A SONG CALLED YOUTH:

ECLIPSE CORONA

JOHN SHIRLEY

Copyright © 1990, 2012 by John Shirley.

Cover art by Paul Morley.

Cover design by Telegraphy Harness.

Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

ISBN: 978-1-60701-349-5 (ebook)

PRIME BOOKS

www.prime-books.com

No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

For more information, contact Prime Books at prime@prime-books.com.

The author wishes to thank the following people for research assistance and other kinds of help, some of it difficult to define:

Corby Simpson, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling,

Jude “St. Jude” Milhon, and Michelina Shirley

• • •

Blessed is the match consumed in

kindling flame

Blessed is the flame that burns in the

secret fastness of the heart

Blessed is the heart with strength to

stop its beating for honor’s sake

Blessed is the match consumed in

kindling flame

—Hanna Szenes,

Jewish Resistance fighter;

written the night before she was executed by Nazis.

• Prologue •

A tooth in a star.

It looked like a broken tooth; a molar broken off near the jaw. The shattered remains of the Arc de Triomphe in the center of L’Étoile, where the great avenues of Paris come together to form the arms of a star. Men in dirty orange worksuits labored in the Arc’s rubble, clearing, preparing, following the terse directions of the engineers and artisans operating out of the little aluminum trailers around the site. The laborers were men with sunken eyes, sallow skin, filthy beards, and the shaky movements of the malnourished. They worked under the unceasing watch of the mirror-helmeted soldiers in black cloth armor who stood guard over them. They worked as men thousands of years before had worked; as the slaves who’d moved stones for the pyramids had worked; as the Bronze Age men who had labored on Stonehenge: without gloves or cybernetic assistance. Hands bled on sharp edges of stone; knees bled from stumbling. There were two bulldozers, in another part of the site, for less delicate clearing, shuddering plastech machines that coughed and hummed. Around the worksite, guns gleamed in the dull sunlight. The Arc would be rebuilt. Or anyway, as one of the engineers had muttered, “A low-rez architectural scan.”

The Second Alliance—the twenty-first century’s neo-Fascists, operating under cover of a private international police force—had destroyed the Arc after Rickenharp and Yukio captured it for the New Resistance. An overzealous American SA commander with no comprehension of politics or French history had ordered the destruction of the Arc, that day, to get at the NR mice who’d hidden within its crown. To him the Arc was just a big heap of fancy stone used as a refuge for the enemy. That enemy’s bones had been found by the workers clearing debris, and tossed in the small-rubble bin.

The truth had been transmitted to the rest of the world through the Grid, the international media network; especially through that part of the Grid called the Internet, with its social media. But now there was an information blackout in SA-held Europe. The French knew what the neo-Fascists told them: The Second Alliance claimed that so-called New Resistance Terrorists had destroyed the Arc de Triomphe. The French mourned the monument, but few asked questions. The destruction was just more of the prevailing madness of the Third World War. There were just too many questions; the answers were one more thing being rationed to the survivors . . .

The Third World War had not been a nuclear war. After a Central Committee coup by KGB hard-liners ended what had been begun by perestroika and glasnost, the New-Soviets and NATO had squared off over Western Europe. But the New-Soviets lacked the technology and the infrastructure to win; fortunately they also lacked the will—or the irrationality—to choose the nuclear option.

The internal tumult brought on by a war going badly drove the New-Soviet hard-liners into hiding. Under a new Party leadership, the New-Soviet Republic retreated—and surrendered. But not unconditionally. Their vast nuclear arsenal precluded any unconditional surrender. They still remained in control of the NSR and some of the Warsaw Pact countries—though they had lost Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. They agreed to pay reparations and to open their borders. Their society slid into a ferment of upheaval as reformists with a strong base of military support jockeyed for power.

Nuclear war had been sidestepped. But the conventional war had been devastating enough. And the crypto-Fascists, in the guise of an international police force in place “to keep order” in the chaos behind the lines, had seized the moment. Had put their puppets in place, contrived the illusion of a nationalist movement in a squirming handful of European states; had taken control of France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Greece; were seizing the reins in Britain and Germany. “A wave of nationalism sweeping Europe, strangely similar, from nation to nation, in its ideological foundation,” one American observer had said. Observers were few in media-darkened Europe, and those few were not permitted to see the pogroms, the European apartheid, the rounding up of Jews and Asians and the dark races; of anyone vocally outraged by the new ghettoism, the new “processing centers.”

The Second Alliance’s power had foundered in the United States, for the most part, thanks to Jack Brendan Smoke, and other NR activists. But it had consolidated in Europe; was consolidating further, now, through the wonders of technology . . . and psychology. And it was for psychological reasons that the new French Fascists had given priority to reconstructing the Arc.

The Arc de Triomphe was a monument to the ego of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was the embodiment of his power; of the strength of his armies. A concretization of megalomania. On pretext, it was built to honor the French army; in reality, it stood for the ambitions of the man who’d directed that army to conquer Europe. Who had sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths as a sacrifice to his vanity. The Arc was begun in 1806; not completed until 1836. A hundred and sixty-four feet high, a hundred and forty-eight broad, more massive than any other European monument of the time; both florid and martial in its design, like a pompous architectural Goliath wearing both his armor and an effete, intricately embroidered cloak.

It was the symbol of French military might and that made it the symbolic backbone of nationalism; it was irrefutably masculine, structured as solidly as an empire.

There was an irony. It had been, for a while, also the symbol of the New Resistance; an outline of the Arc sewn on the NR flag. But that flag had been rarely seen, and the Fascists had again taken the initiative, retaken the symbol, like land retaken in a battle, co-opted it and, in a way, inverted it for their own use.

The New Resistance would find another symbol. It was about to raise a new banner, a banner neither red nor black, and certainly not the white of surrender. The flag was simply blue. The blue of an open sky.

• 01 •

Paris, France. June. Deep into the twenty-first century.

Dan Torrence knew the look; knew how to wear it. A walk that conserved energy; a hunching over, just a little, with hunger. Not stumbling or belly-gripping but sheltering the hollowness in your stomach, and the weak fire that still burned there, as if you were trying to protect it from going out in the thin rain of this lusterless spring day. It was the camouflage he adopted as he moved slowly but stolidly around the edges of the crowd filling the Place de l’HÔtel de Ville.

He’d seen the look often enough in the last few months; could now simulate it effortlessly. Here it was repeated in the crowd like an expressionist’s motif: the distorted posture, the gaunt faces, the pasty skin, the expressions of deep waiting on pallid faces.

He glanced with studied disinterest at the high, ochre insta-mold and raw-wood stage newly set up on the other side of the square, festooned with banners in the colors of the French flag; colors gone dull under the lifeless, aluminum-gray sky. The clouds shrugged out a little rain, and a fitful wind made Torrence hunch deeper into his green plastic slicker. Suddenly, the Marseillaise blared and echoed around the square, pumped from stage speakers as, behind the podium, French soldiers, every one of them Caucasian, in full dress replete with berets, tugged white ropes, to ceremoniously raise an enormous French flag as backdrop for the stage. The flag drooped like a man with a bent back until, pulled taut, it snapped into display as if the man straightened to bare his chest. The crowd reacted with a smattering of applause and a shudder of skeptical muttering. Everyone quietly aware of the forty Second Alliance bulls, the men in soft armor and mirrored helmets, carrying rifles and Recoil Reversal sticks, standing at parade rest, in formation, to either side of the stage . . . They were part of the array, as well as protection for the new president of France . . .

The flag blocked out a large section of the HÔtel de Ville—the City Hall of Paris, in its latest incarnation. Built first in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; burned by the Commune in outrage against the excesses of Napoleon III in the nineteenth century, rebuilt in a foggy imitation of Boccador’s somewhat extravagant wedding-cake conception, looking now Victorian and called by the French an example of Belle Époque. The Second Alliance had chosen it for this event, Torrence supposed, because it was one of the few intact government buildings left in Paris.

The square had been the Place de Grève until 1830; a place of celebrations and official functions, which sometimes combined when there was an execution. In this square, so Levassier said, Ravaillac, the man who’d assassinated Henry IV, had his dagger hand burned off; his torso torn open with sharp tongs, and the wounds filled with boiling oil. Then, while he still lived, his body was pulled asunder by horses . . . And in this Place, other criminals, and supposed criminals, had been “broken on the wheel,” their bones crushed by an executioner wielding a heavy bar; others were simply hung or axed or guillotined, events reliably attended by great crowds of the rich and the poor, enjoying the spectacle.

The spectacle had arisen again, like a ghost who returns on lunar cycles. But today there would be no executions. Except perhaps one execution, Torrence thought: Truth, Smoke would probably say, will be guillotined here today.

They raised the instrument of that particular execution: a television monitor big as a movie screen, humming upright on the back of the sound truck parked to the left on the stage. On it, almost immediately, was an image of the Arc de Triomphe, unfurling in pixels like an electronic flag.

Daniel Torrence, whose nom de guerre had been Hard-Eyes, looked at the scene through the shutters of apparently hunger-blurred eyes, seeming to see only the podium, the flag, the image of the erstwhile Arc: the symbols. Some other observer behind the shutters of his eyes saw the blank boxes set up to one side of the stage: holographic-shading projectors camouflaged as sound equipment.

And, without looking directly at them, he saw that Danco and Lina Pasolini and Charles Cordenne, looking as drab and inconspicuous as Torrence, were in position in the crowd. They stood at points diametrical to him, facing the stage.

The guards slid the paper-thin antiprojectile styrene into place in front of the stage now; stuff so thin and transparent and glare-resistant you couldn’t see it from most angles. It would stop bullets; it wouldn’t stop the interference projector hidden under Torrence’s rain slicker.

Torrence didn’t understand the inner mechanisms of the projector. To him it was a harness of plastic and conductive ceramics, the narrow ceramic cone of the projective nozzle strapped around his upper arm. Switch it on and point your arm and it killed . . .

It killed images. Only images. But the victim was to be the image of a politician, the image a creature with a life of its own; and to destroy it would destroy the politician, in some sense.

Now Louis Cambon, the mayor, was stepping up to the podium. The cameras moved like eels out from their electronic warrens, telescoping sinuously through the air, just a lens on the body of a metal snake. They froze in an almost floral array like stamens around the jowly, balding figure of Cambon, crook-shapes angling back to stare at him. One of them gradually moved farther out, to the brink of the transparent shield, hooking back toward Cambon for a full-face shot, as he intoned the amenities and began his introduction of Larousse, “ . . . the elected president of the Republic.” Torrence nearly laughed at that.

Someone was cutting a swathe through the crowd, angling toward Torrence: a drunk, wobbling out of kilter with the collective body language. There was nothing much to eat in Paris, except what was tossed off the back of trucks at the relief stations, but somehow there were always determined men who managed to find alcohol, Torrence thought. It was a superhuman talent.

This one wore a long black coat smeared with mud from sleeping in some damp park; his beard was caked gray with filth and his eyes were lost in squint as he bellowed at the stage, “Voila! Le Maire de Quoi! Le Maire de Quoi!” The streetside nickname for Cambon: The Mayor of What?

The mayor of ruins, came the unspoken reply.

But aloud, there was only a nervous ripple of laughter in response. Cambon didn’t pause. None of the SA bulls, in their armor and armament, came to carry the drunk away. Not yet. But other, camouflaged cameras were at work. They’d have him computer-identified already. He was marked. He wouldn’t live out the night.

Four men dressed in the white jumpsuit of sanitation workers, here ostensibly to clean up after the crowd (which in any event had nothing to discard), came grinning and chuckling toward the drunk, surrounded him with a semblance of jokey reproach, good-naturedly herding him out of the crowd, slapping him on the back and winking at everyone. Just civic-minded city workers going to take the man home, they told the crowd, get him to his bed, let him sleep it off.

Removing him as casually as wiping a cinder from the eyes. No show of force. That wouldn’t do.

But the others, the ones who’d mutter Maire de Quoi, only under their breaths, knew the drunk would never be seen again. And they were the ones intended to notice his absence.

The crowd grew, swelled to fill the Place, to overflow it. Torrence was now in the midst of the crowd. Cambon was winding up his introduction of Larousse. Torrence hadn’t mastered French, but had enough to make out the phrases . . . like the mythical Phoenix leading us out of the ashes . . . the hope of France . . . I present: Frédéric Larousse!”

Ringers planted in the crowd started enthusiastic applause; the others reflexively followed suit.

Larousse and Cambon exchanged hugs, kisses on both cheeks, and then Cambon stepped to the rear and Larousse began to speak, and there it was, the little telltale: when he stepped up to the podium he seemed, impossibly, to come a little more into focus. As if Torrence had just put on a pair of glasses, corrected a nearsightedness. A change in the way Larousse looked, something you wouldn’t notice if you hadn’t been told about it. You might think: I never noticed before what sheer presence the man has . . .

The holographic correction of Larousse’s natural image had taken hold. He was transfixed and airbrushed by the hidden projectors, as he pointed to the image of the Arc in the huge screen. “This,” he said in French, “is a relic of the past. But it is also a monument to tomorrow. It will arise once more, prouder than its first incarnation, crystallizing an unbroken link to the past. Symbolizing a revitalized future.”

Work to rebuild the Arc had already begun. At first, the few opposition voices had grumbled of the waste of manpower and resources that should go to housing and hospitals and obtaining food for the city’s legions of homeless; thousands on thousands were living in ruined buildings, in refugee shelters and tent cities, and in the open streets, flotsam on the tide of war.

But Larousse’s Unity Party, a descendant of Le Pen’s National Front, had shut down the grumblers, had pressed on to rebuilding the Arc de Triomphe. The Foundations of Nationalism needed a symbol grounded in French history.

It wasn’t yet rebuilt. British neo-Fascists had crushed it with their Jægernauts, and everyone knew it.

How would they square that contradiction in the minds of the suckers? Torrence wondered.

A moment later, Larousse answered him. “ . . . the Communist terrorists, the so-called NR, destroyed the Arc by hijacking Second Alliance demolition devices. Their perfidy has not cast its shadow on the French people, however—it was engineered by the New-Soviets, who connived to undermine our resolve . . . ”

Simple as a lie.

Communist terrorists. There were people in the NR, guerrillas who were believers in the true French Republic, who would wax apoplectic hearing themselves called Communists. There were Communists in the NR; there were also anarchists, Libertarians, Christian Democrats, and every manner of conservative.

Torrence watched Larousse and felt it himself: a subtle summoning, a tug at his identity. Something about Larousse, something in his cadence, his gestures, his visual presence—something manufactured by the mind-control program designing the holographic enhancements of his image—that something called out to a visceral need to belong. To trust and follow and rage with him at the racial injustice that had slung chaos and poverty on all of them . . .

Torrence had to look away. But he knew his cues: he raised his arms with the crowd, which was now swept up in genuine enthusiasm that needed no ringers, and he chanted, “Pour la France!” with the others when Larousse gave out with some particularly stirring phrase. But he kept his eyes focused elsewhere. He waited for the signal.

Colonel Watson and Dr. Cooper walked down the chilly, antiquated hallway of the HÔtel de Ville, and stepped into the Administrative Media Room. Watson had found the ornate interior of the other rooms overbearing; this stripped-down, utilitarian nerve center was a bit of a relief. There was no insolent historical presence here. Its ceramic-white consoles, unfailingly steady TV monitors, and humming mainframes were a kind of electronic continuity for Watson, a connection to the nascent Empire that was his dream and his life.

Watson, head of the Second Alliance’s European operations, was a tall, bulky Englishman in late middle age, florid and balding but energetic, his movements as brisk and crisp as his flat-black SA uniform, his demeanor authoritatively cheerful, the upbeat of a calculated achiever . . .

The milk-haired Cooper was a droopy, pallid contrast: a slender, thirtyish albino, by turns dyspeptic and then feverishly animated, wearing a dun Tech’s uniform: a rumpled, stained short-sleeve outfit at least half a size too big for him.

Watson firmly believed that poor tailoring bespoke the inner man. The two men bore their mutual dislike like a yoke when they walked together: stiffly cooperating but laboring under it.

Watson visibly unbent as he moved away from Cooper, shaking hands with the security chief, Klaus, the other techs and officers working at the consoles; accepting a cup of tea in a Dutch-china cup, exclaiming over it, exchanging banter, backslaps, and the changeless one-liners. “Welcome back, Colonel! Couldn’t bear that Italian food, or did those wop rosies tire you out?”

“I exhausted that lot weeks ago, Chas!”

Cooper watched this display of spurious bonhomie with clinical detachment until at last Watson handed his empty tea cup to an orderly and returned, his smile fading. “Right, Dr. Cooper. What’s the status?”

Watson was fresh from the armored limo that brought him from Orly. He’d flown in from Sicily, where he’d been weeks overseeing the new security measures on the rebuilt SA Communications Center and Central European Headquarters. He was out of touch with developments here. Klaus, Spengler, and the Board had approved the testing of Larousse’s public-image modifications. But Watson was skeptical.

“It’s worked out lovely in Rome with Serro,” Cooper was saying, lacing his bone-white fingers over his crotch; lacing and unlacing them again. “And you can see we’re getting a crowd response in the upper seventies-plus for Larousse.”

Watson glanced at the crowd-response readout. The graph jiggled up and down as the readings vacillated, but it never went below seventy-five. “Short-term success is very heartening, but sustaining it, especially with the vulnerability to sabotage . . . ” Watson took a deep breath as if preparing for an overwhelming task.

“Well, Klaus thinks he’s got any open ends for sabotage quite under wraps,” Cooper said, fluttering his hands at the security-cam monitors. “And as for long-term responses . . . Colonel, a crowd, once it’s primed, will react consistently. A crowd is an entity unto itself, don’t you know, especially one this big. It has, well, a general mood to it, a, ah, collective attitude.” Cooper’s stare slipped into the middle distance; he rocked on his feet, riding one of his enthusiasms. “There are streaks of dissent, but most especially a crowd which has come to see someone for patriotic reasons is a trainable entity. You understand, we’re monitoring the crowd responses on a nanodigital grid, unit-by-unit. We’re literally missing nothing. Every twitch of a muscle in their faces; every blink—and blinks are very significant, don’t you know; every shrug, every glaze of an eye, every modulation of tone and throat clearing. We wrap it up into the Receptivity Signals Factor and it is simply a very consistent output—especially with RSF Enhancement.”

“People in a crowd often act as they’re expected to,” Watson objected, “not as they really feel.”

“It’s how they really feel I’m talking about,” Cooper said, flicking dust from a console with a finger that, if you didn’t look closely, seemed white-gloved. “I barely touched on the signals we monitor. Body-heat levels, exhalation rate, body language in forty-two modalities, bioelectric fields collective and individual, perspiration and the hormone traces in its evaporation—that’s one of our very best indicators. We’re really quite thorough.” His tone carried a dry dash of rebuke.

“The cost just doesn’t justify the potential, to my mind,” Watson said.

“It saves money in the long-run.” Cooper’s voice was becoming a little shrill. He blinked rather frequently in his closeted anger, as if he were personally modeling a Response Factor. “Saves money, don’t you see, because it predicts changes in public mood and allows us to suppress or manipulate them before they become militarily costly. The RSF monitor models out the sum total of the RSF factors and does a ninety-eight percent sociological/sociobiological projection.” He sniffed. “We anticipate the crowd’s mood swings—and by extension the public mood swings—well before they come to fruition.”

Watson knew the general principle. Certain RSF readings correspond to strong latent desires in a crowd. To the desire for expression of hostility against outsiders; to the desire for a ritual of racial unification (which might be as simple as a group salute to the flag); the desire for group violence; the desire for reassurance by an appeal to sentimentalism; the desire for paternalistic reassurance; a volatile range of suppressed and psychologically encrypted needs.

Decrypted, RSF readings could warn the speaker, through implants or hidden headsets, when he’s gone too far, if he’s not energetic enough, if he’s said the wrong thing—even before the crowd had seemed to react at all. Cued second-to-second, he’s got the edge, time to compensate, say just the right thing to bring the audience back under control, this right thing calculated by a computer interfaced with “human resource specimens”: high-level speechwriters pressed into service for the Second Alliance, maintained in semiconsciousness, extractors working in their brains to add the human creativity factor to the computer’s notion of charismatic speaking—the computers having analyzed thousands of speeches, correlating crowd reactions.

Larousse was the focus of all this, a dancer on unseen puppet strings. His public appearance was holographically altered, a thin veneer of image superimposed on the real Larousse, or more precisely on his bioelectric field, an image reconstituting, according to computer models and sociological studies, the look and mannerisms of the idealized French Nationalist leader. Instant charisma.

Watson shook his head. “Surely when he moves he’ll go out of phase.”

Cooper sighed theatrically and led Watson to a large screen on the opposite wall; he thumbed a tab, and Larousse’s profile fizzed onto the screen. Larousse was describing France as a great tree, an ancient and primeval tree that reached up into the heavens. But parasites, vines, and insects were sapping the tree’s strength, cutting off the flow of its vitality at the roots. And it is at the roots that this disease must be stopped . . .

“His movement cues,” Cooper said wearily, “are given to him via small metal nodes implanted just under his skin. They cue him with tiny impulses, little jolts of sensation timed a millisecond ahead. At first his response to this, his movements, were jerky, unnatural, imprecise, but we made it a matter of life and death for him to respond smoothly, and after a few weeks of training it became second nature. It’s all in the head, you know, the attitude. With our enhancement, right down to voice shaping, he’s quite irresistible. I’m overcome by him myself now, when I listen, don’t you know . . . ” Cooper smiled thinly; his almost colorless lips vanished. “He’s come to enjoy it, rather. He imagines it’s all his own invention, the Larousse persona . . . And he’s quite disoriented when we take him off the cues. That’s all backstage, of course . . . It’s essentially a new stage of ‘virtual reality’ technology . . . ”

“It would seem simpler just to project a holo onto the stage and animate that—”

“They just don’t look real enough. And he can’t always be appearing on television, not exclusively. There’s something about the physical presence of a man, maybe even something . . . ” Cooper broke off, frowning. Stopping short of suggesting a psychic connection. Crandall didn’t approve: psychic phenomena was the province of demonology.

But Watson knew what he meant. Hitler had been effective in newsreels and would have been effective on television. But for the core of their movement, they needed to get in touch with something animal, something tribal, atavistic, at the heart of the best fascism. And that required physical presence from time to time, however dressed up it might be. “And the cameras are filtered against telltale holo shifts?”

Cooper had had enough. He turned sharply to Watson, snapped, “Ask your man Klaus. He’s made quite sure of every bloody detail. If you’ll excuse me . . . ” And did his best to stride in manful outrage from the room.

Watson snorted as Klaus walked up, chuckling, looking after Cooper. Klaus was a bigger man than Watson, even massively muscled, his hair cut flattop, his short black beard clipped with equal geometric severity, his eyes onyx glittery. He wore the jet uniform of Security staff, and on his shoulder the chrome insignia of its chief: A Christian cross topped with an eye.

Klaus was effectively the second most powerful man in the European Second Alliance. Not that, at this point, there was any single publicly defined leader . . . except for Crandall. And Crandall, though he made daily appearances, was quite dead. His death was something few people knew about.

“I’m afraid Dr. Cooper feels I’ve been breathing down his neck,” Klaus said. “But there are so many ways this . . . this false presentation could go wrong. I feel the same way about it as—”

Watson raised a hand for silence, glancing at the techs at their control consoles, then turned to go into the conference room. Klaus followed. Watson shut the door behind them. The room was soundproofed and, except for a table and chairs and a blank comm stack, almost featureless.

They sat at the table facing the door, and Klaus went on, “I don’t like it either. It’s not—It seems so clumsy, so indirect, manipulating people this way.”

Watson nodded. “One would think the cleverer thing to do would be to find a natural charismatic, train him, and set him up. In a sense, he’d already have all the necessary software . . . ”

“The Committee is very high on Cooper. They want to plug this thing into the Grid eventually. And in a way, it works with Crandall. He’s a Larousse without the warm body beneath the image.”

“Larousse worries me. A holographic, computerized persona is just too fragile in a public place.”

“Mmm . . . Do you want to see this afternoon’s transmission? ‘Crandall’ was quite impressive.” Klaus opened the table controls and punched in the code. One of the screens blinked on showing Rick Crandall, midway through this afternoon’s “little talk with my friends and neighbors.”

Crandall smiled out at them, his gaunt, Lincolnesque features faintly numinous with some inner light, and said, “I’m convinced the Good Lord wanted us out of North America for a very sound reason. Same reason he wanted the Israelites out of Egypt. To escape the unclean, the persecutors. We’re going back to the roots of the Aryan race, to drink from the wellsprings of our genetic heritage. It’s an Exodus of renewal. We are the true Israelites—those cast out from Israel, falsely replaced by the vermin who occupies that land now, the Jew. The difference between the Jew and the True Israelite should be obvious to anyone not blinded by the Zionist conspiracy. As some of you know, my research indicates that the true Israelite in fact originated in the mountains of Austria . . . ”

Watson shook his head in quiet amazement. Crandall was, of course, quite dead. Assassinated. But only a handful of people knew it. They had re-created him as a holographic computer program—and since it said whatever Watson and Klaus wanted it to say, it was the ideal leader.

“The program’s wandering a bit in its logic,” Watson said with approval. “That’s uncannily like Crandall. His way of almost seeming to make sense, weaving that gloriously superficial illusion in logic . . . ”

Klaus glanced at him. “You do not believe the origin of the Great Race is Austrian? That the Jews are impostors?”

Watson suppressed a smile. “Oh, I have no doubt of it. I’m just very pleased we’ve re-created such a lifelike Crandall . . . The animation is flawless and the charisma is there, too. Perhaps that vindicates Cooper, goes to show just how very artificial charisma is . . . How did the staff react to this little presentation?”

“Warmly. It was like liquor for them.”

“Good.” Watson struck the table with the flat of his hand, a sign he’d made a decision. “Right. We’ll give Cooper’s latest project a bit of a chance, and if it doesn’t work out, ‘Crandall’ will have every excuse to can the program.” Watson sighed happily. “It’s such a relief to have the little bastard’s ghost working for me . . . ” He was aware of the pressure of Klaus’s gaze, and turned to him, adding quickly, “And for you, of course, Klaus.”

The crowd was like a hysterically happy dog greeting its long-lost master, as Larousse thundered into the climax of his speech. The enormous screen beside the stage flashed through fabricated images of a reconstructed France, intercut with .005-second subliminal flashes of Larousse himself holding in his arms a baby wrapped in a French flag, shots of Larousse offering the viewers food, money, love.

“The purification of the French race means the survival and the triumph of the French race!” Larousse boomed. Each syllable masterfully timed, masterfully intoned. Torrence again had to fight himself, feeling the mob immersion in the Fascist fantasy sweep over him like a drug-rush. The man had, literally, an aurora, a faint divine shimmer, almost unseeable . . .

Everyone in the crowd reaching out to Larousse as if in invocation . . .

Torrence looked away and put a hand into his left sleeve, pressed the activation stud strapped to his forearm. It sent a signal to Danco and Cordenne and Pasolini. Together, at four widely separate points in the crowd, they raised their arms as if joining in the adulation, reaching imploringly to the distant figure of Larousse, and the harnesses began to transmit.

“And how is our Anomalous Crowd Movement?” Watson asked as he stepped up behind Klaus, who was seated at the main security console.

Not taking his eyes from the screen, Klaus said, “They haven’t moved, Colonel. Four of them, almost symmetrical, rooted to the spot while the crowd shifts around them. They picked their positions and stayed in place. It’s as if someone painted the footprints for them to stand in. RSFM projects sixty-eight-percent probability of a planned disruption from those four. Smaller possibility of an assassination attempt. “

“Larousse is shielded against rocket launchers, grenades, hoverbirds, all that sort of thing, is he? As well as bullets?”

“He is. And the NR knows it . . . Ah, there we are. Our people are moving in.”

There was so far no effect on Larousse’s image. The harnesses would try a broad range of frequencies. To try to disrupt it, try to make it ripple and warp so the crowd would see him as a fake. An agitprop attack. So far the SA’s filters held. It could take time.

But the time was past. Torrence saw the men in white, the “sanitation workers,” moving toward him, elbowing expertly through the crowd, this time carrying RR sticks. And SA bulls in full armor moving in around the edges. Other figures in white moving toward Danco, Cordenne, Pasolini.

It was all over. Blown.

Torrence reached into his sleeve, hit the stud, signaling the others: Get out.

He didn’t wait around to see what became of them. As of this moment, they were on their own. He turned and plunged into the crowd, recklessly violent, trying to create a stumbling block of turmoil in his wake. He jabbed ribs and stomped insteps and tripped people; they shouted at him, cuffed him as he passed, but no one took their eyes from Larousse for long.

The men in white came steadily on, slowing but never getting entangled, like antibodies searching him out. Torrence pulled the slicker off over his head, stumbling once doing it, nearly falling, catching himself. He fumbled for the plastic suction grenades on his bandolier as he reached the edge of the crowd and plunged into the street, sprinting for the Metro station. It was boarded up, the Metro was defunct, but some of the tunnels had been selectively unblocked by the NR.

An SA bull loomed up, running ponderously to cut him off at the corner, his mirrored helmet flashing dull silver with the afternoon light, his amplified American voice booming and bouncing, “STOP OR YOU’RE DEAD MEAT!” The last word echoing: MEAT-EAT-EAT. Torrence sailed the flat disc of the suction grenade at the bull, like a miniature discus. It hit the Fascist soldier in the chest and sucked itself flat against his armored sternum, whirring as it drilled with its tiny iridium-tipped drills. The SA bull shrieked, “FUCK NO!” Echoing NO-WOH-WOHHHHH . . .

As the drills dug through and the grenade charge went off with a muted whumpf, driving its drill bits into skin and flesh and bones so that blood sprayed around the disc’s flat edges . . .

Torrence heard another explosion, much louder than it should have been; he glanced over his shoulder and saw that the Pasolini woman had tossed a couple of standard grenades into the crowd—oh, god—and people were screaming . . .

Damn her damn her damn her damn her.

He saw Cordenne running along the fringe of the crowd, heard gunfire spurt, Cordenne’s gut erupting red as he went skidding into his own puddle, giving out a sort of sobbing laughter.

Torrence glimpsed a silvery whirring out of the corner of his eyes not far overhead: a bird’s eye, a small thing of featherlight metal and glass, flashing on plastech wings to follow him. He imagined the image of himself—a small, desperate, fugitive figure—transmitted to some Security Center TV monitor. The boarded-over Metro was just ahead (bullets spat chips of street asphalt at his ankles) and the bird wouldn’t follow him down into the metro station because it wouldn’t be able to transmit from underground.

Bullets whined past his ear as he reached the seemingly boarded-over Metro, felt the soft warmth of an aiming-laser kiss the back of his neck. And as he dove through the paper of the false-boards the NR had left here, submachine-gun rounds parted the air where he’d been a half second before.

He slipped in his rush, fell down the stairs of the subway station—striking heavily on his shoulder, cursing with the pain, somersaulting down the steps quite without control, nose bloodying, lip splitting on concrete edges.

Up, instantly, at the trash heap on the bottom of the stairs. Up and running into darkness. Because it was get up and move, or die.

Running into darkness, thinking: That fool Pasolini played right into their hands . . .

“Did you get that clearly?” Watson said. “The NR operative—the woman—tossing a grenade into the crowd?”

“We got it,” Klaus said.

“Let them try to pretend they’re not terrorists when we get that about!”

“Here’s the fourth one . . . He looks familiar . . . ”

Klaus tapped the keyboard, the image on the screen zoomed: a compact man with dark hair; a Spaniard probably, though not dark enough to evoke notice in the crowd.

“That’s the Spanish fellow,” Watson said. “We haven’t got a name for him.”

His name was Danco.

They watched the monitor. On it, Danco struggled in the grip of four men in white jumpsuits, who were dragging him to the building. The New Resistance guerilla thrashed like a worm on hot stone, Watson thought.

The Spaniard bellowing something. Watson caught a few words, “ . . . Cowards if you don’t kill me . . . spineless cocksuckers!”

Danco was trying to provoke them into killing him, of course. Knowing the extractor would pick his brain; knowing there was simply no way to resist an extractor.

Klaus reached for a toggle, spoke into his headset, “San Simon, get down there and tell them to search him before they—” And then he swore in German.

Danco had wrenched an arm loose, found the explosives strapped under his slicker. Klaus shouted, “No, no, you idiots, get it away from him, don’t run—we need him—!”

But they’d instinctively flung themselves away as Danco thumbed the detonator on the plastique, a cylinder no bigger than a perfume bottle that exploded into a fireball, engulfing Danco and the SA bull running up to him and two of the unarmored security men . . .

“Bloody hell!” Watson burst out.

Danco was reduced to pulp, the second one would be too long dead to extract, and two others had so far gotten away . . .

“We need to wire those tunnels,” Klaus murmured.

“Yes, obviously, naturally, but there are miles of them. And it could cause whole streets to collapse if we blow them. Move over, please.”

Klaus stood, and Watson sat down at the console, feeling as if he’d drunk a gallon of espresso, his pulse racing with fury and frustration. He ran back the images of the two who’d gotten away. They had a clear shot of the woman. But the man was harder. Every angle was half blocked by someone, or he’d been turning the wrong way. There—when he looked back over his shoulder, after the grenade went off in the crowd—a grainy shot of his face. Rather too much range for the cameras . . . He seemed to be missing most of an ear . . .

Watson punched for computer enhancement and magnification. The image rezzed onto the screen. A man’s face. A strong, simple, sharply chiseled face. Eyes with an almost psychotic intensity. Maybe that was just the fear, the danger. Still, Watson shivered with a faint sense of déjà vu. He’d looked at that face before . . . and not in a glossy CIA file photo. He’d seen it somewhere digitally, like this. Where?

He punched for a facial match-up search in the videofile. On a hunch, he specified May 12. The evening of the Le Pen assassination . . .

Watson remembered it with toothache clarity . . .

The Palace of Versailles. The fantasy of the Sun King. The embodiment of absolutist royal power. The austere and vast chateau to the west of Paris, its fanatically symmetrical array of gardens now overgrown and pocked with shell holes; the North Wing partly caved in. The South Wing, though, mostly intact.

Le Pen had weathered criticism from the neo-Fascist ranks for making Versailles his base of operations. It was not a state building, it was just a vast, oversized museum. A monument to Louis XIV’s aloofness; his disdain for the stinking, starving masses of the great city. But Le Pen’s intent was obvious to the man on the street; the symbolism shone like fireworks in the sky: imperial power was returned. Kings had been chosen by bloodline, and genetics was the axis of power in the new state.

Le Pen began holding televised nationalist fêtes in the South Wing, and for the latest had arranged to bus a thousand white middle-class Parisians—returned to Paris at the announcement of the war’s end—to the dowdy grounds of Versailles. They waited for him lined up to either side of the formal walkway approaching the Petites Écuries; a shield stood between the crowd and the walkway where Le Pen was expected. The impenetrable transparent plastic shield had been erected in a tunnel shape from the entryway out to the podium in the gardens where Le Pen was to speak. He was always thoroughly protected. And with equal thoroughness he had directed that the carvings over the arch of the Petites Ecuries be restored for the occasion: the masterpiece by François Girardon, Alexander Taming His Charger Bucephalus. Alexander the Great (Alexander the unapologetic tyrant!) astride the raging horse, with two trained chargers holding the rebellious mount to the course. The damage from the war to Versailles was relatively minor: the breast of Bucephalus had been cracked, was partly fallen.

A team of workers from Paris had seamlessly replaced the horse’s chest with a clever cosmetic plaster, tinted to suggest age. The repair was complete when the president of Fascist France, Jean Le Pen, grandson of the founding father of the Front National, stepped out of the entry between the cheering crowds . . . The crowds waved and shouted on the other side of the temporary plastic shielding . . . Le Pen took one long stride toward the podium, where he was to announce the formation of the Unity Party and its alliance with SPOES, the Self-Policing Organization of European States . . .

And the breast of Bucephalus burst open. A stream of Teflon-coated bullets ripped through Le Pen and his bodyguards and his minister of defense.

Le Pen had been killed by a small, remote-controlled machine-pistol lovingly hidden in the ornate carvings over the archway of the entry to the Petites Écuries rotunda. Hidden there by NR operatives two days before. They’d waylaid the repair crew and taken their places. The plaster over the barrel of the gun was paper-thin.

Now, Watson ran the video of the assassination, again and again, zooming in for crowd close-ups. They’d rounded up everyone in the crowd, or so they thought, debriefed them all, extracted them one by one: they found two Jews pretending to be gentiles, and sent them to the “Processing Centers.” But they found not one NR operative, not one assassin. Well, someone could easily have slipped away from the crowd in all the confusion after the shooting.

He scanned the faces, not sure what he was looking for. And then saw him. Half turned away. His hands in his pockets, perhaps activating the remote control on the weapon hidden in the sculpture . . . If you didn’t look closely at the eyes, the assassin looked vacuous, smiling vaguely, happily confused. Putting on the expression of a starved half-wit. His eyes, though, didn’t match the rest of the expression. They were focused, intent, predatory.

It was him! Missing most of an ear, the man in the Larousse crowd just now. The one who’d gotten away in the Metro tunnel (Gotten away? There were still soldiers in pursuit, combing the tunnels. But he’d have his escape route carefully planned, so yes: Gotten away.)

A cross-check with CIA files told Watson the subject was a man marked by the CIA for termination with extreme prejudice. A terrorist.

One Daniel Torrence. Aka “Hard-Eyes.”

“You filthy little rotter,” Watson said softly, staring at the man on the screen. “You buggering bastard. You stinking little turd Jew. You ugly little wog. You’re the target now, fancy boy. You’re it. You especially. We’re coming after you, Danny boy!”

• 02 •

Los Angeles, California.

Nine a.m., and Jerome-X wanted a smoke. He didn’t smoke, but he wanted one in here, and he could see how people went into prison non-smokers and came out doing two packs a day. Maybe had to get their brains rewired to get off it. Which was ugly, he’d been rewired once to get ofs Sink, synthetic cocaine, and he’d felt like a processor with a glitch for a month after that.

He pictured his thoughts like a little train, zipping around the cigarette-burnt graffiti: “YOU FUCKED NOW” and “GASMAN WUZZERE” and “GASMAN IS AN IDIOT-MO.” The words were stippled on the dull pink ceiling in umber burn spots. Jerome wondered who GASMAN was and what they’d put him in prison for.

He yawned. He hadn’t slept much the night before. It took a long time to learn to sleep in prison. He wished he’d upgraded his chip so he could use it to activate his sleep endorphins. But that was a grade above what he’d been able to afford—and way above the kind of brain chips he’d been dealing. He wished he could turn off the light panel, but it was sealed in.

There was a toilet and a broken water fountain in the cell. There were also a few bunks, but he was alone in this static place of watery blue light and faint pink distances. The walls were salmon-colored garbage blocks. The words singed into the ceiling were blurred and impotent.

Almost noon, his stomach rumbling, Jerome was still lying on his back on the top bunk when the trashcan said, “Eric Wexler, re-ma-a-in on your bunk while the ne-ew prisoner ente-e-ers the cell!”

Wexler? Oh, yeah. They thought his name was Wexler. The fake ID program.

He heard the cell door slide open; he looked over, saw the trashcan ushering a stocky Chicano guy into lockup. The robot everyone called “the trashcan” was a stumpy metal cylinder with a group of camera lenses, a retractable plastic arm, and a gun muzzle that could fire a Taser charge, rubber bullets, tear-gas pellets, or .45-caliber rounds. It was supposed to use the .45 only in extreme situations, but the robot was battered, it whined when it moved, its digital voice was warped. When they got like that, Jerome had heard, you didn’t fuck with them; they’d mix up the rubber bullets with the .45-caliber, Russian Roulette style.

The door sucked itself shut, the trashcan whined away down the hall, its rubber wheels squeaking once with every revolution. Jerome heard a tinny cymbal crash as someone, maybe trying to get it to shoot at a guy in the next cell, threw a tray at it; followed by some echoey human shouting and a distorted admonishment from the trashcan. The Chicano was still standing by the plexigate, hands shoved in his pockets, staring at Jerome, looking like he was trying to place him.

“ ’Sappenin’,” Jerome said, sitting up on the bed. He was grateful for the break in the monotony.

“Qué pasa? You like the top bunk, huh? Tha’s good.”

“I can read the ceiling better from up here. About ten seconds’ worth of reading matter. It’s all I got. You can have the lower bunk.”

“You fuckin’-A I can.” But there was no real aggression in his tone. Jerome thought about turning on his chip, checking the guy’s subliminals, his somatic signals, going for a model of probable-aggression index; or maybe project for deception. He could be an undercover cop: Jerome hadn’t given them his dealer, hadn’t bargained at all.

But he decided against switching the chip on. Some jails had scanners for unauthorized chip output. Better not use it unless he had to. And his gut told him this guy was only a threat if he felt threatened. His gut was right almost as often as his brain chip.

The Chicano was maybe five foot six, a good five inches shorter than Jerome but probably outweighing him by fifty pounds. His face had Indian angles and small jet eyes. He was wearing printout gray-blue prison jams, #6631; they’d let him keep his hairnet. Jerome had never understood the Chicano hairnet, never had the balls to ask about it.

Jerome was pleased. He liked to be recognized, except by people who could arrest him.

“You put your hands in the pockets of those paper pants, they’ll rip, and in LA County they don’t give you any more for three days,” Jerome advised him.

“Yeah? Shit.” The Chicano took his hands carefully out of his pockets. “I don’t want my cojones hanging out, people think I’m advertising—they some big fucking cojones, too. You not a faggot, right?”

“Nope.”

“Good. How come I know you? When I don’t know you.”

Jerome grinned. “From television. You saw my tag. Jerome-X. I mean—I do some music too. I had that song, ‘Six Kinds of Darkness’—”

“I don’t know that, bro—oh wait, Jerome-X. The tag—I saw that. Your face-tag. You got one of those little transers? Interrupt the transmissions with your own shit?”

“Had. They confiscated it.”

“That why you here? Video graffiti?”

“I wish. I’d be out in a couple months. No. Illegal augs.”

“Hey, man! Me too!”

“You?” Jerome couldn’t conceal his surprise. You didn’t see a lot of barrio dudes doing illegal augmentation. They generally didn’t like people tinkering in their brains.

“What, you think a guy from East LA can’t use augs?”

“No, no. I know lots of Latino guys that use it,” Jerome lied.

“Ooooh, he says Latino, that gotta nice sound.” Overtones of danger.

Jerome hastily changed the direction of the conversation. “You never been in the big lockups where they use these fuckin’ paper jammies?”

“No, just the city jail once. They didn’t have those motherfucking screw machines either. Hey, you’re Jerome—my name’s Jessie. Actually, it’s Jesus”—he pronounced it “heh-soos”—“but people they, you know . . . You got any smokes? No? Shit. Okay, I adjust. I get use to it. Shit. No smokes. Fuck.”

He sat on the edge of the bed, to one side of Jerome’s dangling legs, and tilted his head forward. He reached under his hairnet, and under what turned out to be a hairpiece, and pulled a chip from a jack unit set into the base of his skull.

Jerome stared. “Goddamn, their probes really are busted.”

Jessie frowned over the chip. There was a little blood on it. The jack unit was leaking. Cheap installation. “No, they ain’t busted, there’s a guy working on the probe, he’s paid off, he’s letting everyone through for a couple of days because of some Russian mob guys coming in, he don’t know which ones they are. Some of them Russian mob guys got the augments.”

