mean, I’ve been thinking about it. You’re right about all that stuff.” He wondered if he was lying convincingly. And then he wondered if he was lying. “Just have a bite with me and hear me out.”

She stared at him.

He added, “I can get that erasure you wanted. Come on. Cup of tea.”

She tossed her head resignedly. “Okay. Just for a few minutes.”

The refugee camp, near Paris.

The autonomous weapon was drawing a bead on the sod hut, its cannon swinging around, the PA grid on its turret emitting a warning siren as the tank plowed through the shacks. The autotank was khaki-colored, on shiny stainless-steel treads, and it was shaped like a dull hatchet with a flattened, streamlined turret studded with electronic sensors. Refugees scrambled to get out of its way; children shrieked and hooted, some terrified and others elated at the break in the monotony. Their mothers simply grabbed them and ran.

The robot tank had an insignia showing the Arc de Triomphe, the new symbol of the Unity Party, on its armored front, and one of the symbols of the Second Alliance, the eye and cross, stenciled on its sides. An old man stood in its path, staring at it, gaping in hunger-dulled confusion till it simply ran him down, crushing him against a wooden shack so that blood fountained from his mouth onto the image of the Arc.

Seeing this, Roseland muttered, “Winning hearts and minds as always,” as he worked his way toward the tank from its left side.

Flame strobed at the muzzle of the autotank’s cannon. Thunder, and the shack just in front of the sod hut flung itself in four directions at once, as the shell exploded inside it. The ground quivered. Debris rained. Blue-black smoke billowed, then elongated in the faint breeze and drew itself over Roseland. He coughed, tasting caustic chemicals and oil. Shreds of tarpaper and chunks of wood were burning raggedly around him. The next round would hit the sod hut.

He heard Torrence yelling at some of the refugees, telling them to get down. Saw the sun blazing off helmets of SA guards approaching cautiously, in a line of six, well behind the first autotank.

Torrence was drawing off the second autotank, thirty yards to Roseland’s right, dodging through the shacks, firing short, innocuous bursts at the unmanned killing machine to get its attention. Roseland was moving toward the other autotank, thinking,
This is crazy, I ought to be running away from this thing.

But they couldn’t. They were surrounded. And Bibisch was busy with something vital . . . 

Roseland was forty feet from the hulking robot vehicle now, imagining he could feel its camera watching him, feel the crosshairs of its machine gun sight in on his head. It shouldered through another shack, crunching and splintering, churning the debris with its treads, spewing dust, its machinery whining. He let go a burst from his Ingram autopistol at the tank, making a broken line of sparks across its beveled prow; accomplishing nothing except scoring the paint.

And making the thing notice him.

Its cannon and machine gun whirred smoothly around to sight in on him. He sprinted off to the left, farther from the sod hut. Heard a crack—and felt the air buzz—as one of the SA bulls took a potshot at him. He felt the faint pulse of the tank’s microwaves bouncing off his chest, targeting him.

Roseland dived behind something metallic and rusty.
Thud.
The ground erupted where he’d been a moment before. He shivered as the shock wave rippled past and dirt pattered down over him. He’d taken cover behind an old Audi hulk, just the rust-pitted body of the car remained, half-filled with trash and scraps of cloth laid out in an oversize bird’s nest for some refugee.

He heard the autotank whining toward the old car. Raising his head to look through the Audi, he saw the autotank framed in the farther car window. It was only about thirty feet away. Well beyond it, the SA bulls were hanging back, hoping the autotank would take the risks, do the work for them.

Halfway between Roseland and the tank someone was lying on an improvised mattress made of the front and back seats of the old Audi. The seats had been pulled from the car and dragged into the sun. It was a woman, hard to tell her age; all he could tell was that she was sick, maybe from cholera. Too weak to run for cover, just hoping the thing would pass her by. But Roseland had inadvertently drawn the autotank toward her: Whining, rumbling right at her, blaring its warning siren.

She turned and, mewling wordlessly, tried to drag herself out of its way. She didn’t have the strength to get to her feet. She crawled.

It was picking up speed.

It’ll go around her,
Roseland thought. He was reluctant to give up the cover of the car.

It kept going, gaining on her—but looking for him.

