A Song Called Youth (45 page)

Hard-Eyes moved in closer and around in front of them, keeping the rifle leveled at a woman and two men. He saw in the glow of the flashlight the young woman had short-clipped, soft-looking auburn hair; a pixyish face; strangely doll-like lips; and big, intelligent-looking, dark eyes. She was short and slender, wearing a gray Colony staff one-piece jumpsuit. She looked familiar, too.

“We’re neutral,” said the thick man beside her. He had a thick nose, small eyes, and an ash-colored crew cut. He wore a pilot’s jumpsuit, and a heavy pack on his back. “Refugees from FirStep. The Colony.”

“Who, uh, are you with?” the second man asked. Thin guy, brown-haired, sad eyes.

Rickenharp for once was struck dumb. He was staring at the girl.

“Train that light at the ground,” Hard-Eyes said.

She tilted the light downward. He moved in to retrieve their guns. Two small pistols. One of them for explosive pellets.

“Let’s have the pellets, too,” Hard-Eyes said.

The skinny one glanced at the others, then handed over a canvas packet the size of a deck of cards. Hard-Eyes stowed the weapons in his belt. The skinny guy took a step toward him—

Rickenharp popped the CAWS butt into the hollow of his shoulder, took a bead on the lanky one’s chest, and rasped, “Don’t you move that neutral ass again, friend.”

The man became a statue. But a talking statue. “Ah, right. I’m Frank Bonham. This is Brett Kurland—our pilot. And this is Claire Rimpler. She’s the daughter of Dr. Benjamin Rimpler.”

Hard-Eyes clicked. “I thought I’d . . . Yeah, okay.” He lowered his rifle. “ ’S’okay, Harpie,” he told Rickenharp.

Rickenharp kept his gun level. “Say what?”

“Said put away your piece. I recognize her.” He was embarrassed to say it. “I did a paper on the Colony-administration system for a sociology class. I watched an interview with Rimpler and his daughter. That’s her. She was a kid then. They’re Colony. Neutral.”

“Neutral is bullshit.” But Rickenharp lowered the shotgun. He went on, “Neutrality doesn’t mean shit if they meet the SA. The fashes don’t care if you’re Russian or American or Australian or a dog. In Paris, anyway, if you’re not fash, you’re the fashes’ enemy.”

“Fashes?” the girl asked.

“Tell you all about it on the way,” Hard-Eyes said, looking at the sky. He’d heard something . . . 

“On the way where?” Bonham asked.

“Our bunker.” Hard-Eyes was scanning the rooftops.

“Hey,” Rickenharp said, sounding like a kid at his aunt’s picnic basket, “you got any goodies in that pod? Like coffee? Freeze-drieds? Fresh water?”

“It’s all here in my pack,” Kurland said brightly. Trying to sound helpful.

“Put out the light.” Hard-Eyes said suddenly.

Claire switched the flashlight off. They looked to see what he was staring at.

Lights were approaching over the ravaged skyline. “Jumpjet.” Rickenharp said. “The trucks’ll be right behind.” He turned to Hard-Eyes. “Let’s make for the metro —”

Hard-Eyes hissed, “Run! The bastard’s moving in!”

The wedge shape of the jumpjet was approaching with jerky movements; like a dragonfly, darting ahead, pausing, darting ahead. Now and then it stopped in midair to shine its spots on the ground, moving on slowly now, tacking the light along the path—stopping to hover over the pod.

Hard-Eyes and Rickenharp, Claire and Bonham and Kurland ran through the shadows. They ran down a six-foot-deep erosion ravine toward the rue Botzaris. Across Botzaris, hot with exertion now, they made their way gasping through a maze of abandoned, rotting furniture spilled from the back of a deserted, wheel-less furniture truck, then down the rue de la Villette toward the metro station. Hard-Eyes heard Claire cursing between gasps. This was probably not what she expected to find on Earth.

When they got to the metro entrance, Claire switched on the flashlight, and they ran down the steps. They paused in the rubble at the bottom to catch their breath. It was an eerie, oppressive place in the glow of the flashlight. “We’ll have to crawl to get past the rubble here,” Rickenharp said. “But after a few feet it opens up, we can walk . . . ”

Claire dropped the flashlight, and sobbed out of the darkness. Bonham picked up the light, and touched her face to comfort her. Hard-Eyes felt strange, seeing that. He didn’t like Bonham touching her.

Neither did she. She slapped his hand away. Her voice was cracked as she said, “I’m . . . it’s stupid to cry now.”

“Good a time as any,” Hard-Eyes said. “We can sit down for a few minutes, we’re under cover now.” He tugged her wrist, and she hunkered down to sit on a slab of broken concrete, atop the rubble heap.