“I thought sure they were going to find my unit,” Jerome said. “The strip search didn’t find it, but I thought the prison probes would and that’d be another year on my sentence. But they didn’t.”

Neither one of them thinking of throwing away the chips. It’d be like cutting out an eye.

“Same story here, bro. We both lucky.”

Jessie put the microprocessing chip in his mouth, the way people did with their contact lenses, to clean it, lubricate it. Of course, bacterially speaking, it came out dirtier than it went in.

“Does the jack hurt?” Jerome asked.

Jessie took the chip out, looked at it a moment on his fingertips. It was smaller than a contact lens, a sliver of silicon and non-osmotic gallium arsenide and transparent interface-membrane, with, probably, 800,000,000 nanotransistors of engineered protein molecules sunk into it, maybe more. “No, it don’t hurt yet. But if it’s leaking, it fuckin’ will hurt, man.” He said something else in Spanish, shaking his head. He slipped the chip back into his jack-in unit and tapped it with the thumbnail of his right hand. So that was where the activation mouse was: under the thumbnail. Jerome’s was in a knuckle.

Jessie rocked slightly, just once, sitting up on his bunk, which meant the chip had engaged and he was getting a readout. They tended to feed back into your nervous system a little at first, make you twitch once or twice; if they weren’t properly insulated, they could make you crap your pants.

“That’s okay,” Jessie said, relaxing. “That’s better.” The chip inducing his brain to secrete vasopressin, contract the veins, simulate the effect of nicotine. It worked for a while, till you could get cigarettes. High-grade chip could do some numbing if you were hung up on Sim, synthetic morphine, and couldn’t get any. But that was Big Scary. You could turn yourself off for good that way. You better be doing some damn fine adjusting.

Jerome thought about the hypothetical chip scanners. Maybe he should object to the guy using his chip here. But what the Chicano was doing wouldn’t make for much leakage.

“What you got?” Jerome asked.

“I got an Apple NanoMind II. Big gigas. What you got?”

“You got the Mercedes, I got the Toyota. I got a Seso Picante Mark I. One of those Argentine things.” (How had this guy scored an ANM II?)

“Yeah, what you got, they kinda basic, but they do most what you need. Hey, our names, they both start with J. And we both here for illegal augs. What else we got in common. What’s your sign?”

“Uh—” What was it, anyway? He always forgot. “Pisces, I think.”

“No shit! I can relate to Pisces. I ran an astrology program, figured out who I should hang with. Pisces is okay. But Aquarius is—I’m a Scorpio, like—Aquarius, qué bueno.”

What did he mean exactly, hang with, Jerome wondered. Scoping me about am I a faggot, maybe that was something defensive.

But he meant something else. “You know somethin’, Jerome, you got your chip, too, we could do a link and maybe get over on that trashcan.”

Break out? Jerome felt a chilled thrill go through him. “Link with that thing? Control it? I don’t think the two of us would be enough.”

“We need some more guys maybe, but I got news, Jerome, there’s more comin’. Maybe their names all start with J. You know, I mean—in a way.”

In quick succession, the trashcan brought their cell three more guests; a fortyish beach bum named Eddie, a cadaverous black dude named Bones, a queen called Swish, whose real name according to the trashcan, was Paul Torino.

“This place smells like it’s comin’ apart,” Eddie said. He had a surfer’s greasy blond topknot and all the usual Surf Punk tattoos. Meaningless now, Jerome thought, the pollution-derived oxidation of the offshore had pretty much ended surfing. The anaerobics had taken over the surf, in North America, thriving in the toxic waters like a gelatinous Sargasso. If you surfed you did it with an antitoxin suit and a gas mask. “Smells in here like somethin’ died and didn’t go to heaven. Stinks worse’n Malibu.”

“It’s those landfill blocks,” Bones said. He was missing three front teeth, and his sunken face was like something out of a zombie video. But he was an energetic zombie, pacing back and forth as he spoke. “Compressed garbage,” he told Eddie. “Organic stuff mixed with the polymers, the plastics, whatever was in the trash heap, make ’em into bricks ’cause they run outta landfill, but after a while, if the contractor didn’t get ’em to set right, y’know, they start to rot. It’s hot outside is why you’re gettin’ it now. Use garbage to cage garbage, they say. Fucking assholes.”

The trashcan pushed a rack of trays up to the Plexiglas bars and whirred their lunch to them, tray-by-tray. The robot gave them an extra tray. It was screwing up.

They ate their chicken patties—the chicken was almost greaseless, gristleless, which meant it was vat chicken, genetically engineered fleshstuff—and between bites they bitched about the food and indulged the usual paranoid speculation about mind-control chemicals in the coffee.

Jerome looked around at the others, thinking: at least they’re not ass-kickers.

They were crammed here because of the illegal augs sweep, some political drive to clean up the clinics, maybe to see to it that the legal augmentation companies kept their pit-bull grip on the industry. So there wasn’t anybody in for homicide, for gang torture, or anything. No major psychopaths. Not a bad cell to be in.

“You Jerome-X, really?” Swish fluted. She (Jerome always thought of a queen as she and her, out of respect for the tilt of her consciousness) was probably Filipino; had her face girled up at a cheap clinic. Cheeks built up for a heart shape, eyes rounded, lips filled out, tits looking like there was a couple of tin funnels under her jammies. Some of the collagen they’d injected to fill out her lips had shifted its bulk so her lower lip was lopsided. One cheekbone was a little higher than the other. A karmic revenge on at least some of malekind, Jerome thought, for forcing women into girdles and footbinding and anorexia. What did this creature use her chip for, besides getting high?

“Oooh, Jerome-X! I saw your tag before on the TV. The one when your face kind of floated around the president’s head and some printout words came out of your mouth and blocked her face out. God, she’s such a cunt.”

“What words did he block her out with?” Eddie asked.

“I think . . . ‘Would you know a liar if you heard one anymore?’ That’s what it was!” Swish said. “It was sooo perfect, because that cunt wanted that war to go on forever, you know she did. And she lies about it, ooh God she lies.”

“You just think she’s a cunt because you want one,” Eddie said, dropping his pants to use the toilet. He talked loudly to cover up the noise of it. “You want one and you can’t afford it. I think the Prez was right, the fucking Mexican People’s Republic is jammin’ our borders, sending commie agents in—”

Swish said, “Oh, God, he’s a Surf Nazi—But God yes, I want one—I want her cunt. That bitch doesn’t know how to use it anyway. Honey, I know how I’d use that thing—” Swish stopped abruptly and shivered, hugged herself. Using her long purple nails, she reached up and pried loose a flap of skin behind her ear, plucked out her chip. She wet it, adjusted its feed mode, put it back in, tapping it with the activation mouse under a nail. She pressed the flap shut. Her eyes glazed as she adjusted. She could get high on the chip-impulses for maybe twenty-four hours and then it’d kill her. She’d have to go cold turkey or die. Or get out. And maybe she’d been doing it for a while now . . .

None of them would be allowed to post bail. They’d each get the two years mandatory minimum sentence. Illegal augs, the feds thought, were getting out of hand. Black-market chip implants were good for playing havoc with the state database lottery; used by bookies of all kinds; used to keep accounts where the IRS couldn’t find them unless they cornered you physically and broke your code; the aug chips were used to out-think banking computers, and for spiking cash machines; used to milk the body, prod the brain into authorizing the secretion of betaendorphins and ACTH and adrenaline and testosterone and other biochemical toys; used to figure the odds at casinos; used to compute the specs for homemade designer drugs; used by the mob’s street dons to play strategy and tactics; used by the kid gangs for the same reasons; used for illegal congregations on the Plateau.

It was the Plateau, Jerome thought, that really scared the shit out of the feds. It had possibilities.

It was way beyond the fucking Internet. It was even beyond the Grid.

The trashcan dragged in a cot for the extra man, shoved it folded under the door, and blared, “Lights out, all inmates are required to be i-i-in their bu-unks-s-s . . . ” Its voice was failing.

After the trashcan and the light had gone, they climbed off their bunks and sat hunkered in a circle on the floor.

They were on chips, but not transmission-linked to one another. Jacked-up on the chips, they communicated in a spoken shorthand.

“Bull,” Bones was saying. “Door.” He was a voice in the darkness; a scarecrow of shadow.

“Time,” Jessie said.

“Compatibility? Know?” Eddie said.

Jerome said, “Noshee!” Snorts of laughter from the others.

“Link check,” Bones said.

“Models?” Jessie said.

Then they joined in an incantation of numbers.

It was a fifteen-minute conversation in less than a minute.

Translated, the foregoing conversation went: “It’s bullshit, you get past the trash can, there’s human guards, you can’t reprogram them.”

“But at certain hours,” Jessie told him, “there’s only one on duty. They’re used to seeing the can bring people in and out. They won’t question it till they try to confirm it. By then we’ll be on their ass.”

“We might not be compatible,” Eddie had pointed out. “You understand, compatible?”

“Oh, hey, man, I think we can comprehend that,” Jerome said, making the others snort with laughter. Eddie wasn’t liked much.

Then Bones had said, “The only way to see if we’re compatible is to do a systems link. We got the links, we got the thinks, like the man says. It’s either the chain that holds us in, or it’s the chain that pulls us out.”

Jerome’s scalp tightened. A systems link. A mini-Plateau. Sharing minds. Brutal intimacy. Maybe some fallout from the Plateau. He wasn’t ready for it.

If it went sour, he could get time tacked onto his sentence for attempted jailbreak. And somebody might get dusted. They might have to kill a human guard. Jerome had once punched a dealer in the nose, and the spurt of blood had made him sick. He couldn’t kill anyone. But . . . he had shit for alternatives. He knew he wouldn’t make it through two years anyway, when they sent him up to the Big One.

The Big One’d grind him up for sure. They’d find his chip there, and it’d piss them off. They’d let the bulls rape him and give him the New Virus; he’d flip out from being locked in and chipless, and they’d put him under Aversion Rehab and burn him out.

Jerome savaged a thumbnail with his incisors. Sent to the Big One.

He’d been trying not to think about it. Making himself take it one day at a time. But now he had to look at the alternatives. His stomach twisted itself to punish him for being so stupid. For getting into dealing augments so he could finance a big transer. Why? A transer didn’t get him anything but his face pirated onto local TV for maybe twenty seconds. He’d thrown himself away trying to get it . . .

Why was it so fucking important? his stomach demanded, wringing itself vindictively.

“Thing is,” Bones said, “we could all be cruisin’ into a set-up. Some kind of sting thing. Maybe it’s a little too weird how the police prober let us all through.”

(Someone listening would have heard him say, “Sting, funny luck.”)

Jessie snorted. “I tol’ you, man. The prober is paid off. They letting them all through because some of them are mob. I know that, because I’m part of the thing. We deal wid the Russians. Okay?”

(“Probe greased, fa-me.”)

“You with the mob?” Bones asked.

(“You’m?”)

“You got it. Just a dealer. But I know where a half million nfootageewbux wortha augshit is, so they going to get me out if I do my part. The way the system is set up, the prober had to let everyone through. His boss thinks we got our chips taken out when they arraigned us; sometimes they do it that way. This time it was supposed to be the jail surgeon. By the time they catch up their own red tape, we get outta here. Now listen—we can’t do the trashcan without we all get into it, because we haven’t got enough K otherwise. So who’s in, for fuck’s sake?”

He’d said, “Low, half mill, bluff surgeon, there here, twip, all-none, who yuh fucks?”

Something in his voice skittered with claws behind smoked glass: he was getting testy, irritable from the chip adjustments for his nicotine habit, maybe other adjustments: the side effects of liberal cerebral self-modulating burning through a threadbare nervous system.

The rest of the meeting, translated . . .

“I dunno,” Eddie said. “I thought I’d do my time, cause if it goes sour—”

“Hey, man,” Jessie said, “I can take your fuckin’ chip. And be out before they notice your ass don’t move no more.”

“The man’s right,” Swish said. Her pain-suppression system was unraveling, axon by axon, and she was running out of adjust. “Let’s just do it, okay? Please? Okay? I gotta get out. I feel like I wish I was dogshit so I could be something better.”

“I can’t handle two years in the Big, Eddie, and I’ll do what I gotta, hodey,” Jerome heard himself say, realizing he was helping Jessie threaten Eddie. Amazed at himself. Not his style.

“It’s all of us or nobody, Eddie,” Bones said.

Eddie was quiet for a while.

Jerome had turned off his chip, because it was thinking endlessly about Jessie’s plan, and all it came up with was an ugly model of the risks. You had to know when to go with intuition.

Jerome was committed. And he was standing on the brink of link. The time was now, starting with Jessie.

Jessie was operator. He picked the order. First Eddie, to make sure about him. Then Jerome. Maybe because he had Jerome scoped for a refugee from the middle class, an anomaly here, and Jerome might try and raise the Heat on his chip, make a deal. Once they had him linked in, he was locked up.

After Jerome, it’d be Bones and then Swish.

They held hands, so that the link signal, transmitted from the chip using the electric field generated by the brain, would be carried with the optimum fidelity.

He heard them exchange frequency designates, numbers strung like beads in the darkness, and heard the hiss of suddenly indrawn breaths as Jessie and Eddie linked in. And he heard, “Let’s go, Jerome.”

Jerome’s eyes had adjusted to the dark, the night giving up some of its buried light, and Jerome could just make a crude outline of Jessie’s features like a charcoal rubbing from an Aztec carving.

Jerome reached to the back of his own head, found the glue-tufted hairs that marked his flap, and pulled the skin away from the chip’s jack unit. He tapped the chip. It didn’t take. He tapped it again, and this time he felt the shift in his bioelectricity; felt it hum between his teeth.

Jerome’s chip communicated with his brain via an interface of nano-print configured rhodopsin protein; the ribosomes borrowing neurohumoral transmitters from the brain’s blood supply, re-ordering the transmitters so that they carried a programmed pattern of ion releases for transmission across synaptic gaps to the brain’s neuronal dendrites; the chip using magnetic resonance holography to collate with brain-stored memories and psychological trends. Declaiming to itself the mythology of the brain; reenacting on its silicon stage the Legends of his subjective world history.

Jerome closed his eyes and looked into the back of his eyelids. The digital read-out was printed in luminous green across the darkness. He focused on the cursor, concentrated so it moved up to ACCESS. He subverbalized, “Open frequency.” The chip heard his practiced subverbalization, and numbers appeared on the back of his eyelids: 63391212.70. He read them out to the others and they picked up his frequency. Almost choking on the word, knowing what it would bring, he told the chip: “Open.”

It opened to the link. He’d only done it once before. It was illegal, and he was secretly glad it was illegal because it scared him. “They’re holding the Plateau back,” his brain-chip wholesaler had told him, “because they’re scared of what worldwide electronic telepathy might bring down on them. Like, everyone will collate information, use it to see through the bastards’ game, throw the assbites out of office.”

Maybe that was the real reason. It was something the power brokers couldn’t control. But there were other reasons.

Reasons like a strikingly legitimate fear of people going mad.

All Jerome and the others wanted was a sharing of processing capabilities. Collaborative calculation. But the chips weren’t designed to filter out the irrelevant input before it reached the user’s cognition level. Before the chip had done its filtering, the two poles of the link—Jerome and Jessie—would each see the swarming hive of the other’s total consciousness. Would see how the other perceived themselves to be, and then objectively, as they really were.

He saw Jessie as a grid and as a holographic entity. He braced himself and the holograph came at him, an abstract tarantula of computer-generated color and line, scrambling down over him . . . and for an instant it crouched in the seat of his consciousness: Jessie. Jesus Chaco.

Jessie was a family man. He was a patriarch, a protector of his wife and six kids (six kids!) and his widowed sister’s four kids and of the poor children of his barrio. He was a muddied painting of his father, who had fled the social forest fire of Mexico’s civil war between the drug cartels and the government, spiriting his capital to Los Angeles where he’d sown it into the black market. Jessie’s father had been killed defending territory from the Russian-American mob; Jessie compromised with the mob to save his father’s business, and loathed himself for it. Wanted to kill their bosses; had to work side by side with them. Perceived his wife as a functional pet, an object of adoration who was the very apotheosis of her fixed role. To imagine her doing other than child-rearing and keeping house would be to imagine the sun become a snowball, the moon become a monkey. Jessie’s family insistently clung to the old, outdated roles.

And Jerome glimpsed Jessie’s undersides; Jesus Chaco’s self-image with its outsized penis and impossibly spreading shoulders, sitting in a perfect and shining cherry automobile, always the newest and most luxurious model, the automotive throne from which he surveyed his kingdom. Jerome saw guns emerging from the grille of the car to splash Jessie’s enemies apart with his unceasing ammunition . . . It was a Robert Williams cartoon capering at the heart of Jessie’s unconscious . . . Jessie saw himself as Jerome saw him; the electronic mirrors reflecting one another. Jessie cringed.

Jerome saw himself then, reflected back from Jessie.

He saw Jerome-X on a video screen with lousy vertical hold; wobbling, trying to arrange its pixels firmly and losing them. A figure of mewling inconsequence; a brief flow of electrons that might diverge left or right like spray from a water hose depressed with the thumb. Raised in a high-security condo village, protected by cameras and computer signals to private security thugs; raised in a media-windowed womb, with computers and vids and a thousand varieties of video games; shaped by TV and fantasy rental; sexuality imprinted by sneaking his parents’ badly hidden cache of brainsex files. And in stations from around the world, seeing the same StarFaces appear on channel after channel as the star’s fame spread like a stain across the frequency bands. Seeing the Star’s World Self crystallizing; the media figure coming into definition against the backdrop of media competition, becoming real in this electronic collective unconscious.

Becoming real, himself, in his own mind, simply because he’d appeared on a few thousand screens, through video tagging, transer graffiti. Growing up with a sense that media events were real and personal events were not. Anything that didn’t happen on the Grid didn’t happen. Even as he hated conventional programming, even as he regarded it as the cud of ruminants, still the Grid and TV and vids defined his sense of personal unreality; and left him unfinished.

Jerome saw Jerome: perceiving himself unreal. Jerome: scanning a transer, creating a presence via video graffiti. Thinking he was doing it for reasons of radical statement. Seeing, now, that he was doing it to make himself feel substantial, to superimpose himself on the Media Grid . . .

And then Eddie’s link was there, Eddie’s computer model sliding down over Jerome like a mudslide. Eddie seeing himself as a Legendary Wanderer, a rebel, a homemade mystic; his fantasy parting to reveal an anal-expulsive sociopath; a whiner perpetually scanning for someone to blame for his sour luck.

Suddenly Bones tumbled into the link; a complex worldview that was a sort of streetside sociobiology, mitigated by a loyalty to friends, a mystical faith in brain chips and amphetamines. His underside a masochistic dwarf, the troll of self-doubt, lacerating itself with guilt.

And then Swish, a woman with an unsightly growth, errant glands that were like tumors in her, something other people called ‘testicles.’ Perpetually hungry for the means to dampen the pain of an infinite self-derision that mimicked her father’s utter rejection of her. A mystical faith in synthetic morphine.

. . . Jerome mentally reeling with disorientation, seeing the others as a network of distorted self-images, caricatures of grotesque ambitions. Beyond them he glimpsed another realm through a break in the psychic clouds: the Plateau, the whispering plane of brain chips linked on forbidden frequencies, an electronic haven for doing deals unseen by cops; a Plateau prowled only by the exquisitely ruthless; a vista of enormous challenges and inconceivable risks and always the potential for getting lost, for madness. A place roamed by the wolves of wetware.

There was a siren quiver from that place, a soundless howling, pulling at them . . . drawing them in . . .

“Uh-uh, wolflost, pross,” Bones said, maybe aloud or maybe through the chips. Translated from chip shorthand, those two syllables meant. “Stay away from the Plateau, or we get sucked into it, we lose our focus. Concentrate on parallel processing function.”

Jerome looked behind his eyelids, sorted through the files. He moved the cursor down . . .

Suddenly, it was there. The group-thinking capacity looming above them, a sentient skyscraper. They all felt a rush of megalomaniacal pleasure in identifying with it; with a towering edifice of Mind. Five chips became One.

They were ready. Jessie transmitted the bait.

Alerted to an illegal use of implant chips, the trashcan was squeaking down the hall, scanning to precisely locate the source. It came to a sudden stop, rocking on its wheels in front of their cell. Jessie reached through the bars and touched its input jack.

The machine froze with a clack midway through a turn, and hummed as it processed what they fed it. Would the robot bite?

Bones had a program for the Cyberguard Fourteens, with all the protocol and a range of sample entry codes. Parallel processing from samples took less than two seconds to decrypt the trashcan’s access code. Then—

They were in. The hard part was the reprogramming.

Jerome found the way. He told the trashcan that he wasn’t Eric Wexler, because the DNA code was all wrong, if you looked close enough; what we have here is a case of mistaken identity.

Since this information seemed to be coming from authorized sources—the decrypted access code made them authorized—the trashcan fell for the gag and opened the cage.

The trashcan took the five Eric Wexlers down the hall—that was Jessie’s doing, showing them how to make it think of five as one, something his people had learned from the immigration computers. It escorted them through the plastiflex door, through the steel door, and into Receiving. The human guard was heaping sugar into his antique Ronald McDonald coffee mug and watching The Mutilated on his wallet TV. Bones and Jessie were in the room and moving in on him before he broke free of the television and went for the button. Bones’s long left arm spiked out and his stiffened fingers hit a nerve cluster below the guy’s left ear, and he went down, the sugar dispenser in one hand swishing a white fan onto the floor.

Jerome’s chip had cross-referenced Bones’s attack style. Bones was trained by commandos, the chip said. Military elite. Was he a plant? Bones smiled at him and tilted his head, which Jerome’s chip read as: No. I’m trained by the Underground. Radics.

Jessie was at the console, deactivating the trashcan, killing the cameras, opening the outer doors. Jessie and Swish led the way out, Swish whining softly and biting her lip. There were two more guards at the gate, one of them asleep. Jessie had taken the gun from the guy Bones had put under, so the first guard at the gate was dead before he could hit an alarm. The catnapping guy woke and yelled with hoarse terror, and then Jessie shot him in the throat.

Watching the guard fall, spinning, blood making its own slow-motion spiral in the air, Jerome felt a perfect mingling of sickness, fear and self-disgust. The guard was young, wearing a cheap wedding ring, probably had a young family. So Jerome stepped over the dying man and made an adjustment; used his chip, chilled himself out with adrenaline. Had to—he was committed now. And he knew with a bland certainty that they had reached the Plateau after all.

He would live on the Plateau now. He belonged there, now that he was one of the wolves.

Paris, France.

At the broken heart of Paris is the Île de la Cité, an island in the River Seine. On the easternmost tip of the island is a memorial to the Jewish victims of Nazi occupation. The current government did not keep it in good repair. The Cathedral of Notre Dame on another tip of the island was also in ill repair, as the Unity Party had no great liking for the Catholic Church, which did not support its racist agenda, and blocked the Vatican’s access with a thousand bureaucratic obstacles. North of Notre Dame lay the ruins of old buildings in the Rue Chanoinesse, the Rue Chantres, and the Rue des Ursins. On the Rue des Ursins was a war-damaged police station, a gendarmerie, long since abandoned. Though not thirty yards from it was an official rationing station, where, every day, the disenfranchised lined up, sometimes for days, to receive pathetically inadequate government rations of freeze-dried and canned goods and petrosynthetics. Groups from a mere cluster to a crowd could be expected here at any time, so it was good cover for the New Resistance. An NR operative approached the rationing center as if he were part of the crowd waiting for a handout; simply entered the ruined building next door, as if to find a spot for a quick pee. He passed through several woebegone, debris-cluttered rooms, and then into an alley, blocked at both ends. Here was a boarded-over back door to the erstwhile police station. The door swung aside if pulled just right. And if the NR operative made the appropriate hand signal as he entered, the guard wouldn’t blow his brains out.

Best to be updated on the hand signals.

If you make it past the guard, you go down a clean but unheated drab-blue hallway to a metal door opening on a row of cells. If you said the right words at the metal door, the guard behind it wouldn’t blow your brains out, either.

Instead, she’ll slide the door open for you, and you’ll go to the cell where your debriefing takes place.

• • •

Steinfeld, Pasolini, Dan Torrence, and Levassier sat around an old Formica table in a chilly metal room, formerly a big holding tank used mostly for drunks. There was a sat-link terminal in the corner, gathering dust, because they didn’t have a secure way to use it just now, and there was a plastic flagon of hot coffee on the table. There were rifles stacked against the wall. There was the smell of dust and sewage: the toilets didn’t flush. Sewage had to be carted out in buckets.

Torrence was sitting on a wooden bench that rocked on its uneven legs whenever he shifted his weight. His hands clasped the tin coffee mug for warmth.

He felt like shit.

“Danco is dead, Cordenne is dead,” Torrence said, “and that’s bad. But I’ll tell you what’s worse. Six civilians were injured, three are dead.” He turned to stare at Lina Pasolini. “And the fucking Fascists have a major propaganda victory. We go from being freedom fighters to being terrorists.”

Lina Pasolini was dark, her black hair cut short, her thick eyebrows two bars of black emphasis over her hooded eyes. Her face was carved out of deep shadows and strong planes, a handsome face that hid its sensuality under a burden of quiet suspicion. She wore khaki trousers, sneakers, a grimy sweatshirt. There was a .44 stuck in the waistband of her pants. She didn’t need it here.

She lit a stubby Russian cigarette and looked at it, caught like a pointer between her thumb and forefinger, as she spoke in her careful, trained English. “Showing they have the will to kill anyone necessary has worked for many guerilla groups. The crowd was in support of the fascists . . . And—you know—bad propaganda can be good propaganda if it is followed up, redirected.” She’d grown up in Sardinia, but she had a master’s in international poli-sci from Columbia, and more than once Torrence had heard her speak of having lit a cigarette with the burning diploma.

Torrence thought she was dangerously certain of herself and, worse, unbearably pretentious. And as if to confirm that, she went on:

“Terror is the only statement that, once heard, is never forgotten.” Her voice was deep but without much inflection; her Italian accent was almost imperceptible. Torrence thought of Italians as noisy and assertive. But Pasolini was always laidback, maddeningly calm, methodical. As if she was absolutely certain that everything she said was inarguable fact.

“You’re saying you did it on purpose?” Torrence asked. “You meant to kill civilians?”

“Not precisely—there were fascists after me, I was trying to kill them. But if it happens that we sacrifice so-called civilians—if there is such a thing—it becomes part of our statement. A declaration of commitment, you see.” She gave him a gauzy look from somewhere deep inside herself. “There really are no civilians, ‘Hard-Eyes.’ ” A little mockery in the use of his long-discarded nom de guerre. “Everyone must be in this war, children and adults, women and men, and if I knew how to bring their dogs and cats in, I’d do that too.”

Torrence looked at Steinfeld, who was combing his graying beard distractedly with the blunt fingers of one work-grimy hand, shifting his heavy bulk in his chair. His curly black hair had grown shapeless, was streaked with white. His black eyes were sunken; his face had been round, was sagging to jowly. He had been working, that afternoon, on one of their old FRG Army trucks, in frayed grease-spotted overalls and a yellowed T-shirt. His Mossad-issue Damazi machine rifle leaned against the wall.

Steinfeld said at last, “I understand your thinking, Lina. War is not simple. But the New Resistance has a policy. The policy sustains our ability to work together despite differing political backgrounds.” He almost never used the term “New Resistance”; usually he’d say, “We.” His use of it meant this was some sort of official ruling. “The policy makes a strict distinction between civilians and our enemy. We do not kill non-combatants.”

“What was Le Pen? You killed Le Pen—or did I dream that?”

“He was a commander in chief,” Torrence snapped. “Not a civilian.”

Steinfeld said, “There are better examples you could use, Lina. This Mengele of theirs, so to speak, this Dr. Cooper—he’s a civilian. I would gladly kill him if I could. We tried to kill Crandall. He was a civilian. But those are false civilians. They are worse than collaborators. We know the difference most of the time. People killed at random in a crowd, now . . . even people cheering for the enemy—I mean, after all, who knows how they were pressured into being part of that crowd . . . ” His voice trailed off, his eyes roamed some dark inner landscape.

There was a moral weight in this work, Torrence knew, a weight you had to carry; a weight that grew. And Steinfeld was feeling it. Torrence felt it too.

It would be easy to become like Lina Pasolini and never feel uncertainty. It would be a relief.

“I think we should take Pasolini here off of armed duty,” Torrence said, looking at Steinfeld, taking the tone of one administrator to another.

She stiffened, just a little. It was good to get some kind of reaction from her. “I got you people back into Paris,” she said softly. “Me.”

“The Mossad got us in,” Torrence shot back.

“That is shit. I was on the inside, I led the team that cleared the tunnels, I organized it. They were postmen for the move only. And you need soldiers, not people to sew uniforms.” She smiled vaguely at Torrence. “You are a very tired man. You do this because you needed something to do, and because you like to fight, and maybe you are one of those people who simply like the feeling that comes in a fight. Something to chase away the depression, no? And you are here to find a reason for it. A . . . justification. Me, I am not tired. I do not fight because I don’t know what to do with myself. I fight because I’m angry. This anger never sleeps.”

Torrence felt his face go hot. “You—” He couldn’t finish it. He turned to Steinfeld, swallowed the cold stone that had risen in his throat, and said, “You know your people. If I’m not motivated, if I don’t believe in this thing, then get me a fucking ticket home. Send me back through Israel. Which is it?”

Steinfeld made a fly-shooing gesture. “I have no doubts about you at all.” He hesitated, then nodded slowly. “She’s right about one thing, I can’t take her out of combat. We’re too short.”

He turned to Pasolini. “But Captain Torrence is also right. We do things one way. We distinguish between civilians and the enemy, and when there are exceptions, I make them. Not you.”

She stood up, abruptly, so that Torrence flinched a little in his chair. She smiled at that. “I’m on watch.”

“Not yet,” Steinfeld said. “Take a meal.”

“Our stomachs are too delicate here for eating. I’m going on early.”

She drifted from the room, closed the door very gently behind her.

Torrence said, “Steinfeld, you ever wonder about the kind of people this kind of thing attracts?”

Steinfeld shrugged. “That’s what she said about you.”

Processing Center 12, a few miles north of the city limits of Paris, France.

“It’s not so different, this place now, than it was before the war,” Gabrielle was saying. She was a black French woman, with a dirty blue scarf on her bald head—the SA shaved them all to make the lice manageable. Or to make them into human ciphers. She wore the dull-orange pajamalike detainee’s uniforms they all wore, and sandals made of tire rubber. Roseland wore the same.

Roseland was an American Jew, had been working on a kibbutz in Israel. He’d volunteered to help on an unauthorized airlift to take food to Jewish refugees in France, the airlift had been shot down, and he was one of two who survived the crash outside Paris. The other one, a woman named Luda, had been murdered by the SA thugs for screaming when they dragged her out of the wreckage, the bone splinters driving her mad with pain . . . So they shot her and left her body there.

And now Abe Roseland, a pale, gangly boy of twenty-one with slender feet and hands and a faint look of weary amazement, kept his mouth shut and survived to sit here in the “exercise yard” of Processing Center 12. Roseland had been a performance-art critic and programmer in the States for an interactive digital-TV channel. A life that seemed as far away as the planet Pluto now. He’d been a cynic politically, essentially apolitical, but interested in his cultural roots, feeling an itch to do some sort of Judaic walkabout. Which led to the kibbutz, which led to the airlift, which led here: looking out at the Philips LHD 11377 microwave fence. The gray metal posts beaded moisture in the misting rain, the boxlike transmitter/receivers quivered with strangely symmetrical patterns as water beads rearranged to electric fields. A thin precipitation did a little shimmy as it passed the microwave beams, as if running over warped window glass. You could almost hear the fence humming. The metal posts had been recently cemented into the street, and Roseland wondered, with all the dampness, if maybe they hadn’t really set very well. Maybe they could be pushed over if you—

No use trying. Any interference with the posts and the guns went off overhead, one spraying the area indiscriminately, the other computer-aimed. He had seen it happen.

Some part of Roseland’s mind was thinking about this. The rest was thinking about food and trying not to think about food. Rations had been reduced again.

Don’t think about the protein package in the old sofa.

He hugged himself, rubbed his upper arms in the cold, and moved a little closer to Gabrielle on the steps. The cold got to him more lately. Maybe it was anemia.

The exercise area was a sort of courtyard between two high-rises. They were low-income housing, chiefly for Algerian and Arab and Persian immigrants, before the war. Badly built and under-maintained and vandalized, in some sense sabotaged by the disappointment and despair of the prior inhabitants, the high-rises had become crumbling eyesores, cracked and rust-streaked and smirched with graffiti. The SA hadn’t cleaned the concrete apartment buildings before making them into Processing Centers 12 and 13. Around the outside of the foundations was a collection of trash and debris, furniture thrown from the gutted apartments, garbage of all kinds: “Like the filthy panties of a whore down around ’er ankles,” one of the Brit SA guards had said. “And these wogs are the crab-lice ’appy to live in it.”

There were two thousand detainees upstairs, crammed into the windowless rooms; some of the walls had been knocked down between apartments, but there wasn’t space for everyone to lie down. That had to be done in shifts. They had stopped allowing them baths, and the open sewage tubs were rarely emptied, so the stench was unspeakable and lately there was cholera. They had no medical treatment, and sometimes the dead lay in the rooms with the living for days before they were allowed to carry them out. Roseland’s stomach lurched, remembering the guards holding a detainee’s head under the sewage, dunking him again and again as punishment for prying a breathing hole in the blocked-over windows.

Roseland took a deep, grateful breath of the open air. Only forty detainees were allowed outdoors at any one time, twice a week. It was Gabrielle and Roseland’s turn, with thirty-eight other “processing detainees” on the front steps or poking listlessly about the eighty-foot-wide compound.

He looked across the courtyard compound at PC 13, the almost identical high-rise, with another almost-identical group of detainees on its steps, huddled inside their own microwave fence perimeter.

(How remarkably alike they all became, at least to look at, after they were here for a while, Roseland thought. The same expressions, and the uniform imprint of hunger and sickness on their faces . . . And now he himself was beginning to perceive them all as alike as white mice or cockroaches. That was the triumph of the ones who had put them here: they were molding his own perceptions of himself, and the others.)

Roseland shivered, and coughed, and looked back at the microwave fence.

The microwave beams weren’t strong enough to hurt a trespasser on their own; they were triggers and orientation devices for the dual system of the Chubb CCTV surveillance cameras fixed on the sides of the two high-rises, and the contiguous Saab-Scania Datascan microprocessor system that controlled the aiming and firing of the four FN 7.62 mm sharpshooter’s machine guns, two on each building, mounted on 180-degree turrets . . .

There were SA guards too, three in an office on the second floor, usually playing cards or cursing the bad reception on their little satellite TV; wearing their armor but not their mirrored helmets. Sometimes taking one of the women in, sharing her around. Beating the ones who complained, beating the prisoners who protested.

There were two more guards supposed to be in the instabunker across the street, as often called out on scavenging errands, hustling wine and cheese to supplement the rations of the officers housed in the old pensione down the way. Just about half the time the bunker was empty.

But the Philips/Chubb/Saab-Scania security troika was never turned off, never took a break, never looked away—and it never made mistakes, as far as Roseland knew. It was smart enough to distinguish between SA and prisoners. An Iranian whose name Roseland had never known had tried to cut the power cables to the camera/gun turret. But the camera had stored power in it, and kept working, and the microchip-controlled gun across the street tracked over and shot the Iranian fifty times, as well as a woman who happened to look out a window nearby.

“You think there’s going to be another transport today?” Gabrielle asked. She’d learned English at the Université de Lyon and in America before the war. Her family had owned a string of patisseries, which had been seized by Le Pen’s people as “stolen property”: her parents, the SPOES government said, had “stolen business opportunities from native Frenchmen.” She had watched as her mother and father were taken away in the trainlike semi-trucks; a huge tractor-truck pulling six separate trailers, each with its microprocessor-controlled steering keeping it on a computer-imagined train track.

“Yes,” Roseland said, “they’ll be by again for more. They’ll take me next time, I think.”

“Do they take people to gas chambers?” She asked it lifelessly, as if asking whether there was a toll booth on a bridge ahead. After the guards had used her the vibrancy had gone out of her voice.

“No,” he said, “I don’t think there are gas chambers this time. I think they take you to work.” They’d taken her parents, so he didn’t tell her the rest: that they worked you to death. Literally to death, like a bar of soap (that inescapable irony) used to scrub—to scrub what? A prize pig?—used till it dissolved into nothing, was washed away and gone. And he didn’t tell her that some were taken for medical experiments; that all died, eventually, one way or another. That by now her parents were surely dead.

“Maybe the work—it’s better than here.” She didn’t sound as if she cared if it were better or not.

He thought about that. Maybe he should pretend to her that it was better. So she’d feel all right about her parents. But maybe not: then she’d try to get on the trucks and go, and she’d soon be dead.

“It can’t be better,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I think it’s death.”

“Ma mama et môn papa, they are dead, I know, but maybe it is better than here.”

He hated the flatness in her voice. Like one of those old computer toys that talked to you when you pressed its buttons.

He swallowed. It was wet and clammy out, but his throat was so dry.

As a teenager, he had read about the Holocaust. The horror had been difficult to bear, so he hadn’t read widely in the subject, and he hadn’t tried to remember the details. To remember the event, the historical fullness of it, that was enough, he decided. That would not be forgotten.

But later he had read something else: that there were people claiming the Holocaust had never happened, claiming the exterminations had never happened, the monumental brutality had never happened. And there were people stupid enough—or politically opportunistic enough—to believe it, or pretend to believe it. And he had learned that the young in most countries, even those countries involved in the Second World War, were learning almost nothing of the Holocaust, and many didn’t believe it had happened at all . . .

The enormity of this stupidity, the insufferable amorality of this abdication of responsibility, this abandonment of history, had left the young Abe Roseland breathless.

He had gone back to the library and delved into the details of the Holocaust, so that he, at least, would remember.

He had read about the camps, and wondered what a great many others had wondered: why had there been so few rebellions?

The Nazi guns? Yes. But so few guns, relatively, and so many prisoners. Why not rush them, en masse, when you found out you were all going to die anyway, otherwise?

Now he knew the answer. Hunger.

Hunger became weakness and weakness was passivity. It was hard to think things out, hard to work in unison with others when you couldn’t think. Hard to make a decision and hard to find the strength to carry it out. Hunger was more effective than a thousand guards.

And the degradation, too, the shaving and the uniforms and the cattlelike herding and the random punishments. Techniques that worked on men and women like coring tools on apples. They cut the pith out of you.

They left you with nothing, or at best with a ghostly hope that something would break down, the Americans would get wind of it, Israel would come, the NR would come, or the Second Alliance and SPOES would realize it had gone too far and it would stop, or perhaps you could finesse your way into a servant’s job somewhere if you waited one more day, just one more day . . . Better to wait . . . better than rushing their guns . . .

It wasn’t better.

He said it aloud. “It’s not better.”

He stood up and said it again. “It’s not better.” And he said something else. “Not this time. Not again.”

Gabrielle didn’t even look up at him.

(How many months had he been here, trying to tell himself that it wasn’t what it seemed? That it wasn’t happening again? But he knew, some part of him knew, from the first day. The denial had died out in him about the same time the strength and the will for rebellion had drained away. Realization and resignation, coming together. So what had brought him out of it now, so suddenly after all this time? Was it Gabrielle? Yes.)

After the first rush of anger, Roseland felt weak in the knees, dizzy. Legs wobbly. He had a package of protein paste saved, thinking if ever the chance for an escape came, he’d need strength. He’d hidden it selfishly, back when they’d had the children with them; had watched children go hungry and hated himself, but he’d kept it hidden.

Now he made a decision. He would need the food now, for the strength to talk. The day’s ration would come soon, if it came at all, and he had to talk before the ration came. He had to talk to everyone.

He moved to the heap of trash to the right of the steps, where there was an overturned sofa whose synthetics, churned by acid rains, had collapsed into a gummy, shapeless mass of shit brown. He knelt behind it, reached into the plastic frame, felt for the package. Panicked. It was gone. Stolen! He bent over, stuck his head in the mildewy, soggy stuff, clawing it away from his eyes . . . saw the glint of shiny plastic wrapping. There. He drew out the little rectangular transparent plastic container, with shaking fingers hit the open-tab. Its top peeled itself open, and he ladled the stuff into his mouth with his fingers. Tasted of vat-chicken and mold.

Maybe his great decision was a sham, was just an excuse to eat the food, he thought.

He felt the warmth and mood-lift of the sugars, the proteins roll through him, lifting him inside like a summer updraft, and he sucked it from his fingers and thought: Now.

He turned and began to run to Gabrielle, thinking he’d share the last of the paste with her; then told himself: don’t run. Conserve your energy. He strolled to her, glancing at the camera on the opposite building, knowing the guards could be monitoring him. Hidden food was contraband. He saw foxfaced Dindon watching him sharply, eyeing the plastic box. “Give some me, or I tell the guards,” Dindon said.

“Fuck off,” Roseland said. “You say anything, I’ll kill you in your fucking sleep. No, I take it back. I’ll wake you up first.” He felt positively eloquent now.

He hunkered next to Gabrielle and offered her the food. She just stared at it. He took her grimy hand and dipped her fingers in it; he put her fingers to her mouth. After a moment she sucked the paste away, and kept sucking absently on her fingers. He took her hand from her mouth and fed her the rest of it, except for a thin coating around the edges of the tin. He tossed the package to Dindon, sensing that Dindon and the sallow Lebanese guy beside him were going to jump him for it anyway, and then went into the building. Someone said, “If you go in, the guards won’t let you come back out again.”

He didn’t reply. He took Gabrielle’s arm and dragged her after him, went into the all-consuming stench of the place and gagged a moment—you could smell it more when you had strength—and then he climbed the stairs and went into a room, and everyone looked up. He paused, looking at them, overcome by an unexpected amazement: it was as if he was seeing them for the first time. Sagging faces, dull eyes, pallor, cueball heads, misery shared between them with stunning uniformity. He knew that he looked just exactly the same. And he began to talk. After a while, urged by Roseland, Gabrielle fell into the rhythm of translating. The urgency, the mood, the insistence they took from his tone; the sense from Gabrielle’s affectless translation.

At first no one really listened. They were faces emptied of volition, like a room full of cancer-eaten children watching cartoons—children bald from chemotherapy, sunken from disease—turning incuriously, briefly, to see who was at the door of their terminal ward. But in about an hour, near dusk, the guards came with the ration pail, and prisoners had a little strength after that, they were adults again briefly, enough to listen, to stand, to consider, as—once the guards had gone—Roseland kept talking. Driven by the rage of six months’ confinement and degradation, driven by a sacred memory—the Holocaust—he kept talking. Articulating their feelings for them, talking their feelings alive again, like breathing CPR into a drowned man, bringing him back. He talked, and he kept moving, even after he felt his strength ebbing, adrenaline spurring him on from room to room. He spoke of dignity. He spoke of slow, degraded death and quick glorious death; he said, “Who will die with me today? Who will die in freedom? Who will die with me so that they see us as we are? Who will die so that our people remember us? Who will go with me now?”

Some of them followed him up to another room, and another, and he kept talking. The SA hadn’t bothered to wire the rooms; they could talk all they wanted, if they had the strength, and he used that luxury, used it up, kept talking, talking till he was hoarse and then mute . . .