It wasn’t going to go around her.

The guards will stop it, he thought.

It kept coming, she was in its shadow now, and her mewling had become yowling. Screaming.

“Goddamn it to fucking hell!” Roseland yelled, jumping up and firing at the tank turret. He sprinted to the left, trying to draw it away from her. Too late.

Without hesitation, it rolled right over her.

It broke her back, and broke her head, and churned her up, and spat bits of her out the back. This wasn’t some programmed-in cruelty, it wasn’t punishing her; she was simply in the way, and the device was not going to be diverted even for an instant from its objective.

Roseland stopped moving, froze, staring at it. One of the SA soldiers fired at him, the bullet kicking up the dirt close beside his left foot, but he didn’t move.

He stared at the autotank.

The autotank was the Second Alliance International Security Corporation. It was all fascists. It was all intolerance, all inflexibility, all racism, all xenophobia, all absolutism, all of it. In one machine. Programmed by the Fascists. Told to hunt down these guerrillas and don’t slow up for the civilians in the way. Simply move in and eradicate the little pocket of resistance.

It was a thing of hard angles and unforgiving edges. It was implacable. It was murderous, it was efficient; it was murderously efficient. It was the mechanical embodiment of his enemy.

He saw again the processing center. The electronic fences. The gray, septic hours packed in the misery of Processing Center 12’s little rooms. The breakout, the escapees mowed down as they ran. And her, Gabrielle, his friend: her head exploding.

He saw Hitler; he saw the Nazis. He saw the Holocaust.

All of it somehow compressed into this one machine.

Suddenly he was running at the thing, shrieking obscenities, firing past an oil barrel. The thing returned fire, the oil barrel catching its burst,
spang-spang-spang-spang,
bullets pocking the rusty metal. Roseland throwing his only explosive, a magnetized metal disk that stuck to the front of the autotank—
whump
as its cannon fired and
crack-thud
as his explosive went off. Its shells struck a shack just in front of him. Something picked him up and threw him down. Shrapnel raked his thigh and right arm.

Blank.

And then Roseland found himself on the ground in front of the autotank. Looking up through the smoke and dust as the autonomous weapon bore down on him.

The explosive hadn’t stopped it—maybe confused only its sensors a little and dented its hull. But it kept coming.

He got to his knees. That hurt. Getting up was like climbing a ladder made of broken glass. He raised his gun to fire, trying to shout, to let the pressure out, but his mouth was gummed with blood.

He felt the pulse of its aiming device; knew its crosshairs were centered on him.

He spat blood and yelled, “Fuck
you
! I’ll meet you in Gehenna, you brainless pigs!” And he fired. And it kept coming, aiming at him, and, he fired and—

It stopped.

Clank:
stopped.
Humming indecisively to itself.

He blinked and coughed in the smoke, staring at it. Had he hit something electronically vital with a lucky round from his pathetic little machine pistol?

Through the smoke he saw the silhouettes of enemy soldiers, coming at him. Half a dozen of them.

Suddenly, the autotank’s turret whirred into an about-face, like an owl turning its head all the way around, looking behind itself. It fired its cannon three times in quick succession. SA soldiers were snatched clumsily into the air by fingers of chaos.

She did it.

Bibisch had interfaced with the Plateau. Found sympathetic wolves. Using the microchip unit in the sod hut. Got the access codes, the back door into the autotank’s computer. Transmitted new programming.

The guardsmen were running. The tank was firing on its partner.
Wham.
Hit the other autotank dead center, kicked it onto its side so its treads dug uselessly at the air.

Torrence, grinning, was trotting up to him, coughing through the smoke. A fire was spreading through this section of the camp. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Bibisch do that?”

“She fuckin’
did
it!” Torrence crowed. “That’s my
girl
!”

“How’d she get control of it so fast?” Roseland asked as they hurried back to the sod hut. The autotank was opening fire on more SA. Driving them back. Killing half of them. It was a beautiful thing to see.

“She’s been working on it for a while, for days really—working with our people on the chips. Alouette—Smoke’s little whiz kid—she worked it out, along with some others. So Bibisch sent an inquiry just now, like, did they have the dirt on the thing yet, and, yeah, they had it. We just lucked out.”