The flashlight was pointed downward; he could just make out her shoulders shaking as she sobbed. “I don’t know . . . ” she muttered. “But God . . . I wanted to come back so bad . . . But it’s so strange here, it’s like . . . it’s heavy and cold and exposed . . . and it’s worse than the Colony . . . ”

“Not worse,” Rickenharp said. “We got a sky here. And there’s parts of the planet—big parts—the war hasn’t touched. You hang in there, you can go see ’em.”

Hard-Eyes said nothing. Let her believe it. But the chances were, none of them would get out of Paris alive. After a while, she said, “Okay. Let’s go.” Her voice was steady now. Hard-Eyes took the flashlight, and they went on.

Walking down the tunnel. Flashlight beam flaring the red eyes of rats, spotlighting fist-sized mutant roaches.

Rickenharp sighed, world-weary, when Claire fell in beside Hard-Eyes.

“What’s at your . . . headquarters?” Claire asked.

Hard-Eyes snorted. “Headquarters consists of a hundred raggedy guys and a few women sitting in the basement of a bombed-out apartment building. Cleaning guns, arguing politics, reading. Playing cards with a deck that’s wearing see-through. Guys from every nationality . . . Most of them speak English. It’s not cozy there, but we got some chemheaters, ersatz coffee, small store of canned food. Now and then we find somebody’s hoard in the ruins . . . We got to turn down this tunnel, we can’t go on that way ’cause the tunnel’s collapsed . . . ”

“Your friend said something about the SA.”

“Fashes. Neofascists.”

“The Second Alliance.”

He looked at her. “That’s right.”

She laughed bitterly. “We have that particular species of cockroach on the Colony, too. They took over. A coup, really. They’re calling it an emergency police action. When we left they’d overrun everything. They’re in complete control there now. Martial law. Praeger’s little dictatorship. My father . . . ”

“I was going to ask you if he was still . . . how he was.”

“I think he’s dead. He . . . ” She shook her head, her eyes closed. After a moment she opened her eyes and said, “Bonham had a pass on to an outgoing ship, but we had to hijack the pod when we got to Station One. They had us scheduled to go down in the States, and I’m pretty sure the SA would have arrested me there. And Bonham thinks they wanted to brainwash him. So we had to steal an unscheduled pod, and we happened to be over Europe, and Bonham heard the NR was in Paris . . . ” She shook her head. Her voice was dry, so dry it cracked. “We didn’t know it was like this.”

“It wasn’t this bad till they sealed off the town. No one goes in or out, unless they crawl the whole way maybe. Lot of people are starving. They got wind that Steinfeld is here . . . ”

Rickenharp said sharply, “You’re talking a lot, man. If they got extracted . . . ” He licked his lips, twitching from blue mesc.

“Fuck off,” Hard-Eyes growled. “SA already knows everything I’ve said.”

“Steinfeld is your leader?”

Hard-Eyes nodded. “They’re flattening the city looking for him. Methodically trying to dig him out . . . There’s no fuel left in that pod?”

She shook her head.

He shrugged. The fashes had it now anyway.

She said, “I can’t believe what they’ve done to Paris.”

“Most of it was done by the Russians and the Americans. Rickenharp there, and me, we were Americans. We fucking swore it off.”

“What kind of people are in the Second Alliance army? Around here I mean.”

“They’re a mix. A lot of them are Hispanic and Italian, but none of the Latins rise far in the ranks. Around here, mostly British, Afrikaner whites, Lebanese Phalangists.”

“So—what are you people going to do?”

He shook his head grimly. “You picked a bad LZ. You put your foot in a bear trap. We’re just hanging on, hoping some of our allies get through. They tried to run a chopper in for Steinfeld once—it was shot down. They’ll try again. Well, there’s something else . . . ”

Rickenharp looked at him. “Hard-Eyes, man, she could be captured.”

Hard-Eyes nodded. “But I’m going to tell her anyway. Coming down in this shit, the woman’s got a right to know. We get captured, you think we could keep anything back, the equipment they got? They’d get it from us, too, Harpie.”

“Go on, blow it then. Shit,” Rickenharp muttered.

Hard-Eyes hesitated. Maybe Rickenharp was right. But he was tired. And it seemed important that she know. He glanced at Claire—and found it impossible not to trust her. “Our people are moving in from the other capitals, planning to drive through to get to Steinfeld. If it weren’t for the rest of us trapped in here, I think Steinfeld would tell ’em to forget it, write him off. Because it probably won’t work. The SA lines around the city are tight and well entrenched. And they got the Jægernauts.”

“What’s that?”