But by then the others were talking, saying things that had been said before but never acted on. Only now Roseland was the activating spark, and they felt a conflagration growing in them, a burning strength in the mutuality of their choice and their conviction. They felt it all around them, charging the air, growing toward a Moment.

The Moment came when two SA guards came to the first room downstairs and shouted, “What the bloody ’ell is all this noise? No more talk! Lights out!”

And then the call went up from hallway to hallway, stair to stair, room to room, “Maintenant! Now!”

And the surge began, a lava eruption of people from the volcanic recesses of the high-rise, the first two guards borne down and disarmed, their armor pried at till it came away and they lived only long enough to kill twice and to shriek once apiece. All the while the others surged past them and down the stairs and out the doors, chanting, a chant led by Roseland, “Jamais plus! Jamais plus! Jamais plus! Jamais plus!”

Never again! rolling endlessly and raggedly from two thousand parched throats as they poured from the building.

Some of them slung offal at the cameras, trying to block the lenses, and partially succeeded, but the guns found their targets anyway, guided by the sensors in the microwave fences.

The mass of starveling detainees surged across the microwave barriers, setting off the sirens; the cameras swiveling, the guns barking like startled dogs, people screaming, others remembering what Roseland had drilled into their heads: Don’t turn back when the shooting starts, because they’ll only kill us all anyway. No matter what, don’t stop. Die with me today.

Your sister falls beside you, shot in the back: don’t stop.

Your husband stumbles and falls: don’t stop.

Your best friend spits blood and screams for help: don’t stop!

“Don’t stop!” Roseland bellowed in the midst of them, dragging Gabrielle along beside him, “Jamais plus!” Never again!

The dying words of a hundred people, two hundred, three hundred, mowed down by thundering guns equipped with hundreds of thousands of rounds . . . machine guns with computer guidance, guns unceasingly fed, capable of aiming themselves and firing for days if necessary . . .

Roseland was distantly aware that detainees in the other building were watching, across the compound, from cracks in the sealed-over windows and from the front steps; a few making tentative motions as if to join the rebellion—until they saw the lake of blood spreading out from the fallen . . .

Roseland kept going, past the empty bunker, dragging Gabrielle along, hearing bullets whine past his head, hearing her scream.

Turning to see her brains flying out her mouth.

Letting go of her. Choking with grief—but, Don’t stop.

The machine guns never pausing, cutting methodically and almost flawlessly, rows of men and women falling like harvested wheat . . .

The security system was flawed: the machine guns were programmed to concentrate their fire at the compound’s perimeters; if they’d concentrated their fire on the building doorways, almost no one would have escaped.

As it was, of fifteen hundred who’d run, some four hundred won past the guns; leaving eleven hundred dead and dying, a reservoir of carnage, of suffering and blood. As the buildings shook with the whoops of sirens, the yammer of guns, almost drowning out the screaming and the chanting. Jamais plus.

Then came the IS vehicles, Internal Security Vehicles, three anti-insurgency Mowag Roland units: six wheels apiece, olive-drab armored cars shaped like thick ax wedges, their prows equipped with dozer blades, turrets that fired gas or grenade rounds or bullets, the operators watching everything on screens inside; up-angled deflection skirts all around against mine blasts. Electrically charged exteriors.

Suddenly the ISVs were wheeling around the corners, plowing into the four hundred survivors, grinding them under, driving them back, shunting them like human mud. Booming out commands in a voice so amplified it cracked the eardrums of those standing near: DO NOT MOVE AND YOU WILL BE UNHARMED. RUN AND YOU WILL DIE. DO NOT MOVE AND YOU WILL BE UNHARMED . . .

“Don’t stop! Jamais plus!”

Roseland kept shouting, kept running. Running through a cloud of exhaust smoke as an IS vehicle smashed past him and crushed a dozen men and women under its dozer blade; as another opened up with a barrage of explosive rounds to his rear . . .

Then he felt the ground shake. He paused, looked back to see the crystallized-steel Gargantua arching its metal scythes over the horizon: a Jægernaut, ten stories high, this one, a spoked wheel without the rim, a giant steel swastika, a skyscraper-size Rototiller ripping up anything in its path, brought here through the ruined buildings near the high-rises. Converging on Roseland’s high-rise, biting down on Processing Center 12, the five hundred who’d remained inside crushed between the floors as they accordioned flat . . . he could hear them screaming even from here . . .

Making an example for the ones across the street, in PC 13. And for the ones who’d hear about it later in other parts of the city.

A mountainous geyser of dust rose where the building had been, swirling around great scythes of metal that cut through the night sky.

It was an act beyond murder. Murder was too small a word.

I should have died with them . . .

But when he heard the ISVs rumbling down the street, searching him out, he began to run once more.

Running blindly. Or perhaps some part of his mind made decisions about where it was running to. Or maybe it was dumb luck.

But thirty minutes later, when the strength went out of his limbs, he collapsed into the high weeds of a vacant lot, letting a fresh rain wash over him. Wash some of Gabrielle’s blood from him . . .

He found that he was alive. Alone. Intact.

It was almost five hours—hearing IS vehicles, now and then, roar obliviously past him—before Roseland had the strength to move.

He sat up and retched. The world spun.

When the spinning stopped, he saw that the clouds had parted and there were stars. He sat there, very still, cold, muddy, not moving in the yellow grass that reached up to his chin. The smell of the wet grass was overpowering.

Was he the only one who’d made it?

Oh, please, no. Kill him if it was so. Someone kill him if that was true.

Another thought, then. It wasn’t in words, at first. Just a picture, a blurry peripheral image of people exploding from gunfire all around him. After a while, there were words to go with it: I led a thousand and more to their deaths. I led them into the slaughterhouse.

He waited for the guilt to come. Gabrielle was just one of more than a thousand dead. He was guilty of leading her and the others to death. The guilt would come down on him like a hammer from the sky.

He waited. Not moving.

Nothing.

Feel it. Face the guilt: Maybe they should have waited. Maybe someone would have come to save them. Maybe . . .

No. This was better.

He felt another kind of remorse. He had survived: he should have died with Gabrielle, with the others. Not because he led them into a shower of bullets, but simply because he was one of them. There was no fair reason he should survive and they shouldn’t. No justice in it.

He sat completely inert, balancing precariously on his spine, thinking he’d fall forward or back if he tried to move. Thinking: All that death. Most of them gone.

It was still better.

He went into a gray study. Stopped thinking at all.

A little while later, something ran over his leg.

He moved only his eyes, some instinct priming his fingers, waiting . . .

Again. Motion. Something moving toward him. Investigating him. Thinking he was food. A rat.

Moving up his leg.

All by itself, his hand moved. He watched his own hand with amazement as it struck like a rattler and grabbed the rat. Squeezed it dead and tore it open. He closed his eyes and let his hands and mouth do their work.

After a while, Roseland could move again. He was on his feet, staggering south, toward the city.

Just after dawn, as he crouched in a doorway somewhere in Paris, he saw a woman spraying a wall with a glue can, then slapping up a poster. Translated, the poster said, THEY’RE LYING TO YOU. LIES MAKE SLAVES. WAIT FOR THE RESISTANCE. Above the words was a picture of a sky-blue flag.

Moving quickly, the woman put up two more posters, then hurried away.

He trotted after her. “Hey! Hey!”

She froze on the street. He could see she was about to break into a run. She thought he was police. He shouted hoarsely, “Please! I need . . . I ran away from the processing center!”

Just as he said please, she’d started running. But now she stopped. He could see by her body language, her silhouette against the dawn-lit backdrop of blue morning mist, that she felt she was taking a chance as she turned, slowly, to look at him. She walked toward him—then suddenly ran to him, grabbed his wrist. A faint expression of revulsion flickered over her face as she looked him over.

She led him into an alley, into another street, and into a debris-choked entrance to a Metro station. After much worming and climbing and walking in darkness (all the while Roseland feeling he would die if he took another step, but somehow always taking another step), they came up in a ruined building, and she took him through some doors. There was some argument at the doors in French, but they went through.

They were brought to a lean man missing an ear. A man whom Roseland knew immediately as an American. Knew without knowing how.

“Monsieur Torrence,” the woman said, introducing the stranger.

Roseland said, “My name is Abraham Roseland. Give me a gun. Give me a fucking gun.”

And then he collapsed.

Merino, an island in the Caribbean.

Jack Smoke, a tall man with a hawk nose and sharp black eyes, walked on a long-legged drooping gait across the tarmac to the transport plane; he was walking more slowly than he would have liked so that the little girl carrying the crow could keep up with him. Her name was Alouette; she was about ten. She was the color of a polished coconut shell, her wavy black hair tied up under a sky-blue scarf. Smoke wore an identical scarf around his neck. Both of them wore short-sleeve white shirts, shorts, and sandals.

“You said we could go swimming again before we took the plane,” she said. She made it sting by saying it matter-of-factly.

She had too many of the adult tricks, Smoke thought. There are advantages to having a gifted child, and disadvantages. But he’d never regretted adopting Alouette.

“We’re not taking this plane yet. We will go swimming before we leave the island,” he promised, glancing at the sky. It was a warm day, but the subtropical island was sheeted over with a thin cloud cover, and there was a brisk wind. Weather report said a storm was coming; he hoped it would take its time, and not make him a liar. “We’re going out to this plane to see the reporter from MediaSat.”

“Oh. You could’ve told me before.”

“You were too busy bragging about your chip access level.”

“Wasn’t bragging.”

“You were too.”

“No, wasn’t.” She took his hand and kissed it. The crow, nestled in the crook of her other arm, made a crotchety caw. “Hush, Richard,” she told the crow. “We’re going to see a television man.”

Hand, the digital-TV man. Smoke had seen Witcher’s file on him. Hand’s real name was Nguyen Hinh. Rising young muckraking our-man-in-the-field for the relatively new MediaSat, an Indie that had taken advantage of the big Worldtalk shakeup to carve out a broadcasting niche. Hinh was known to his ratings share as Norman Hand.

Nguyen Hinh. US citizen. Father was Vietnamese, mother American, thirty-two years old. Got his degree at NYU in media studies, was a member of the Democratic Party with a history of voting for party moderates. Nice head of hair, vocationally color-streaked for that streetside identity cachet. Mostly round eyes, pretty blond skin, boyish, said to be gay but not remotely effeminate, at least on camera. Suits were printouts but not stenciled. High-quality designer prints, the kind you get in your clothes printer only if you’re a platinum-card subscriber. Hinh was chic but not snobbish enough to wear real cloth.

Highly ambitious. Probably not interested in the New Resistance story for partisan reasons.

Hand was posed in the shade of the forward-swept wing of the fat-bellied blue and white jet, talking intensely into the little fist-size camera standing on a thin collapsible tripod. His black technicki cameraman hunched over the viewfinder, making minute adjustments.

Behind Hand, islanders directed by a Witcher employee loaded plastic crates from a luggage tractor onto a portable conveyor belt carrying them into the plane. A swaying robot arm whirred from the plane, grasped the crates in its immense tri-fingered metal hand, and hoisted them into place. The crates swung precariously in the robot’s grip, but somehow were snugged exactly into the optimum packing configuration. Muscular backs bare and sweat-glossy, the human laborers worked in concert with the cybernetic laborer as comfortably as rice farmers with a water buffalo.

Smoke gestured for Alouette to be quiet, and the two of them waited behind the cameraman for Hand to finish his taping.

“What you see,” Hand was saying, “is a small piece of an exodus; the final preparations for an exodus from an island—an island which must remain unspecified—which has been a haven for this intriguing band of guerrillas, now on the run from, so they allege, an illegal international force of crypto-Fascists. Their destination: somewhere distant and secret; their timetable: immediate and desperate.” His voice was deep, resonant, and utterly confident.

He paused and then spoke to the gray-jumpsuited technicki. “Go to the sound bite.”

“Gah,” the technicki said. Meaning, Got it. He made an adjustment and said, “Go.”

“NR guerrillas—getting out, and fast. In a hurry like Moses’ people, but this time it’s the supposed Fascists playing Pharaoh’s Army. Where are the rebels headed? We don’t know where, but we know when. Now. In a helluva hurry.”

He paused, then nodded to the technicki, who tweaked the mouse. “Down,” he said, nodding.

Smoke knew the drill. One recording for the upperclass public-TV seg, the smallest demographic slice, known as the C viewers; then the sound bite for impatient, hungry middle America, the A viewers: the biggest slice. The last for the semiliterate, the technickis, the B viewers. Other variants would be computer-dubbed in Cantonese, Japanese, Spanish, German, Farsi, Arabic, Ebonics.

“NuRillas,” Hand was saying in Technicki. “Gedouwf, hidgoodn’gone, s’pose fash hanimerdown—dunhu buhwheh. Hup.”

Hand paused, then nodded at the technicki. “That’s it.” He turned, smiled at Smoke, widened his smile for Alouette. Behind him the loading machinery went whir, click, clack. “Mr. Smoke. Good to meet you in the flesh.” His voice off-camera was higher, daintier.

“Likewise. That was recorded? You’re not linked, I trust?”

“Right. Your people’d scotch it anyway.” He winked.

Smoke smiled. “We’d sure try. You can send it when we’re home free.”

“You ready for that interview?”

“We could do a preliminary here, but I’d like to do the bulk of the thing in our media center, so you can see what we’ve got.”

Hand seemed to consider, then touched a corner of his jaw, spoke into his implant. “You got that, anchor? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well no, we’re not going to let them stage a—Right. No, there’s no ER.” His eyes flicked at Smoke; Smoke knew what ER meant. It wasn’t Emergency Room, it was Editing Rights. He was going to have to take whatever they dished out and hope it looked good. That was the deal. MediaSat was the only overGrid outfit interested in covering the story. Too much of a downer, too unprovable, and too rhetorical, was what the others said. The lefties from the underGrid covered them, but who cared? They had the ears of a tiny slice of the populace. The Internet stories of an ongoing New Holocaust in Europe, after all, were countered by the authorities, were dismissed by most people as hoaxes. “Okay, just get that comparison segment ready so we can—yeah.” He tapped his jaw joint again, walked toward Smoke, hand out, his smile like a cool breeze as he went to Alouette. “Lead the way, young lady!”

She shook his hand, staring at him. “Your voice changed,” she said.

“When I was sixteen,” he said, winking.

Only a few monitors and the linkup mainframe remained in the comm room of the Merino NR headquarters. Hand’s technicki had interfaced with the linkup system so they could intercut NR video as needed. But the camera wasn’t on yet. Smoke sat across from Hand, who was trying to soften the chill that had set into the room after Hand had let slip this was going to be only a fifteen-minute segment and not the hour special he’d hinted at.

“You can’t make people understand in fifteen minutes that they’ve lost a continent to Nazis when they weren’t looking,” Smoke said. “It’s too big to comprehend, too big to believe without proof. People have this blind faith in the Grid, in media—if their media hasn’t told them it’s happened, then they believe it hasn’t happened. There’s this myth that everything is ‘covered’, everything is reported on, that free media is everywhere. It’s been a myth since the last century. And everyone believes the myth. In the face of that—we need at least an hour to get even close to proving it. Lord, just to lay the groundwork.”

“You’ll have a basis for starting,” Hand said. “A springboard. It’ll prompt more media interest . . . ”

“Bullshit,” Smoke said. “The president slithered out of impeachment. She saw the country through a war so they don’t want to hear about her connections to a bunch of right-wing extremists. Okay, they tell us, so she got a little panicky and went too far, World War Three was on, could happen to anyone. So let’s put this nasty talk of Fascists behind us and look to the sunny future and . . . the whole schtick. I’ve heard it two hundred times.”

“Maybe they’ve got a point?” Like a psychotherapist, putting it as a gentle question.

“More bullshit. It’s just denial, Hand. American media and American foreign policy hide from the truth because they’re tired of conflict and maybe because they’re hoping the bastards’ll take care of the Third World émigré problem for them—”

“That comes off pretty paranoid. The Second Alliance corporate people were jailed or deported or had to jump the country, Smoke. It’s hard to believe they’re much of a threat. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt and we’ll cover it from your angle, but—”

“ ‘Much of a threat!’ They’re running France. Germany now. Italy. England soon ”

“England? I was just there. Travel lines are beginning to open, I didn’t see any jackboots. Certainly no concentration camps.”

“In England, it’s just beginning. Why do you think no outsiders can travel in France, Italy—”

“They say it’s because of the aftermath of the war. No functional airports yet, cholera, various other diseases, bands of hungry desperadoes—”

“Since when did those kinds of restrictions ever stop media coverage before? What happened to ‘fearless war correspondents’?”

“Look, we’re wasting a lot of good material here. We should be getting this on camera. Let’s see where it takes us, okay?” Hand’s most open, winning expression. It bounced off Smoke like a bubble, and Hand let it slide. His face went blank. “Yes or no?”

Smoke snorted. “Let’s do it. Maybe you’ll see . . . ”

Hand nodded to the camera technicki, then raised a hand for a pause. He took out a hand mirror, checked his media-flesh and his makeup, put the mirror away, then pointed at the camera.

“Go, “ the technicki said.

Hand conducted the interview in a soft combination of phrasings for A and C viewers. “Mr. Smoke, the public relations division of your organization claims that”—he glanced down at a printout on his lap—“there’s an ongoing apartheid throughout Western Europe fast becoming a genocidal Holocaust.” He looked up at Smoke. “World War Two Redux?”

“It’s not a replay of World War Two, obviously, except in the genocidal sense—and even there it’s different. Its ideological foundations are more a distortion of sociobiology than what we knew as old-style Fascist racism. Then again, to some extent it’s rooted in an extreme form of Christian fundamentalism. And as for its execution, it’s enormously broader. It applies to vast numbers of Arab and Persian and Pakistani immigrants, to Hindus and Muslims from India, to blacks and gays and Jews. Of course, more people than Jews were persecuted by Nazis during the Second World War, but the scale—”

“Whoa, chill out long enough to explain to us how something like this could go on unreported under the noses of the governments and media of Western Europe, of American forces who are still stationed along the front of the war—and most of all, Israel—”

“It hasn’t gone on unreported. It’s there on the alternative stations, on social media, a great many places. Mainstream media is treating it as a conspiracy theory. But that’s not what it is. We’ve got statements from hundreds of soldiers, including fifty-two officers, complaining of the ‘apartheid methods’ of the Second Alliance and SPOES . . . ”

“The ‘Self Policing Organization of European States . . . ’ ”

“Yes. Second Alliance sympathizers in the NATO high command suppressed the reports, saw to it they never reached Congress or the UN. Censorship is easy to justify in those conditions.”

“A media blackout over a whole continent? That’s a little hard to swallow.”

“It’s not necessary over the whole continent. What was the last communiqué you saw from France that wasn’t from the US military or, say, from the Larousse government? Most of the lines of communication are down. Unauthorized sat-transers were destroyed, cables cut, and fone relay towers down. Travel is still restricted ‘until order is restored.’ And the question is, what kind of order will be restored?”

“And Israel is just standing by as Jews are rounded up—”

“Israel has repeatedly demanded investigations into the stories of new death camps and these so-called ‘refugee processing centers.’ It’s hard for them to go in alone and establish the truth without violating international law. They are assisting us on a certain level. They may well go further . . . ”

“We have a new US senator,” Hand put in, referring to the printout again, “Senator Jæger, who says, and I quote, ‘These NR people are trying to foment a dangerous postwar hysteria, and if you ask me, the whole thing is a leftist fund-raising device.’ How about that? I mean, isn’t it in your interest to convince people for fund-raising reasons that there’s another Holocaust going on, Jack?”

Smoke bit down on his temper till it stopped writhing to get free of his mouth. Finally he said, “It’s in the interest of stopping the Holocaust, Norman. Senator Jæger’s company manufactures the Jægernauts used by the SA to destroy the homes and lives of thousands of innocent people. He’s hardly an objective opinion. Why hasn’t the UN been shown the charter for SPOES?”

“Ah, right. They’re more or less like Interpol was, I believe—”

“No. It’s a military alliance which I believe is the blueprint for a single Fascist state uniting Western Europe.”

“If I remember rightly, their ‘charter’ is to locate terrorists and collaborative saboteurs—”

Smoke ground his teeth in frustration. “That ‘collaborative saboteurs’ chestnut is a smoke screen, an all-purpose phrase they use whenever they want to get rid of anyone. The ‘saboteurs’ who supposedly helped the Soviets in their invasion are—just by coincidence—always Jews, Muslims, Socialists, anarchists, or the wrong kind of intellectual. The SA arrests anyone it wants with—”

“Now, whoa again. You keep referring to the SA as if it’s the same organization that was policing the war zones a few months ago. To the best of our information, the SA is now just an ordinary private-cop outfit.”

Smoke looked at him in amazement. “You really believe that?”

“Our information is—”

“Let me run the scenario down for you in its simplest terms,” Smoke snapped. “Western Europe has been through hell, and its people are hungry for the kind of orderliness promised by SPOES. But the European countries who are part of SPOES are puppet governments run by the same people who ran the SA. The SA has become a police-action arm of SPOES. They’re talking about dissolving their NATO ties in favor of the SPOES charter. Now each SPOES military force is on the surface commanded by nationals from the country it occupies, and most of its troop strength are local people—except for the SA, which functions more or less as the SS did for Hitler’s people—but the orders come from outside the country. Each country thinks it’s developing a new nationalism, but in fact it’s selling its soul to a greater European Fascist state. There are dissenting voices, but—”

“Do you have evidence for any of this? This talk of puppet governments—”

“We have video testimony, affidavits, some of our agents you can talk to. But I’d like to start with the most pressing issue, the images of ongoing apartheid and genocide . . . ” Smoke turned and hit a button on the bank of monitors; the technicki recorded the vid for later intercutting. Hand turned to watch the monitor.

The image was sometimes focused, sometimes not; it was apparently shot from waist height, and it wobbled. But they could make out a room packed full of detainees—heads shaved, filthy uniforms, starved. One of them clearly dead. An SA bull suddenly stepping into the shot, grabbing a young girl by the throat, dragging her aside, someone rising to protest, beaten down by an RR stick wielded by a second guard, whose back blocked the cameras. “This video was shot by one of our people who penetrated a processing camp . . . Here’s a shot of the SA rounding up ‘detainees,’ as they call them, into a transport. You can see there are whole families here, old people who can barely walk, children, people herded like animals, hardly a raid on a terrorist camp—”

“Now, this material looks very convincing, and it could be what it appears to be. It could also have been staged, or mixed with computer-generated imagery,” Hand said. “You have to admit you have the resources. And we do have some contradictory video from these processing centers.” Hand signaled the technicki, who ran the video on another monitor. “This came to us from the French minister of foreign affairs . . . ”

Another kind of processing center. Happy, well-fed people in their own clothing in a comfortable dormitory, waving at the camera. A guard handing a doll to a small girl, who hugged him and then kissed the doll . . . Interviews with the ‘refugees.’ In French, dubbed in English. A man wearing a yarmulke: “I was worried when they asked us to move to the processing center, but when you get here you understand, we have food here, we have safety and warmth—we didn’t have any of this at home. They did it to save us from the terrorists. God bless them.”

Smoke stared at the screen. “You are going to show this patently obvious fake to the American public?”

“We have to show both sides—”

Smoke turned and pointed a trembling finger at him. “If you don’t see for yourself, you’re a fake yourself. Come and see for yourself, or you’re no reporter. I can get you into Europe. Our lines of transportation are open. It’s dangerous, but I can get you in. I challenge you to see for yourself.”

Hand glanced at the technicki, who was watching him, curious to see what he’d say. Smoke said, “You can edit this out, you can edit all of this. No one has to know I challenged you to see for yourself. But you’ll know, Hand. Nguyen Hinh will know.”

The two men looked at one another. Hand swallowed. “Set it up. I’ll go.”

A tall, black Witcher guard in fatigues and boots, pistol strapped to his hip, banged in through the door from the next room. “Intercepted this maybe thirty seconds ago.” He passed Smoke a printout. Smoke read:

PD 5

REPORT TYPE IS 0370

!FDC 8/2621 FDC PART 1 OF 2

CARIBBEAN FLIGHT ADVISORY . . .

DUE TO PUERTO RICAN INSURGENCY DANGEROUS ENVIRONMENT IN LESSER ANTILLES/ PUERTO RICAN CARIBBEAN ZONE . . . US NAVAL VESSELS AND AIRCRAFT OPERATING BETWEEN 20 DEGREES NORTH AND 15 DEGREES NORTH ARE PREPARED TO EXERCISE APPROPRIATE MEASURES. IT IS STRONGLY ADVISED THAT ALL AIRCRAFT/ FIXED WING AND HELICOPTERS/MAINTAIN A LISTENING WATCH ON 121.5 MHZ VHF OR 243.0 MHZ UHF WHEN OPERATING WITHIN THESE AREAS. SPECIAL CAUTION ADVISORY: AIRSPACE ISLAND OF MERINO.

PD 5

REPORT TYPE IS 0370

!FDC 812621 FDC PART 2 OF 2

CARIBBEAN FLIGHT ADVISORY . . .

MILITARY AND CIVIL AIRCRAFT UNDER ATC CONTROL SHOULD IMMEDIATELY ADVISE ATC OF ANY CHANGE OF HEADING AND, IF APPROPRIATE, DECLARE AN IN-FLIGHT EMERGENCY. FAILURE TO RESPOND TO REQUESTS FOR IDENTIFICATION AND INTENTIONS, FAILURE TO ACCEPT RECOMMENDED HEADINGS, FAILURE TO RESPOND TO WARNINGS, OR CONTINUING TO OPERATE IN A THREATENING MANNER WILL PLACE AIRCRAFT FIXED WING AND HELICOPTERS AT RISK BY US COUNTER INSURGENCY AND/OR DEFENSIVE MEASURES . . .

END OF PART 2 OF 2 PARTS

Smoke passed the printout to Hand, who scanned it and gave it to his technicki. “Get a shot of this.” He looked at Smoke. “If that’s okay.”

Smoke nodded. “You know what it means?”

“It means there’s some kind of guerrilla action involving aircraft on Puerto Rico—”

“The revolutionaries on Puerto Rico have no aircraft at all,” Smoke interrupted tiredly. “These ‘counter insurgency measures’ are part of a CIA operation, working through the NSA. They’re going to claim the Puerto Rican Communist guerrillas were constructing some kind of military base on Merino. They’ll claim the Communists are launching an air attack from there. With aircraft that doesn’t exist. They know we’re here, which is why we’re leaving. And they know we’re leaving. They don’t intend for us to get away. I’m afraid you visited the island at a rather unfortunate time, Norman.”

• 03 •

Paris.

“St. Zoros,” Father Lespere was saying, as he slapped a clip into the assault rifle, “is one of the most important examples of the Flamboyant style of architecture in Paris.” His accent was thick, though his grammar was good. Roseland and Torrence had to listen carefully to make out the words. Words like flamboyant and important, spelled the same in French and English, Lespere pronounced the French way. Roseland listened raptly as Father Lespere took aim at the firing range’s target. “The south side of St. Zoros, on the cemetery—the decoration is marvelous.” He pronounced this roughly mar-vay-you. “The traceries on the gables, the pinnacled buttressing, all the best saints in sculpture, and some very fine gargoyles. These gargoyles, creatures of real character, you understand? Not these banal, bland gargoyles one sometimes sees . . . ” He switched off the laser-sighter, which he regarded as unsportsmanlike for target shooting and not much use in a firefight (he was wrong about that, Torrence maintained), and opened fire on the target, a riddled and splintery outline of a man with a mirror-visored motorcyclist’s helmet stuck on the top to resemble an SA guardsman. The helmet was quite intact until he opened fire from seventy feet; Roseland jumped a little at the racket of the gun in the narrow, low-ceilinged stone chamber, and the helmet spun on the stump of the neck. When it stopped spinning, its back side was turned to them: shot through, shattered.

Roseland had spent ten days recovering in the NR’s chilly, badly outfitted infirmary. But the dingy infirmary was a franchise of heaven, after the processing center. He’d eaten twice a day, and bathed, and shaved, and they’d given him imitation vitamins and blue jeans, boots, and a soft blue plastic jacket.

Now they were a few hundred yards from the abandoned police station that was the NR’s regional headquarters, and about thirty-five feet below the nave of the church of St. Zoros, in what had been a wine cellar for the manor that had stood here before the church. The wine racks were long gone; there were only stone flags, stone blocks, a chemlantern, and two battery-powered floodlights for the gallery; the target at the far end of the room stood like a war-disfigured scarecrow against a thick backdrop of bullet-pocked fiberboard and mattresses.

Father Lespere was a man of pale skin and very dark hair and eyebrows; he had a long nose and hands as precise in their movements as in their manicure. He wore the traditional black cassock; his hair was tonsured, but only by middle age, balding at the crown. “And the tower of Elizabeth de Bathory,” Lespere went on, sighting in on the belly of the target. “I will show you myself. The art is late Middle Ages, very fine, nothing damaged in the war at all. The interior of the church is splendid: remarkable vaulting—” He fired, stitched a line of bullet holes across the target’s middle. He spoke with luxuriant pleasure in the description as he aimed the weapon again: “The vaulting of the side aisles and ambulatories, delicate columns that flow up into the vaults, into ribs like fans, you must set them—Joris-Karl Huysmans compared them to a palm forest.” He sighed. “I should have remained in the study of architecture.” He passed the gun to Torrence and turned to Roseland. “You will forgive me my enthusiasms, but I have not belonged to St. Zoros very long . . . I was a priest who was really only a kind of tourist guide at Notre Dame, and then when there were no tourists to guide, a priest who was really only a custodian. Do you like our place for target practice?”

“I’m no connoisseur of target shooting, Father,” Roseland said. “They can’t hear it on the street?”

“No.” Lespere watched critically as Torrence fired a burst through the helmet, spinning it on the stump again. “You are pulling the trigger too hard, Daniel.”

“I hit it, didn’t I?” Torrence said, shrugging a little too briskly. He could be defensive, Roseland had noticed.

“Some of the rounds hit and some did not,” Father Lespere replied. “Enough for now. Come on.” His cassock whisked softly on the stone floor as he switched off the floodlights, plunging the bullet-crucified target into darkness. He picked up a chemlantern and led the way from the room.

Torrence tossed the gun to Roseland, who caught it clumsily and followed them down a damp, dark, low-ceilinged corridor of irregular stone blocks. There was a faint smell of sewage, with dissolving minerals. And gunpowder.

Lespere bent near Torrence to speak softly, probably intending that Roseland not hear him; but the whisper carried with eerie lucidity along the echoey stone shaft. “The news for you is not good. Apparently you have been identified. They do not know where to find you, but they know who you are. What you look like. They have connected you with the Le Pen assassination. Perhaps it’s time you . . . ” He hesitated.

“I can’t leave,” Torrence said. “If I do, people like Pasolini . . . ” He didn’t finish it, merely shook his head.

“I was not going to suggest you leave. We cannot spare you. I suggest, instead, that you change your face.”

“Those kinds of surgeons are in short supply.”

“It is your decision, but . . . you need not use those kinds of surgeons.”

Roseland felt his gut contract at the suggestion. This Lespere was one hardassed priest. Christ! Basically, telling Torrence that disfigurement was a viable option . . .

Torrence said, “If it comes to that.” His voice very flat.

Lespere shrugged. “Do you really suppose it matters how pretty you are? None of us are likely to live a year.”

Hearing that, now, didn’t bother Roseland at all. It was perfectly, entirely appropriate. (A flash of memory: the Jægernaut arching over Processing Center 12 . . . )

Lespere went on, “You must understand: Klaus is sending The Thirst after you. He will do things. This man The Thirst is a German, raised in Argentina and Guatemala—his great uncle was an SS officer. His grandfather a Hitler Youth. His name is Giessen, but they call him The Thirst, and he will do things . . . ”

Open space swelled around them. They were in a vast, dimly lit room. Their footsteps took on a different sound here. The room was big, very long, two stories up to the pipe-clustered ceiling; it was subterranean but not a cavern; its walls were hidden by strips of exposed insulation, veined with wire; its floors were piled with plastic crates, and cryptic machinery: old-time dynamos and factory presses. The insulation and metal surfaces and crates were sloppily starburst with red and yellow. Paint splashes, splattered with impact bursts. “What’s all this?” Roseland asked.

Torrence gestured vaguely, perhaps thinking, Roseland guessed, about the kind of man who could earn a nickname like The Thirst. “Underground storage for the downtown system of fallout shelters,” Torrence said. “The crates are mostly filled with loose plumbing parts. They’ve forgotten all about it.”

“Please, take a little stroll, look at this place,” Lespere told Roseland gently.

Why? Roseland wondered. But he took a few steps farther into the chilly, shadowy room, looking around. He strolled into the maze of junk, peered into the shadow-wrapped dimness. It reminded him of a big train station in a way, “What are we going to do with this place?” Roseland asked. “Some kind of, um, hideout or—”

Men sprang into view all around him, rifles clicking smartly. Aiming at his chest, or head. They’d been hidden behind crates and machinery, not more than six feet away.

Roseland was paralyzed, impotently clutching the rifle.

“To answer your question,” Torrence said, walking up behind him, “we use it for training.” He nodded at the guerrillas. They lowered their weapons. “You’re going to train with these people.”

The island of Merino, the Caribbean.

“Someone at the State Department fumbled the ball,” Witcher said. Smoke had difficulty hearing him over the whine of the jet. “They couldn’t know Hand is with you. They must know that if they bomb an installation with a hotshot American TV journalist in it, it’s going to look pretty bad.”

“Not necessarily,” Smoke said. He was sitting beside a very nervous Norman Hand in the cargo plane’s little passenger compartment, talking to Witcher on a fone. He kept the fone screen on the seatback blanked, so Hand couldn’t see who he was talking to. “They’ll pull some strings, whitewash it, say that Hand was covering this imaginary ‘Puerto Rican Communist guerrilla air attack.’ Same old bullshit. It’ll be worth it to them, to get us.” There was a staticky pause before Witcher’s reply. He was talking via satellite, a continent and an ocean away, safe in his Kauai estate. “Suppose you’re right. We’ll try to call them on this one . . . But it’ll be too late to—Whoa . . . A trace. Got to go.”

Smoke glanced at Hand, saw the reporter’s knuckles were white on the arms of his seat. Hand peered out the scratched window; Smoke looked over his shoulder. The airfield was near the beach, and out to sea the picket of American destroyers was visible, gray notches against the horizon. “Why don’t we take off? I should’ve called that damn chopper back—”

“It wouldn’t have come,” Smoke told him, not for the first time. “They’re . . . civilian. They won’t ignore the aircraft advisory.”

He was thinking of Alouette, glad he had gotten her out ahead of the others. He worried about the islanders. They’d gone into hurricane shelters, a long way from the NR base, but American naval artillery was notoriously inaccurate; its smart missiles so poorly made—by the contractors who routinely ripped off the Pentagon—they weren’t so smart . . .

“Why don’t we take off?” Hand demanded again, his voice a little shrill. Across the aisle, his technicki smiled in quiet satisfaction.

As if in answer, the plane lurched into movement.

The pilot’s voice crackled from the fone. “We’re getting a stay-down warning, Jack. They claim we can surrender peaceably.”

“Accept!” Hand burst out.

Smoke shook his head. “It’s a lie. This isn’t a military operation, this is CIA. They might or might not take us alive, but eventually we’d all die in their hands.”

You they might just put under an extractor and erase your memories of the whole thing, Smoke thought.

He wasn’t going to tell Hand that. It would be an acceptable option to Hand. Unacceptable to Smoke.

“See if you can stall them, tell them we’re thinking about it,” Smoke told the pilot. Feeling sweat stick his back to the seat; hearing his heart hammering in his ears.

There were seventy others with them in the passenger compartment. A few were muttering; no one crying, no one panicking. Every one of them NR; every one of them ready to die.

Their silence touched Smoke, made his throat contract with emotion.

The plane took to the air; two others, almost simultaneously, took off in other parts of the field, carrying the entire NR base. The island was at the end of its usefulness to the NR anyway, Smoke reflected. Most of their work was in Europe now. And on FirStep. They’d divide their operations between the space base and, probably, Israel. A springboard to Europe.

On some level, he was conscious that he was thinking of these things, making these mental preparations, to cover the fact that he was scared as a son of a bitch. He was trying to convince himself he had a future to plan for.

The US Navy, lied to by the CIA, was going to try to shoot them out of the sky.

Of course, Smoke had tried to talk to the ships on radio. He was presumed to be an American radical sympathizer, lying to protect Puerto Rican Commie compadres.

The plane was angling up as steeply as the pilot dared. “We’re for it,” Hand said. “They’ll use hunter-seeker missiles. Exocets, whatever. Blow us out of the fucking sky.”

“Quite possibly,” Smoke said. He wondered if Alouette was taking good care of his crow.

Smoke looked at Hand, wondering if he was going to become hysterical. Hand sat there rigidly, staring out the window, watching for a missile. Obviously not the war-correspondent sort of reporter.

Trying to broaden his résumé, Smoke thought, and look what it got him.

Finally, Hand took a deep breath and relaxed. “Whatever happens, happens,” he said hoarsely, shrugging.

Smoke nodded, then held on to the seat as the plane banked sharply, its engines roaring now. “If it’s any comfort, this plane is augmented for defensive actions.” He could feel the inertia trying to pull his spine one way and his rib cage another. “Might surprise them.”

“Ohshee, cheh’dow,” the technicki said, staring out his window, his voice cracking.

Smoke looked over. The plane had banked so that the port wing was pointed almost straight down at the island. Alongside a surfline of blue-white butterfly-wing delicacy, a line of fireballs huffed, threw tons of sand into the sky. The sound and muted shock wave rolled through the plane, which shivered and rattled. Smoke saw the next wave of artillery shelling hit the NR’s little airport tower, blowing off its top and splitting it down the middle.

“Neb’zah?” the technicki asked.

Smoke shook his head. “No, nobody there. Evacuated in good time.”

“What the hell are those?” Hand blurted. “Look like flying saucers . . . ”

Smoke didn’t have to look. “They are, sort of. Saucers about two feet across. They fly, or glide anyway, down behind us. We just let go a cloud of them.”

“Pulse camouflage,” the technicki said, saying it in standard English.

Smoke nodded. “Some of our defensive augmentation. They put out an electromagnetic pulse that distracts the missiles—”

“We got past two of them,” the pilot said.

“Two what?” Smoke asked.

“My guess is Patriot Fourteens. Very nice missiles with Multiple Target Capability. The defense industry’s finest. But that’s not saying much.”

Irony in the pilot’s voice. You deal with it how you can, Smoke thought.

“We lost them with the pulse cammies?” Smoke asked.

“Looks like. But we’ve got SPVs coming after us . . . ”

“Stop with the goddamn acronyms!” Hand snapped at the intercom.

“Self Piloted Vehicles,” Smoke translated. “Drones. They can do things no human pilot can. Sometimes they make mistakes no pilot will, too.”

“They’re turning off for . . . ” the pilot said. “Oh, waitaminnut. Here comes another, and it’s not taking the bait. Well, shit.”

Smoke closed his eyes. Assuming the pilot had seen a missile getting through to them. He waited for the impact, the noise, the crushing and tearing and screaming. The pain.

A dull, distant whud. “They got Number Two.” The pilot’s voice was almost too soft to hear.

Smoke opened his eyes, relief and horror leapfrogging in his gut. He saw the fireball through the window. Trailers of vapor left by pieces of the disintegrating passenger plane, making it into an exotic flame-red and smoke-black flower against the sky. Sixty-four NR operatives, dead in an instant. Shot out of the sky. To the American media, it would be sixty-four Puerto Rican Terrorists shot down while en route to a bombing run over San Juan.

“Holy shit,” Hand breathed, face pressed to the glass. “Fuck. We’re next.”

Smoke shook his head, feeling tears on his cheek. “No, we’re probably out of range by the time they get their RPVs back in line. They haven’t got any human-Piloted vehicles.” He felt like he was locked up in a flying steel jail, while some fake Smoke was outside the jail cell, chatting with the warden.

“Are we really going to make it?” Hand said. “Get away scot-free?”

Smoke winced. Scot-free. Dozens of his brothers and sisters blown into meat scraps. Scot-free.

Smoke felt like he should have died back there too. Glad he didn’t and disgusted that he didn’t. Both.

“There’s a good chance we’re away,” he said, clearing his throat. “We . . . If we hadn’t got the jump on them, we’d be dead by now . . . ”

“So where to now?” Hand asked. “What happens to me?”

“We’re going to a place in Mexico,” Smoke said distantly. Still seeing, as if projected on the blank screen in front of him, the chrysanthemum of fire and smoke as the second NR transport blew up, like the centerpiece of a funeral’s floral arrangement. “You can go on your merry way or go with us, see some things,” he said dully. He should try and talk Hand into going along. But he didn’t have it in him to say a word more than he absolutely had to.

He felt the old wrenching come back, the uncertainty about what was real and who was important and who he was; seeing, not so far away, the brink: beyond it, the madness that had held him at the beginning of the war. He had been fractured when the SA goons had taken him, tortured him; fractured still deeper when he saw the new Nazis tearing like jackals at the dying corpus of European civilization. Steinfeld and Hard-Eyes had saved him, welded him back together. But the fracture was still there, like a badly welded crack in a steel post. Maybe there was too much pressure on the post. Maybe it was going to break again.

Several of the others were sobbing. Some had lost friends, lovers, maybe relations on the exploded jet. Some simply wept after seeing sixty-four people expunged like flies in a cloud of insecticide. Instantly snuffed out, like pests.

Smoke got out of his seat. There was an NR doctor sitting two rows back; a stocky Filipino woman in glasses, a white dress, and anomalously, a flak jacket. She’d just finished throwing up into a vomit bag as Smoke labored up the aisle to her. Straining against the inertia of the accelerating jet, Smoke leaned against a chair back and said, “Give me something.”

(Steinfeld wouldn’t ask for a tranquilizer, Smoke thought. Steinfeld wouldn’t show his pain, not like this. He’d be moving around, comforting people, helping them get over this. He’d be tougher, more caring; he’d be what we needed now. I’m not Steinfeld.)

The doctor nodded, folded the bag up, dabbed her mouth, wiped tears from her eyes. She took a bottle of pills from her coat pocket, popped one herself, and gave one to Smoke. “Don’t take it if you have to do something in an intelligent way.”

“Who the hell knows what’s intelligent?” Smoke muttered, popping the pill and sitting down.

From the Second Alliance psych evaluation report on Patrick Barrabas, aged twenty-one, Citizen of the United Kingdom:

Barrabas has the usual British obsession with class issues. He is perhaps more obsessive about it than most. Angry about class barriers—cited the appeal of Nazi Party’s promise to dissolve society into one class of grass-roots Caucasians. Hypocritical about class: Seems to have been Cockney, worked hard to eliminate the lower-class accent, manages most of the time to sound upper middle class. Clear-cut and steerable convictions about the lesser races, but maintains: “Not that I believe in genocide, none of that. Repatriation, that’s my idea for them.” Probably salvageable aggression curve . . . Grew up in a poor London neighborhood where several ghettos intersected, was persecuted by a black gang: good resentment foundations there . . . two years with the National Front “skinheads,” for the sake of street protection at first, then politicized firmly. Gave up video technology vocational school after two terms due to inability to pay tuition. Minor digi-vee editing job experience at VidEx before the company became a war casualty: possible use in battlefield video-journalism but deep motivation speaks well for counter-insurgency assignment. No neuroses that are not utilizable. Recommendation: recruit for SPOES enforcement, front line.

[Witcher files note: The American psychologist who conducted the interview and composed the preceding report was recently stripped of his standing by his colleagues for his racist papers on what he called “The Sociobiological Foundation of the Caucasian Imperative.”]

Swinshot, England.

Patrick Barrabas was marching through a ground fog with twelve other men. They were marching in close formation behind their American trainer. Barrabas was a short, muscular young man. At five foot four and a half, he was a bit touchy about his height. He had good looks: bright blue eyes, wavy red-brown hair, pretty but masculine features—“You should have been a digi-star,” his last girlfriend had told him. That had salved his ego a little. He wore a flat-black SA trainee’s uniform with infantryman’s green plastic boots, carried an SA/Jæger Mark 3 assault rifle, one of the new “smart” rifles, with its special ordnance launcher and microprocessors for aiming and heatseeking and warning you when it was overheated or dirty. But it didn’t yet have a battery—or ammunition—more’s the pity.

Barrabas was beginning to feel at home in Swinshot, decrepit though it was. Swinshot was the flesh-plucked skeleton of a rural village northwest of Southampton. The New-Soviets had made only tentative forays into England, low conventional bomb runs over military installations. Either confused military intelligence or bad aim made harmless, bucolic Swinshot the target of a carpet-bombing raid. As if synchronicity had arranged another delicious irony, the few surviving buildings were the only ones with any strategic value: the post office still stood, and the city hall, and the police station. The school and the clinic and the old people’s home and most of the houses in Swinshot—all were devastated. One of the chapels still stood, only half-caved-in. The village’s survivors had been relocated by the government.

The intact buildings were unoccupied, except the chapel, and City Hall, which had been turned over to the company that had been given unofficial-and-yet-official use of the Swinshot area: the Second Alliance International Security Corporation.

And Patrick Barrabas had worked for them, training here . . . how long now? He totted it up in his head as he did a smart about-face, making the mist churn. About eight weeks now. Work? It was more like boot camp, he thought. But he had come to like it.

They were strange people to work for. Clever people, the way they’d put it all together—a security company, a political movement, a religion rolled into one. The SAISC was in hot water in the States, it was said, but in England the corporation openly advertised its services on the BBC like any other company.

When Sparky put him up for the job, he’d thought he was going to be a security guard somewhere. Something dull. But then come to find out there were wheels within wheels, in the SAISC . . .

You couldn’t just apply to work for them like any other company. Which was strange as well, because there was a shortage of able men to work in the U.K. after the war, and most companies had people stopping you on the street to hand you an application—but not the SAISC. And there was no SAISC personnel office. You had to know someone on the inside. And then they talked to you till you thought you were going to drop from exhaustion. Made you talk to a shrink. And they put you under the extractor thingie, and maybe they said yes, and if they did, well, here you were.

Marching in a bloody private army, through the rubble.

He’d missed NATO military service with his high lottery number, but he’d have gone, eventually, if the war hadn’t ended. When it ended he’d felt a stab of irrational disappointment. A war like that, chances were you’d get yourself killed. Hundreds of thousands had. But afterward, you didn’t feel quite a man if you hadn’t gone, stupidly trite as that was. It was a feeling you couldn’t quite get away from.

He felt better about it now, tramping in step through the morning fog. The sun rising to the east was burning mist off the broken roof of the old chapel. Off to the south, beyond the fallow rye field, a mistletoe-choked oak woods looked grimly dark, as if it were still night within its hoary confines.

“Barrabas, dammit!” McDonnell bellowed at him. “Keep your eyes straight ahead! Did I tell you to gawk at the fucking landscape?” The red-faced, pig-eyed American trainer with his buzzcut hair and almost lipless mouth was tramping along side by side with Barrabas now. Barrabas savored it. He was perfect, even his ugly face. Just like a Marine D.I. in the movies.

Barrabas snapped his eyes forward, suppressing a grin. He liked this “job,” he definitely liked it.

“You are working as part of a fine-tuned machine, Barrabas! You can’t do your part without paying attention, fuck-face! What do you think we are, here, eh? A lot of individuals? Like fucking Bohemians? Like bloody anarchists? You’re just a part of the outfit! We’re all one unit or you end up dead, shot in the back by guerrillas!”

“We’re never quite one unit here,” Torrence was telling them. “We work together, but we have to be as autonomous as possible, too, partly because we often get separated. There aren’t very many of us. Your determination to complete your mission has got to come out of something personal in you, you know?”

Roseland nodded to himself. It felt right.

Roseland and the other guerrilla trainees—mostly French Jews, some Algerian immigrants, a couple of Americans, an Israeli who’d been stranded here, and a Dutch woman—sat on the cold floor in the ring of the lantern light, in a semicircle around Hard-Eyes. Rifles leaned against the dusty crates behind them; the weapons, gathered piecemeal from here and there, were as variegated as the nationalities of the trainees. Ammunition that’d work for everyone was a perpetual problem.

“Certain fundamentals of our overall strategy will be kept from you, though,” Torrence went on. “And information about the whereabouts of some safe houses, weapons, observation posts, people who work with us—that is, you know only about the ones you have to know about. Because of the extractor. An extractor extracts information directly from your brain, electrochemically, whether you like it or not. Extractors are expensive—they don’t always have one, not right away. And then there’s torture, when they don’t have access to an extractor, or if your brain chemistry is extractor-resistant. Some people seem to be. But no one is immune to torture. Everyone, eventually, spills whatever they know under torture. Don’t kid yourself.” He paused to sip weak coffee from a blue plastic mug. “We keep what we can from you, but you already know a lot that can hurt us. You know about Lespere. He’s a valuable man. He’s got them convinced he’s an enthusiastic collaborator. A racist, an enthusiast for the National Front and the Unity Party. He’s got the confidence of Larousse himself. And yet you know about him, about what he really is, because he’s part of your training. You’re not to speak of him outside this circle: not everyone in the NR knows about Lespere—you do, because you’re the Point Cadre. Lespere will be using you, directing you—Lespere and I both—for special actions. You’ve been chosen for your strong motivation . . . ”

Why, Roseland wondered, did Lespere have to be part of training? If he was so important, they should leave that to someone else and keep his complicity a secret.

Roseland, thinking about Lespere, suspected he knew. There was a sense of release about whatever Lespere did with the guerrillas; a sense of tensions easing. As if he were letting go, acting out something he needed to get out of himself.

Roseland figured that Lespere insisted on taking part. It was how he kept his sanity after having to chum it up with Nazis, maybe even take part in their genocide in some way. Lespere was a deeply humane man. His conscience led him to the undercover work for the NR; his conscience led him to become a monster.

The pressures these people work under! Roseland thought with awe.

There was a terrible beauty in their sacrifice and in their contradictory mutuality. Roseland was an American Jew. Lespere was a French Catholic priest. Others here were Muslim; the historical conflict between Muslim and Middle Eastern Jew was still hot in their racial memories. But these Muslims, these Catholics, these Jews, were utterly convinced of the spiritual necessity of their work together. They were brethren in a moral imperative that plumbed a humanity deeper than all their differences.

Roseland felt an exquisite pain thinking about it. He was moved, and saddened for them all. Because what had brought them together was horror, and loss. He closed his eyes, seeing Gabrielle’s pretty mouth spitting blood and brains . . .

He made himself listen more closely to Torrence. “What all this means,” Hard-Eyes was saying, “is that you’re on your own in a lot of ways. If you’re captured, we probably won’t be able to help you. If you escape, you may not be able to find us again—because when someone is captured, someone who knows where home base is, we move on to another. And since you know about Lespere, we’d have to take him out of place, evacuate him. We’d lose him as an intelligence source. And there are other things you know, unavoidably, that we don’t want the Nazis to know. So . . . I can’t order you to do it, but . . . ” He paused a beat, meeting their eyes, his own eyes smoldering with emotion. “Danco . . . Danco was the heart and soul of the Point Cadre. And . . . ”

Danco had killed himself on capture, Roseland knew.

Slowly, Torrence unbuttoned his coat. He opened it, and they saw the explosives taped to his chest. “You have a choice. You’ll all be issued these. We don’t wear them constantly. It depends on the risk of capture. If I’m captured, I’ll use mine. Whether you use yours . . . ” He shrugged. “We’re not the kind of people to indoctrinate you so much that you can’t make choices. You’ll always be able to think in the NR . . . ”

Swinshot.

“The best thing is if you never have to think!” the American told them. McDonnell shouted the words, hammering the verbs with window-shaking authority. “You shouldn’t have to make choices most of the time. Your training will make them for you. You’ll be so thoroughly trained, you’ll know what to do or who to defer to in each situation.”

The town hall was very old, with a blackened stone fireplace and a warped wooden floor. All but one of the windows had been dashed out by the bombing shocks and were boarded over. Butter-yellow sunlight, hinting seductively of fragrant summer fields and flower-lined roads, poured through the remaining window, but Barrabas was careful not to look that way. He was turned slightly away from it, in his wooden desk, third row back from the portable instruction screen McDonnell had set up. The screen was like one of those old blackboards that came in a wooden frame and on wheels. But the frame was aluminum, and a wafer-thin TV screen replaced the blackboard. McDonnell moved a control mouse and the video-animated outlines of men shifted obediently. McDonnell’s blaring declamation gradually broke down into an instructor’s drone. “Suppose the guerrillas are fanned out around us in these derelict buildings. Twenty of them, well spread out. They may or may not be communicating with headsets. Our patrol moves in here in an orderly column. The guerrillas open fire. Some will have armor piercing rounds. Your patrol captain gives you the Ambush Seven command, and you break up into four units of five men each, two units to each side of the street. You’ve got your helmet filters on; the gas operative has laid down the smoke-and-choke screen and you’re rushing the buildings; your unit’s APD operative does an AntiPersonnel Device sweep for mines, trip wires, as the rest of you lay down suppressive fire on the high ground. You enter the building behind the designated point man. Should the designated point man be injured and unavailable, the designated replacement point man will take his place.” The cartoonish SA soldier shapes moved across the screen into the down-angled view of the maze of buildings. “You’re communicating on your designated helmet frequencies, using the designated code of the day in case the enemy is monitoring you, so that you move in tandem with the other three units. It’s important for each unit to know as accurately as possible where the other units are at any given time for reasons of strategy and the avoidance of ‘friendly fire.’ Entering the building here, we see a scenario requiring that Unit Man Four and Two move to the right and left and One and Three move down the middle of the room, firing as they go . . . ”

Paris.

Roseland was scared of getting shot, and felt foolish for it, considering what he’d been through at the detention center. He’d been shot once already that afternoon, right in the heart. And it had stung, too. But it had left just a little welt—the round was only a wax ball containing red soap-liquid, fired by a C02 gun. It was just to mark you, so you knew for sure if you were “dead.”

But he’d stood there, marked “dead,” looking down the barrel of the grinning Arab trainee he’d stumbled across, then looking at the wet red smear over his heart. And he’d felt his legs go rubbery. He’d had to clutch at the wall to keep from falling. A Jew—shot through the heart by an Arab.

The Arab had slapped him on the shoulder and said, “You’ll learn, you’re a smart one, I see that!” And offered him a smoke. But Roseland had been spooked ever since.

Alone now, his own C02 rifle in his hands—they had about a dozen of them, scavenged from a bombed-out sporting-goods store—he moved down the corridor of dusty crates, squinting into the thick shadows. He paused to wipe sweat-fog from the inside of his goggles, then moved on. Froze at the sound of a scuffle, paint balls smacking some plastic surface about fifty feet away. Someone swearing, someone else laughing.

They’re just paint balls, he told himself.

But his mouth was bone dry as he went on, in a half-crouch, air rifle slipping in his sweaty fingers.

They’d been skirmishing for days like this, running short of paint balls. Roseland wondered more than once if all this meant anything in the real battlefield. The guys who wore the white armband were playing SA, but they didn’t have armor. A lot of the SA had armor though SA regulars went without much protection. The stuff was expensive. They kept it back for “elite” search-and-destroy and for sentries, who were vulnerable to snipers. But if you did come up against a squad in armor, what did you do when your bullets bounced off them? Laugh sheepishly and back away?

There were ways of getting past the armor, Torrence claimed. They’d get to that part of the training. But still, the odds were in favor of the armored soldier . . .

Next time, real guns. Next time, the SA. Next time, the stuff won’t be soapy goo. It’ll be warm and red, and there’ll be more of it.

Swinshot.

The kid speaker was a special treat, they were told. Something inspirational. But he was getting on Barrabas’s nerves. Maybe it was an aftereffect of the drug.

They’d told Barrabas the Second Alliance didn’t use medication-spigots on their soldiers, as some of the NATO forces did. They didn’t drug them into kill-consciousness. Barrabas wanted none of that. He’d seen a bloke in a pub, ex-infantryman back from the war, strangle a barkeep into unconsciousness for calling Time. He’d seen the infantry bloke’s glazed eyes, the way he’d clutched at the spot on his thigh where the spigot used to be.

Not for Barrabas, thanks all the same. But now they were giving him a “harmless variant of vasopressin, just a memory kicker” so he could “soak up the tactical reflexes.” McDonnell had said it throwaway like that, like he was offering a cup of coffee.

Only, the stuff in the inhaler made Barrabas tense and vaguely headachey; it made his eyes itch and his nose dried out. Affected the way things looked to him, too.

Might be that was why the chapel looked like something from a bad dream. Or maybe it was the little blighter with the glittering blue eyes. Their speaker.

They had chapel every morning right before lunch. A bit of the C. of E. chapel was missing, part of the wall and ceiling, at one corner, crumbled in, behind the altar. You sat in the pew and at the end of the sermon, when the sun had moved around the sky some, you squinted against sunlight coming through the break in the wall. Somehow it was appropriate; the wounded church symbolized their sacred struggle, they were told, their sturdy faith still standing despite a crumbling world.

They’d left in the old stained-glass windows, those that had survived, but they’d put in a Second Circle cross on the altar. A big steel Christian cross, with the hologram attachment down at its base.

The boy Jebediah, with his two armored bulls for bodyguards, stood beside the cross, talking softly to the roomful of recruits; softly, but to Barrabas, somehow, the boy could almost have been whispering directly into his ear. The kid was like some toy action-figure in his scaled-down, immaculately tailored uniform: A flat-black uniform with black gloves and wide black belt; the Second Circle symbol on his arm patch: the eye over the cross. Jebediah had brown hair and deep-set glittering blue eyes, an almost girlish face and a voice that hadn’t changed yet, telling them, like a perfect little angel, “When I met Rick Crandall, everything changed for me, and I had the wonderful fortune to see what many adults never see.” Reciting it, but he had the trick of making it sound as if he’d never said it before. “I saw God’s divine plan for us. It’s all in one word. Purity.” A dramatic pause. “Purity is cleanliness, and if you’re not clean, you’re in sickness. As we’ve seen in the last several years, the world is in great sickness. What we have before us is the job of doing more than a little tidying. Purifying is a very strong word, and Rick means it in its absolute sense. He means the word to be strong!”

The kid was the Second Alliance’s idea of a kind of USO show, supposed to go around to all the troops and cheer them up. “Psyche you up good,” McDonnell had said. “So listen up.” Up, everything was up. Up the White Brotherhood.

Barrabas glanced around at the others. They were rapt; the kid had them in his soft, rosy little palm.

But to Barrabas, the kid seemed less like a sending from God. To Barrabas he seemed like a well-oiled robot. And maybe a bit around the bend. What ten-year-old kid could talk like this with such conviction and still be in his right mind?

Finishing, the kid said breathlessly, “God has put his sacred blueprint in each and every one of us. Behold.” The boy switched on the hologram.

Humming faintly, a three-dimensional representation of a DNA molecule shimmered into being around the stainless-steel cross. Above it floated an eye. “This is the configuration”—the kid, to Barrabas’s satisfaction, had a little trouble saying “configuration”—“of genes which can be found as part of the DNA chain of each and every man in this room. It is the distinctive DNA marking of the Upper Caucasian race. And as you can see, God watches over it. And in our own smaller way, it’s our job to protect it too . . . ” And that was it. The kid led them in a hymn: “Racial Purity Is Thy Will.” Then he smiled shyly and turned off the hologram.

McDonnell, tears in his eyes like a little kid himself, prompted the recruits into a standing ovation and a hymn as the boy, carrying his hologram box under one arm and Crandall’s Corrected Bible under the other, was escorted from the chapel.

The service ended. Barrabas shook his head, walking out into sunlight. What had happened? That morning he’d been feeling good, feeling like a part of something bigger than himself, and loving it. Feeling strong in it.

But something—maybe the drug, maybe the sight of the self-righteous little prig talking about the genes . . .

Maybe that was it. All that talk of genes was too close to talk of breeding, which sounded like aristocracy. Class stuff. You had to stick with white people over the wogs, but this stuff about genes, that was right in line with notions of royalty. Set his teeth on edge.

“Barrabas!” McDonnell said, stepping up beside him. He took Barrabas by the arm and led him off to the side of the little group lining up for lunch. Barrabas was shaken: How had McDonnell known the treason he’d been thinking? Was it written on his face?

But it wasn’t that. “You’re getting your orders early,” McDonnell said, handing him the papers. “You’re going to Lab Six, up by London somewhere. They’re not giving out the location. Sending someone to pick you up.”

“What?” Barrabas blinked at him.

“You’ve got some kind of camera skills?”

“I did some video work, is all—”

“It’s that and they’ve decided you’ve got the right attitude or something. I didn’t get the lowdown.” He was a little apologetic. “You’ll see action later, you can count on it. They want you to vid some kind of experiment . . . He shrugged, and clapped Barrabas on the shoulder. “Good luck.”

He walked away. Barrabas stared after him.

He wasn’t going to Paris. He was going to . . . Lab Six?

He looked at the papers. Yeah. Lab Six.

• 04 •

The outskirts of Paris, France.

Dan Torrence sat in a rotting easy chair with his feet up. Roseland glanced at Torrence, could see only his Hard-Eyes in a bar of harsh light coming through the slat. Roseland was hunched on a wooden box beside him. They were hunkered down in a blind made of trash. It looked like the rest of the roof: a trash heap, stuff thrown from the taller, adjacent building by some errant Soviet shell the previous year. Sheathed in damp cardboard, black plastic sacking, ancient broken rooftile, and a half-gutted mattress matted with a rain-gooey beard of stuffing, they watched through the shaded slats as the guards changed at Processing Center 13.

The night was almost warm, but it was damp in the blind and reeked of mildew. Roseland bent and peered through the lower slat, watched the Second Alliance bulls, seven stories below, gathered in a knot of high-tech body armor, talking, laughing. One of them had his helmet off, was smoking a cigarette. Roseland could just make out the coal of his cigarette, faintly pulsing as the guard inhaled. “They’re more armored than they were before,” Roseland said softly.

“Your breakout shook ’em up,” Torrence said.

Behind the glare of floodlights and beside the mound of rubble that had been PC 12, Processing Center 13 was shaped like a stubby high-rise made of rectangular shadows. Only one light was visible, at the guard’s office, second floor.

“You know, we’d never get tower evacuation before their reinforcements come,” Torrence said.

Roseland swallowed, a painful scraping in his dry throat. “There’s got to be a way.” He had to say what he’d been thinking, and had tried not to say, for too long. “You waited too long already. I mean—didn’t you guys know?”

“There aren’t very damn many of us,” Torrence said defensively. “Some of us sprang a work camp, up in Belgium. Four hundred refugees were killed. We lost forty fighters, man. We’re hoping that . . . well, we’ve got some people working politically. Trying to get the pressure on to stop this shit from the outside. While we concentrate on what Steinfeld calls pressure points.” There was a shrug in Torrence’s voice.

“We can’t let this go on anymore,” Roseland said.

Torrence nodded. “We’re risking it all, but . . . ” He sighed. “There’s a way, maybe. We’ve got a man who thinks he can get into a Jægernaut. We could use it to block the reinforcements, give us a chance to move the others out . . . ” He shrugged. “I dunno . . . ”

A Jægernaut. Roseland’s heart revved at the thought. The justice of it. Go with it, sell Torrence on the idea. “That’d work. It’d be a propaganda victory, too . . . the Jægernauts are a symbol. And hey, you got to understand, you’ll triple your recruits after this, at least,” Roseland pointed out.

“Most of those we rescue won’t be capable of fighting,” Torrence said. “They’ll need medical help. Getting them to safety once we break them out is a logistical nightmare. We’re gonna try to get them to the NATO hospital and hope they’re believed . . . ”

“So what do we do at this end?”

“Get them at shift change. They do it all at once—so we’ll do it that way too. All but two are together, then. We get most of them at once, with armor piercers, and they don’t hole up anywhere. We can’t handle a siege situation; we’ve got to get in, fast.”

“What about the two upstairs?”

“Have to hit them with an RPG.”

“Blow the office from out here? That’ll take out maybe half the floor above them, kill some prisoners.”

“I don’t think it can be helped.” Torrence’s voice had no apology in it. “We haven’t got time to do it any other way. We’ve got all those people to move out . . . ”

“They’re going to be scared,” Roseland said, “and an explosion’ll scare ’em worse.” He felt lame saying it. It sounded trivial, but it wasn’t. Only, it was hard to explain how it wasn’t. “They saw what happened to PC 12 . . . ”

“They’ll come with us; they won’t have a choice,” Torrence said.

Roseland nodded. None of us have a whole lot of choice, he thought.

He realized, then, that he was scared of being killed in this raid. Breaking out of PC 12, he hadn’t been scared of dying. That was living death. He’d seen people die every day. He’d seen people spiritually murdered, too. Death had seemed a strangely viable option.

Now he was ashamed to realize he wanted to live again; ashamed because of what had happened to Gabrielle; to the children he had seen dragged away, and beaten, or dying of cholera with not even an aspirin to soothe them.

His gut churned with the wrongness of his own survival. He thought about his mother, and remembered that she’d let herself die after his dad had gone. She’d been healthy, but then she mostly refused to eat, and wasted away. She had let pneumonia get her. She’d known what to do.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered.

“About what?” Torrence asked, glancing at him, his Hard-Eyes going into shadow when he turned.

“Never mind,” Roseland said. “Thinking aloud.”

He stared out the blind at the Processing Center . . .

Torrence stared at him for a few moments. “Let’s get out of here before they do heatseeker check. They send up those fucking birds sometimes, spot checking.”

“Let’s do it.”

They crawled out the back way, through a tunnel of trash.

Just outside of Tijuana, Mexico.

Jerome-X was sick of being cooped up. This was almost as bad as the fucking jail.

Not that there was anything appealing outside the building. I mean, fuck it: Go ahead, go outside. He’d seen it, coming in on the plane. In the distance, maybe four miles from here, was the outskirts of Tijuana. Junkyards, abandoned resorts, shantytowns. Around “the ranch” was just desert—a tarantula-haunted, scorpion-infested, ugly brown dusty desert. Cactus and twisted little gray trees, and along the cracked, empty concrete highway the occasional rusty car pocked with bullet holes.

Not even a goddamn cantina around the ranch.

The ranch. An old therapeutic spa for bogus cancer cures, purchased by Witcher and converted for the NR.

Jerome-X sat in the air-conditioned, cinder-block lecture room in a wheelchair. That was what they had to sit in, old, motorless wheelchairs, with rusty spokes. They came with the ranch. “If you aren’t crippled before you sat in this thing,” he mumbled to Bones, “you will be afterward.”

Bones—gaunt, zombie-phlegmatic, ghetto-black Bones—shook his head at him once, smiling but reproachful. Meaning: Shut up and pay attention.

There were seven students, counting Jerome-X and the little girl, and there was the instructor, Bettina: a three-hundred-fifty-pound (Jerome’s chip calculated) black woman with Rasta’ed hair; she was close to six feet tall, sweating despite the air-conditioning, wearing a printout shift. It was a pink Tuffpaper dress, a cheap brand that used the same patterns for its line of paper towels. As the day wore on, her sweat would make the dress deteriorate, bit by bit, under her arms, crumbling its edges into little pink worms of synthetic paper-cloth.

The floor shuddered faintly as she strode back and forth in front of the holographic illustrator, tapping factors into place with her fingernail cursor, explicating the computer underground in her hoarse New Orleans drawl.

The holustrator had been an object of fascination for Jerome-X the first few days he was here. When it was turned on, it looked like an astrolabe of translucent neon lines, hovering in the air about six feet across. The 3D cursors moved about in the faintly reticulating globe like fireflies in geometric formation; formations that split into contrary asymmetries as luminous, floating numbers flickered by. “Computer viruses,” Bettina had explained that first day, “and yo’ so-called computer ‘tapeworms,’ were de pests of de end of de twentieth century . . . ”

And despite advances in decryption and the use of hard partitioning write-protects, the only thing that reliably resisted the predatory viral programs was the cybernetic immune system provided by parallel programming. The “clean” system of the secondary and tertiary computers interlinked with the primary mainframe to watch over the primary programs. “But—dere are ways: A smart enough virus can redirect de code traffic to fool de guardian computer. And if we git ourselves parallel progammed—lotta brain chips working together—we stand a better chancea outsmartin’ de guardian. We use de holustrator to practice dat cooperation. We learna be awarea one another as on-line processing factors . . . ”

They were here to improve their chip-to-chip communication for underground information dispersal. And for one other, more trenchant reason . . .

To learn to be human computer viruses . . .

It had all seemed very romantic at first, when Bones had pitched it at him. Bones, it turned out, was New Resistance. The NR was a brotherhood, Bones said, a brotherhood that transcended race and nationality. And it could be a refuge, too. After the jailbreak, Jerome needed a home. He was on the run. And even internally, Jerome felt homeless and fugitive. Seeing himself in cybernetic summary, with unwanted objectivity; seeing his own shallowness.

I’ve been jerking off all this time with video graf, he told himself. I’ve been playing with the toys of the ego.

The New Resistance was in line with his own political convictions, his mistrust of the Grid, the power structure. Like Bones, he was convinced that the Second Alliance’s attempt to take over the US wasn’t isolated. He’d heard too many stories through the hacker networks about the repression overseas. Like Bones, he believed that the New-Soviets had been pushed into their aggression, forced into World War Three, by the economic machinations of the multinationals. Big Business had wanted a conventional military confrontation and now it wanted a Fascist power structure in order to further roll back the threat of communism. Jerome was no enthusiast for communism, but he understood its provenance: the people at the bottom of the pyramid were tired of holding up the ones at the top. They wanted a fair share.

Bones’s offer had seemed like serendipity. Join the Resistance. Travel, meet interesting people, all expenses paid; try not to get yourself tortured and murdered by Fascists. Okay, there were drawbacks, the likelihood of getting killed was one of them, but . . .

But it had seemed like just what the doctor ordered then. Now it seemed like a trap.

He felt their hands on his brain in some sense, molding him. He felt himself molded into a tool for their political imperatives.

Maybe all that was just the perception of a man with cabin fever, he thought. Too many days in this room. Staring at the bare cinder-block walls, or into the headache-maker—the holustrator. Watching Bettina thunder back and forth, her enormous breasts tweaking his libido while her thick, collapsing ankles made him wince. But then, he’d always had this weird thing for, ah, heavyset girls . . .

Stop evaluating the woman on those levels, Jerome. Take another deep breath and give it a chance. Bones was a right guy . . .

Bettina was saying, “ . . . and Jerome, you focus on yo’ factor and work wid Alouette.”

Jerome-X sighed.

Bettina paused, turned to him. “You got a problem with dat, honey?”

“Uh-no.” But he did. The little girl, Alouette, was smart, some kind of genius and a natural with this stuff. But he knew her; she’d run off into playing with cellular automata and leave him holding the processing bag. He glanced at her and saw her pouting. Little kids don’t hide that stuff. “No, she’s good, but . . . ”

“She good but what?” Bettina asked. “Hell, she faster on de uptake den you are.”

“It’s just that . . . ” He glanced at Alouette. The little black girl, sitting with her feet dangling, looked as if she was going to cry. She was too damn young for this. How could they do this to her?

Most of the time, though, she loved working with chips. She seemed happy, except that she missed her dad. The one they called Smoke . . .

She was happier here than Jerome was. “It’s just that I’m burnt out, is what it is,” Jerome burst out. “I need a fucking break—” He glanced apologetically at the little girl. “I need to get out of here. I mean, for a day or—or something.”

Bettina checked the time blinking in a corner of the holustrator. “Shit. Dat’s it for today.” She tapped the foot switch with a toe, and the shimmering globe vanished. “We do dis set in de morning. I guess it time to break out de recreation. We got a video to show, and you can each hab two Tecates. Except Alouette.”

Alouette’s pout deepened. “I can’t see the video and drink beer?”

“No. You can hab a Dr Pepper. And you can get on de bus.” Bettina grinned at her. “Mario’s going take you to de Tijuana Sheraton to see a man.”

“Smoke! It’s Smoke!” The little girl flashed a smile like sun-washed seashells. “Can I take Richard?”

“Yeah, sho, what I care you take de crow.”

Alouette made an excited motion with her hands, as if she were patting down invisible dough. And then she sprinted through the door. .

There goes one of my classmates, Jerome thought. Gnarly.

“Go on now, alla you,” Bettina said.

Gratefully, Jerome got out of his desk, stretching. The others moved toward the door and he started to follow.

“Not you, Mr. Burnout,” Bettina said, blocking Jerome’s way. “I wanna talk to you.”

He groaned inwardly. Another ideological pep talk. As the last of the other NR students filtered out of the room—Bones glancing back with a funny, rueful expression on his face—Jerome said, “Hey, Bettina, I know what you’re going to say. I hear it every night from Bones. I got to either get my motivation together or get out.”

Bones closed the door behind him. Jerome was alone with Bettina.

“You got to get some shit in perspective.” She put her hands on her hips and took a step toward him. Like the rolling of a great soft wave, coming toward the beach. “You tired of twelve-hour days, workin’ every day, little holustrator headaches? You going to go up against a cybernetic mind got a computing capacity dat compares to you like Einstein to a Chihuahua. You wanta hack into de SA’s computers, some of de mos’ sophis’icated around, you got to be committed to work.”

“I know that, I just—”

“Besides which, who de hell you to complain?” She took another step toward him. He could smell her. Salty, meaty, sweaty, and female. Not unpleasant really, if a bit overwhelming. “Dere’s thousands of people under de fucking jackboot in Europe, women and children, sufferin’, starvin’. Dyin’.” She shook her head, came closer. He moved back.

“I wasn’t complaining. I was . . . well, making a suggestion, like. This is creative work. I do better creative work if I get a little, I don’t know, R and R and maybe some, uh . . . ”

She took another step toward him. He stepped back, looking into her big brown eyes. Trying not to think about her big brown . . .

He swallowed.

“Maybe some what?” she said. “Some pussy?”

“Uh . . . ”

“You think I don’t see you watching me?”

“Well, I . . . ”

She had him pressed against the wall now; she radiated heat: she was a pliant, dusky sun; her great, barely confined breasts were puddles of sensation on his chest. They seemed to suck at him. He could almost feel the gravitational pull of her mass: a delirious heaviness. He felt a rustling at his crotch; his erection, bent like a bean sprout in his pants, struggling to reach her nurturing warmth.

“Come here, skinny little white boy.”

She enfolded him then, and a few moments later there was the sound of paper ripping.

Kauai, Hawaii.

How long have they been with me now, Witcher asked himself, looking at Marion and Aria and Jeanne. Three years? Four? Something like that. He was becoming dependent on them. As he got older, he found it harder and harder when he had to go away from them. They were a tonic, as his father would have said.

Pretty girls pretty girls pretty girls with guns. Arrange them in the room like flowers in a vase.

They were in his bedroom at nine o’clock on a sunny, crystalline Hawaiian morning. They’d all slept in the bedroom, Witcher on his single bed with its lacquered mahogany backboard, the girls on the big, very big, round bed across from his. Where he could see them, if he woke in the night.

One wall, curtained with white silk now, was a mirror. The other held Witcher’s professional awards, citations and certificates, framed and mounted. He hadn’t received one in years, had become too reclusive for the bonhomie of the business world. Another wall held the doors to the walk-in closet, with the girls’ vanities lined up in them, their video mirrors, and the Jacuzzi.

The seafront side of the room was all silver-curtained glass doors; the doors were closed, but from somewhere he could smell the sea breeze.

Sometimes he felt a little guilty, in his comfort. But his foresight had made it possible. The western world was mired in war, the residue of war, and poverty; he had invested in the East. His money was all about China and SE Asia.

Aria was doing her calisthenics, wearing only her bikini panties. The tall, Amazonian fullness of her; the ripple of her exaggerated extreme-body-builder muscles; the Swedish gold of her hair, her skin. The gold-plated Walther autopistol strapped to her thigh put an edge on her erotic appeal. Those jiggling golden breasts; those deeply set jade-green eyes . . .

He was pleased she hadn’t taken off the weapon before doing her exercise. She knew he liked to see it shine beside the other shininess of her perspiration. (He did hope, though, that she showered soon. She also knew he disliked anyone getting their bodily effluents on the furniture.)

And Jeanne. Lying on the bed, on her tummy, nude but for the prescription dark-blue sunglasses, reading Bataille’s Historie de l’Oeil. Small, this creature, small-breasted and only five two, but full-hipped, softly dimpled all around. Straight, Cleopatra-cut raven hair, bangs over her tinted glasses like the fringe in a funeral limo’s window. She knew he sometimes liked to see her wearing only the blue glasses.

And her skin. He never tired of it. Alabaster, touched with rose pink here and there. Her black hardened-plastic carbine—plastic but quite real, quite lethal—leaning against the bed, within reach. Jeanne.

And Marion. Watching a rock TV show without the sound on. As usual. Half Puerto Rican. Short and busty. Heavy kohl on her brown-black eyes. Two little rings in one nostril, gold wire stitched up and down the edges of her ears. Short auburn hair, spiky, each spike tipped with a different color. Made him nostalgic for the college-circuit punk shows he’d gone to in his early twenties. Long time ago. All that shared and hopeless anger . . . Marion wearing a black neoprene bikini—amazing that she could sleep comfortably in that thing—and a black lace brassiere. You could see nipples through it the color of dried blood. Spike heels that looked as if they’d been carved of volcanic glass. Black painted finger- and toenails. She was, culturally if unconsciously, a part of her own little demographic tribe. Her submachine gun, one of those transparent jobs that showed off its bullets, lying across her knees, under her hands. Her hands reposing like black-beaked doves on it.

Sometimes he thought: Maybe I should do it. Actually make love to them. Physically do it. Maybe they’re disappointed I never actually do it. That I just like to have them there to look at, play with, pet a little.

Probably not. They were hired escort-bodyguards, expensive ones; courtesans who could fight and shoot. They were his own secret service and, in an austere way, his companions. They were professionals, and to them it would be just more work if he wanted to actually have sex with them.

He was having sex with them, after his fashion. Just watching them move about. Knowing that he could fuck them if he wanted to. They were available. Profoundly available. They were there for him, eternally waiting. Sometimes he made them strike poses. Spread their legs, torquing this way and that. Jut their bosoms, tease him with their expressions. Sometimes he put his face close to them, so close he could feel the body heat of the girl on his lips. Sometimes he’d put on the freshly laundered silk gloves and pet them a little. He’d order them to make love to one another; combine and recombine them as he watched from a chair by the bed. They were all bisexual. And he paid them breathtakingly well.

So they didn’t mind if he chose their clothing and their unclothing; their perfume and their bath soap; their makeup and their cold creams. Their lingerie and their weapons.

He was convinced that if he actually had sex with them, it would be a let-down. Any one of them, he didn’t doubt, was quite proficient. But the act itself had always been a disappointment to him. The excellence, the exquisite essence of sex, for Witcher, was in the contemplation of it. The anticipation. The almost. The allure. That was the high. His refinement of voyeurism was an esthetic achievement, really, an art form that he was proud of. Was he making them into objects? Sex objects? Partly. Making them into art objects, more truly, with his mind the gallery for his art. That’s how he felt about it. Arranging them around him like the parts of a living erotic collage.

But sometimes . . . he felt oppressed by their mocking nearness; near and yet far. Their availability and tenderness—but underneath it, they always maintained an emotional distance.

How could he expect anything else?

He couldn’t. And sometimes that depressed him.

It helped to get away from them for a while when he felt that way. As he was beginning to, now.

“I’m going to have breakfast in the main office,” he said. “Need to talk to old Lockett. He gets flustered when he sees you. You want your breakfast on the balcony?”

“Yes, please.” Jeanne didn’t took up from her book.

“Thanks, Dad,” Aria said, as she did her t’ai chi.

“That’s be great, Dad.” Marion absently reached over, toyed with Jeanne’s ass.

They called him Dad, and he encouraged it. He wasn’t sure why.

“I’ll have it sent down. Then take a patrol around, check out the grounds, will you?”

“Sure thing, Dad.”

“You got it, Dad.”

“We got it covered, Dad.”

Witcher’s isolated beachfront estate on the Hawaiian island of Kauai was watched over by a dizzying variety of reconnaissance devices; by satellites and motion-assessment cyber-eyes; by vibration sensors and overflight recon birds; by a variety of cameras and human guards. Aria, Jeanne, and Marion were just three of fourteen bodyguards.

But it was Witcher who saw the thing first, just looking out his window.

“It can’t go on,” Witcher’s accountant was telling him, shortly before Witcher saw it. “It simply can’t go on!” Mincing through the sentence. Lockett—who was on a video display, his image sat-shot from New York—pursed his lips in his prissy way, and as usual Witcher thought of Lockett’s closing lips as the shutting of a clutch purse. “Your capital outlay is just not matched in the—”

“There are other issues here besides financial convenience,” Witcher said. He was standing at his breakfast bar, picking at the remains of his morning’s organically grown fruit salad, gazing absently out the window as he talked to Lockett. The sea was restless today. Thin clouds skied ahead of the wind, and below the clouds a single aircraft flecked the azure. “The NR is an important step in the direction that I . . . ”

Witcher’s voice trailed off.

The aircraft had birthed something out of itself. It was too far away to make it out clearly. But it was growing . . .

“Jesus!”

He ran for the hurricane cellar.

“Now, look . . . ” Lockett was saying from the monitor behind him. “You can’t pretend it’s going to go away . . . this kind of debt . . . ”

The voice diminishing, lost as Witcher half dove, half ran down the steps—then grabbed at the railing as the world roared and the building rocked around him.

A missile. He couldn’t believe it. How dare they.

He watched a crack make its way across the concrete basement wall ever so slowly. Crick. Crick-crick. He waited for the building to come down around him.

But the crack stopped spreading; the building quieted down. Whatever was left of it was going to stand.

Slowly, on wobbly legs, he climbed the stairs, into smoke and shouting, flickering light. A few shards of glass tinkled from the crust remaining in the frame of the picture window. Flame licked down the hallway; gray smoke collected under the cracked ceiling. The monitors were blacked out; two of them cracked, one caved in.

Maynard, his new chief of Security, a whip-thin black man in a sky-blue jumpsuit, came in wearing a gas mask but coughing underneath it. Witcher felt his spine freeze, and asked, “Did they nerve-gas us?”

Maynard shook his head. “No, I’m wearin’ the mask against smoke.” He pulled it off, and his face was sheathed in blood from a cut on his forehead. He was gasping, leaning against the tilted breakfast bar. “You okay, Mr. Witcher?” When Witcher nodded, Maynard went on. “There were two more missiles, but we got those, they went down in the ocean. The one that got through hit the sun veranda, took out the whole south wing. The aircraft is gone. We didn’t get a clear make on it. We’d better get you out of here.”

“You’d better run a check for antigens, especially viral agents.”

Maynard looked around nervously. “Germ warfare?”

“Chances are slim, but check.” They wouldn’t have used one of the viruses; they wouldn’t want to tip anyone off about them. They didn’t know the New Resistance was aware of their viral program; and they didn’t know about Witcher’s contact in their lab. At least, last he knew they didn’t . . .

Witcher had to wet his mouth, working up saliva, before he could talk. “Anybody hurt?”

“Your whole kitchen staff. Most of them dead.”

Witcher shook his head impatiently. “I mean the girls.”

“They’re okay, they were out on the grounds, on the other side. They’re checking the fences now.”

“Okay. Get on the fone in the limo, get some paramedics out here, then get the chopper warmed up. We’ll risk the sky. I want out of here fast.”

“Where to?”

Witcher hesitated. The Second Alliance was behind the attack, of course. They had decided to take the offensive. They were tired of playing with his intermediaries. His funding was the lifeblood of the resistance. They were trying to slash the artery.

He had to get way out of range.

“Book me on a shuttle to FirStep. ”

Maynard blinked. “The Space Colony? Seriously?”

“Seriously. Have the girls go to my suite in The Waikiki till I send for them. Tell Russ Parker I’m coming out. And get yourself bandaged up. See a doctor when he comes.”

Maynard turned to go.

Witcher called after him. “Maynard—make that shuttle ticket a one-way.”

Just west of London, England. Lab Six.

It had taken Barrabas all morning and half the afternoon to get clearance for Lab Six. Interrogation, extractor mind searches, more psych profiles, sheer bureaucratic suspicion. He was afraid they might have stumbled onto his misgivings about the Second Alliance, his dislike of the boy Jebediah, and his mistrust of their reverence for aristocracy. But they hadn’t followed up the right chains of associations, it looked like, because here he was at last, walking into Lab Six with the albino.

“It’s such a relief to be back in England after Paris,” Cooper was saying. “You can’t get a proper biscuit there, and they have no understanding of heated housing.”

“Oh, yes?” Barrabas said, thinking he was expected to say something. He was tired from all the interrogation, from trying to defend himself without being defensive. It was like balancing on a narrow tree limb in a wind.

Both men were wearing white lab jumpsuits. They walked down a hallway done in dull-green tile and soft lights, with a temperature so exactingly controlled you never felt even a fractional change in temperature from the mean. Cooper, with his one pink eye and one blue eye, his dead-white skin and wispy thatch of white hair, had startled Barrabas when he’d first seen him. Naturally Barrabas had tried to conceal that reaction.

“I understand that you, ah, were slated for another kind of work for the Alliance,” Cooper said, superficially apologetic. “But the war, you see, has created a shortage of available technicians. We have to make do . . . ”

Make do? Insulting, that was. But Barrabas shrugged it off as Cooper unlocked the double locks of the editing room.

“All this security is so tiresome,” Cooper said. “It really is an impediment, don’t you know.”

Digital editing equipment, white plastic consoles, and chromium interfaces filled most of the small editing room. A wall-size video screen stood beyond it. “Here’s your workstation,” Cooper was saying. “If some of the equipment is unfamiliar, we’ll try to get hold of the appropriate manuals.”

“I know the main unit here, but this other stuff . . . ” Barrabas shook his head. “It’s like I tried to tell them, I had a year of video tech voccie and I worked about two weeks at VidEx before they went belly-up. I’m not real experience—”

“Oh, we’ll soon get you up to form. I’ve been doing some amateur editing myself, and I can operate the main unit. Some of the other stuff is a bit, ah, arcane . . . ” He activated the machinery as he spoke, tapped rewind. “I was just going over the recordings when they called and said you were here, so we’ve got wizard timing, anyhow. We’re really not supposed to leave this material in the machines when we’re out of the room, but I locked it up and, ah, I only popped out for a few minutes. I doubt we’ve been infiltrated by spies in the last five minutes, eh? But Klaus and Colonel Watson aren’t much interested in common sense . . . Ah, here we are.”