“A—killing machine.
Big.
Hard to describe. Anyway, we’ve changed our base op three times in three weeks. They’re crowding us in. Maybe we’ll just take our stand around the arch and let ’em know we’re there. Get it over with, take a few of them out with us. Free the rest of the NR to go on. We’d be martyrs. Good political strategy—if anyone ever hears of it.”

“You mean—take a stand and let them kill you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Like the three hundred Spartans. Romantic.”

Rickenharp cawed at that. His voice trembled a bit, his eyes blinking too much, as he chortled, “Romantic. Yeah. Mostly it sucks.”

“Why—why take your stand around the arch? You mean the Arc de Triomphe, right?”

“Uh-huh.” He shrugged. “Maybe it’s foolish. Corny political symbolism. Trying to rally the French behind us. The arch is one of the few places of old Paris left standing mostly intact. So it’s the symbol of the NR. It’s on the NR flag. We had a prisoner tell us the fashes are planning to use Jægernauts level the arch. ‘To try to crush what can’t be crushed,’ Steinfeld says. Meaning our spirit, I guess. Sometimes he talks that way. Makes speeches about dying meaningfully and . . . all that. We make fun of the way he talks but—” He broke off, embarrassed.

He never had to explain Jægernauts to her. Except to say, later, “They were built by a Second Alliance armor subsidiary, a German firm run by a guy named Jæger.” He didn’t have to explain because when they came up out of the metro station at Clichy, they heard the world-filling roar of a Jægernaut. Saw it a few minutes later when they were jogging along the sidewalk, a few blocks from the new safe-house.

Rickenharp and Hard-Eyes looked at one another. And started to run.

But it seemed to Claire that they ran the wrong way:

They ran into the cloud of dust that surrounded the Jægernaut, Hard-Eyes shouting for her and her companions to wait where they were.

The ground shook and the air itself shook, with the noise of the killing machine, the THUNK-rumble-THUNK-rumble. The crashes, the squeal of snapping metal, crystallized steel grinding stones into dust . . . They saw it up ahead, lit up along its axis; yellow and red lights that made the dust cloud glow . . . 

The Jægernaut loomed above them, a five-story double swastika of plasteel, wearing the dust cloud like its cloak of power.

Hard-Eyes squinted up at it, his eyes burning, lungs wracked with the smoke billowing from the rubbled gap where the building had been: the building that had housed their headquarters.

The Jægernaut finished it work. It hadn’t spotted Hard-Eyes and his companions. Plowing through massive buildings as a tank would plow through a fiberboard house, it crashed away from them; bricks rained to either side of it like spray at the prow of a boat. It used tight microwave beams to soften up the stone and iron as it shouldered through . . . 

The whole machine was a giant wheel without a rim. Like two rimless wagon wheels with eight-jointed spokes on each side. Hydroplas “muscles” kept it churning, digging, gouging, plowing through, looking to some like a Rototiller—but fifty yards high. At the axis, between the two sets of gouging spokes, was the nuclear power source, and you’d be sorry if you blew that part up. Each spoke was four yards thick. The power source remained stationary; the axis turned around it. The Jægernaut was terrifying to behold, even before it began to move. It was the ideal instrument of state terrorism. A half-dozen could level a city in under a month. And they were a bitch to bring down.

Rickenharp and Hard-Eyes forced themselves to clamber over the remaining crust of wall, coughing through the smoke and dust. They felt the thrum of the departing Jægernaut, heard its monumental clanking, the shudderings so heavy in the air it was like moving through another medium, a kind of shock-wave liquid . . . 

Then they climbed down into the smoking socket where the New Resistance HQ had been.

A small fire burned in someone’s leather jacket, where a chemheater had been smashed. The fire-flutter was the only motion—the smoke rising in wisps like the departing wraiths of the dead. Here and there were hanks of skin, hair, shredded fatigues. A bloodied yet bloodless hand thrust like a claw from one of the mounds of rubble. Bloodied black bandannas now mingled indistinguishably with the flesh and brains of the wearer.

The Jægernaut had gone over the place more than once.

Hard-Eyes felt a jolt as he found what was left of Jenkins. His heart turned to slag inside him.

“They’re all dead,” Rickenharp said shakily, sounding like a lost child.

Hard-Eyes shook his head. “No—they . . . maybe some got away . . . ” It was a dream. He tried to imagine how it had been real. “The sentries . . . the fashes send commandos to kill the sentries. Then they bring the Jægernaut in on quiet trucks. Auto-assemble the parts maybe a block away. Activate it, it unfolds itself—it’s pretty compact when it’s folded up . . . And it comes down on them before they know what’s happening . . . ”