He hit the play button and the screen rezzed up a slightly blurry image of the detention pens in the experimental center near Lyon. It was a down angle on three pens of wretched-looking prisoners, divided up along racial lines. Brown, black, white. “I suppose you’ve been briefed?” Cooper asked. “As to my, ah, work, I mean.”

“Well, no, not really. That is, a little. Psychological warfare against mongrel terrorists, they said.”

“Yes, ah, something along those lines. Amongst other things. I’m a social geneticist, you see. In this experiment we’re attempting to prove that racism is instinctive—not so we can tell the world, but so we can activate the instinct where needed and bring people around to our, ah, cause, don’t you know. Here we used increased survival-stress factors to promote racism between the three groups . . . I enjoy using the fast forward here.” He chuckled. “Watch.” He hit the button, and the video fast forwarded through several days of prisoner millings and interaction, so that the figures, seen from above, surged around and betwixt one another like beans in boiling water; whirling together, bouncing apart, a feverish human Brownian motion. “If you watch closely, you can see the pattern superseding over time, a kind of rhythmic surge, back and forth, between the pens, as they move in slow waves of aggression that gradually build up till we remove the barriers and they come together in Secondary Aggression—an outbreak of violence.” He slowed the images down so they could see the detainees in combat, race against race, maiming one another with teeth and fists and feet.

Barrabas’s stomach lurched. Be a man, he told himself.

“Of course,” Cooper went on, “these racist instincts are usually well under control in most people—it’s possible to condition them out entirely. And some people are resistant to them—they may lack that particular behavioral gene. You can see some of them hanging back.”

“What’s my part in all this?” Barrabas asked.

“You’ll be editing this recording with me, and some others, for presentation to the Inner Council. And to certain select individuals. Also, you’ll be helping me review video—we have some prisoners we regard as salvageable, if they’re racially appropriate. We check through the vid for the right bone matrices, the other indicators. A winnowing process, don’t you know . . . ” He was switching feeds, going to another vid.

Barrabas watched with mounting discomfort as Cooper showed him studies of “degenerative behavior in Detention Center prisoners”; the “degrees of resistance and the submission points, in reference and contrast” as Jewish and black and Oriental and homosexual prisoners were tortured (one of those made him gag, something Cooper ignored—Cooper understood the need for workplace acclimatization) using techniques developed by the CIA and perfected by Chilean and Guatemalan secret police; experiments in “efficiency-execution of prisoners”; nerve-gas tests on prisoners; experiments in mind control on children separated from their parents under enhanced-trauma conditions and “undergoing behavioral reprogramming with negative/positive stimulus.” And then the last recording . . . of the squirming pink things.

“Blimey!” Barrabas burst out. Backsliding to old speech mannerisms in his shock. “What the bloody ’ell!”

Cooper was shaken himself, for, a different reason. “Not supposed to be on here. You weren’t supposed to . . . ” His finger hovered over the off button. But then he shrugged and drew his hand back. “Well, you’ve, ah, seen them. You’ll have to see them eventually anyway, although we’d planned to do some further extractor work with you—we can always erase your memories later, I suppose.”

On the screen were half a dozen semi-human creatures. Squirming, wheezing, hairless pink things, rather like shaven puppies standing on their hind legs. But with flattened, slightly warped human features. They had hands too big for their arms, double-length fingers, receding foreheads—the skulls of chimps behind human faces—and shrunken human genitals. No nipples. They were a bit bigger than German shepherd puppies. As Barrabas watched, one of them defecated on itself, then scooped the stuff up in its fingers and smeared it on another creature’s back in a spiral pattern . . .

“These are our darling little subhumans,” Cooper was saying. “S-Human 6. Our sixth generation. I call them Puppies. People Puppies. They are rather like puppies, aren’t they?”

“What are they?”

“The work force of the future. Or, anyway, an early model of it. A prototype. They’re genetically engineered for certain characteristics . . . We’ve not got all the kinks out of the old DNA spiral, as you can see, but we’re working on it, coming along nicely. These are rather stunted, it’s true. Once the mongrel races and the otherbloods are eliminated, these subhumans will be needed to fill a certain, ah, economic niche. In a way they’re idiot savants—they’re animal-stupid on one level, bred to be entirely obedient, but on another they’re capable of being trained to do some kinds of skilled labor, like bricklaying, assembly-line work, plastic molding, garbage reclamation, even electrical work. They’re too mentally handicapped and passive to ever cause us any trouble. They can understand language up to a point, enough to take orders—but they can’t use language. They’re almost living robots. These, now, are rather stunted. They tend to die young, and they have faulty lungs, but they have a good attention span for instructions when they’re motivated with an electric prod. By the seventh or eighth generation—available in about three years, we hope—the subhumans will be workable. And one day the world will be divided between the Ideal Race and the Subhumans. There will be no other races. And this lot will never be capable of rebellion—not a bit. They’re marvelous, really, don’t you think?” Cooper turned to look at him.

Barrabas marshaled all his self-control and parrotted, in a rasp, “Marvelous.” He cleared his throat. “Um—will I be . . . working with them . . . in person?”

“Oh, but of course!” Cooper said cheerily, hitting the fast forward button. “Now that you’ve seen them.” The squirming pink things scurried around their filthy little pen like hyperactive maggots on legs.

Barrabas stared at the screen and took deep breaths, and after a while thought, Okay. I can go through with this.

But deep down, he wasn’t so sure.

FirStep, the Space Colony. Interplanetary space.

From the outside, the six-mile-long Colony looked like a cylinder that had swallowed something too big to digest . . . The bulge at its middle was a Bernal sphere, itself a mile and a half in diameter. The concave interior of the sphere was to have been the main inhabitable area of the Colony. It was Pellucidar, the Hollow Earth: the landscape stretched away to an inside-out horizon, curving up when it should have curved down. The colony’s cylinder was pointed toward the sun, and reflected sunlight glowed from filtered, circular windows at the sunward end . . . The colony rotated once every five minutes, creating a subtle centrifugal artificial gravity for the thousands of people who lived in it, working at refining ore brought from the asteroids; working in the lowgrav areas on lowgrav specialty products; working on finishing the floating city in space—though it was a vast artifact designed to be never quite finished . . .

Claire Rimpler knew that something was wrong with Witcher when she shook hands with him. She could feel the telltale rubberiness of a sheath on his hand: a sort of condom for the hand, much tighter than gloves, nearly invisible, difficult to feel. And even with the sheath, he drew his hand back faster than was quite civil.

They stood in the Colony Administration conference room, beside a wall-size videoscreen and a table shaped like a backward S, making small talk as they waited for Russ Parker—actually, they were sizing one another up.

Witcher looked about forty, but he was much older; he had the slightly glossy look of a man who used cosmetic surgeons and glandularists, enzymologists, RNA retoolers to slow the aging process. He’d allowed a little silver into his long, neatly clipped brown hair and his small, geometrically perfect beard. He was a compact man in what looked like an astronomically expensive tailored suit of soft maroon leather.

Claire Rimpler was not quite diminutive, but nearly; she had, large, hazel eyes, short auburn hair, lips a little too large for her doll-like face. It was an appearance that might have made her seem a soft person, someone of negligible force—but she came across as the opposite. What I heard was, she’s no kill-virgin, someone had said when she’d come back to the Colony to take over the administrative reins; she had killed, and seen killing, seen enough to fill the lives of three generals, in the service of the New Resistance; her father, who had designed and run the Space Colony, had been first murdered and then cerebrally violated, portions of his brain used to interface with a colony computer, until the disastrous consequences.

Claire had left her lover, according to Witcher’s files on her—an NR operative whom Witcher knew slightly, Dan Torrence—left him back on Earth, to come here and take charge. And she was smart as a whip.

And much of that hard past, that lethal competency, was subtly present in her body language and her expression.

But when she smiled, you heard wind chimes.

She smiled at Witcher now and said, “It must be a comedown, your quarters, after what you’re used to. When Russ came back from your place on Kauai, he had palm trees in his eyes.”

“It’s kind of comforting here, actually, the smaller rooms,” Witcher said. “After someone has fired a missile at your house, you want to go to ground.” Adding distractedly, “And I’m close in where the gravity is light; it’s refreshing.” He was looking at the door as Russ Parker came in. Behind Russ came Lester and Stoner and Chu.

I was right about Witcher, Claire thought, watching him. The man was some variation of paranoid. It was like sitting with your back to the wall, being here, for Witcher. He doesn’t know how fragile the place really is . . .

Russ Parker was a stocky, red-faced middle-aged guy wearing real blue jeans and a blue printout shirt. It was gauche, supposedly, to mix printout and cloth clothing, but it was like Russ to be oblivious to that.

Lester, the technicki rep, sat at the table with Stoner and Chu, talking softly. He was a large man, black as the space between stars, wearing a comm tech’s gray zippered jumpsuit. His wife, Kitty, was a nondescript white woman who turned out to have enormous wellsprings of character. Chu, the brisk, intense Chinese woman who was now administrative secretary, was an NR organizer who had found out that Kitty was Dan’s sister: Dan Torrence’s sister! The coincidence was a little eerie. But maybe not so strange, really. In her way, Kitty was a fighter. She had fought for Lester. She had fought for her baby. She had fought for Russ Parker’s conscience, and she’d won it.

And Dan, as of a few weeks now, was an uncle. She’d have to get word to him somehow, she reflected, as they all sat down. Dan needed cheering up. But it was hard to get word into Paris. There was a Mossad line of communication that could be used sometimes. Witcher could set it up for her perhaps.

Claire ached to talk to Daniel “Hard-Eyes” Torrence. Every morning, charging into her workday, she told herself she should forget him, let her feelings for him die on the vine. He was a guerrilla in a hotbed of fascism. It was like being an active resistance partisan in Hitler’s Berlin. His chances for survival—especially with extractors around to help ferret him out—were microscopic. She’d probably never see him again. Thinking about him, worrying about him, took her out of focus here.

So every morning it was, Today I forget about him.

But at night she curled up, fetuslike, around an ache shaped like his name.

She felt not only lonely for him, but guilty for having left him to take this job. She’d been the only one he could open up to. Without her, he had to stay in that hard shell all the time. Emotionally claustrophobic . . .

Unless he had already found someone else. There were other women in the resistance—and New Resistance women didn’t waste any time; they went after what they wanted.

Chu broke into Claire’s thoughts as she read the minutes of the last meeting, then went directly to the major topic for this one. “Security. Mr. Witcher has some concerns.”

“We’ve all got some concerns in that direction, I think,” Stoner said. He was a paunchy, wide-shouldered man with thinning grease-slicked hair and a face that was bland except for bright blue eyes. He wore an antique cowboy shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps and cowboy boots. He’d had to flee the CIA when the agency’s racist collaboration with the SA had “stuck in his craw.” Stoner and Russ Parker had hit it off despite some fundamental contrasts. Parker was a Christian and Stoner wasn’t; Stoner was a family man, come here with his black wife and child, and Parker was a longtime bachelor; Stoner was a northerner and Parker a southerner. But both were older men with a nostalgia for the middle twentieth century, and the somewhat mythical values of the American West.

And both of them had turned their lives upside down for the sake of conscience. Russ Parker had left the employ of the SA, staged a successful mutiny that had overthrown the Fascists who had wormed into power at the colony; Parker’s coup had become an administrative fait accompli. UNIC—the United Nations Industrial Council, a multigovernmental consortium that oversaw the Colony from Earth—accepted the unauthorized transfer of power. The Colony coup coincided with the discrediting of the Second Alliance International Security Corporation in the United States. UNIC perceived it was saved some political embarrassment. Parker had kept the putsch quiet.

“I’ve been debriefing Percy Witcher here,” Stoner was saying, “and it appears that there’s been a recent attempt on his life.” He went on to outline the missile attack on Witcher’s Kauai stronghold.

Chu said, “I don’t wish to seem inhospitable, but . . . the Colony is in some respects a fragile thing. If they want to get to him badly enough, they might be willing to sacrifice the Colony’s inhabitants.” She shrugged. “They’re willing to exterminate half of Europe if we let them. Why not the few thousand we have here?”

Russ pointed out, “Mr. Witcher is a major Colony stockholder, as of just about one month ago today, and without him the New Resistance just would not have gotten a single foothold. He’s been protecting us, and to me it’s pretty damn obvious it’s the good Lord’s will that we reciprocate.” His faint Texas accent was charming, Claire thought, but the reference to his Christianity embarrassed her. Primitive stuff.

Claire said, “The Second Alliance is well aware that the Colony is resistance-sympathetic now. We’re their target either way, I’m sure.”

“Anyway, I don’t think they’ve made him here,” Stoner said. “He covered his tracks pretty well. Used fake ID, arranged decoy ‘appearances’ in New York while he was at the launch site in Florida . . . ”

“I’ve got confirmation about an hour ago: they’re still looking for me in New York and Boston,” Witcher said. “They don’t know I’m here.”

“They will find out,” Chu said. “But it is true: we are quite possibly targets anyway.”

“The Colony is not a balloon,” Claire pointed out. “If you puncture it in one spot, it won’t all burst. My father built it with section integrity, so that if one section loses air pressure or becomes a danger in some other way, it’s sealed off. It would take a large nuclear device to really devastate the Colony. It could be crippled, though, in other ways—if someone hacks into the life-support system.” She paused, feeling a tug as she remembered the strange, posthumous sabotage her father had wreaked on the Colony. The others knew what she must be thinking about, and respectfully said nothing till she cleared her throat and went on. “It’s expensive, attacking us up here—from the outside.”

Stoner nodded sharply at the implication. “You got it. What we got to worry about is internal. The SA wants to get us, it’ll be from the inside.”

“What you need,” Witcher said flatly, “is a freeze in hiring. For starts.”

“That suits the union,” Lester said. “Except in external repairs—they’re shorthanded, after the RM17 thing . . . ”

“They’ll have to make do,” Parker said. “We can’t risk bringing in anyone new right now.”

“How many have you brought into the Colony in the last month?” Witcher asked.

“Maybe a dozen,” Claire said.

“How about tourists?”

“We aren’t letting them through yet, till we’ve finished repairs.”

“I recommend you don’t let them through at all until the SA problem is . . . resolved.”

Lester blinked. “T’ers!”

Witcher grimaced with impatience. “I really don’t speak Technicki.”

“Sorry. I said, it’1l take years!”

Witcher shrugged. “It’s the only safe course. And not just safer for me.”

“I reluctantly have to agree,” Stoner said. “No tourists—no stopover people . . . ”

Claire shook her head. “It’s not realistic. We can’t control who the Lunar Mining Corporation hires. And their people have to stop in here when they make the trip.”

“Then we’ll have them interrogated, and watched.” He hesitated, looking at Witcher. “Extractors might—”

“No!” Claire snapped, hitting the table with the palm of her hand. “Those things are the tools of fascism.”

“Both sides use them,” Witcher said.

“It doesn’t matter! The NR shouldn’t use them! It’s inviting fascism when the Resistance uses them! It’s laying the groundwork for a future fascism. It’s just wrong for any government to have access to a machine that can . . . can violate your inner thoughts, your memories! The right to privacy is the right to freedom, my dad used to say. Extractors ought to be outlawed everywhere.”

“They might be usefully employed by psychologists,” Chu suggested tentatively.

“Psychologists will just have to get by without them, if it’s up to me. No, I won’t have them. I’ll resign—”

“Whoa, slow down, honey,” Russ said hastily. “No one’s put in an order for an extractor.”

Claire had been doing an awe-inspiring job as administrator; no one wanted to lose her. She’d facilitated rapid repairs on the damage done to the Colony during the rebellion. She’d smoothed the transition to a redress of the balance of power so that technickis, the Colony’s working class, were able to move up without much resistance from the Admin minority. She was a general and a politician both.

“Then we’ll do it with camera surveillance and maybe a buddy system on visitors,” Stoner said. “But we have to do it.”

“Fine,” Claire said, telling herself to cool down. “You and Russ work up a brief on that for me.” Witcher was scowling now, she noticed. He wanted extractors. Maybe he wouldn’t be happy till he was on the Colony alone.

Chu went on to the next item, pay raises and improved housing for technickis.

Lester leaned forward. “Admin is falling behind on the timetable for reform.”

“We just haven’t got the resources to raise pay any further,” Claire said. “We’re cutting Admin paychecks considerably, as it is, in order to be able to afford—”

“Administrative positions are easier in some ways, and should not rate a better pay—” Lester began.

“Lester, I realize that you and Chu are ‘Reds.’ ” She used the slang term without denigration, saying it almost affectionately, the way an outsider would refer to the Amish. “But we are not all painted with the same brush here. I am just not a socialist. I believe that you need an incentive system for people to work hard.”

“When was the last time since the overthrow that you promoted a technicki?” His face had gone stony.

“There haven’t been any posts open. Be reasonable. It’s only been a short time. Trust us for a year, okay? Housing is improved—we have technickis moving into the Open almost every week.”

“But there is still a predominance of Admin people living in luxury in the Open housing projects—”

“I can’t just evict those people. The damage to morale . . . those people have children.”

“So do technicki families.”

He might have said, So do I. Claire admired Lester because he’d refused to move into a house offered him in the Open though she knew he longed for his wife and child to have a comfortable home. He wouldn’t go “till all technickis have decent housing.”

“We’re building, Lester, as fast as we can. There’s an ecological balance in the Colony’s parklands, and there are quality-of-life considerations—we don’t want to overdevelop. We’re building as much as we can, and we’re going to build a new section onto the Colony this year.” He opened his mouth to object again, and she broke in, “I’ll tell you what—I’ll meet with the union personally, offer them a better timetable for reform, and we’ll vote on it, set up a two-year schedule. It’s what we should have done anyway. We’ll find the middle ground.”

Lester held the hardness in his expression for two more beats. And then let it soften into a sardonic smile. “I guess I just been finessed. But okay.”

“I didn’t finesse you, Lester. You’ll see.” She turned to Chu. “Anything else pressing? I’ve got to get to the Comm center.”

“Nothing else.”

“Class dismissed!” Claire said, standing.

She hurried, out, feeling she couldn’t wait any longer: she had to contact Dan. Thoughts of Dan Torrence had distracted her too often. She needed to discharge them in some way so she could concentrate on her work.

Stoner caught up with her at the elevator, stepped on with her. “Hey,” he said when the doors closed. “You going to message Haifa?” Meaning their Mossad contacts in Israel: the message conduit to the New Resistance in Europe.

She nodded, and he handed her a datastick. “I was going to get permission from you for a message—could you transmit that for me and then erase it? And listen—before you scramble it, read it when it comes up on the screen. I thought maybe you should know my thoughts . . . No real emergency, but—I wanted to keep you up to speed.”

“Sure, okay. But what’s it about?”

“Just . . . read it. The whole thing.”

He got out at the next floor. Thoughtfully, she watched him go. He had seemed to be saying something more than he was saying out loud.

In the Comm Center, she booted up the message file Stoner had given her and read it. Intelligence reports, none of it really arresting. But at the end, she found what he’d been talking about; something earmarked for Smoke and Steinfeld:

Witcher keeps popping up with blank spots. He’s covering something from me, and being pretty cagey about it. It’s nothing I can call him on. I don’t think it’s any kind of special relationship with the other side. His hostility for the SA is almost pathological. But some of his own operations (including Orange County Research operations) are still opaque to me. Also, he says things that worry me. I quote verbatim: “The trouble with the world is there are too many people on it to manage. It could be a utopia, it really could, a place of racial harmony, all the races living in peace and complete equality, if there were only, say, a few million people to administer . . . ” The guy means: a few million people on the whole damn planet. I don’t know, maybe it’s just paranoia on my part. Maybe it’s nothing . . .

• 05 •

Paris. Processing Center 13.

“So, where’s Steinfeld?” Roseland asked.

“He’s in Egypt, trying to get us some backup,” Dan Torrence said.

“He’s not going to be here for this?” Roseland said. “Christ!”

“ ‘Christ’? Some Jew you are.”

“Okay, okay: Moses! You happy? Me, I’m not so happy, I mean, this is delicate, isn’t it? It’s not that I don’t trust you to—I—” Roseland fumbled for words.

“I know what you mean. I wish he was here too. We’ll do all right, man.”

They were crouched in the rooftop blind, close but not too close to the high-rise concentration camp, watching the skyline, ready to give the signal to the others. It was a warm, gently breezy night. Paper trash scraped and fluttered on the rooftop outside.

Some Jew you are, Torrence had said. His idea of a joke. Not a racist joke, just a weak one. Roseland’s own sense of humor had only started to come back to him in the last week. You needed strength to make jokes. Torrence seemed to feel a little threatened by Roseland’s humor, felt he had to contribute from time to time. An uncle of Roseland’s, old Dave Meyers, used to say, “People without a sense of humor shouldn’t try to be funny.” And it was true of Torrence. Not much of a sense of humor. But you didn’t tell “Hard-Eyes” things like that . . .

Anything, apparently, to avoid thinking about what was coming. Roseland dreaded it. Dreaded going to PC 13. Dreaded seeing the blood of the innocent mixed with the blood of the guilty.

Just do it, he told himself. Just do the job.

Torrence was looking fixedly through the slat. Roseland saw him tense; or sensed it somehow, in the dark. Heard him speak into the headset. “That’s it, it’s the change of the guard. Tourists, take your pictures.”

There was a staticky snip of reply, and then Torrence’s gun clattered against his gear as he moved out the back way. Roseland followed, his own rifle on its strap across his back, and in minutes they were climbing out through the first-floor window, into the little, narrow street behind the building where the others in the first assault team waited.

Pasolini was there, and Musa and Jiddah, and a French woman, Bibisch: a pale, lanky, long-faced woman who almost never spoke, but cared for her submachine gun lovingly. And others Roseland hadn’t got to know much yet. There was a moment when they clustered on the corner, in the light from the full moon; they stood next to the window of a deserted butcher’s shop, waiting for Torrence, who conferred with other assault teams on the headset. And in that moment Roseland found himself looking at his own reflection in the glass of the shop. Roseland had been eating modestly but regularly, and his face had filled out some; usually he looked almost healthy but not in this reflection. In the muted light, his reflection in the dark glass was hollow-eyed, cadaverous, his face a thing of shadows and sallow planes. As if he were looking out from the dimension where dead things dwell, he thought. The way he’d looked in the concentration camp they’d called a processing center.

He stared at himself, thinking: That’s me inside.

He’d always had a deep empathy for children. And he remembered, when there were children in the Processing Center, how they had died of dysentery and cholera and malnutrition, shaking from spasms of endless diarrhea, puking when there was nothing left to puke, feverishly pleading for water; the dull anguish on the parents’ faces when they gave up trying to explain about the water ration; when they had to accept: I cannot help my child. I cannot even comfort the child.

Someone had been shot one morning for giving away their own water ration; for no particular reason, giving away your ration was forbidden. And the children, dying slowly, had begged, as their parents hugged and rocked them, and one of the guards had become annoyed and shouted, “Shut that brat up or I’ll feed ’er me boot!”

Roseland had seen what was happening that day in the Processing Center, and hadn’t the strength, then, to fight. Couldn’t say a word.

Maybe that was when his insides had shriveled to match his outsides.

He thought these things, staring at his sunken-eyed reflection, until Torrence said, “Here it comes. Let’s do it.”

Here it comes but still a ways off, between the buildings, the clean-edged, cold, crystallized steel arc of the hijacked Jægernaut, slicing up through the skyline. The distant, ringing thunder of its approach, coming through areas already war-ruined, or condemned.

They were in the prearranged positions in seconds, Musa and Jiddah and Bibisch and Roseland under Pasolini’s command; Musa with his RPG; Torrence rendezvousing with a second group taking out the guards.

Torrence came out of one alley down the street, while a third team on a rooftop opened up on the guards with armor-piercing explosive rounds. The cluster of guards meeting for the change in shift had the new kevlar-7 armor, more resistant than the old SA bull outfitting, and the rounds tended to explode on the armor or on the ground near them, with little effect; but one high velocity round hit at just the right angle and penetrated the armor. The guard fell writhing while his armor ballooned with blood. The others were staggering with the small explosions, trying to bring their rifles into play, the so-called “smart” rifles, computer-enhanced, except they were stupid because you had to perform two steps, accessing the firing chip and rangefinder, to get them to fire, and by then Torrence was on them with three others, tossing the explosive disks at them . . . one of the disks deflecting, the other two sucking flat on the armor and blowing. The NR to Torrence’s right going down, spinning, cut in half by a burst from a guard who finally convinced his smart rifle to defend him . . .

Roseland only glimpsed this in fits and snatches as he steadied Musa’s RPG-8 and stepped out of the way. Musa had brought three of the vintage twentieth-century rocket-firing weapons with him when he’d slipped into Paris, and a small truckload of rounds: a masterful stage-magicking act of smuggling. A survival skill handed down through generations of Mujahedin.

The RPG hissed exhaust from its vents, and the rocket went shuh-shuh-shuh directly to the third-floor window. Roseland prayed it was the right window. The rocket punched through the plaster and fiberboard patch over the window, detonating, obscuring the socket with a fireball—

Almost simultaneously another guerrilla RPG on the roof ripped the security-camera-and-machine-gun system to shreds—

The horizon’s battle-ax thundered closer—

The last of the outer guards went down, blown in half, his screaming amplified by his helmet PA system to echo around the street—

(There are men inside those mirror fishbowls, Roseland thought.)

A guard stumbled out of the front door of Processing Center 13, missing his helmet, coughing in the smoke that billowed after him, his face charred, but firing at them, bullets strafing up the street until Pasolini cut him down with a short, neat burst that punched his face into his skull.

Roseland couldn’t move.

You’re Point Cadre, he told himself. Go! But the monolithic bulk of the converted high-rise seemed to lean forward, as if poising to fall on him, to scoop him into itself, like some gigantic shell-creature eating a worm. How could he have come back here?

He looked at the tumbled ruins of 12, thought he could just make out a human skull and a yellowing, skeletal hand emerging from beneath the massive pinch of a boulder. Whose body?

Gabrielle’s, bulldozed there?

Pasolini kicked him in the tailbone. It hurt like a bitch, like the bitch she was, Roseland thought, but it was a blow that could have come from the other, angry part of him, personified.

“Get moving, asshole!” she shouted, saying what he was saying to himself.

And he remembered Father Lespere telling them earnestly, “All of us are already dead. That is what you must accept, and then you can begin to do the work.”

Jamais plus. Never again!

The dam burst and the rage poured through, carrying him with it, his rifle spitting fire and metal at the second guard staggering from the door. The bull’s armor deflected the bullets, sparking, but the firepower’s impact knocking him backward. Roseland was running at him, firing again, screaming something (What? Maybe it should have been: “Never again!” But it wasn’t. It was: “Die, you ASSSSSSHOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLESSSSSSSSS!”) as the guy got to his feet, only to be knocked back again by Roseland’s next burst. But still the guy got up, almost literally wading upstream against Roseland’s gunfire. And then Roseland’s clip gave out and his assault rifle lapsed into sheepish silence and the guy was firing back . . .

Pasolini shoved past Roseland, tossing a grenade, everyone flattening except the guard who reacted too slowly, the explosive flipping him through the air so that blood made a spiral against the wall behind him.

Roseland: Up and plunging into the building, running up the stairs, not allowing himself to think, not even stopping to reload (aware that Pasolini was yelling at him, cursing him in a mix of Italian and English), climbing over the body of a guard dying under a heap of imploded masonry. The guard’s crushed body giving a little under the slab that Roseland clambered over; the guard screaming with pain—

Then Roseland was past, kicking down the door, and there they were.

They were being punished.

Outside, Dan Torrence issued commands, sending guerillas into the building to begin evacuating prisoners as the articulated truck Musa had stolen that morning backed up to the door. Torrence moved across the courtyard, checking the blockades, moving from one to the next as they were set up: stolen cars blocking the street.

Behind him, Pasolini dispatched the wounded enemy. Torrence had given her the job because she’d argued for the necessity of it the night before. Torrence had argued that wounded men are a burden on the enemy; leave their wounded alive and you slow them down and force them to use resources and time and personnel. But Pasolini pointed out the SA Army was relatively small and most of them were racist fanatics. A greater advantage was had in reducing their numbers than in inconveniencing them. If these wounded recovered, they were a political and military resource for the enemy.

But killing the enemy wounded is not a sound political move, Torrence had said.

Oh, but it is, Pasolini said. It underlines our commitment. We’re more a force to be reckoned with . . .

She’d persuaded Steinfeld, and now it was done. Sometimes Torrence wondered if they hadn’t skirted the real issue: that he simply wanted to spare lives, and nursed some guilt over the act of killing; whereas Pasolini enjoyed killing.

Crack: a shrieking soldier silenced.

More gunfire now, on the perimeter of the little square, as the vehicles the guerrillas had driven up to block the street came under fire from advancing SA. There were only about a dozen Second Alliance, so far. They were containable: Torrence’s backup team were holding them back with rifle-launched grenades and firebombs.

The greater threat was from the north: Second Alliance reinforcements in large numbers were moving in with armored cars, maybe only blocks away.

But the Jægernaut was there: he felt the ground shudder under him, glimpsed a gargantuan shifting, as if a tower of steel were stretching itself after a long hibernation. Voices in his headset: “Swineherd, we’re making contact with the trotters.” The Jægernaut hijack unit was moving the gargantuan machine into place.

What potential power there was in controlling a Jægernaut, Torrence thought . . .

He noticed Roseland running from building 13, white-faced. Panicked, maybe. Looked like he was going to lose it, after all. They might have to—

But then he saw Roseland rummaging in the cab of the evacuation truck, coming out with insulated wire clippers, swearing to himself as he turned and raced back into the building. Torrence went in to see what was holding up the evacuation.

Upstairs, past the rubble, he found Roseland in a large stinking room that had been made when the walls in the original apartments had been knocked down. He was using the clippers to cut away plastic restraints from the necks and wrists and ankles of the prisoners. Every one of them had been bound in the stuff, tied together, squeezed in so tightly there was barely room to move or breathe. Torrence recognized the hard but prehensile gray plastic, as sparks shot from the clippers, severing it. Restrain-o-Lite, it was called. Used by British cops to hold large numbers of prisoners after a riot; the stuff absorbed static electricity and gave it off whenever you moved. Sit still and it didn’t hurt you; squirm and it gave you a nasty shock. The condition of the prisoners . . .

Torrence, who’d thought himself inured to horror, had to turn away till his stomach quieted down.

About a fourth of them had died in the restraints; were hanging there, rotting. Some had rotted free, slipped to the floor. The others were starved, bruised, cold, semiconscious, drained of dignity. Looking like plucked game birds hanging in a string.

And there were more, hundreds more on the floors above. Torrence took a breath and turned around, began to shout orders, commencing the evacuation. Glad Claire wasn’t here to have to see this. And yet wishing she was at his side . . .

The Hôtel de Ville, Paris.

Colonel Watson, Klaus, and Giessen stood at the monitors in the Security Center, watching the shaking TV image shot from the underside of the chopper approaching Processing Center 13.

“How did they get hold of a Jægernaut?” Giessen asked, not troubling to conceal his disgust. “That is supposed to be impossible—”

“I know it is,” Watson snapped. “And I don’t know how.”

“How many gunships can you muster?” Giessen asked. “Air support will compensate for the Jægernaut . . . ”

“Only about three, at the moment,” Klaus murmured, as he stabbed a number on the fone.

“I’m afraid I cannot commend your planning, Herr Watson,” Giessen said.

Watson turned to look at him, knowing he’d made a mistake in bringing Giessen in, and wondering how big an error it had been. Giessen—“The Thirst”—could have been a tax investigator. He was a prim, ferret-faced, sartorially elegant little man who had been, inexplicably, excused by Rick Crandall from wearing a uniform. He wore a real-cloth suit two hundred years outdated, a Victorian outfit, ludicrously anachronistic (“looks like a bloody actor in a Public School revival of an early Shaw play,” Watson had muttered), modeled on an old tintype of a certain Dr. Gull, who’d been “seen on der fringes of der Ripper investigation.” But Giessen’s methods were very up-to-date. He’d patched into the Crime mainframe on the plane from Dresden, and fed in a collation program of his own design. Already he’d confirmed Watson’s guess: that the assassin of Le Pen was most probably the New Resistance officer known as Daniel “Hard-Eyes” Torrence.

“You’re not here to second-guess my planning or policing tactics,” Watson told Giessen. He couldn’t exactly upbraid him: Watson’s post was something like an Internal Affairs officer. Watson didn’t outrank him, or vice versa. Giessen’s was a post independent of rank, but reeking of authority.

Watson saw digital-compressed mayhem from the corner of his eye.

“Bloody hell,” he muttered, turning to the monitor in time to see the hijacked Jægernaut reducing a convoy of armored cars and I.S. vehicles to scrap metal. It simply rolled right over them. “How did they get it? Who did they bribe? Those men are supposed to be our most loyal . . . ”

“There is a report of a black market in drugs,” Giessen said, clearly making a conscious effort to control his accent.

Watson glared at him as Klaus foned in orders to the chopper to ignore the Jægernaut and concentrate on Processing Center 13. Why was this fetishistic lunatic maundering in non sequiturs? “There’s always a black market in drugs!”

“Not always in der—in the military,” Giessen said. “Sometimes ja, sometimes no. Now, we haf a—we have a trade in US Army experimental fighting-drugs. Oxycontin, stimulants, tranquilizers. I have reason to believe that some of our sentries are using them. I also suspect that these resistance terrorists are selling them under some sort of . . . cover. You see, there were sniping attacks on SA sentries around the Jægernauts and other installations. They seemed to reach a peak intensity about two weeks ago and then stopped when so-called ‘street people’ began coming around to sell zese—to sell these drugs.”

Watson stared. The man had been here only hours! How had he found out so much? He must have had some preliminary studies done. Must have realized he was to be called in.

Watson cleared his throat and lied rather clumsily, “Well, of course . . . we knew about that.”

Giessen allowed himself a self-satisfied smirk. “Yes, most certainly. The connection is clear: through the sniper attacks the resistance deliberately built up in the sentries a constant fear for their lives, then through intermediaries they offered them drugs, knowing they were very much ready for them. They introduced the addiction into the Army to poison it, to weaken it—and to obtain access to sensitive areas. A man becomes addicted to something, he will sell secrets, he will allow access—even to the Jægernauts, ja?”

Watson swallowed. “This is Steinfeld’s doing. The man is devious.”

Giessen nodded. “I have come to the same conclusion. He would be a better target than this Torrence—but, not likely to be as emotionally vulnerable.”

Watson blinked. “You’re going after Torrence through his emotions?”

“They’ve got some kind of surface-to-air missile . . . ” crackled a voice on the emergency frequency. Chopper Two, at center 13. “Evasive—”

No good. The dancing digital image blanked out. The guerillas had blown the chopper from the sky.

“What about Chopper One!” Watson roared.

“Engaging a rooftop machine-gun emplacement,” Klaus said.

“Get it away, that’s a decoy! Deploy to the street, stop those bloody trucks!”

“The Jægernaut is on the scene, it’s blocking the chopper. They’re increasing altitude but—”

“Microwaves—” Chopper One. “Microwave beam from the fucking Jæger—”

Then a scream muted by transmission—and another monitor blotted out.

“Why not bring a second Jægernaut to bear?” Giessen suggested.

Watson spun on him, spraying spittle in his fury, taking his frustration out on Giessen. “Because, damn you, we have only one other here, and it’s the bleeding wrong end of town! We can’t run it through the middle of town! The French went half mad when one of our lads rubbled their bloody Arc de Triomphe. The Jægernauts are to be used to attack cities fully occupied by an enemy—they’re a weapon of siege! We’ve had a cunt of a time doing damage control on that one, lying through our bloody teeth—we can’t plow through the middle of town, those things destroy wherever they go . . . ”

“I see, of course, they need a special route. It was a bad suggestion, Herr Watson.” Giessen gave a thin, maddeningly patronizing smile.

Klaus was listening tensely on the fone; Watson could tell he was getting something nasty. “Well, what is it, Klaus?”

“Their trucks! The Jægernaut completely routed our boys and the guerilla trucks are away. They’ve quite escaped with their load of Jews and Negroes . . . ”

Sometimes human planning lines up neatly with chance; sometimes synchronicity vibes sympathetically; sometimes there is serendipity.

When it happens, you have a holiday from fear, you can lie to yourself cheerfully about how it’ll all turn out. (And sometimes, it does indeed turn out well. Sometimes.)

When Torrence returned to the safe house, he found he was resonating sweetly with things for the first time in a year or two. First there was a sense of relief: they’d taken the refugees to the meeting place where they were turned over to those who’d agreed to take in the stronger escapees—taken in by hundreds of decent Parisians who were among the NR’s “auxiliary.” The most grievously ill were taken by the “underground train”—carried on stretchers, through the old Metro tunnels—to the north of the city, where other partisans waited to take them to outlying hospitals and sympathetic doctors. It had taken a long, difficult while to organize, and it had gone off well, and they had been lucky.

Another serendipity: Smoke had been at the meeting place, an artillery-ruined square in the north of Paris where the evacuation trucks left off their long-suffering human cargo. Smoke, and an American newscaster named Norman Hand.

Hand and his technicki assistant had videoed the refugees, interviewed those who could talk. With enormous satisfaction, Smoke watched Hand’s skepticism melt into horror.

Then had come the safe house, which seemed warm and snug after the “bullet weather” of the firefight. They had the space heater going, and the six male refugees they’d recruited were fed warm broth and a little rice—Roseland fed them, almost weeping from happiness and release—and Torrence thought: If we don’t accomplish anything else, we’ve made this difference. Hundreds freed from the Fascists. Among them, some children.

He was just sorry they’d had to blow up the Jægernaut. He’d been tempted to try to get it to Second Alliance headquarters, use it to stomp them good, turnabout is fair play. But the Jægernaut would have crushed civilians, getting there. So, instead, they’d used it to mangle a couple of roads and railroad lines important to the Fascists, and then trashed it.

Now he sat in a corner near the rattling electric heater and ate his soup, his thoughts turning to Claire—and to his sister Kitty.

Kitty had a new baby, was working with her husband on the Colony; both of them happy with their promotions, proud of having come through hell together. Kitty was doing all right. That was something else to hold on to.

Claire’s letter had come off affectionate, but also a little irrationally petulant. As if she was reproaching him for hanging around in her head when she was trying to get some work done. He would have liked the letter to have at least hinted at romance. Maybe she was deliberately forgetting their intimacy. She seemed to suggest that he should find some other . . . outlet.

When you have time, just live, she’d told him. Try to feel some warmth, even though I know it’s hard to do there. Try to get close to people. That’s survival, too.

He was still pumped up from the fight, the escape, the sight of the Jægernaut coming down like a slaughterhouse hammer on the swine at the Detention Center. He was almost high on the knowledge that they’d made a material difference . . .

It was hard to just sit here and watch the others; watch Smoke and Hand talking to the refugees and Pasolini cleaning her weapon—as she tried to be an example of the perfect soldier, another overcompensating female—and Musa and Jiddah, half-seen through the door into the next room, on their knees, praying toward Mecca. And Bibisch . . .

Who sat down beside him, dipping a bit of sourdough bread into her bowl. She glanced at him out of the corners of her eyes, then looked fixedly back at her soup.

Oh, he thought.

Well, she was pretty enough. Curly black hair, delicately elongated Frankish features, softly brooding gray-blue eyes; very handsome, her face, if a little dour. She wore shapeless clothes, as all the women here did, so it was hard to know if . . .

He winced, mentally imagining Claire telling him off for his sexist speculation. For wondering about Bibisch’s tits and ass. Her legs.

Demeaning, Claire would say. And she’d be right.

But still, he wondered how those long legs looked in moonlight . . .

Synchronicity, serendipity: Bibisch suddenly turned to him and said, “Did you see the moon? It is so bright tonight. The clouds blow away, the moon come in, c’est tres jolie.”

“Yeah, saw it when I was coming in.”

“You look . . . happy. This is abnormal for you, yes?”

He smiled. “Yeah, well, I’d be pretty fucking abnormal if I was happy around Paris nowadays, Bibisch.”

“Your fucking is abnormal?” She seemed interested.

“That’s not what I meant, it’s just an—Forget it. You know, I didn’t know you spoke much English.”

“I am not very good on it, so I do not like to, you know . . . ” She shrugged. Inconspicuously, she moved closer to him.

“Your English is better than my French.”

“Toujours. Bad English is better than bad French. French, c’est fragile.” She said it “frah-sjheel.” The French pronunciation bringing onomatopoeia.

An outburst from Norman Hand distracted them. “I still can’t believe this could be going on without NATO and, I don’t know, without the UN knowing about it.”

Smoke said patiently, “I’ve told you: they know about some of it. But there was a war on, Hand, remember? There are hundreds of thousands of refugees, there are destroyed economies, there is starvation in pockets all over the continent, there is pestilence, there are bands of paramilitary groups jockeying for power, factions fighting for control—the so-called international ‘authorities’ are dealing with all that, they can’t sort out the SA-created suffering from the suffering that comes from the aftermath of war. They’ve got their hands full. They can’t see the goddamn forest for the trees. We need you to bring this out where people can see it.”

There were two rail-thin Oriental men among the group of refugees from the concentration camp; one of them tried to explain things to Hand in Korean, rattling it off arcanely for a full minute as Hand tried to tell him, “I’m not Korean! I don’t understand! I’m Vietnamese!”

The other Oriental sat up excitedly. “Vietnamese! Me Vietnamese!” Then he reeled off a couple of feverish paragraphs in Vietnamese.

“I’m Vietnamese, but I don’t speak Vietnamese!” Hand protested weakly.

The Vietnamese broke off, looked at him with raised eyebrows.

Torrence and Bibisch laughed. Bibisch leaned over against Torrence, as if simply to share a confidence, but he felt her linger over the casual touch, press a little closer than necessary. He felt his manhood harden. He was that pent up.

“I heard this Hand when he arrive,” she whispered, “he is bitching about the quarters to stay in, no hot water, he was so jet lag, he want a good meal, this was like a kidnap almost, he said.” And then she made a noise like a puppy whimpering.

Torrence and Bibisch laughed till tears came. Hand snapped a glare at them, sensing he was the object of some unheard drollery.

Torrence looked at Bibisch and stopped laughing. She looked gravely up at him. “You can see the moon,” she said, “from the storeroom, if you open . . . I don’t know the word: la fenêtre . . . ”

He nodded. His throat was dry; the pants at his crotch were taut. “You want to, um, check out the moon?”

She stood, nodding, and went to the stairs. He followed her, aware that some of the others were trying not to stare at them. They climbed the narrow, winding, creaking stairway, two flights, to the top of the old police station. There was a storage room, dusty and smelling of mildew, packed with weapons in crates, and the single window. Ornate black bars over the glazed window, this side. Light streamed through the window; the rest of the room was a jumble of sharp-edged shadows. They crossed to the window, and he tried to open it. It hadn’t been opened in years; wouldn’t budge. He was a little embarrassed at being unable to open the window; then felt foolish at wanting to look strong to her.

“It’s old,” she said, “and the wetness, it makes the wood . . . ”

She shrugged, looking at him. “But the moonlight is still here . . . ” She motioned at the window with a tilt of her head, without taking her eyes from his. “The moon is there, but . . . ”

He looked at the window glass. The moon was distorted by the glaze, was big and blurry, as if the moon’s light had been evaporated into a milky spray, something to bathe in. Her skin in the moonlight . . .

“It’s beautiful,” he heard himself say. Clumsy at this kind of thing.

“Mais . . . I am cold here,” she said.

He knew an opening when it was offered him. He put his arms around her and she came to him easily, dropped all pretense instantly, and kissed him, lingering only a moment on the lips, going quickly to a mesh of tongues, pressing her breasts against him, full enough for him to feel even through their clothes, and it went on and on. They kissed till they swayed from standing too tightly together, and then she took the initiative again and took one of his hands, guiding it up under her coat, under a sweater, into a good place, between flesh and the moist, welcoming, static-electricity itch of damp, body-warmed wool. She closed his hand over her breast. Closed it instructively, hard. To let him know her taste: she liked a hard grip, at least for now, she wanted aggression.

“Yes,” she said as he squeezed, hard, felt the tissue give like a swollen sponge but exquisitely silken (blocking an image of Claire, forcing himself to concentrate on now—and it wasn’t difficult to focus: the desire was roaring through him like a subway express).

“Oui,” she said as his other hand gripped her ass and bruised it. “Forte. Harder. Oui.”

Following his instincts, he bit her full lower lip. Not quite hard enough to break the skin. “Oh, oui, encore, hurt me a little, tell me what I am . . . ”

She taught him things. She directed him; instructed him to abuse her just a little, and both of them sensed that it was entirely appropriate for the two of them, it was in the pocket, it was them. Knowing full well she was a political feminist, Torrence himself a believer in absolute women’s equality. And simultaneously: she asked to be dominated. And he fell into it with an almost frightening naturalness. Almost tearing off her clothes, not bothering to remove his own. He simply dropped his zipper (she liked that, too, this time) . . .

They lay on a bed of shed clothing, Torrence almost tearing into her, taking her, the first time, till he came, resting like a lump of slag on her, then hearing her whisper to him again, Hurt me a little, hurt me a little . . .

Near Tijuana, Mexico.

At the same moment, but during daylight: in the same instant that Torrence thrust himself into Bibisch, Jerome-X lay on his back in the very center of Bettina’s double king-size bed, staring up at the Brobdingnagian folds of her flesh descending on him, her enormous, doughy-soft but powerful thighs, the great waddling smothering ebony pillow of her belly hanging down, almost covering the black and chocolate and glistening pink bifurcations of her vagina; the small, floral organ nearly hidden in folds of thigh flesh like the interior of some oversize Claus Oldenberg orchid; an orchid of swollen flesh and surreal excess. The smell of her soap and the smell of her musk and sweat and skin . . .

All of it coming down on Jerome like a sexual apocalypse.

”Take it,” she ordered him. Obediently, he opened his mouth. She snapped, “What’d you say?”

“I said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ ” And the gratification of his submission made his cock even harder as she encompassed his face and very nearly, deliciously nearly, smothered him . . .

Torrence, afterward, holding Bibisch tenderly in his arms, kissing her eyelids, kissing her lips softly, stroking her head soothingly as she nestled against him. As if comforting a child frightened by thunder. “Toujours, I adore you,” she said. “I never stop watching you.” She sighed—and then stiffened a little, looked sharply at him. “You won’t tell anyone what I ask you to be doing? OK?”

“No,” he said. “I won’t.” The moonlight streamed over her white skin. “You look almost . . . ” He almost said made out of moonlight, but stopped himself. “You look good in the moonlight, it fits you . . . ”

Would he tell anyone? Hell no. He was amazed at the things he’d done, amazed at his own rapacity. He’d never done that sort of thing . . . role playing, sexual-discipline games, even talking dirty in sex. Never. He’d had no idea it would evoke such arousal in him.

God, am I that sick? he wondered. Is that me, or has the war done it to me, made me this way?

But he knew, even as he asked himself. Sexual dominance was deeply a part of him, and always had been. It had been closeted in him, till now. Maybe it was a sickness, but he had felt it shiver sympathetically in the core of him, and he knew it was integral to him.

But he also knew it wouldn’t work if she didn’t enjoy it. He was too empathetic to be a true sadist. He was just a little bent, apparently. Just a bit . . . kinked.

And he felt a little better about it when he reflected that Bibisch had led him through the whole thing. She’d begun it, instructed him in it, and in some sense it was really Bibisch, with a kind of sexual judo, who’d really been in control the whole time.

“Did you know,” he asked, “that I’d get into, uh, this kind of thing?”

“Yes.”

“How did you know? I mean—I didn’t know myself. Am I . . . do I seem like I’d be a . . . ”

“No, no! When you fight, you are very strong and beautiful and efficient, but you are not cruel, and you are very kind to everyone. Pasolini and some others, they think you are . . . ”

“Soft?”

“Oui. But you are not . . . not soft. You are kind inside. I don’t know how I knew that your sex was . . . I don’t know. C’est subtil. Probably no one sees but me. I see because I am one too, from the other side . . . ”

He nodded. Still feeling a little revulsion at himself, but some relief, too.

Jerome-X lay in Bettina’s arms, serenely reposing in her great soft damp fullness. She stroked his hair soothingly, muttered sweet endearments, and he was happy. But something chewed a fusty little tunnel under the skin of his happiness.

Was he sick? He’d never done it this way before, and he’d been amazed at his own response. How had Bettina known he’d be complementary to her own dominatrix inclinations? Did he radiate some kind of sexual wimpiness? Doubtful. It had to be subtler than that.

He not only got off on being dominated by her—he got off on her obesity. Sexually, for Jerome, she was the Earth Mother, the Venus of Willendorf, the very incarnation of the fertility goddess, and she was a refuge he could explore for hours. He could sort of understand if someone found all that extra flesh unattractive but it hit him right in the basal ganglia—right in his sex. The more of her there was, the more lust it evoked in him. Bizarre.

Where did it originate in him? Was it Oedipal? Freud had been discredited, but still . . . Jerome had been alienated from his mother—no, that seemed too simpleminded an interpretation.

He shrugged. Probably he’d never know. He reflected that, in some strange way, he was in control when they made love. There was comfort in that.

“Dis time,” she said huskily, “we gone switch on our chips, and get on de same frequency. I got a frequency no one listen on to. And we gone use a little augments for it, and I show you some stuff.”

And in minutes, they were frequency-wired together, fucking electronically and somatically, and he saw the beauty and horror of her, saw her expanding in his mind’s eye like a mandala from hell.

With the flick of a nanotech switch, Jerome was in love.

• 06 •

The Badoit Arcological Complex, a quarter mile beneath the Qattara Depression, Egypt.

Steinfeld’s palms were sweating, though the room was almost painfully air-conditioned. Abu Badoit, seated across the low comma-shaped table from him on the confoam swivel chair, seemed centered and at ease, patiently watching the video on the table’s fold-out screen: a vid of Second Alliance atrocities, and interviews with European apartheid victims. He watched it almost as if he were sitting through someone else’s tedious home movie.

Why shouldn’t Badoit be at ease? He was sitting in the center of his power base.

Steinfeld had just met Badoit for the first time; he wasn’t sure the Arab leader was as unperturbed as he seemed. But his expression was as composed as his grooming. Badoit wore an immaculate real-cloth flat-black silk suit from Broad Street in London. He had been schooled at Harrow, which seemed to impart its gloss to his short, sculptured black beard, his impeccably clipped hair, and his onyx eyes. There were several platinum rings on the fingers of his right hand, one of them glowing with a big smoky diamond, and a rather incongruous gold-chain choker in his high collar. His was a dark, boyish face, but he was at least fifty, Steinfeld knew.

What did he know about Badoit? That Badoit was a mutakallim to some, an embodiment of the Sanna of the Prophets to others: Not thought to be divine but a man with a direct line to God.

Badoit, a good host, poured tea for them both, only flickeringly taking his eyes from the digi-viddy . . .

Steinfeld let his gaze wander out the polarized window of the Egyptian’s office to the vast, fully illuminated, cluttered recesses of the underground Badoit Arcological Complex. A refuge from war, Jihad, and the ravages of global warming, the complex was one hundred seventy-five square miles of subterranean city, residence, clean industry, and hydroponic farming. It was built partly in a vast system of caverns underlying the lowlands of the Western Desert, and extending into man-made caverns carved into the bedrock. It was all lit by a mellow blend of electricity and reflected-sunlight shafts. Solar power, gathered on the Saharan surface, provided energy, driving toylike electric trams winding, underground, between the hulking blocks and opaque-glass pyramids of the complex; in two places the minarets of mosques broke the stark angularity with their ceremonious curves, spires, and intricate ornamentation. Nearer were swooping yellow-and-black banners with Islamic slogans declared in Classic Arabic lettering. The metal reinforced ceiling was just a hundred and fifty feet over the tops of the highest buildings. Now it looked like a mythical city under a metal sky that shone with a hundred small, strangely geometrical suns; in the evening, when they turned down the lights, it was a netherworld metropolis glowing softly under a perpetual lid of lowering cloud. Only, look close and the cloud became granite and plastic and metal. Huge, gleaming steel columns that were also elevator housings to the upper world stood at intervals for stability; the ceiling was triply reinforced against earthquake with a groinwork of high-tensility plastech girders.

When he’d first read about the Badoit Complex, it had made Steinfeld think of the Space Colony, FirStep. But now he thought Giza; of the sphinx, of the great tombs of the pharaohs, of the wonders of the ancient world. He was a little in awe of Badoit, who had created a quasi-secessionist Islamic state in the midst of the Arab Republic of Egypt—a masterpiece of quiet diplomacy, brilliant engineering, and relentless necessity. Egypt had been threatened with civil war between the Islamic extremists and the moderates; between the isolationists and the internationalists.

The political wisdom of creating a sacrosanct enclave for Badoit’s brand of moderate-to-fundamentalist Islam had been obvious; the wisdom of spending billions developing the underground Arcological Complex had been more elusive for many.

But Badoit had insisted the Arcological Complex could not maintain true spiritual integrity without economic and military self-sufficiency. True economic self-sufficiency required agricultural self-sufficiency; but in North Africa, a land of droughts and desert, the only agricultural surety was in a greenhouse. And the only military surety, in a land of coups and factions and extremists, was in a bunker. And the only economic surety, in a land of struggle over oil sources, was energy self-sufficiency. And as for cultural integrity—it was hard to achieve in a world suffused with transmissions and travelers.

Badoit envisioned a grand solution: a combination greenhouse and bunker. The complex’s location underground made television and radio transmissions highly controllable; the complex received only what it wanted to receive. Badoit’s commission of cultural censors allowed more than Jamaat-I-Islami law would—Badoit did not forbid vids or lectures where women showed independence and dressed untraditionally, and, within the limits of decency, much “western” clothing was allowed—but the arcology disallowed excessive violence in media, explicit sexuality, homosexual imagery, and non-Muslim theology: Islam was taught as an inarguable fact in schools, and Mosques throughout the arcology proclaimed the salat. Badoit strictly forbade so-called “female circumcision” or violence against women on the basis of non-traditional behavior. Yet theft was still punished with hand-amputation, and traditional dietary restrictions, including a fixed prohibition against alcohol, were in effect.

Here, too, travelers could be restricted in a way that was impossible on the open borders of an overground city, preventing entry by terrorists from rival factions, as well as inhibiting the cultural terrorism of those who carried the decadent ideas of the corrupt West with them.

The underground deep-water sources were not quite enough, but Badoit had recently begun piping seawater to a desalination plant, and water perfusion was at last adequate and he was able to sell clean water to other states; Saharan solar energy seemed eternal; the hydroponic greenhouses, thriving on reflected and artificial light, never suffered drought or pestilence.

Here and there the austere cityspace was picked out with palms and other greenery in small parks. Broad panels in the ceilings glowed, reflecting sunlight from a baffle of shafts.

Craning his neck just a little to look down, Steinfeld could see people—in traditional Bedouin garb, up-to-date printout suits, or gowns and veils—milling past the view windows of a mall.

The place had captured the imagination of the Arabic world. As a city, it was called simply “Badoit.” And Badoit, the underground city, was a second Mecca. Oil-rich Muslims from all over the Middle East had lined up to donate millions on millions to its construction, adding their largesse to grants from the governments of Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Iran, the Republic of Palestine, and Saudi Arabia. In exchange, they received a place in Badoit, permanent or simply in case of emergency. A nuclear war had seemed close—this would be the only refuge.

It was a magnificent conception, Steinfeld thought. And he was a little shaken to be sitting beside the man—indeed, to be soliciting help from the man—who had built it all. This vista had begun as an idea and a commitment in this man’s head; a vision had somehow superimposed itself over a hundred seventy-five square miles of Earth, had crystallized the local world into conformity with itself. There was no squalor here; no extreme poverty. There was no pollution—that would have been lethal—and there were up-to-date hospitals and vaccination programs.

But the Complex had its problems: the power drain from the constant necessity of recirculating air was enormous. The Arcology was growing faster than its housing, and was becoming crowded, in some sectors, so constant expansion was necessary—and expansion was costly. Immigration restrictions had become fanatically stern, for anyone not bloated with money. Despite its success at exporting pesticide-free produce, water, and highly refined metals, and despite Badoit’s oil-founded personal fortune, the Badoit Complex wavered back and forth between solvency and insolvency. And perhaps the arcology’s relative cultural insularity—its limits of freedom of expression, its absence of freedom of religion—were regrettable.

But still, Steinfeld reflected, in its realization of artifice and organization, of order from chaos, its economic fairness at all levels—this place was civilization distilled.

“That will do,” Badoit said suddenly.

Steinfeld came to himself with a start, and hit the stop button on the digi-viddy. He looked at Badoit, who seemed thoughtful but wholly unsurprised. “If you have any doubts about the authenticity of this video,” Steinfeld said, “you can run a check for computer animation. I can assure you that this information is accurate. If you wish to send some of your people back to look over the situation personally, I will be glad to provide them the coordinates—they will see that it’s all quite true: Muslims are being persecuted systematically throughout France, Italy, Germany—”

“No, no,” Badoit said, waving a hand impatiently. “I’m quite sure it is authentic. Don’t you suppose my people have ‘looked over the situation personally’? Naturally. We have wide-ranging intelligence sources. We have become aware that these Second Alliance devils are persecuting the European Islamic community—”

“Persecuting is too weak a word.”

“Quite. We were not aware that it had gone this far—your material brings a certain immediacy to the issue. The problem is not that something needs to be done—it is to determine, precisely, what should be done.” He paused and smiled distantly. “You do not care for tea, I notice. Will you take some coffee? It is always ready.”

“Yes, thanks. Coffee.”

“Splendid. Sixteen years in England; I picked up the habit of tea in the afternoon. But if tea is my habit, coffee is my vice.” Badoit turned to an intercom, spoke a short sentence in Arabic.

Steinfeld wondered what was going on in Badoit’s head. There was no hint in the man’s neutral expression. Perhaps he would be dangerous to deal with. Could such a man ever be knowable, even to his intimates? He was a nation builder, a city builder, the president of a microcosmic nation he had created himself: a man who never questioned his course once he set it. A visionary, but a ruthless one. He would take an alliance very, very seriously.

Steinfeld was lucky to have got into this office at all. Steinfeld was a Jew—there had been relative peace between Jews and Muslims, since the Israelis had—at long last—accepted a Palestinian state. Badoit was relatively moderate, an advocate of rapprochement, even alliance with the Jews. Still it was difficult for a non-Muslim who was not a head of state to meet with Badoit in person. Badoit maintained contacts with the Israeli Mossad, as there were some Islamic extremist factions who opposed him. Those strict-Fundamentalist factions were security threats to Badoit, Badoit the city and Badoit the man, and the Mossad—the Israeli intelligence service—helped him keep tabs on them. In exchange, he had agreed to see Steinfeld, who was something of a Mossad ward, if not truly an agent.

“You come here asking me for military aid, for weapons and soldiers. It seems to me that you have undervalued and underused the political channels,” Badoit said. “You have jumped the gun, quite literally, and gone right to a military solution.”

“Most political channels are closed to us,” Steinfeld said. “The UN will not hear us. We’ve tried. The media is restricted in Europe. Most American media regards us as cranks. Armed resistance, so far as I can see, is the only practical course. Naturally, we’re trying to alert people politically, to raise consciousness, as they say, in America. To use political channels. To interest the media—with only indifferent success. In the meantime, the murder goes on.”

“You are working on many levels,” Badoit said, “but your efforts on some of those levels are rather trivial.” There was a touch of smugness in his tone as he revealed the extent of his knowledge of New Resistance activities. “You promote notions of divisiveness in the ‘Self-Policing Organization of European States.’ ” Saying the catch-all name of the new Fascist state with heavy irony. “You spread discontent with stories that the umbrella organization is bleeding the member nations for cash and resources. You promote the idea in France that the German leaders of the Second Alliance corporation are more influential than the French in SPOES, and so will reroute resources to the German advantage. You use television graffiti, Internet, pirate radio, leafleting, postering—you even spread seditious jokes. ‘How many Frenchmen does it take to make up the French government? A thousand Frenchmen: five Frenchmen with French accents and nine hundred and ninety-five Frenchmen with American and German accents . . . ’ ” He smiled, though clearly not amused. “You have contacted the American media and international Grid sources, including young Norman Hand.” He shrugged disdainfully. “You have done nothing politically. These efforts are . . . minuscule.”

Steinfeld nodded. “We only do what we can. I’m in favor of political effort wherever possible. But there simply is not time to wait for political action on a larger scale—the oppressed are being killed, even as we speak. Your people and mine.”

The doors swung open and a coffee cart hummed into the room on its own, a steward walking behind it. The cart paused by the conference table and the steward poured thick, sweet coffee for them into small china cups. There was also a silver tray of sweetmeats.

The steward discreetly withdrew as they sipped their coffee in silence. The stuff made Steinfeld’s cheeks flush and his head hum.

Leaning back in his chair, Badoit said at last, “I agree that military intervention is necessary. But you propose that I do it under the auspices of the NR. And indeed, I would feel the need to work within the framework of some such organization—I do not want to send my people in cold. Just getting them into Paris would be difficult without you. But . . . it would be a political time bomb for me. Dealing with you; with, if you will forgive the expression, infidels. There are people who would use this connection to denounce me. I have much support, but . . . not from everyone.”

“You can trust me not to—”

“Can we?” Badoit interrupted. “Can I trust you with my fighting men? You know, you would have some authority over my soldiers—it would be a very delicate situation. I would have to trust you. I cannot take the chance without investigating you somewhat more thoroughly.”

“What does that mean, precisely?” Steinfeld asked.

Badoit spoke a brisk phrase in Arabic into the intercom.

Almost instantly, four heavily armed men came into the room. Abu Badoit turned to Steinfeld, rose, made an ironic variation of the gracious gesture offering accommodation, and said, “It means you’re my guest, for a while. It is only a matter of attitude, really, the distinction between guest and prisoner—don’t you agree?”

Cooper Research Labs, London.

She said her name was Jo Ann Teyk. And, she said, that morning she’d found something in her brain that scared her.

She was here at the lab complaining that Cooper Research Labs had used her brain for some kind of “calculations,” if he understood her rightly, and the stuff scared her. She wanted it erased. And Barrabas knew, almost instantly, that he fancied her. He wasn’t sure why. She was at least ten years older than him, her curly blond hair in no particular style, just flouncing to her shoulders any way it chose; her eyes were pale blue and her features were, somehow, reminiscent of the Dutch. But her accent was American.

They were standing awkwardly in the waiting room of Lab Six, Cooper Research Labs, a waiting room that hadn’t been used, till now, in all the weeks Barrabas had worked here. A lab technician had fetched Barrabas, because this Jo Ann Teyk woman was asking for Cooper, and Barrabas was the only assistant to Cooper currently in the building.

“Dr. Cooper isn’t here,” Barrabas said. “He’s in Paris. He’s coming back tomorrow, I think. I could try to get him on the fone—”

“Would you? This thing is really bothering me. The Brain Bank won’t be held responsible, they say. They won’t pay for the erasing time, and I can’t afford to pay for it. I’m trying to save up to get back to the States. Flights to New York are just outrageously overpriced now because they haven’t got the war damage at the airports fully repaired and . . . ”

She was rattling on rather nervously, and he nodded in the appropriate places, but he was only half listening. He was staring at her, wondering why she was so attractive to him. She wasn’t beautiful. He pictured her in one of those old-fashioned white cloth hats, almost like nurse hats, the Dutch women had worn. Nothing sexy about that. She was moderately pretty. Her breasts were small and her hips a shade too wide. But she gave off something indefinable. Energy. Need. Maybe something seen in the warm ghostliness of her glance, a subtle female vitality and . . .

Sexuality, yes, somehow, though she wasn’t dressed for it. She was wearing a rather weathered charcoal-blue printout women’s suit and blue transparent-plastic sandals. He was glad she wasn’t wearing heels; she was already at least three inches taller than he was. He was glad, too, he hadn’t had to wear his SAISC uniform to work in the lab. People sometimes reacted nastily to it. People on the street who saw you in an SA uniform seemed to either wink at you, give you a sort of illicit approval, or else they’d glare and you had a sense they’d like to tell you off but didn’t dare.

“ . . . I mean,” Jo was saying, “you do see the problem, don’t you?”

“Hmm? Oh, oh yeah—” He broke off and grinned. “Actually, no. I’m a bit muddled on this Brain Bank business. Had the impression they hired people to do calculations or something. You’re a mathematician, or—?”

“No. No, I’m an artist, or was. I’m an American.”

No kidding, he thought. Her American accent was like a trumpet declaring her nationality.

She went on, “I had a show over here when the war started, and I’ve basically been stuck in London ever since. My patrons all sort of . . . some of them are dead now. The others I can’t find. The gallery was burnt in the food riots, all my work gone. Digital paintings.”

“Really? I do some, uh, digi-vid work myself. Just a little editing, nothing artistic. We have a Sony Ampex system. Doing a sort of documentary.”

Clam up, he thought. He turned to the video painting on the wall: a rectangle of wafer-thin glass playing a loop of collaged digital imagery, soothing pastoral scenes, pictures of rustic North Country villagers and the like, all bathed in a kind of halcyon ambience. He nodded at it. “What do you think of that one?”

She seemed annoyed at being distracted to make art criticism, glanced irritably at the videol painting. “I think it’s a decoration meant to go with the furniture, not a painting. Not a real one. Facile interior design background stuff.”

“Yeah, I see what you mean,” he said, looking at it more critically. Although he didn’t see what she meant particularly.

“Well, back on the subject: if you don’t know what Brain Banks are . . . ” She made a fluttery gesture of frustration, and then said, “It’s a . . . essentially, they rent a portion of your brain, see. Companies who can’t afford high-speed mainframe time. Or just trying to save money, cut some corners. So they hire a ‘passive’—that’s what I was, at this Brain Bank—and they attach a dermal contact socket and access your brain for computer time. And you just lie there and let them use it, let them do all the thinking with a part of your brain you don’t normally use. You can be thinking of something else entirely, and all this stuff is buzzing around in the . . . in the very back of the mind. Sort of.”

He blinked at her in confusion. “They . . . hook into your brain somehow?”

“Yeah. The human brain can do some things better than computers: holo-imaging, certain kinds of computer-model elaboration, and the kind of stuff they were trying to develop artificial intelligence for. Certain kinds of complex thinking, see. And if you interface with a biochip, the brain is capable of all these, like, remarkably complex calculations and storage in parts of the brain we don’t usually use much. A ‘passive’, you know, rents those out to people. Sort of like transients selling blood to a blood bank. The pay is better, but not all that much.”

“And you just sit there wired in, and the data . . . ”

“It just flashes by in your brain. Too quick to comprehend, usually. You don’t usually remember anything afterward, see. All you got left is this weird taste in your mouth and a headache. Normally. But I guess sometimes the operator is sloppy with the erase function—sometimes the stuff remains in your brain. And it can flash onto your conscious mind, see, and bug you. I mean, I’m walking down the street, and then all of a sudden I see about a trillion numbers flashing by instead of the cars, and I see these, uh, molecular models instead of buildings. It was so fucking weird. It was like the numbers were the cars and the molecules were the buildings. And I walk into a wall or something. It blinds me. And it wakes me up at night. It’s like someone’s talking statistics in your ear all the time. You can’t sleep with all that—”

“And it was Dr. Cooper who rented this, um, brain-time?” Barrabas asked.

“Yeah.”

“That’s odd . . . ” Cooper had a budget for access to a major-league mainframe. Why go to one of these cheapo brain-rental outfits? “Um—do you remember what sort of work your brain was used for?”

“I had a semester of molecular biology a few years ago. I recognize stuff from that. It looks like the models we saw of genetic engineering for microorganisms. Build-your-own-virus stuff. Except it’s not the same kind of viruses, if that’s what they are . . . ” She shrugged. But the shrug wasn’t really one of indifference. Somehow, he sensed she had an inkling what the research might be, and it worried her.

Barrabas felt a chill. The program she was talking about had to be the Second Alliance’s biowarfare work. Not Cooper’s project per se—its provenance was the molecular biology team—but Cooper was Head of Research, and all major computer time was approved by him. They’d have brought him the work, asked him to authorize it. Cooper had evidently decided to run it himself on another system. The one they usually accessed was secure—the SAISC used it for virtually everything. Dotty old bugger.

And now the stuff was churning around in this woman’s head. The molecular breakdowns, indices, models. If she recited some of it to the wrong people—or had it read out on an extractor—it would all come out in the wash.

Barrabas shook his head silently. Personally, he was frightened of the whole project. He didn’t know exactly what sort of biological warfare it was—a viral attack of some sort. He was only on the periphery, but still, he could be held accountable by a war crimes commission. He’d told himself they wouldn’t really use a virus, it was just a deterrent device, just a club to hold over the heads of the enemy once the SA took power. That’s what Cooper had hinted.

But the Second Alliance wasn’t in power in England yet. They were close, but they still didn’t have the reins. In the meantime, if this thing broke . . .

What the bloody hell had Cooper been thinking of? Why had he used a nonsecure calculation device? The brain of an American expatriate artist, yet.

“Do you think you could fone him?” she asked again. “Or maybe get authorization somewhere else to pay to have this stuff taken out?”

“Um . . . no. It’d have to be Dr. Cooper. I’ll see if I can get him. Have a seat.”

He smiled at her, saw her face soften a little as he agreed to try to help her. The softening let something else shine through: the attraction was there. She felt it too. What was it about this woman?

He went into the comm room, was relieved to find everyone else had already gone for the day. The duty officer was on break. He sat at the console and tapped out Cooper’s “Find and Notify” code. Somewhere in France, Cooper’s fone would be going off. He was probably in the HQ, not far from a fone.

The console’s respond light flashed green. Barrabas sat back within clear range of the camera that would transmit his image to Cooper, and hit the receive button. Cooper’s face, looking like an irritated ghost, appeared on the little screen. “Yes? Oh it’s you, ah, Barrabas. What is it?”

He told Cooper what Jo Ann had told him. Barrabas wouldn’t have thought it possible for the albino’s face to go paler, but what little color there was in Cooper’s cheeks made itself noticeable with a sudden absence. “Oh, Lord, it would have to happen this once,” he muttered. He said something else, but a shash of static and snow blotted it out.

“I didn’t get that, sir, there was interference. What did you say?”

“Nothing, never mind. Listen—I don’t want anyone else taking care of this. All right? I’ll do it myself. I’ll be back in a couple of days. Tell her stiff upper lip, I’m on my way.”

“But—”

“No!” Cooper’s vehemence was startling. “No . . . I’ll have to handle it myself, in person. You’re to say nothing to anyone else about it. You work for me—show some loyalty, man!”

“As you say, Doctor.”

“In the meantime—keep an eye on the girl. I don’t care how you do it. Romance her if you have to. But make sure she doesn’t talk to anyone else about this.”

“Um—I’d have to take the rest of the day off in order to—”

“Yes yes, fine fine, just see to it!” And he rang off.

Barrabas returned to the waiting room to find Jo Ann staring into space, squinting as if trying to see something better.

Distract her. “The doctor will attend to the matter personally when he gets back. In a couple of days.”

She blinked, then frowned at him. “A couple of days! I can’t live with this stuff.” She shook her head incredulously.

“Isn’t there anything that, um, suppresses it?”

“Well . . . loud music. Drink. Stimulus of different kind . . . ”

“Look, I feel responsible for you. I mean, it was our fault, and we really should be doing more to help you. How about if I . . . ” He hesitated. This sounded pretty phony. But maybe she’d play along. “If I took you out to some places to ease it. Some clubs, maybe. Do you like minimono or angst or retro or bonerock or House Dada or what?”

She smiled ruefully, looked at him for a full five seconds. He felt his cheeks flush. Finally, she said, “Bonerock and House Dada, mostly. Minimonos are so reactionary. Can’t stand ’em. I heard Jerome-X is in town. His first tour. Just doing a few dates.”

“I don’t know his stuff.”

“He’s pretty obscure. He had a kind of college-radio bonerock hit called ‘Six Kinds of Darkness.’ He was on the edge of hot in the underground for a while, and he was ‘big in Korea,’ and then he disappeared. Just now resurfaced. He only had one album, but I’m kind of a fan. I have some files of video graffiti he did, too.”

“Oh, yes?” He tried to sound neutral, though he didn’t approve of video graffiti. The bloody wog radicals used it. Never mind. “Right. It’s my solemn duty to take you to see this Jerome-X cove. Tonight?”

“Okay. Tonight.”

A nightclub among the dock warehouses in London, England.

“Sure, Brit Customs believed it,” Jerome-X said. “But if the Second Alliance or M15 take an interest in us, we’re fucked. They know we came overseas on a private jet. They know most of the jetlines aren’t open yet. They know that some of the biggest bands in the US couldn’t get over here and I’m like a nobody in the bone scene—”

“Hell no, boy, dey don’t know that,” Bettina said. They were sitting in his dressing room on the sagging, cigarette-charred sofa, waiting for his cue. They were in the London club, Acid Burn, once an Acid House nightclub now basically gone bonerocker. In the background, filtered by the cracked concrete walls, was the rumble, rattle, and hum as a band cranked on the stage, from here sounding like a thunderstorm approaching across a mountain range. “Yo’ bein’ paranoid.” Her accent seemed to have thickened since coming to England, as if in defense. She was a three-hundred-pound New Orleans black woman; she was Jerome’s contact in the Resistance; she was Jerome’s lover; she was his computer-systems guru; she was the Sage. “You think dese cock-biting English prigs know anything about American rock?”

“Lots of ’em do, actually, but—You really think I’m just being paranoid?”

“You bet yo’ skinny white butt. De jet was loaned to us by a guy who admires yo’ music, is all. Dat’s our line. A fan, is what we telling people. He got it registered under a different name. Ain’t nobody knows it Witcher.”

“I’m nervous, I guess.”

She slapped his rump. “Boy, I guess so. Relax, kid!” She took his head in a playful armlock.

“Don’t be doing this shit in public!” he wheezed.

“Just playin’, son, don’t get all—”

“Hey, I’m in charge of the stage biz, we agreed that, Bettina! Don’t be doin’ that shit to me here!” he protested, pulling free.

“We backstage now. Gimme a kiss.” She crushed him to her, and he gave in. She broke it off herself, looking him in the eye, almost nose to nose. “You know de protocols?”

“I know the UNIX protocols. I know the systems call code to log on as a superuser. I know how to evoke the debug function. If they haven’t changed the debug function.”

“Dey probable haven’t, ’cause dey using a rented system. High security, but rented. If dey have changed it, fuck ’em, we log off and dey won’t be able to trace it to an aug chip. I think de back gate is still open on dis system—”

“Where’d you get it from?”

“De anarchist underground. Plateau subsystem bulletin board.”

“Some of those Wolves’ll give you fake codes just to get their rivals in trouble.”

“Dese ain’t Plateau Wolves, these are Plateau Rads. About de only people I met on the Plateau I trust. Dey got a guy used to be a hacker for SAISC till he found out what dey were into. He knows de system’s back gates.”

“The anarchist underground cooperates with the resistance? You’d think they’d say fuck off. The NR wants to re-establish the old European republics. That’s not very anarchist.”

“Anarchists hate de Fascists worse den de Social Democrats, worse eben den de Republicists. Dey scared, like ever’body else out in de cold, boy. One of my braid’s comin’ loose, can you—Ow! Don’t be doing it so tight! De NR’s got anarchists in it, along with everything else. Just get rid of de Fascists and den fight over de bones, I guess is—”

The rest was drowned out in a tidal-wave magnification of the careening noise from the stage as the door opened and the club’s manager looked through. He was a weakchinned rocker with sections of his depilated scalp shaped into three-dimensional figures like those on ESP testing cards: wavy lines, star shapes, squares, circles—like little flesh antennae on his head, made of transplanted skin and collagen. “Scalping up” hadn’t hit the States yet, and Bettina found the fashion disconcerting. Whenever the guy came in, she stared at his head, which pleased him enormously.

“Are you ready, then?” the scalp-up asked.

“Yeah,” Jerome said, standing up, so the guy would think he was coming right that second. So he’d leave, thinking Jerome was going to follow. He left, and Jerome turned to his shaving kit, took out his shaver, took off the rotary heads and found the plastic-wrapped aug chip. Bettina got hers from a tube she carried in her vagina. At her size, she had to wrestle with herself to get it out.

Jerome took the chip from the plastic; wet it, opened the flap of skin on his head, and inserted the chip, activating it with his thumbnail mouse. In a way, it was like doing a hit of speed, only it was isolated in you; one part of you hummed with restrained power, and the rest paced itself normally.

He ran through the password code, ran a quick program to check that the chip had gone through Customs without being magnetically scrambled, and then, nodding to himself, headed for the stage, Bettina coming along behind him, moving like a sailing ship in high seas. “I’m not that much into the concert part today,” he said over his shoulder. “I’m, like, totally out of practice, and I was forgetting about performing anyway when you guys thought this shit up . . . ”

“Oh, yo’ love it, yo’ little ham.”

“Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. I was never in a band much. I used to do little concerts with digital and maybe one player, and the recording was all electronic, except for a couple of musicians I used in the studio and never saw after that. A band is such a hassle, it’s like babysitting, I’m not really into it. But you can’t get up enough crowd energy just using purely electronic backup, you got to have some other people, live . . . ”

He was already picking his way over the gear on the stage, looking to see that everything was in place.

Bones was there, waiting, at the synthesizer. They called him Bones, but he couldn’t stand Bone Music normally, calling it “neurological masturbation for bored middle-class white kids,” and he could barely play the keyboards. It didn’t matter much that he couldn’t play well, though Bones didn’t understand that. He was as nervous as a kid auditioning, running through the simple keyboard lines over and over, behind the polarized screen that was the stage’s curtain. Club roadies moved equipment to either side of him.

Andrea, the guitarist, was dialing her tuner, and the wire dancer, a faggy Spanish guy named Aspaorto, was taping his wireless transers to the electrodes on Jerome’s thighs and arms and calves and hips—Jerome-X used some of the minimono techniques—and the mikes were whining with feedback as the soundman turned them up. It was a live, noisy, electrically charged space, and that would help mask the aug signals, Jerome thought.

He sighed, and shook himself. His hands were damp. He wasn’t in the mood for the music part. He wanted to break into the system, do the work, get it over with. Only, the way it was set up, it wouldn’t be over with, in a sense, for a long time. A long, long time. Because they were infecting the system for now. Not destroying it. Bones had gone all stress case over this approach. We oughta wipe it out while we got the chance, not fuck around, he’d said. It’s taking a dumb chance.

Steinfeld wanted it done this way, though. Slow infection.

Steinfeld could plan, long-term, Bettina said. That’s why he was going to kick ass, she said, when the time came.

Jerome took a headset mike off its stand and slipped it on over his head. Heard his own breathing come back to him on the monitors.

Get into the mood, he told himself. These people paid their money, and there ain’t much of that around London nowadays.

He was still invisible to the audience behind the black plastic screen, but he shouted over the mike to see if he could prod them in advance a little. “Maybe we shouldn’t bother playing, nobody fucking cares anymore what anybody does!”

“Sod off, ya barstads!” someone shrieked in gleeful reply, and the audience set to whooping and howling. He could see them in foggy silhouette through the translucent screen, a gallery of faceless busts from here, joggling up and down. Some of them, he could see by their outlines, had scalped up: tombstones of cemeteries atop their heads was a favorite. Others were still in flare hairstyle variations, in multi-Mohawks, in retro spikes.

“Yeah, well fuck off, or we will play!” Jerome threatened.

“Uhgitta chezick!” someone in the audience yelled in technicki. Meaning, I’m getting chillsick, and the rest of the audience laughed, because it was a joke, a sort of pun. Bone Music gave you the chills when you heard it, very literally sent shivers through your bones, but between bands the club played music without the shiver frequency to give you a rest, otherwise the audience got sick, “chillsick,” and to say you were chillsick while you were waiting for a band meant, essentially, Don’t bring ’em on, I’m sick of this shit already, especially when it comes to these blokes. Which was in fact not really an insult, just affectionate mockery, taking the piss out.

Jerome laughed, liking it. He was getting some attitude on now. He had to slip into a kind of split subpersonality, a schizy character that was all authoritative punkiness, in order to pull off a concert. It didn’t come to him naturally, not like some—not like, say, Rickenharp. Jerome had to work on getting the right attitude in a public place. It was a lot easier to do video graffiti at home alone with your minitrans and camera. He was a little embarrassed on a stage playing underground pop star. His boyhood idol had been Moby—and he found himself pretending to be Moby in his own mind. It was okay to be a pop star if you were Moby.

He checked that everyone was in place. He glanced at Andrea, who nodded to signify readiness, one spike-heeled boot poised over the sound-control box on the floor; she wore a video dress that was showing an old movie, Apocalypse Now, exposing her long, seashell-pink legs and tattooed shoulders; her bald head crawling with anima-tattoos. He could never quite follow the animation sequence; something about a grinning Jesus smoking a pipe and firing an AK-47. Andrea herself was smoking a glass pipe with an all-night THC/MDMA flameless-smoke capsule in it; tonight, a hot-pink smoke that matched her boots and belt. Her eyes glazed from the X-dope. She always looked as if she were going to fall over, but she never missed a note. She was a real find.

Jerome glanced back at Bettina, saw her glaring at him from hooded eyes, her silver-robed hulk of a body emitting an unexpurgated body language of angry jealousy. Evidently he’d spent too long looking at Andrea. He grinned and mouthed, “I love you” at her, and she relaxed and grinned, put on her headset mike for backup vocals.

He nodded at Bones, who hit the program for the percussion, the shivery thuds rolled out into the club like stark milestones in a sonic landscape, and the screen rolled aside and Andrea hit the bass programmer with one toe while segueing into the guitar lead with her hands. Bones shakily skrilled out his keyboard part, frowning with concentration.

Jerome hadn’t turned to the audience yet, he just stood there, back to them, looking over the band, like some kind of inspector, moving a little to the music but not acknowledging the crowd till he was good and ready. Bones was a pretty lame keyboard player, all right, but it was adequate, and when he missed, it somehow sounded like the deliberate “noise factor” that many bands used; much of it was masked by the undulating sheets of sound Aspaorto rippled out of his limbs, dancing music out of his neuromuscular impulses.

Jerome was chip-linked with Bones on the Plateau. He transmitted a readout to him that said: Scan for surveillance.

No shit was Bones’s reply. Smartass.

Rather tardily, the soundman did the introduction, yelling “Jerome-X!” over the house PA, but that was washed away by the torrent of sound from the stage, and the audience knew who he was anyway, they were his small but intense London cult following, and they were already shivering to the sound . . .

As Jerome turned to them and bellowed,

The thing that lives in Washington

It’s a kind of living stone

The thing that lives in Washington

Its makes the planet groan.

Jerome letting the shivers carry him, getting into it now, letting his pelvis tell him what to do. More vigorously, as he found the groove and delivered:

The thing that lives in the temple

The temple with five sides

The thing that lives in Washington

Takes children for animal hides . . .

The room itself shivered, and, on some secret molecular level, the walls themselves danced.

Bone Music always made Barrabas feel ill. But he tried to keep his expression from going sour as the shivers whirled around his stomach; as he danced with Jo Ann in a sardine press of people. Only now and then, through the churn of bodies, could he make out Jerome-X, a geeky American kid gyrating and bellowing, barely carrying a tune. A big fat Negress wobbled like jelly on a plate behind him, every so often punching through with some gospel-sounding backup singing. Something like,

Show me, show me, show me the way out

Oh show me, show me, Lord show me the way out . . .

Why’d they have to use these bleeding bone-shivering frequencies? Barrabas thought crabbily. He’d read about it, but he’d been in a bone club only once before. Some people claimed the vibrations could cause bone cancer; some people claimed it cured bone cancer.

Whatever, it reached into you, a subsonic current that carried the music like a kind of aural flotsam; carried it into you physically, so you felt the chords shivering in your bones, in your skull, in your flesh. Some people had Bone Music receptors implanted in their skulls, in pelvic bones, in their spines, receptors that picked the music up on special frequencies others couldn’t hear, turning their whole bodies into antennas. Some people, lots of people, found it ecstatic. Sexual and hypnotic and all-involving.

“You okay?” Jo Ann yelled into his ear. Yelling loud, but he could barely hear her over the blast of the band. “You look like you wanna puke!”

“Not used to this bone stuff!”

“Come on, let’s get a drink!”

She took him by the wrist and led him into the bar. He didn’t much like being led around by girls, but he let her do it, anything to get out of that dance floor.

The bar had closed doors, the music was filtered, and the bone shivering was mostly gone in here. It was dark, like it was supposed to be, the only light coming from the bar itself, which was made of stained glass; murky, oddly shaped panels of blood red and wine purple and jade green and dull blue, some of them illuminated from within, shattering the shadowy, smoky room with random shafts of colored light. Barrabas sat on a stool in a shaft of purple; Jo Ann sat almost astraddle a beam of green, some of it streaming up her front to tint her gray eyes jade.

They ordered vodka martinis and sat hunched together between two groups of sweating, almost-naked men giggling over cocaine fizzes. Advertisements blinked up the cocktail straws; digital music groaned like a machine about to break down. On the walls, videopaintings re-creating scenes from medieval depictions of the Crucifixion and Resurrection flickered through sequence in doleful chiaroscuro; occasionally the images of Christ alternated with other figures, paintings by Paul Mavrides and other icons from the erstwhile post-Acid House era: Timothy Leary ascending into heaven, riding a CD like a flying saucer; William Burroughs and Laurie Anderson waltzing through a concentration camp while the starveling camp victims played Strauss on orchestral instruments; Kotzwinkle shooting skull-shaped dice with William Gibson; the minimono star Calais chained to Stephen Hawking’s wheelchair; Philip K. Dick with an arm growing from his forehead, arm wrestling with an arm growing from Rick Crandall’s forehead; Rickenharp falling into the rubble of the collapsing Arc de Triomphe; Ivan Stang adding twentieth-century paper money to the flames under the stake on which a grinning J.R. “Bob” Dobbs is being burned alive; David Bowie eaten cannibalistically by a demonic horde of twenty-first century pop stars; Iggy Pop having sex with Mrs. Bester, the president of the United States.

And back to the dead but numinous body of the scourged Christ, his head in Mary Magdalene’s lap.

“That loose data bothering you here?” Barrabas asked. “The Brain Bank stuff, I mean.”

Jo Ann shook her head. “Isn’t room for it with all the input here. You feel better?”

“Much. I’m sorry about the dance. I’ll get a few drinks in me and then—”

“Don’t worry about it. It was too crowded to dance anyway. What is it you do for Dr. Cooper? Video stuff, you said?”

“Documentation, editing.” He wanted to change the subject. She was frowning slightly.

Two guys behind him were talking over one another, yelling opinions that neither heard. He felt a nonmusical chill when he realized what the issue was. “The bloo’y SA Fascist barstads ’er in Parliament now, what yuh going to do, ay?” one of them, a white guy in dreadlocks, yelled. “There’s no bloo’y way we can get the Nazi barstads out without a war, a blee’in’ civil war, mate, ay?”

At the same time the other shouter—a black with a scalp-up shaped like a street scene, his home neighborhood—was saying, “Oi mean, these buggered right righ-cist barstads are everywhere, fuck me for a joke, ’ow you goin’ to fight them, bloo’y ’ell you’d arv to bust in the system, righ’?”

And, Barrabas realized with a twinge, Jo Ann was listening to them. He wondered if she knew the lab she’d done brain work for was a branch of the SA. He wondered, too, if she was politically liberal. She was, after all, an artist. She answered his unasked questions, then, when she remarked, “The SA corporation really scares me, the way it’s growing. Racism amazes me. It’s like some old superstition, like believing the world is flat and the sun rotates around the Earth!”

“What, the sun doesn’t rotate around the Earth? Go on!” he joked, hoping to kid her away from the subject.

She smiled fleetingly and then put on an expression that said, But seriously . . . “I mean—what can anyone do about these racists? That dude was right. They’re a part of the system now . . . ”

He was into the system. Jerome felt it before he saw it. He was in.

The computing work was done by the left brain—and the camouflage by the right brain. The right brain was singing. Singing the chorus to “Six Kinds of Darkness,” while the other part of his mind worked with the chip. The right lobe singing,

Six kind of darkness, spilling down over me

Six kinds of darkness, sticky with energy . . .

The left lobe hacking:

London UNET: ID#4547q339. Superuser: WATSON.

The music was camouflage, cover for the mole-signals, the piggyback signals that used updated palm-pilot tech to reach out, to access . . .

The left lobe of his brain working with the chip, which emitted a signal, interfaced with a powerful microcomputer hidden among the micalike layers of chips in the midi of Bones’s synthesizer; Jerome-X seeing the Herald on the hallucinatory LCD screen of his mind’s eye:

London UNET, ID #, date, assumed “superuser” name.

Then he ran an e-mail program that was his encryption worm, executing his diabolic algorithm, overflowing the input buffers receiving the data, the overflow carrying him into the target computer’s command center. Bypassing the passwords and security, now that he was in the computer’s brain, and then commanding:

CHANGE DIRECTORY TO ROOT.

ROOT: Superdirectory of the system. Scanning, at the root, for the branch of the system he needed.

Scanning for: Second Alliance International Security Corporation: Intelligence Security subdirectory . . .

Watching from the audience, Patrick Barrabas remarked (and was unheard in the blare) that Jerome-X had a funny, contortionistic way of dancing as he sang. His eyes squeezed shut, his hands moving as if over typewriter keyboards . . . Not playing the “air guitar,” but typing on the air keyboard . . .

Jerome was typing the commands out. Using a technique Bettina had taught him to implement more complex commands; sending through his aug chip by radio trans to a powerful mainframe; typing physically on a mental keyboard.

The chip fed him tactile illusions and read out his responses through its contact with the parietal lobe, reading the input from the proprioceptive sensors—sensory nerve terminals—in the muscles, and kinesthetic sensors , tactile nerves in the fingers: Jerome’s movements translated into cybernetic commands. His rapport with the aug chip essentially creating a mental data-glove, a data-glove that materialized only in the “virtual reality” holography of consciousness.

As Jerome sang,

Darkness of the Arctic

Six months into the night

Darkness of the eclipse

forgetting of all light

Six kinds of darkness

Six I cannot tell . . .

Finding his way through the darkness in the forest of data. Taking cuttings. Taking information. Planting something of his own . . .

• 07 •

Paris, France.

They were in Father Lespere’s flat behind the church. It was in one of the old-fashioned Parisian stone houses, with its high, narrow, rusting-iron front door; a door so tall and heavy it could almost have belonged to a cathedral. The cracked walls were brown with age and, in streaks, sepia with water stains. They’d come through the rear building, up the narrow, winding stairs. The light in the clammy, echoing stairwell, in the parsimonious French manner, turning itself off after they’d climbed a flight. The place smelled musty; its spaces were glum.

Father Lespere’s flat was a little more cheerful. It was cramped but high-ceilinged, done in off-white and pale yellow; there were some tasteful chandeliers, and an old rolltop desk, a few silk daffodils in antique Flemish vases. Lespere was one of the city’s elite, which meant he had a gas fire and electricity, a console playing music. Mozart. The furniture was simple to the point of spareness. There was a crucifix, of course, and a Mother Mary, and a wall filled with books on theology and architecture. Many books, but nothing that would make SA visitors suspicious. He had long since purged his bookshelves.

Briand looked at them with a gentle amazement as they came in. Smoking a cigarette, Old Briand sat in an old wooden kitchen chair; his face was gray with grief and age and flecked with salt-and-pepper stubble; he wore the uniform of a street cleaner, his crumpled hat in his hands, a china bowl of coffee and a bit of bread on a white wooden table beside him.

Bibisch and Torrence were dressed as construction workers themselves, as if they’d been laboring with rabble-reclamation teams all day. They’d put dust in their hair and grimed their hands. Their machine pistols were well hidden in their clothing.

Father Lespere wore a cassock, as if he were about to take confession, and in a way he was.

They shook hands and drank a little coffee and complained of the drizzle outside. Through the window, through the attenuated slant of rain, Torrence saw the strange landscape of Parisian rooftops, looking to him, in his present mood, like the monuments of a cemetery, the humped gray tile roofs and attic stories like barrows and mausoleums, the chimneys like an endless vista of abstracted gravestones. Here and there were the blasphemous intrusion of dormer windows. The surfaces slick with water; the sky murky with it.

“Et bien,” Lespere said, “if you are ready to hear the story, I will ask Briand to tell it.”

Torrence nodded mechanically.

Working hard to keep his expression neutral, Torrence listened as Bibisch translated the old Frenchman’s account. “They came in the morning, when everyone is a-sleeping. Not me, I work very early, I am alone awake in the building, happy that morning because I have some tea, difficile to get . . . Then there is a sound of a truck and a machine that smashes doors and the building shake, everything fall from the wall; and the men come into every apartment, take us out by the necks, we cannot see the faces because they have balls of glass on them. You know this kind of soldier . . . they take us to the street, everyone is looking from the other buildings. And they murder. That is all. They murder. They broke in—many times I have seen them break in and take people, and say that it is for France, it is for the Unity Party, it is for Security, and they had weapons so we will not argue—but this time they did not take someone to a prison, no. They kill them. They kill them there on the street. They say is reprisal. Is execution for . . . ” She hesitated, then asked Briand to repeat the name. Briand did; said it quite clearly. Torrence felt a ghostly hand trying to choke off his breath.

Reprisal. For the one called Hard-Eyes. For the work of the terrorist Hard-Eyes.

Aka Daniel Torrence.

“How many are dead?” Torrence asked in a croak.

“Quatre,” the old man said. “Une petite fille.” One of them a little girl.

Torrence let out a long, slow, shuddery breath.

“They do it with a child, too. C’est psychologie.” Bibisch told Torrence softly, squeezing his arm.

He nodded. “They’re trying to play on everyone’s feelings. Including mine. And it’s going to work.”

She shook her head. “Non! Merde, c’est pas vrai!” And then launched into a burst of rapid-fire French. Telling him off for letting this get to him, he gathered. The sound of her voice was loud in the room, but to Torrence it was a distant echo, the sound of a passing siren heard in the distance as you stand in a funeral chapel.

He envisioned strapping explosives about himself, breaking into SA HQ, blowing up The Thirst and Watson and as many others as possible . . . just taking them with him.

“Why did they pick your building, Monsieur Briand?” Torrence asked.

Lespere did the translation this time, as the old man wearily said, “Maybe no reason, or perhaps because someone in the building complained about the water. We had no water for two weeks, and the Unity government controls the utilities, and they said it was unpatriotic to complain because everyone must face shortages. Or perhaps for no reason, just a neighborhood where none of their own class live. I do not know, Monsieur.”

Lespere turned to Torrence. “They probably picked one that had annoyed them, but it wasn’t of great consequence. Their object was to attack you, Torrence.”

The old man was crying now, with no change in his expression. He simply let the tears roll as he spoke. “Simone,” Bibisch translated for him, “was my niece. The little girl. I have no one now.” She added, in an aside, “Say he wants to die . . . ” She shrugged.

“Then he came to the right place,” Torrence muttered.

“You are feeling sorry for yourself?” Lespere asked him.

Torrence shook his head. Then, abruptly, he said, “Yeah. Yeah, I am. For me and everybody else that got stuck in this fucking thing.”

“You leave the work of Christ to Christ. Sacrifice is required of you, but not martyrdom. It is just beginning. You have to be ready. It will be worse. The Thirst will bring people in and torture them to try to find you. But the truth is very simple: You are doing more good than harm, even if they take reprisals in your name, Daniel.”

Bibisch nodded. “Exactement. C’est ça.”

Torrence felt like an urn filled with ashes. Une petite fille . . . Torture them to try to find you . . .

“More good than harm?” he snorted. “That’s hard to believe.”

“There is one thing I am especially equipped to know,” Lespere said. “And that is: believing is always hard.”

The Glass Key Club, London.

Barrabas and Jo Ann. It was the third club they’d gone to on their first date. The Glass Key was an after-hours place, rounding out things nicely because both of them were jacked up on MDE spritzers and couldn’t have slept anyway. And the Glass Key was the kind of place you went when you felt that way and you were looking for a place to be in public and yet be alone . . .

They’d gone into the ambient-field of the sex club’s back rooms by tacit mutual agreement, acting as if they were just looking around, checking the place out, but both of them knowing how it’d end up here, especially with the sexual momentum that’d been building up all night, and the drug-drinks.

The first time, they did it standing up; he pinned her to the wall, her skirt hiked up and her legs wrapped around his hips. The second time, on the mattress that covered the floor, and they’d even undressed, except he’d forgotten and left his socks on; she mercilessly teased him for that later.

The third time was very slow, and he never did quite come, but that was all right.

Afterward, though, the MDE was beginning to wear off, they were both tired and sore and, one of the after-effects of the drug, a little irritable. “I could just burn out the fucking Brain Bank excess with druggy brain damage,” she said, “if I keep this up.”

“Oi’d die for a pint o’ bitters,” Barrabas muttered. His birthright accent showing through his fatigue.

“Yeah, I could use a drink without any goddamn uppers in it,” she said, awkwardly pulling on her panty hose. They dressed in silence after that, went out to the bar, and—it was closed.

“Shit!” they both said at once.

Outdoors, the morning sun had the cruel temerity to be breaking through the clouds, and Barrabas felt his head throb with the intrusion of light and street noise.

But the fresh air helped a little, and the walking flushed out their systems some, and after a few minutes of strolling to the tube station, looking wistfully at the black-snail humps of the electric taxis they could no longer afford, they held hands and felt a little closer once more.

They paused in front of some shop windows, where cameras took in their image, digitalized it, and projected it onto the blank-faced robot mannequins in the window—so that in the window display he was now wearing baggy pants and a coat-and-tails made of black leather, and a ruffled puce shirt, and she was wearing a skintight spiral-strip gown. Their exact faces appeared on the mannequins, which mimicked even their movements, like reflections in mirrors. They laughed when they saw it. “That’s supposed to make me want to buy it?” Barrabas said. “Seeing myself in that I’ll never go near one of them rigs.” He gave it the finger—and the mannequin of himself in the black leather coat-and-tails and ruffled shirt dutifully gave him the finger back, his own exact face grinning back at him.

She laughed, and then held her head. “Ow. Don’t make me laugh.” They walked on.

“That was some exxy night,” Barrabas said when they reached the image-crowded hoardings around the tube station.

They stopped, and she grinned at him. Some of the almost luminous vitality that had attracted him to her flared in her eyes again. “Yeah.”

Four young Pakistani men, probably students on their way to university, burst from the tube station and shoved hurriedly past Barrabas and Jo Ann, one of them bumping into her. Barrabas scowled. The Paki who’d jostled her paused beside Barrabas to look her over. She was rumpled and mussed from the events at the sex club.

He grinned. “Sorry, miss. Wish I had time to apologize right. Looks like you’re a bit o’ fun.”

Barrabas reacted instinctively. His hand snaked out, smacked the wog backhanded so that he staggered into his friends. In his most upper-crust voice, Barrabas snapped out, “You disgusting little wog. How dare you.” Feeling a surge of pleasure as he said it. Thinking he was making points with Jo Ann, showing her he’d fight for her, keep the rabble off her. “Get the bloody hell out of here, you wanking wog bastard,” he said. “Back to Packi-land, preferably.”

The wog went all flint-eyed and started to sputter an answer, but the students laughed derisively at Barrabas to defuse the thing, and made obscene gestures, then dragged their angry friend away. Chiding him to ignore the Fascist oaf: “Probably an SA git.”

Barrabas realized that Jo Ann was staring at him. The red of fatigue in her eyes could have been tailored for the cold anger in her expression. “I don’t believe it,” she said with slow and careful incredulity. “You had me fooled into thinking you were a human being. But you’re a fucking Nazi. Aren’t you?”

“What? Nazi? Bloody hell. No. No.”

“You’re a racist thug!”

“I just . . . I just want them out of England, the wogs. There isn’t room. There isn’t enough work or food, and we have our own effing way of doing things here.”

“You really believe that shit? You ever think for yourself?”

“I always think for meself. What a load of bollocks—what do you know about it, you’re a bloody American!”

“Yeah. Fine. Fuck off.”

She turned on her heel and ran into the tube.

He wanted to go after her and couldn’t.

There was a monstrous roaring in his head. But it was only a train, roaring by on the elevated tracks. Stopping on the platform, up the staircase from him. His train. After a moment, he dragged himself to it.

Paris, France.

The Jægernaut crunched down the street, making the buildings shake, so that loose bricks and bits of cornices rained onto the sidewalks and Watson was glad he sat in the armored protection of a bus-sized Internal Security Vehicle. They had driven in only a minute ahead of the Jægernaut, and now they watched its approach on the monitors inside the ISV—cameras were safer than windows—and it felt something like watching a missile test in a military ICBM-launch installation: The monitoring equipment bleeping to itself, the impassive technicians wearing their headsets as they helped direct the Jægernaut and scanned for saboteurs. It was distanced just enough by the screens—watching it from the street nearby, exposed, was a little too awe-inspiring. Too unnerving. It was like watching a volcano erupt—or watching as some contorted, massive-girdered suspension bridge pulled itself up from its moorings and went for a vindictive walk . . .

The Jægernaut—this model remote-controlled—came on with the methodical pacing of automation, not gracefully but without hesitation, making directly for the old tenement building. Watson was glad they’d got the address right. It was a bit dismaying when they crushed the wrong house, since they usually killed several hundred of the wrong people. And that was perfectly awful public relations.

Some of the tenement’s residents had felt the Jægernaut coming, and a few had made it out the door. But most of them hadn’t had time.

Others came to the windows to look for escape. But then the hammer came down. The Jægernaut’s smashing scythe of impervious girders, aided by a tight microwave beam to soften the building’s stone, bit deeply into the roof of the tenement, crunching through tile and roof like a beak crushing the shell of a snail.

And the building’s people were like the slugs that squirmed in snail shells, Watson thought. They stood in the windows, screaming and waving their arms as if that’d stop thousands of tons of crystallized alloy bearing down on them.

Bloody stupid of them, really. If you know you’re going to die, Watson reasoned, die with a little dignity. What was the use of hysteria?

The Jægernaut bit more deeply into the building; Watson could feel the vibration of its impact as it shivered through the street, quivering through the ISV. In less than a minute, an eight-story building was imploded, a crushed shell, a spindly, collapsing thing in a hood of smoke and dust. The screaming was now drowned out in the steel-foundry roar of the Jægernaut’s grinding progress. When the scythe rotated up, like the blade of a Rototiller coming around again, it was edged in dripping red.

Watson would have enjoyed this more under normal circumstances. But Giessen—The Thirst—was here, looking as usual for all his dramatic nom de guerre, like a prissy Royal Tax Accountant, and the bastard was spoiling Watson’s fun.

They were sitting side-by-side in the cramped control deck, just behind the driver and to one side of the forward gunner, whose head was entirely concealed by the complex machinery of his video targeting ordnance. Watson sipped tea from a plastic cup; The Thirst drank coffee with a little schnapps in it. He was listening on a headset to the rooftop surveillance crew and the chopper.

“Anything?” Watson asked. Knowing full well from Giessen’s expression that they’d come up with nothing, but wanting to needle him.

The Thirst shook his head. Nothing.

Watson smiled to himself. It was perverse to be pleased when the New Resistance didn’t fall into a trap. But he’d told the fool it wouldn’t work. Giessen’s plan had been like a plot from a Dumas novel, or Zorro—in order to flush the guerillas, let them know you’re going to carry out a reprisal on a tenement full of Arabs. They’d be there to defend them, to avenge them. They hadn’t let anyone know which tenement it would be, or even what neighborhood—but they’d let them know it would happen. They assumed the New Resistance would watch the compound where the Jægernauts were kept, follow them to the attack site and then move in with Stingers or some other armor-piercing weapon—and hopefully this Torrence wretch would be there, directing the operation . . .

It hadn’t worked out that way, of course. Steinfeld was no fool. And Torrence was no sucker. They would not be drawn so easily. Especially knowing that there was little that could be done against a Jægernaut. The reprisal against the building—said to harbor New Resistance civilian auxiliary—was useful in and of itself. That was the sort of thing they kept the Jægernauts for. Eventually, of course, they’d be used in warfare: advance phalanx when invading a city. When the time for expansion came . . .

Giessen took off the headset, shrugging. “I wasn’t at all sure it would work. But I wanted to try a feint, see how they would react.”

Watson seethed inwardly. “I told you how they would react. Your lack of regard for my opinion is hardly flattering. Security is after all my specialty.”

“I have every respect for you, Herr Watson. But I have a need to explore this problem in my own way. My feeling is that some of the old-fashioned techniques will work. Executions in return for this Torrence’s activities—that is an ancient, time-honored method, and it will eventually provide us with informers, as well as put pressure on this man, force his hand. I intend to use some newer techniques also. We have some new surveillance technology . . . something that will be very useful in these Metro tunnels and sewers they are using.”

“What, precisely? Listening posts?”

“No. Bird’s eyes.”

“But they lose their guidance signal underground! And then they can’t transmit!”

“The new ones are internally guided. They don’t transmit, they record. They are equipped with infrared. They will explore the tunnels for us. They will find them.”

Torrence and Roseland, assault rifles cradled in their arms, stood with their backs to a stack of moldering cardboard boxes filled with books, keeping an eye on the door. The room was dim, dusty, chilly, and smelled of piss. The old furniture that had been stored in it was coated with powder from the insulation in the ceiling, shaken down during the shellings of Paris. Their only light was a guttering chemlantern and what came through the basement window. They’d left the old van parked around the corner, but the SA could notice it, might realize it hadn’t been there earlier. They might have seen them scramble into the building. They might be here any minute.

Torrence didn’t think so—the SA’s attention was focused on the buildings and streets closer to the one being demolished.

“We could have done something,” Roseland said, his voice lifeless.

He had gone into his monotone phase, Torrence noticed. Roseland, when he was coping, would joke around, use funny voices, toss out the one-liners. Letting off steam that way—for himself and everyone else. But when the emotional pressure was there, when he looked right into the face of the monster, his voice and personality became affectless, monotone. It was as if he’d slipped back into some sympathetic variation of the typical Detention Center victim, voice and eyes flat from despair, his bitter assertions made in a voice colorless as tin. “We should die with them. We deserve it, sitting here watching them die.”

“We couldn’t have stopped it,” Torrence said. “We didn’t know what building it was. And they’ve got the whole area staked out. We’ll be lucky if they don’t track us in here.”

He was, in fact, watching a handheld monitor that was supposed to show a blip if a bird’s eye or some other electronic surveillance device was near enough. The screens weren’t very reliable, though.

The building shook and a little white dust filtered down from the ceiling, as the Jægernaut made another pass over the tenement three blocks away.

Torrence glanced up at Norman Hand, who, with this technicki aide, was sitting on the back of an overturned sofa, which was stacked on another sofa, just under the basement window; they were getting digi-viddy out the window.

“You getting a good shot, Hand?” Torrence asked.

Hand nodded. His technicki was using a long-range, digitally enhanced camera scope. They didn’t have to get in closer.

The reporter hadn’t said a word since the demolition had begun. He was watching the little monitor in his hand, seeing, magnified, what the camera saw. Sometimes his jaw trembled a little.

Torrence was glad. Hand was affected by what he was seeing. He was seeing something that couldn’t be denied, couldn’t be shrugged off. With luck, he’d have the balls to translate his feelings about it into Grid reporting. He’d have the video as partial proof. Maybe they could round up some survivors to interview. At least the men, women, and children in that tenement hadn’t died for nothing. They’d die again on the Grid, where there would be millions more witnesses.

But Torrence felt foolish and helpless when he thought about what was going on right down the street.

Roseland was fidgeting. “We could snipe some of the bastards, at least.”

Torrence shook his head. “We can’t risk this Grid project. This coverage is a way of attacking them, it’s turning their own brutality against them, man. You know?”

“You’re going to just vid this thing and go home.”

“And use the images. Yes.”

“People will say it’s computer-fabricated stuff.”

“It can be tested for that. And—it has . . . it’ll just feel too damn real to deny.”

Roseland’s voice was especially flat when he said, “It isn’t worth it. I’m going out, to kill some of them.”

Torrence said, in the tone he’d learned since becoming a paramilitary officer, “No. No, you’re not.”

Roseland stood up and moved toward the door.

Torrence debated threatening to shoot him. He wasn’t at all sure that a threat would work.

He might have to kill him.

“Roseland,” he said.

Roseland put his hand on the doorknob.

“If you do it—”

Roseland turned the doorknob.

Torrence took the safety of his rifle off.

Then he said, “If you do it, I’ll kick you out of the NR. We’ll ship you to the States, and you can go live with your relatives happily ever after.”

Roseland hesitated, then slowly turned to him. “I’ve proved myself.”

“Sure you have.” Torrence put the rifle aside. “But I’d have to do exactly that.”

“You want to maintain your authority that much?”

“I want to keep the Resistance organized, Roseland. You do it and you’re out. Gone. You won’t be able to kill another Fascist. Not around here. And they’ll just go on . . . ”

Roseland stared at him. His eyes were lost in the shadows. He looked like the living dead.

Sounded like it, too, when he said, “Yeah. Okay.”

He went back to his spot on the floor and sat down. He hugged his gun and stared into space.

The building shuddered again. Hand groaned and, shoulders shaking, began to weep. Torrence felt sick.

Lab Six, Cooper Research, London.

“What do you mean you lost touch with her?” Cooper’s voice was stretched into a squeak with near-hysteria.

“Steady on,” Barrabas said. They were standing in the editing room with the door shut. It was close and stifling in there. “This is a cock-up, all right. But she’s going to get in touch with you. She needs us to pay for her erasure.”

“You don’t know that. She might have gone to the bloody radicals if she realized it was biowarfare stuff. To anyone.”

“She doesn’t know what it is.” But he wasn’t so sure.

“Right. This is what I want you to do for me—”

“Hang on,” Barrabas interrupted. He had been thinking things over. “I want a talk first.”

Cooper licked his cyanotic lips. “What, ah, did you want to talk about?”

Barrabas hesitated. It had occurred to him that he knew something about Cooper that could be useful leverage. He could get something in exchange for his cooperation in keeping it mum. Still, Cooper might not like being blackmailed, however subtly. He’d make a dangerous enemy. But Barrabas wanted the hell out of this project.

“I heard a bit of gossip, Dr. Cooper. To the effect you’ve been on balancers.”

Cooper opened his mouth to deny it, then thought better of it. “What of it?” he grated. “I got started before anyone knew how . . . ”

“How addictive it is?” Barrabas nodded. Balancers. Ironically named. A kind of drug spigot, an implant that doles out doses of stimulant in the morning, a certain amount of tranquilizer to take the edge off the stimulant, a high in the evening—sometimes a long, illegal rush of pure pleasure—and then a sedative. Keeping you stoned, feeling good, getting you off, but never giving you too much of one or the other . . . constantly balancing, with its micro bloodtesters, the levels of the drugs with your daily needs. Only, it didn’t take into account tolerance beyond a certain point, and it got more and more expensive; was more addictive than any one drug, and left you so sensitive to neurological change you couldn’t do without the implant for a minute, once you were used to it. And going without for even five minutes led to suicides . . .

So they made it illegal. Meaning the price went up, way up, and if you didn’t want to rehab, you paid through the nose. Eventually you broke your financial back under the strain. Or learned, in Cooper’s case, to embezzle.

“My guess is,” Barrabas said, “you’ve been skimming the budget that’s supposed to be for the High Security mainframe, diverting the cred to pay your illegal balancer bills, and doing the calculations yourself on the cheap through the brain borrowers. You had the basic calculation program . . . ” Cooper’s pasty tongue made another swipe over his blue lips.

“You’re guessing. That’s a serious accusation. The SA doesn’t tolerate—”

“Right. Doesn’t tolerate much of anything. Doesn’t tolerate a cock-up that costs them money, most especially. Ay? And I’m not really guessing. I did a little . . . research.” Barrabas was bluffing about that.

But Cooper bit. “Right, then. What do you want?” Whining now. “You know I’ve no money.”

“I want a transfer. I want out. Transfer to some place . . . I haven’t decided. I’ll let you know. And a recommendation of a promotion. Those things you can get me.”

“Yes, yes, I suppose so. Righto. But listen, mate—” He was all matey and conspiratorial now, talking in a manner he fancied appropriate to Barrabas’s class. “You got to do a little something more for me. This has to get itself cleared up.”

Covered up, he meant, Barrabas thought. “I’m with you, ‘mate.’ But if you want me to find the girl . . . ” He shook his head. “Won’t be easy. She and I, we had a falling out.”

“Find her. Apologize. Do what you must. But find her and tell me where she is. Keep her there and I’ll come and . . . talk to her. All right?”

Barrabas chewed his lower lip. Talk to her? Cooper?

“Yes,” he said slowly over a churning in the pit of his stomach. “I’ll find her.”

Ten miles outside Paris, near Orly International.

The refugee camp had gotten worse for some and better for others.

Torrence and Bibisch and Roseland and Hand were trudging along the rutted mud path winding through the camp, squinting in the unobstructed sunlight, talking softly. Summer had finally come to north-central France. They weren’t dressed for the weather. Most refugees simply wore everything they owned. Torrence and companions dressed in the unwashed, haphazard clothing typical of the refugees: Roseland wearing a promotional sweatshirt for participatory movie-software, on his chest a grimed, grisly solar-activated videoprint touting Psycho Sam, the Man With the Chainsaw Fingers; Bibisch wearing a stained jogging outfit; Torrence wearing a thickly layered outfit of pieces of military uniforms, insignia removed, the whole too warm in the sunny afternoon but usefully concealing his weapons; Hand wearing a grungy blue sweater and torn khaki pants, mismatched Army boots.

They looked to be luxuriantly outfitted, Roseland thought, compared to the people squatting at the huts and shanties and tents around them. The starveling children, their faces dull as veal calves in an agribusiness pen, particularly depressed Roseland.

Children, he thought, were just adults that hadn’t come into focus yet, and it was probably stupid to feel more sentimental about them than about the adults who suffered here. Suffering was suffering. But inescapably he felt a special empathic sense of violation when he saw the children in the camps.

And there were so many homeless children in Paris; everywhere in Europe, children either dying before they were twelve or becoming murderous with their determination to survive. They were a rootless nation within a nation; a nation of the disenfranchised.

The camp stank, of course. At first there had been chemical toilets, brought by the puny efforts of the Red Cross. But when the Red Cross witnessed SA atrocities and complained, it had been excluded from the camps. The few sanitary facilities were overwhelmed by the numbers of the refugees, who had taken to digging open pits as privies. The flies were terrible, big and blue-black and so ubiquitous they seemed somehow spontaneously generated by the stench. That was a medieval notion, but then, Roseland reflected, medieval notions were apt here.

The refugee camp itself was a patchwork that refused definition by the eye. It gave the general impression of thousands of human beings living in a trash dump, occupying it like sea gulls on a barge. The path had been muddied during the rains, then hardened by the sun into something footprint-pocked, rutted, and cement-hard. Torrence and the others picked their way along the road, swiping at flies and trying to breathe through their mouths.

And then they came to the giant digital video screen.

“I don’t believe it,” Hand breathed. “What the hell is that thing doing here? The fucking thing is two stories high!”

It was. Torrence pulled his floppy hat lower over his eyes, trying to obscure his face, as they approached the clearing with the giant TV in it. It was big as two billboards stacked one atop another, a TV screen several stories high and broad as a barn: an absurd anomaly in a refugee camp. It was a glassy, chrome-edged section of the Grid, set onto a girderframe that was held in place by rock-hard insta, with orderly rows of folding metal chairs in front of it. The chairs were empty, but for an old woman who cursed incessantly to herself and a ragamuffin child toying with his genitals as he gaped at the screen. Four Second Alliance soldiers stood guard around the giant screen, two in back and two in front, the legs of their armored suits well apart and locked in place so they could lean on the suits inside; the suits were air-conditioned, quilted Kevlar-backed black fabric, mirror-reflective helmets locking their heads into insect anonymity.

On the video monolith rearing two stories over them, the talking head of the president of France yammered about the Unity Party. Every so often images of the French flag superimposed over his shoulder, alternating with shots of the small sections of Paris the Second Alliance and SPOES had cleaned up and rebuilt.

Then came shots of happy Parisian citizens at work on the “Volunteer Rebuilding Plan,” waving at the cameras and chatting companionably as they cleared rubble from shell-damaged buildings; as they replastered and repainted damaged walls, happily chatting, everyone cheerfully working without pay except for stamped coupons supposed to be good for food at a later date. Some unnamed later date . . .

Then came a short commercial for SPOES, with the Unity Party’s endorsement of the alliance that would give France “a new national strength.” Followed by a public service announcement warning about “anti-Unity Criminals.” There were mug shots and digitized re-creations of some of the “criminal” faces; many of them Roseland recognized from the NR. Most of them were black or Arab or Sikh or Hindu. The last two were white—but one of them was Jewish.

They were Torrence and Roseland.

A jet of chill air played along Roseland’s spine as he stared up at the two-story image of himself on the screen, running away from the processing center. The video computer had blocked out the people running on either side of him—people who were being shot down. There was just a profile shot of Roseland, and then full-face as he looked over his shoulder (he didn’t remember doing that; maybe it was a computer modeling), and into the camera. The image froze, close up.

A criminal who staged a massive jailbreak, they said. Watch for him. Report him. Or turn him over to a Citizen’s Justice committee. Which meant, betray him to the Fascist vigilantes, the brownshirts who roamed the street looking for scapegoats to brutalize.

They’d passed such a group on their way to the refugee camp. The brownshirts had looked at Hand as if they were considering kicking his ass for being Asian. But they were intent on some other mission. If they’d recognized Roseland from this video mug shot, they’d have jumped him, beat him to death.

But either they hadn’t seen the video or he looked much different now. His face had filled out and he’d grown a beard and long hair. He was going to have to do more to disguise himself.

And now there were the computer-enhanced shots of Daniel “Hard-Eyes” Torrence. Who was staring up at the images of himself, the two-story high digital wanted poster; gazing up at it with something beyond paranoia; something more in the category of awe.

A “terrorist responsible for the deaths of many innocents, possibly including the murder of President Le Pen.” A lunatic killer, they said. If you see him, don’t try to take him prisoner: send someone for the Second Alliance police. He’s highly dangerous.

Roseland was a little jealous of their special regard for Torrence.

Roseland glanced at Torrence, who was watching the video with no change in the expression he’d worn all day. It was a look of resignation and depression. He’d been like that since the Second Alliance had begun carrying out reprisals “for the activities of the terrorist Hard-Eyes Torrence.” Reprisals that were the true “murder of many innocents.”

Twice Torrence had made plans to turn himself over to the Second Alliance; twice Smoke and Roseland and Bibisch and Lespere had talked him out of it.

If Torrence turned himself in—or, more precisely, blew himself up on their doorstep—someone else would have to take his place as Steinfeld’s field commander. Someone else would do the same job, and someone else would be picked as “the cause of reprisals.” That’s what they told Torrence, anyway.

And then of course there was the extractor to think of. But Torrence insisted that he could be prophylactically extracted in advance, if they could get him to the Mossad—they could take out his knowledge of Lespere, and the NR’s safehouses.

Still Smoke said no.

Torrence muttered that the reprisals were something personal; Watson and The Thirst, the bureaucratic sociopathic Giessen, had it in for him in particular.

Hearing that, Father Lespere had called him a solipsist and a mégalomane.

They talked him out of turning himself in.

But looking at Torrence now, Roseland thought that perhaps the Second Alliance had already won. Torrence was going through the motions. But in some sense, he was beaten.

“Jesus and Buddha in bed,” Hand swore under his breath, staring at the video mug shots. “That’s—”

“Shut up,” Bibisch hissed.

“They’re going to see those two,” Hand whispered. Visibly shaking.

“We’re too far away,” Roseland said softly. “The guards won’t recognize us from here. They probably wouldn’t, even up close. I’ve changed. Our boy Danny has his face pretty well covered.”

Hand took a deep breath. Roseland could see him suppress the panic. “I can’t believe this TV screen in the midst of all this . . . What the hell!”

The TV was showing an old movie. A French film about a heroic police commissioner’s fight against Arab terrorism. A few people from the huts trickled out to watch the movie, shading their eyes against the sun.

“A movie!” Hand said. “I don’t believe it! These people are half starved and living in huts that, as far as I can tell, are made out of shit, and they put this thing up! I mean, an installation like this is expensive.”

“And there’s a dozen of them in the city, and in the camps,” Roseland said.

“Mind control’s more important than housing and feeding people,” Torrence murmured in a rather distant tone.

Bibisch told Hand, “Mais, they have given some housing to some people. They push Arabs and Jews and blacks out of houses, and give places to white people. Very simple housing plan. And on the other side of the camp it is different. They have metal houses—” She turned to Torrence. “What do you call it?”

“Quonset huts. With running water, chemical toilets, showers. Rations. Compared to tents or trash huts, they’re pretty decent short-term shelter.” He nodded toward the south; they could see the sun glancing off rows of gray metal humps on the far side of the camp.

“Well, that’s not so bad, then,” Hand said. “They’re working on it.”

“It’s only for the white refugees, Hand,” Torrence said wearily. “And only the loyal white people. The whites in the camp who aren’t loyal to the SA and the Party at the start soon learn to be.”

“Can we confirm that?” Hand asked.

Torrence nodded. “We’ll take you to see it. Talk to a few of them.”

“I’d like to get some video here . . . ”

“We’ll smuggle your procam stuff in after things cool down.”

Hand looked nervously at him. “What do you mean, after things cool down?”

“I thought you wanted to see an NR action.”

“Today? I mean, I thought we—Well anyway, I, yeah, I want to see one, but, you know, not from right in the middle of it. I was planning on shooting—camera shooting, I mean—from somewhere nearby. Somewhere safe. I’m a journalist, not a soldier. And I don’t have my proper equipment, just my fone-cam.”

Torrence looked at Bibisch, “I thought you said he wanted to come for this? Didn’t you tell him . . . ?”

“Oh!” She pretended surprised remorse. “I have forgot. Merde!”

Torrence almost smiled. Roseland chuckled. Hand looked at Bibisch accusingly. “You set me up to get caught in this! This your idea of funny?”

She looked at him wide-eyed. She didn’t like Hand. “I don’t know what you mean!”

Torrence sighed and shook his head at her. “You shouldn’t have done it. He’s important to us. He can get the truth out.”

She pouted a little. “It’s okay—he’s going to come out of it alive.”

“Or if he doesn’t,” Roseland joked cheerfully, “we can prop him up in front of the camera, use ventriloquism, maybe work a few jokes into the act.”

“That’s not very funny,” Hand said icily.

“Okay, I’ll leave that joke out.”

Hand turned with exasperation to Torrence. “What exactly have you got in mind? Am I going to get shot at?”

“With luck, no. Which is probably why Bibisch thought it was okay to drag you along. Come on, it’s all set up and we can’t waste it. They do a check of this place every so often and they might find it . . . ”

Torrence set off into the maze of trash huts ringing the TV clearing, and led them to a sort of sod hut made of sections of sod covered with tarpaper and bits of plastic held in place with bricks and spikes of torn metal. It was bigger than most of the others. Two thin, shoeless men Roseland didn’t know, men in rags who looked Pakistani or Indian, were hunkered in the doorway, loosely gripping homemade spears made of broom handles tipped with sharpened nine-inch nails. They nodded at Torrence and moved away from the door.

“Go ahead and take off,” Torrence told them. They didn’t understand his English, but they knew the gesture he made with it. They seemed poised to go, but didn’t quite. Torrence reached into his coat, pulled out two US Army ration tins. “Almost forgot.” The men took the rations and disappeared into the piebald complexity of the camp.

The entrance hole to the large sod hut was facing the back of the other huts. No one was watching as Torrence pushed the burlap flap aside, and they went in.

Inside, it was dim but for a slat of sunlight coming through a narrow airhole in the dirt ceiling. There was a portable video transer and some other equipment on the hard-packed earthen floor; Roseland didn’t recognize most of it. It looked like a shortwave radio crossed with an old laptop. The Dell logo on the back of the display was smeared with dirt, or maybe dung.

The room was hot, and it reeked. Hand held a perfumed kerchief over his nose; Roseland wished he’d thought to bring one. You could get a bottle of expensive perfume fairly easily in Paris lately. It was much less expensive than a can of beans.

“Dammit,” Torrence muttered, “this stuff ought to be camouflaged somehow. Covered up, at least.”

“Should’ve been wrapped in plastic to protect it, too,” Hand said, trying to be one of the guys.

“Easy to say,” Roseland said, “but it was hard enough to smuggle this stuff in here. They probably didn’t feel like sweating the details.”

Bibisch squatted beside the equipment and switched it on. Its batteries were intact, it seemed. It hummed, and bits and pieces of it lit up with green light, including the small display screen. From his coat, Torrence took a datastick and handed it to Bibisch, who slotted it into the transer. She watched the readouts, made adjustments, tilted the antenna—which projected through a wall to look like a spike holding a bit of roofing in place—and said, “C’est marche.”

“What exactly,” Hand asked, “are we doing here? If it’s not too intrusive of me to ask.”

“Going to do some pirate transmissions,” Torrence said.

“Won’t they trace whatever it is you’re going to transmit? You know—trace it back to us?”

“There’s an interference-signal generator that should confuse their ability to triangulate us without losing our signal.” Torrence was talking distractedly as he watched Bibisch, trying to understand, Roseland supposed, the mystical rite of this technology. High-tech hands-on stuff was not Torrence’s strong suit.

Suddenly Hand jumped up, hitting his head on the low ceiling, capering about, scrabbling at the back of his neck. Yelling, “Shit! Get it out!”

Bibisch laughed. Torrence impatiently plunged his hand down the back of Hand’s sweater, plucked out a squirming cockroach big as his thumb, and tossed it out the doorway. Hand shivered, tugging his collar snug, and examined the ceiling. “This place is infested!”

“Most of them are in the little holes,” Torrence said, squatting again beside Bibisch. “Just stay away from the little holes.”

“What was that little dance you did, Hand?” Roseland asked. “La Cucaracha?”

Hand glared at him. Torrence said, “Stop being a pain in the ass, Roseland, and watch the back door. That’s what you’re here for.”

Roseland was happy to follow the order. He could breathe cleaner air at the door. He hunkered in the open door, peering past the doorflap. No one around except a couple of little kids staring listlessly over the top of the huts at the giant digital video screen twenty yards away.

One of the kids gasped and pointed at the screen. Roseland stood up and peered around a corner at the screen that rose like a drive-in movie screen in the distance. The guerrillas’ transer was working. They’d interrupted the signal with their own. It flickered from time to time, but held: images of Second Alliance thugs beating children; images of a Jægernaut crushing a building. People trying to get away from it, dying like bugs under a boot heel. While a recorded voice warned in French that the New Nazis were taking over Europe and must be resisted. The blue New Resistance flag waving. Another shot of a fascist atrocity . . .

That’s when Roseland heard the autotank coming. He knew the sound, the high-pitched whine of it. He’d seen them in another action. There was no one in an autotank, and somehow that scared him more than facing an IS vehicle. The thing knew only how to hunt and kill.

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.”

“Hand probably pissed his pants.”

Torrence laughed. “Yeah, probably.” He’d needed this, to get his mind off the reprisals. Needed to “Dance with Mr. D.”

The autotank met them at the hut, a different critter now. Like a big, friendly, domesticated rhino, waiting for another command. Its engine heat feeling like body heat. They heard the yawing whoop of approaching sirens, coming from the North.

Bibisch came out of the hut carrying the little computer unit. Norman Hand, pale and hugging himself, came out just behind her. He was talking into a little hand-held voice recorder. Something about, “The sirens of SA police approaching—”

“They’re on the far side of the camp,” Torrence said. “We’re near the old refining plant on this side—it’s about a quarter mile south of here. I think we can hide the tank in there, but we’ll make ’em think we headed west.” He was already putting on his headset, calling for a decoy hit off to the west of camp.

Roseland listened to the sirens. Sounded like Torrence was right. They had time. Just enough. It would take the SA commanders a while to figure out what had happened. They’d figure it out, though: much of war now revolved around strategies of signal transmission, signal interference, and electronic co-optation.

They climbed onto the back of the autotank, clinging behind the turret as Bibisch gave the autotank new commands and Hand babbled into his recorder. The tank whined and moved off, rumbling to the south, full speed.

Roseland smiled. They were going to keep this autotank, hide it till it was needed. And, oh yes, it was going to be needed.

In fact, they used it again as they fled the camp. On the way out, they told it to blow up the giant TV screen.

It did. And that was a beautiful sight, too.

Paris, SA HQ.

Jebediah dropped the videodisc into the player and turned to the small audience in the conference room. Watson, Giessen, Klaus, and a dozen lesser functionaries were seated around the table, facing the big screen. The room was white, windowless, lit brightly; it could have been any time of the day or night. It was ten p.m.

Our Jebediah, Watson thought, ought to be in bed, and not up here running the show.

He was beginning to fear the boy.

The screen flickered alive, making Watson remember the pirate transmission that had gone out to most of the functioning televisions in Paris via the unit in the refugee camp; and he remembered the stolen autotank that had shattered the giant TV screen. A lot of money down the drain.

Worse, the propaganda that had gone out on the pirate transmissions. The cheering when the resistance vermin had escaped . . .

The refugee camps were hotbeds of potential trouble. They had to be cleaned out. The wheat separated from the chaff, and storehoused; the chaff disposed of.

“The Reverend Crandall,” Jebediah said, “has made an announcement that will shortly be sat-transed to the entire world.” His voice reverent but confident. His uniform spotless. Remarkable poise, too, for a child. His father, Watson supposed, had drilled him in this little speech. “It is an announcement that will seem to some people to be only of scholarly interest. But other people will be very angry when they hear it. Eventually, everyone will see what it means: a change in the way we think about God and our place in God’s Plan.” He looked at them gravely, then hit the play button. “What you’re going to see is a revelation from God.”

As Crandall’s image appeared on the TV screen, Jebediah went to stand respectfully to one side.

On the screen, “Crandall” was saying that thirty years of research by Church scholars had at last come to fruition. Through archaeology, documentation study, and a dozen other scholarly means, they’d come at last to the incontrovertible conclusion: the Bible, as we know it, is not truly the Bible. “We have positive proof,” Crandall was saying.

No. Crandall wasn’t saying it. In a power-grab, Watson and Klaus had murdered the real Crandall. Only they, of those in this room, knew that they were watching a lifelike computer animation; only they knew that Crandall was dead.

Watson had no interest in listening to Crandall’s speech. He’d written it himself, he’d heard it till he was sick of it. He’d given it to Jebediah and his father, and was gratified to see the way they’d taken it to heart. At the same time, he’d been unsettled by the boy’s fanatic conviction. His grasp on what “Crandall” was saying made Watson feel he was losing control, his project somehow co-opted by the boy.

Watson looked away from Jebediah, covertly watched the others to see what their reaction would be. Redesigning Christianity was an important step in the taking of power. They needed the philosophical reins, as well as the political ones . . .

“Jewish conspirators,” the computer-generated Crandall was saying, “tinkered with the New Testament of the so-called King James Bible, and altered it to make it appear that Jesus was of Jewish origin. Further, they edited out those sections which confirm God’s plan for genetic purification.”

Giessen was reacting to Crandall’s revelations with a flaring of nostrils, a dilation of the eyes, a slight twitching of the hands. Watching him, Watson felt a thrill at his own power over Giessen’s mind.

“And now,” said the stunningly realistic animation of Crandall, “I have something precious to give to you. A direct quote from Jesus himself that has been lost to us for two thousand years! This quote came to us from the Damascan Scrolls, which were discovered by a team of our Church archaeologists two years ago and only recently translated. I repeat, what you are about to hear is a direct quote from Jesus Christ Himself: ‘I am the spark that lights the Flame of Purification. Let the miscegenists hide their faces from my light. Those who would interbreed besmirch the Divine Plan. Yea, verily I say unto you, those who do not recognize the Chosen Race are the whisperers of Satan, who would elevate animals to rule beside men. The Flame of Purification will burn away the tinder that is the Animal Races. Truly, the worshipers of false gods are those who would elevate animals; and those who would elevate animals are worshipers of Satan under another name. In my name, then, return them to God’s Judgment with the Flame of Purification; give them to Death who gives them to Judgment. Verily, this is my word. Write it in your hearts.’ ”

There were gasps in the conference room—the gasps of believers.

Watson allowed himself a small smile of satisfaction. He had written those words, just as he had fabricated the Damascan Scrolls. Some would know it was a hoax, of course, and would say so, but the believers would believe anyway.

Crandall paused reverently, looking gravely out at them. “The teachings of our church are confirmed in the word of Jesus. In another passage, Jesus prophesizes of the Satan of the ‘Dog-Men’ who will be born in the southeast, in the place call Mecca . . . ’ This man, whom he calls ‘one of the five great Liars,’ will poison much of the world with his false doctrine. Clearly, Jesus is speaking of the man called Mohammed. His warning is clear, and his admonition to us about the worshipers of false gods, and those who would elevate animals—in other words, the lower races—to the status of men, is quite clear. Deliver them, said the Lord Jesus, to Death, so that Death may deliver them to Judgment . . . Our task is obvious.”

Watson glanced at Klaus. Saw the tension in the set of his jaw: Klaus was nervous about releasing the bit about Mohammed, the great Liar. “We aren’t ready for a holy war,” Klaus had said. “Chances are, the Muslims won’t wait for us to carry out the ‘word of God.’ They’ll come after us. We aren’t strong enough yet.”

“The white Christians will close ranks around us,” Watson had replied. “This will polarize the world more, accelerate the whole process—we need the confrontation to knit us together, make people see their enemies clearly.”

“It’s lunacy. It would get out of hand, Watson. Play that bit for our people, if you want, but don’t release it to the general public . . . ”

“Inarguable documentation,” Crandall was saying, “will be released in the near future to confirm the authenticity of these sources. In the meantime, I will be largely out of touch. I am going on Retreat to meditate on these revelations, and to ask God just how we are to realize these revelations in the world of men. In my absence, please regard Colonel Watson as my voice. I will be in close touch with him. God bless you all.”

The recording ended. Watson carefully didn’t look at Klaus. He could feel Klaus staring at him.

“You are going to release that to the public?” Giessen asked abstractedly, inspecting his manicure.

Watson said, “All but the last part about his retreat and my standing in for him.”

Giessen looked at him. “Are you quite sure he wants the rest of it released?”

“Quite sure,” Watson said coldly.

“But—this business about Mohammed. It is rather inflammatory. Bad politics . . . ”

Klaus snorted as if to say, For a sane man, it would be obvious.

“And you are saying that the Reverend Crandall’s interpretation of the Newly Revealed Scriptures is false?” Jebediah demanded, sounding more like a white-bearded old dogmatist than a boy.

“Not at all!” Giessen put in hastily. “He has confirmed what I always knew in my heart! But—it’s a question of timing, of how and when it will be revealed—”

“That sort of concern is not your province,” Watson said sharply. “You are essentially a police investigator.”

“I thought that was your role as well,” Giessen said, his voice flat.

“No longer,” Watson said. “You have not been keeping up with developments.”

He smiled distantly at Klaus. Who merely stared back at him.

I’ll have to smooth things over with Klaus, Watson thought. And until then, I’d better watch my back.

“The world is changed,” Jebediah said suddenly. They all turned to look at him. His eyes glittered like an eagle’s. “Just as surely as it was changed when it rained for forty days and forty nights. Everything is new again. We have the word of God, the true word of God, for the first time.”

Watson had a sinking feeling, hearing that. Can I really keep control of this?

But Giessen had clearly been moved by the boy’s words. There was a mystical streak in Giessen that, in its balancing counterpoint to his punctilio and pragmatism, was very German.

Giessen—The Thirst—stood, and said, “I . . . I feel ashamed that I have done so little. While Rick Crandall is on Retreat, we must do his work.”

“God’s Work,” Jebediah said.

Giessen nodded. “Yes. God’s work.” He smoothed down his coat jacket, tugged his tie into proper position and checked his watch. All signs he was about to launch into some sort of activity. “Truly God’s work. There are prisoners I have not interrogated. I will remedy this now. One of them, I feel, will lead me to the animal they call Hard-Eyes Torrence.”

He went briskly to the door, purposeful as the swish of a knife blade.

The Badoit Arcology, Egypt.

When—a week after his first visit—Steinfeld was brought back into Badoit’s office he had the feeling the meeting was continuing as if it had never been interrupted by his arrest. It was about the same time of day, the tea cart was there, Badoit wore more or less the same suit, and the same expression of friendly detachment.

“Please sit down, my friend,” Badoit said. “I would like first to apologize for keeping you in ‘house arrest.’ We informed your people you would be delayed in returning, but I am sure it was a great inconvenience to you.”

Steinfeld shrugged, and sat in the same seat he’d occupied before. “More like a vacation. I had a spa, movies, TV, a comfortable apartment, good food, and access to a swimming pool. And a masseuse.”

“And then there was the indignity of subjecting your mind to an extractor search . . . ”

“It’s a painless process. I’d have done it voluntarily. I didn’t mind. Because—I was prepared to open my mind, my heart to you, Shaikh Badoit.”

Badoit smiled thinly as he poured coffee for them. “You are the very soul of politesse. Very well: I take it you have forgiven me. Let us put it aside. You passed the extractor test with flying colors. The extractor insists that you are quite sincere.” He grinned, brief and bright as a flashbulb pop. “And not at all bent on sabotaging my organization from within. Some of my advisers had thought . . . well, no matter. The other investigations into your background confirmed everything you told me. You are really quite an honest man for a former Mossad agent.”

“I am not a Mossad agent,” Steinfeld said. He shrugged. “Hard as that may be to believe. I do some work in association with them. I am merely an antifascist organizer.”

“Ah.” He didn’t sound convinced. “You mentioned the television.” He passed Steinfeld coffee and a scone. “Did you see, on that television—about Damascus?”

“The announcement from the Reverend Crandall? The so-called Damascus Scrolls. Yes. Astounding. And this business about Mohammed—the gall of these people amazes me. They have made a great mistake. They’ve become overconfident. Arrogant. And stupid. They think the rest of the world is even stupider, apparently.”

“Precisely correct: they have made a great mistake in this fabrication. And they make a mistake to malign the Prophet. They pushed me into commitment, my friend. You will have your freedom, and the help you require—up to a point.”

“Up to which point, Shaikh Badoit?”

“To begin with, up to about four-hundred-thirty million in world currency, to fund your resistance organization. Or you may have it in securities, gold bullion, or bank transfer to any account you name.” He sipped coffee. “Later I hope to double that amount.”

FirStep, The Space Colony.

Russ Parker and Claire Rimpler stood on the podium platform under the inverted cradle of the sky—that was also the ground, if you walked far enough—and waited for the dedication to get under way.

The temporary platform was made of pressed recycled paper—the artificial-cellulose pulp they used for the printout clothing they wore—and it quaked a little under Lester’s rather heavy tread as he crossed to them, shook their hands for the Colony TV station’s cameras, and then went to the grass-blade-thin microphone taped to the podium. He spoke to the technicki crowd in Technicki argot; telling them that it was partly through Claire and Parker’s efforts that the new technicki-staff housing project had been completed in the Space Colony’s Open; that Parker had saved his life; that Claire Rimpler was a person who understood workers, who cared about them. That the housing here in the Colony’s Open—the parklike space in the Bernal Sphere that held the inside-out biosphere, complete with fresh air and sunlight and beneficial fauna—was a symbol of the new respect Colony Administration had for workers on every level.

Parker didn’t understand Technicki well, couldn’t make out most of it. He heard his own named mixed in with a mush bowl of consonants and vowels, each sentence sounding to Parker like one long word. Parker felt embarrassed, knowing he was being praised, but happy, knowing something had been achieved. And he felt close to Claire just now.

Sometimes she intimidated him. She had come back from Earth with a real edge to her. She’d seen things there that had hardened her, sharpened her. But when she was happy, the woman shone out of her like Texas starlight, and man, he just wanted to . . .

You too damn old for her, Rusty, he told himself.

When Lester was done, Claire nudged Parker, and he went awkwardly to the mike, wincing at the paper noise as he unfolded his notes, read out his short speech in Standard. Claire, the show-off, did hers in Technicki. They cut the ribbon, strolled through the multidwelling units to drink punch at the reception in the project’s Community Center.

Claire and Parker stood together, chatting with Lester’s wife, Kitty; Lester strolled over and Claire muttered, “Uh-oh. He’s got that rhetoric look in his eye.” Kitty chuckled; Parker inwardly groaned.

“You know,” Lester said, pinning Parker with his challenging stare, “we got some momentum going here, zeal for reform and all that, Maybe we should use it, keep going. Reform the economic infrastructure of the Colony.”

“Lester,” said Parker, “do you really think that if you put it up to a popular vote people’d vote for a socialist state in the Colony? Come on. Most technickis are more or less of Democratic Party persuasion, not radicals.”

“Especially in light of the changes lately,” Claire said. “Things are working for them as is.”

“No,” Lester said. “Things are easing for them. That doesn’t mean that things are really fair. There’s still a class structure here; there’s still under-representation; there’s still salary inequities. Admin’s not treating them like indentured servants anymore—more like . . . like ordinary servants with a ‘liberal’ employer.”

“Reform’s ongoing,” Claire said. “I’d like to see it go farther—Maybe we do need some kind of Democratic-Socialist structure. In a moderate kind of way. I think your health care should be completely subsidized and not come out of your paycheck; I think housing should be more broadly subsidized. But socialism per se is just too archaic for this kind of environment, Lester.”

“Socialism isn’t archaic any more than the principles of engineering are archaic—they get refined as people learn how to build things better, but the basic principles . . . ”

It went on like that for a while, ending with everyone agreeing to think about it. Lester didn’t seem angry that they hadn’t jumped on his bandwagon, but he could be pretty inscrutable; it was hard to tell for sure.

After Lester’s wife rescued them, dragging him off to help her with the baby, Claire said, “I’ve had enough politics for one day. Feel like taking a walk, Russ?”

Hell, yeah.

There was weather in the Colony. Understated weather, but weather still. Some of it was deliberately contrived by Life Support Systems, some of it was an accident of the Colony’s design and internal cycles. There was some clouding and mild, misty precipitation in the Open; there was a little smog sometimes, from the imperfect air filtering. The rotation of the Colony, with changes in temperature as the solar wind basted its turning sides, led to breezes produced by shifting air-pressure. Today, with the windows adjusted to let in more sunlight than other times of year, and with the evaporation from this morning’s irrigation, it was rather humid, making Parker think of Dallas.

“What I want right now . . . is ice cream,” he told her as they strolled down the path through the thin woods, watching potbellied “Frisbee athletes” gliding plastic plates to each other on the grassy field beyond the treeline.

“Might give you some, you play your cards right,” she said.

“You got ice cream? Since when did that ship in?”

“It didn’t. I made it. My dad had a hand-crank ice-cream maker.”

“And you’ve been hiding this from me! Boy, I tell you, there’s nothing to this old-boy stuff among the Admin people if you’re any example! Where’s my damn share of your decadent perks?”

“You got to exercise to earn it. Ice cream’s fattening. When it’s humid like this, I like to go to the freefall rooms, do some air tumbling, work out a little. It’s not much fun alone, though. You want to come?”

“Uh—sure. I guess. I haven’t been but once . . . ”

“Elevator for that section’s at this end of the woods.”

Parker followed her onto a crosspath, toward the curving wall, recently cleaned of most of its graffiti, where a transparent-plastic corridor, like an umbilicus stretching from the placenta-like Open, led into the intricately engineered uterus of the Space Colony.

She seemed a little pensive; that, and the fact that the freefall rooms were often used for sexual trysts, made him think: Maybe I’ll get lucky.

No way. You’re too old for her.

In the Colony’s Admin Comm Center, Stoner was sucking Coca-Cola Nine from a paper carton and waiting for his call from Earth to come through. He sat at the console, staring at the empty screens; three of them centered with the words “Transmission Wait.”

Steinfeld came in first, from Israel, his image blinking onto the left-hand screen; then Smoke, from London, in the right-hand. The middle screen stayed blank, as Steinfeld said, “Our backer—” meaning Badoit “—won’t do the videoconference. He’s just too paranoid—or maybe just wiser than me. But he’s with us all right. I’ve got the money to prove it. And I think he’s going to lend us some troops for certain actions . . . ”

With the transmission lags edited out, the rest of the conference went, “Smoke, you getting us both?”

“Right with you.”

“Steinfeld?”

“Yes.”

“Steinfeld, are you confident about the security of this transmission?”

“Unless someone’s got a technological edge we don’t know about. Always a possibility.”

“Let’s just do it,” Stoner said. “I got something I need to talk about. Look—if our Backer’s really there for us, then we don’t need Witcher. Correct?”

Steinfeld hesitated. Some interplanetary interference, maybe a burst of solar radiation in a troublesome wavelength, made his image flicker and fuzz for a moment, as if the TV screen were acting out his uncertainty. Then it stabilized—and he nodded. “We can always use Witcher’s support too, but we can now get by without it and still be effective, I think. It’s gotten worse?”

“Yeah,” Stoner said. “it’s gotten worse. I’m pretty sure Witcher’s making concerted efforts to keep intelligence from us.”

“This doesn’t necessarily mean he’s hiding something from us for, ah, the wrong reasons,” Steinfeld said. “It might be a need-to-know issue. Because of extractors.”

“What extractors? Here on the Colony? I doubt it. Anyway—I’ve had an inkling what some of it’s about. It’s something he definitely should be sharing, you know what I mean?” Stoner paused, sucked thoughtfully at the Coca-Cola. These transmissions were expensive, the systems time shouldn’t be squandered, but he had to think about how he put this. “He approached one of our technicians, offered him a lot of money to work for him in private. Setting up a transmitter controlled from his room. He paid the guy to do EVA work, set up a shortwave antenna to piggyback the signal onto our main beam after the transmission goes out, and receive independently . . . Well, the guy thought about it and came to Parker to see if it was okay. Russ Parker’s the security chief, and assistant administrator. And Parker brought it to me. I told him go ahead and install it, with some modifications . . . and Witcher doesn’t know about the modifications.”

“You’ve been spying on him?” Steinfeld said. “That was pretty risky. If he’d found out and we didn’t have the backer . . . ”

“Maybe. I couldn’t resist the chance to find out what’s going on with him.”

“You’re still CIA at heart, Stoner,” Smoke said.

Stoner shot a glare at Smoke’s camera. The remark hadn’t been a compliment.

“It’s done,” Stoner said, “and what I got is some back-and-forth with his company vice president about some investigation his outfit’s been doing for him. The SA’s been hiring people with expertise in gen-engineering viruses. Witcher sent a transmission asking them to get him the specs . . . ”

“To me, sounds like he’s doing research for our protection,” Steinfeld said. “We have worried about the fascists developing biowar materiel.”

“But why all this secretiveness about the transmission? His transmission is no more secure than ours—except from me and Parker.”

Steinfeld shrugged. “He’s a paranoid, maybe deciding to look into it on his own, doesn’t want to trust anyone else until he has to.”

“It doesn’t feel like that to me. It doesn’t jibe with my experience,” Stoner said. “And that is the CIA man in me.”

Steinfeld said, “Okay, keep monitoring him. Investigate any way you want. The risks . . . ”

“Maybe,” Smoke said, “it warrants extractor interrogation—if it comes to that, we could talk about it.”

“Are you serious, Smoke?” Steinfeld asked. “Witcher?”

“I’ve often felt he had some kind of . . . hidden agenda,” Smoke said.

“He might be playing both ends against the middle,” Stoner said. “NR against SA for some reason. Maybe just to benefit his company.”

“No,” Steinfeld said. “If you think that, you don’t know him. He’s a strange sort of idealist. If he’s playing us against them, he has some other reason.”

“So I can go ahead and look into it.”

“Yes.” There was regret in Steinfeld’s tone, audible over hundreds of thousands of miles of void. “Look into it.”

Women’s liberation, Russ Parker thought, was a regional thing on Earth. It was widespread in much of the US and Europe, still a rarity in much of the Middle East and parts of India though the worst oppression of women had eased there. Lately it was doing surprisingly well in Africa, largely due to the efforts of the black woman who was the president of South Africa and the chairwoman of the African National Congress.

But it hadn’t made a lot of headway in Texas. Not where Parker was raised.

It was one of those things that Parker believed in—but somehow found hard to live up to. So Claire’s aggressiveness caught him off guard. Confused him.

That’s not to say he didn’t like it when she grabbed him in midair, kissed him hard on the mouth, and wrapped her legs around his hips.

There had, yes, been preliminaries. They’d talked a great deal on the way here. He’d talked about his ex-girlfriend back on Earth, and she’d talked about Torrence. Talking about past lovers was a way of laying the romantic groundwork without being too blunt about it, he supposed. And for her, maybe it was a kind of confessional—she felt guilty about Torrence. About thinking she needed a love life away from him. Talking about it, admitting the guilt, was some kind of expiation in advance, he supposed.

Talk had stopped ten minutes into their freefall time. The sound system was playing the Japanese composer Tanaka, sweeping expanses of synthesizer sound and sampled choirs superimposing the cathedralesque on the ethereal; beating with the soft, insistent pulse of longing, of subdued libido. He watched her turn in the air like an Eastern European gymnast in a slow-motion instant replay, no wasted motion, interpreting the music but without self-consciousness, without extravagance. He watched the ballet ripple of her breasts; the roundness of her movements in the air . . .

Then she’d grabbed him, kissed him, clasped him with her legs. They were spinning in a slow cartwheel through the big, roughly circular room, its lights dialed low. The padded walls wheeling by. Parker’s stomach rebelled—he had less tolerance for anything that threatened his balance, the older he got—but his sex engorged, and strained at his trousers. He felt her undo his zipper, was briefly embarrassed when he felt the cold air at his crotch. She wriggled out of her clothes like some fantastic flying animal molting in the air. He undressed more clumsily, wishing the lights were dimmer to better hide his paunch. He reached out and stopped her spinning when they got near a wall; Claire seemed to accept that he needed anchored sex. He’d never done it in freefall; had heard it took training. But holding on to a wall strap, finding the center of gravity between them, in their interlocked genitals, they had the advantage of freefall sex without the disadvantages. It was rather like something he’d done on Earth once: making love in a swimming pool, holding on to the concrete edge. But there was no water to interfere with them here. Nothing interfered with them. The near-weightlessness seemed to cohere their flesh more completely, let their blood surge more freely. He penetrated her gravitational field, a gravity well it was called, and imagined they were like a two-planet system in space, like the Earth and the moon . . .

After he came, the semen escaped from her vagina, made opalescent pearls around them in the air, quivering with potential life.

Okay, he thought, holding her, the two of them floating slowly, reclining in one another’s arms, drifting through afterglow . . .

She took his head between her hands and gave him a long, slow kiss.

Okay, she likes older men too . . .

Paris.

“They know I’m here,” Torrence said.

“Don’t be stupid,” said Roseland. “It’s a coincidence.”

Torrence sat with Bibisch and Roseland at a café table on Place Clichy. The place was crowded. They sat with their backs to the glass of the café windows, at one of the innermost tables, feeling the sunlight glancing off the window bring sweat out on the backs of their necks. Underneath the statuary in the midst of the square, across from the bombed-out shell of the old adult video store, the Unity Party soldiers were lining up the prisoners. More prisoners blinked in the sunlight as they were brought out of the backs of trucks. How many were they going to execute?

“They must know I’m here,” Torrence said again.

“How could they know?” Bibisch said. “Nous arrivons—” She broke off when Roseland shook his head at her. She sipped her iced coffee with no sign of enjoyment.

They’d come to the café because she had heard that this one had real coffee. Now that the war was over, shipments of prime consumer goods were coming into Paris again, but the stuff was taking forever, it seemed, to reach the public. Maybe some of the corrupt U.P. bureaucrats had to take theirs off the top first, to make a last profit on the black market.

Forty, Torrence thought, as the soldiers slammed the rear doors of the transport truck. They’re going to kill forty people. They know I’m here.

“They are the U.P’s Soldats Superieurs,” Bibisch whispered.

Torrence nodded dumbly. The government’s new SA-trained elite troops of Racially Pure Frenchmen. Superior Soldiers. The Unity Party’s SS. They wore armored kevlar uniforms of silver and flat black, the U.P.’s symbol sewn onto the shoulders: the Arc de Triomphe against a French flag.

“We will go now, Dan,” Bibisch said. “Come on.”

He shook his head. He couldn’t move. A spiritual inertia held him rooted to his chair. A weight in his gut he couldn’t possibly lift. He weighed about a ton and a half. About the weight of forty underfed people.

Some of the prisoners were dark-skinned, a few of them were Hassidim, several of them white French “subversives”; they milled in a small oblate crowd, blurred together, individuality lost in the commonality of their confusion at this abrupt consummation of destiny. The guards stood around them in a human chain, facing inward. A man Torrence recognized as Giessen, The Thirst, studied the crowd around the square. Don’t move. Don’t run. Don’t scream. He’ll notice you.

“I can’t move anyway,” Torrence muttered.

Bibisch looked at him. “Quoi?”

Torrence said nothing.

Giessen spoke softly to the FSS commanding officer, who turned to the crowd, announced that this execution of “criminal conspirators” was being carried out in reprisal for the crimes of the terrorist “Hard-Eyes.” Then he turned to his soldiers, and barked an order. The soldiers aimed their machine pistols. Prisoners screamed, cringed. Some of the people watching screamed. The FSS officer opened his mouth with the command to fire.

Torrence stood up. Didn’t know he was doing it.

He began to move toward Giessen, opening his mouth to shout.

But Giessen wasn’t looking his way. Roseland and Bibisch took Torrence, one on each side, turned him away from the sight, Roseland covering Torrence’s mouth with a hand, Bibisch hissing something in French at their waiter—a friend.

Roseland murmured, “Role-reversal time, Torrence. My turn to keep you from blowing it.” He and three other men, shielded from the sight of The Thirst by the crowd around the square, dragged Torrence into the café. Into the back, out through a back door, up a stairs, into the building . . . down into a back street.

Torrence, voice muffled, was trying to tell them, They must know I’m here anyway, so it doesn’t matter. They’re doing this to torture me, before they come and get me. They know. They know. This is punishment.

“No, no,” Bibisch said. “Hush.”

Torrence heard the C.O. bark his final command.

But he wasn’t there to hear the machine pistols’ sss, sss, sss as the pellet-size explosive bullets were shot into the prisoners.

Torrence wasn’t there to hear it; he wasn’t there to see it.

But, somehow, he saw it over and over again, in his imagination, for a long time after that.

• 08 •

London.

Cooper was acting strangely. And Barrabas began to worry he’d done the wrong thing in bringing Jo Ann back here.

They were in the video editing room; not for editing, but for talking in privacy. Cooper was sitting on a swivel stool, hugging himself, swaying a little, looking as if he might fall off at any second. His eyes were dilating and shrinking, dilating and shrinking.

He’s stoned, Barrabas realized. He’s been tinkering with his balancer.

“She’s out in the lobby?” Cooper asked thickly.

“Yes.”

“Go out and talk to her, keep her there. I’ll have Security bring her around back. We’ll have a car ready . . . ”

Someone’s footsteps sounded in the hall. Barrabas reached over, sloppily hit a switch, turned on the editor so the noise would cover their talk. It showed disconcerting images of the subhumans. Stumbling around, shitting themselves; living mockeries of humanity. Barrabas looked quickly away, trying to ignore the mewling sounds that came from the speakers.

“How much are you going to erase?” Barrabas said. “I mean—not all her recent memories? I don’t want to be erased from her memory. Unless maybe selectively. Just the gen-engineering stuff or—?”

“What are you babbling about?”

“She’s come to have that stuff erased—”

“That costs money. I mean, we can’t erase that without causing a lot of questions to be asked . . . ”

“What? I mean, what the bloody hell—”

“I’m saying, never mind any of it. Leave it to us.” Cooper tried to smile reassuringly. It was like a ferret baring its teeth.

Barrabas stared. “You’re going to kill her.”

Cooper made a dismissive gesture. “Not personally.”

Pink things, mewling, squirmed in video on the edge of his vision. “They’re going to take her in the car and—”

“You’re not really involved with this creature, are you? She’s a leftist, quite possibly a Communist or an Anarchist. Leave her alive and she’s liable to marry some great strapping Negro and have his children. Miscegenation of the worst order. Revolting. Put her out of your mind.”

Barrabas blanked his face, and shrugged with resignation. “Right.”

“Toddle along, now. Keep her out there till—”

“Right,” Barrabas said again. He nodded, turned, mechanically opened the door, walked stiffly out and down the hall.

He found her in the lounge. Looking nervous, turning her handbag over and over in her fingers. “Did you get the approval for the . . . thing?” she asked. As if he’d been arranging an abortion.

“Yes. Yeah, uh . . . ”

He heard voices in the next room. One of them was the chief of Security.

Barrabas took her firmly by the wrist. “Come on, I’ll take you over there myself.”

“Don’t yank me around like that.” But she went with him, out of the building. “What are you in such a fucking hurry for?”

He looked around, sorting through the traffic. It had just rained; the streets were damp and glossy, and the air was muggy as the pavement gave off the earlier heat of the day into the twilight.

There, parked in front of a pub, a hulking black taxi. The driver wasn’t at the wheel—probably having a pint.

Barrabas dragged her through traffic, making cars honk at them and swerve. He pulled her into the pub. He looked out through the dusty window, saw the SA security men stepping out of the lab’s front door. They were looking around, frowning. A beer lorrie pulled up in front of the pub, blocking their view. And traffic was thick. There might be time.

Barrabas found the cab driver at the old brass and wood bar: a squat, sallow bloke with a thin mustache and watery eyes, Southeast Asian maybe, sucking up the brown foam at the bottom of a pint. Barrabas took the width of the room in two strides, grabbed the driver’s elbow, slapped a twenty-pound note down in front of him. Britain had never changed to the world currency—was still using the pound sterling.

“Break’s over, mate. Bit of an emergency.”

“ ’Ere, I’m not giving up me dinner break for twenty quid—”

“You drinking your dinner? All right, here.” He slapped down another twenty quid. It was all the money he had.

“Barrabas, what the hell!” Jo Ann started, angrily. Thinking he was bullying a wog again. “The guy is—”

“Trust me this once, love.”

The cabbie was making a great show of his reluctance as he scooped up the forty and folded it, put it in his pocket. Then he unsteadily followed Barrabas out to his cab. Jo Ann trailed after, scowling.

The security men were on their way across the street as the lorry pulled away. They spotted Jo Ann as she and Barrabas got into the cab. The SA men shouted as the taxi pulled away, reaching into their jackets. The flow of traffic was with the cab and they quickly left the SA thugs behind.

“Where to?” the driver asked.

“Just . . . Picadilly.” Till he could think of somewhere else.

She looked at him. “We were running from them?”

He nodded, leaned back on the seat, letting the tension drain from him. Feeling dizzy. He’d hyperventilated. He whispered, “They weren’t going to erase the stuff—they were going to erase you, completely.” He made a throat cutting motion across his gullet.

She gaped at him, shook her head in disbelief. “Why?”

“Just an erase extraction—Cooper’d have to do a lot of explaining—it’d come out how he’d been skimming money from the SA. See, he—” And then he saw the way she was looking at him. Realized what he’d said.

“The SA,” she repeated. “The Second Alliance. That’s who owns that lab?” Adding in a whisper: “That’s who you work for.”

“Did work for. It was—I just needed work.” What was he ashamed of? He’d been proud of the uniform, the training. The mission. He ought to tell her to go to hell. But he said, “I saved your life. You know that, or not?”

She nodded slowly. “Risked yourself to do it. I know that. But you’re one of them. They don’t just hire people. What I heard, everybody’s got to believe.” She was staring at him, seeing him differently now. She asked him bluntly: “Do you believe in that crap? Their racist shit?”

He reached for the belief, for his pride, his conviction.

Then he saw the pink squirming things. The subhumans. The things in tank forty-one. And conviction was a wet bar of soap.

“I don’t know. It’s—getting harder to believe in.” It was the best he could manage.

She looked out the window. “Why Picadilly?”

“No reason. Just wanted to get to another part of town. Got a better idea? My house or yours is right out.”

“I ought to ditch you,” she said, not looking at him. “But I guess . . . I guess I don’t want to.”

But she continued to look out the window. He wanted to take her hand, put an arm around her, but a certain compression of her legs together, a warning in the set of her shoulders, kept him back.

After a long moment, she added, “I got an idea where we could go.”

“Some friends to hide with?”

“Yeah. Somebody, anyway, I know through a friend. Only met him once. But I think he’d help. I heard he was in town, over at Dahlia’s. A guy named Smoke.”

Barrabas had a sense of unreality when he saw Jerome-X and his enormous black Negress sitting on the sofa at Dahlia’s.

No: Jerome wasn’t on the sofa, exactly. Jerome was sitting in her lap.

Miscegeny, Barrabas thought. Expecting to feel the nausea of revulsion. All he felt, though, was a dull disorientation.

Jerome was wearing a black leather jacket, open to show a few hairs on his skinny, shirtless chest. Antique jeans, rather silly red plastic boots with bright yellow baby doll’s arms on them in place of Mercury’s wings. The black woman wore a big shapeless red house dress with electric-blue carnations strobing on it. No shoes. Barrabas was worried the couch would break under the bloody great bulk of her.

“Hi,” Jerome said. “What’s happenin’?”

Barrabas decided it was a rhetorical question used as a greeting, and only shrugged.

Jo Ann said, “We’re looking for Dahlia.”

“Right here.” She appeared at the door to the dining room—a tall, gracefully long-necked black woman in an African robe batiked in red clay, copper, and silver; she wore silver contact lenses, white-blue lipstick, earrings that were dangly gold replicas of ancient tribal fetishes; cornrowed hair, each row glazed a different metallic color: copper, silver, gold, platinum, bronze, stainless steel . . .

“ ’Ello, love,” she said, crossing to Jo Ann. Her anklets clinking; her bare feet slapping on the polished hardwood floor. She hugged Jo Ann, slowly and deeply. A little embarrassed, Barrabas looked around.

They were in a high-ceilinged sitting room, in the old Edwardian terrace house, beside a dusty marble fireplace. The room was busy with the sheer excess of its decor. The mantel was crowded with a collection of jade figurines. The late-nineteenth-century plaster moldings near the ceiling were ornate. On the walls, between the cheerfully painted woodwork, covering most of the faded, intricately patterned wallpaper, was a crowd of artwork; aboriginal art, with its assertive angularity, was mixed indiscriminately with the evocative blur of Impressionist paintings and the restless collaging of video paintings. African and Australian nature gods scowling out from between Seurat and Thaddeus Wong.

My God, where has she brought me to? Barrabas thought.

Dahlia came out of the giggling clinch and snaked out a long arm to Barrabas.

In a rather rummy voice, Barrabas thought, Jo Ann said: “Oh, Dahlia, this is Patrick Barrabas.”

“ ’Lo.” He took her hand. It was warm and moist.

“I guess you’ve already met Jerome and Bettina.”

“Sort of,” he said. “And we saw them perform the other night.” Dutifully, he added, “Exxy show.”

Jerome grinned. “Thanks.”

Dahlia led Jo Ann to the Louis XIV sofa. Barrabas sat across from them in an antique chair of cracked brown leather. He tried not to stare at Jerome and Bettina.

Bloke looked like a bloody ventriloquist’s dummy sitting on the great puddle of the black woman’s lap, Barrabas thought.

Dahlia reached languidly to a remote on a mahogany end table. “Let’s have some music,” she said. Her accent was middle-class London, Barrabas thought, for all her African affectation. A wealthy family, like as not, judging from the expensive jumble of the furnishings. From a family of black immigrants, he told himself, come over a generation ago, taking opportunities that should have gone to white British natives.

Barrabas tried to work up some inner spark of outrage about it. But the flint found nothing to strike on.

The music swelled to thud and skirl on the high ceiling; Barrabas had expected recordings of “authentic aboriginal” music, or some such, but instead the music was an amalgamation of house music and dance electronica. Perhaps it was the contemporary equivalent of aboriginal music.

“I was hoping Smoke was still here,” Jo Ann was saying. “I need to talk to him, if you think it’d be okay. I’ve got a problem. Some people—”

“Might be better to tell as few people as possible,” Barrabas broke in. Smiling apologetically. “To protect them as well.”

Jo Ann hesitated. “I guess so. To protect them.”

“Oh, I do love the dramatic sound of all this,” Dahlia said, yawning. “Not going to tell even poor Dahlia?”

“Um—eventually,” Jo Ann said.

“They don’t know if they can trust us,” Jerome remarked, whispering it sotto voce to Bettina.

“Hell, I don’ know if dey can either,” Bettina said. “I don’ know who dey are. I don’ care about dis shit neither. Dying for some motherfucking dinner.”

Jerome started to get up. “I’ll get Smoke, maybe we can all cruise for something.”

Bettina grabbed him, held him back. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere. Did I say you get up?” Looking at Jerome with narrowed eyes.

Not serious, Barrabas realized. Some kind of game.

“Fuck you,” Jerome said, trying not to laugh, wriggling free of her. “I go where I please, bitch.”

“Who you calling bitch—? Come here, I beat yo’ skinny pink ass!”

But he was gone, laughing at her as he went through the door.

“Little white punk!” she called after him. “I make you sorry!” But shaking with silent laughter, big belly and the obese undersides of her arms quivering.

Weird, Barrabas thought.

“If you want Smoke’s help,” Dahlia said, thoughtfully clicking her long, gold-painted nails against the carved wood of the armrest, “then it’s maybe some . . . political problem?”

“Yeah,” Jo Ann said.

“You need Smoke’s people too?”

“Yeah.”

“Right, no reason not to talk in front of Jerome and Bettina. It’ll come out, I reckon—they’re part of it.”

“Uh—” Jo Ann looking at Barrabas. Thinking, he supposed, of warning Dahlia not to say too much in front of him. She wasn’t sure of his loyalty.

And he wasn’t sure himself. But he said. “It’s okay, Jo Ann. I’m committed.”

She pursed her lips—but shrugged resignedly.

Barrabas noticed Bettina watching them; following the implicit message as well as the explicit one, in the exchange between Jo Ann and Barrabas.

He had an uncomfortable feeling Bettina knew exactly what was going on. Looking at her, just a quick glance into Bettina’s eyes, he glimpsed the analytical whir of her mind; was shaken up by the hard glitter of intelligence he saw there.

Jerome returned with a stooped, lanky, hawk-nosed man in a rumpled, ill-fitting real-cloth suit of gray pinstripe. He was in his stocking feet. “This woman wanted to talk to you,” Jerome said.

“Jack Smoke,” the tall man said, crossing to them, shaking Jo Ann’s hand.

The restaurant was crowded and close and smelled strongly of beer and beef. Yellowed prints of nineteenth-century opera posters on the wall almost vanished into the dim, dark-wood ambience. The low rafters were smoke-blackened from a time when smoking was allowed in restaurants. Barrabas, Jo Ann, Dahlia, Jack Smoke, and Jerome banged elbows in a hard wooden booth. Bettina sat grouchily on a chair at the end of the table. Jo Ann told her story, keeping her voice down for much of it so they had to strain to hear her. Finishing just as the food arrived.

“Only ting dey know how to cook in dis fuckin’ country is roast beef,” Bettina said, digging into hers with no further preliminaries.

Barrabas would have liked to have resented the remark, only it was uncomfortably correct.

“There’s curries,” Dahlia said. “And cous-cous.”

Not British, Barrabas thought. Except by default.

“I’ve been taking cooking courses,” Dahlia said. (Barrabas thinking: I was right about her, she’s a course taker.) “North African cuisines. And it’s had an effect on my paintings.” (Barrabas nodding to himself.) She went on, “The spicier the food I cook, the more color I tend to use—it’s a reflection of those energies, you know.” And she went on, filling up the time talking about “her art” and “her music,” as Smoke ruminated on Jo Ann’s dilemma.

Finally, when they were drinking bitters and eating pudding, Smoke said, “Jerome. Bettina.”

They looked at him expectantly.

He went on slowly, staring into his half-eaten pudding. Talking low, though the place was crammed with noise, “Can you check the Plateau, see if anyone we can trust has access to an extractor in London?”

Jerome-X and Bettina nodded, like a person with two heads.

And as one, their eyes glazed.

Barrabas felt a chill, looking at them. Like they were in a trance. Some kind of chip augmentation, maybe.

“Mickin,” Bettina said.

“Cover,” Jerome said.

“Hub?” said Jo Ann.

Smoke explained. “They’re talking in a sort of aug-chip shorthand. She said that there was a microwave oven in use creating some interference; Jerome said he’d give her some transmission cover so she could get through.”

“Oh.”

“You wouldn’t mind our using an extractor, Jo Ann?” Smoke asked. Politely but without any real concern for her dislikes.

“An extractor?” Jo Ann asked nervously. “Can you get the stuff out with . . . well, I guess you can.”

Smoke nodded. “And we can record it. Find out what it is. Way you describe it, it sounds as if it would be of interest to us.”

To us. It was then that Barrabas was sure. About who he’d fallen in with.

He was with the New Resistance.

He was hiding out with his own enemies.

They thanked Dahlia and sent her home. The rest of them cabbed directly from the restaurant to the London Institute of Neurobiology, where a sympathizer had access to an extractor. Getting into the cab, Barrabas was uncomfortably aware that the big black woman was standing very close to him; was, in fact, watching him. As was Jerome. They began keeping an eye on him directly Jo Ann told them about his involvement with the SA. He began to wonder if he would be separated from Jo Ann at some point, taken somewhere for interrogation. Afterward, his body dumped in the Thames . . .

They weren’t going to just let him go, that was certain. He toyed with the idea of disappearing on his own. He was afraid to return to the SA, but he might hide out with relatives upcountry—or somewhere, anyway, on his own.

He couldn’t bring himself to break away completely from Jo Ann, though. When he looked at her, a strange gestalt organized her face into someplace exquisitely restful.

Suppose he suppressed those feelings. Suppose he asked them to let him out of the cab, right here . . .

They’d never let him go. They didn’t dare trust him. He could hardly blame them for that, really. There’d be an argument at least, quite possibly a fight.

No. He’d have to take his chances with them, at least for now.

By the time he’d decided, it was fair dark out and they’d arrived at the hospital.

They drove around the back. A nearly midget-size Paki doctor in a blue tunic was waiting for them, his arms clasped anxiously over his chest. He nodded briskly to Smoke, frowned at the others, but said nothing. The doctor led them into the clinical brightness and medicinal tang of the corridor, their footsteps echoing off the white tile walls. He took them hastily into a lab, through the lab to a little room filled with equipment Barrabas didn’t recognize. In the midst of all the cryptic gear was a padded examination table. “Lie down, please,” the doctor said.

Barrabas realized, with a chill, that the doctor wasn’t talking to Jo Ann. He was talking to him. To Patrick Barrabas.

“I’ll go first,” Jo Ann said, seeing the look on his face.

“First?” Barrabas said.

“Lord, motherfucker can talk! I thought he was deef!” Bettina said.

“Keep your voices down, please,” the little doctor said, almost squeaking it, looking through a window in the door. “We’re not supposed to be in here, you know.”

Smoke nodded and said softly to Barrabas, “We have to debrief you, find out how much we can trust you, how you stand on things, what you might know that can help us.”

“For all I know, you might erase part of me,” Barrabas said. “To protect yourselves. Or brainwash me.”

Smoke shook his head. “Not going to erase anything from your head. Or plant anything. Just going to read it. We won’t force you. But . . . ”

But. Barrabas nodded. It wasn’t a threat exactly. That wasn’t the tone the man was using. More a mixture of regret and warning—that they might have to kill him.

Barrabas took a deep breath and said, “You are forcing me, in a way. But sod it.” He turned to Jo Ann. “I’m going to do this for you.” Maybe it was melodramatic; he didn’t care.

He felt trapped. But, strangely, at the same time he felt set free.

He lay down on the table, and she held his hand.

Dover, Kent.

Dawn was breaking steel blue and aluminum gray across the Dover Straits. It was a windy morning, and the sea lashed against the pilings of the dock, making the big hover ferry rock at its moorings. Barrabas and Jo Ann and Smoke and Jerome stood on the dock at the back of the crowd, waiting for the all-clear to go aboard the hover ferry. Bettina was conspicuously absent.

To their right, drivers with permits to take cars to France were queued up, mostly in the cheap Brazilian methanol compacts.

Barrabas huddled into his coat and moved a little closer to Jo Ann. The sky was dull with clouds, and whitecaps tipped the jade peaks of the sea. “Fuckin’ cold,” Jerome-X muttered.

“That’s England for you,” Jo Ann said. “Supposed to be summer.”

“It’ll warm up,” Barrabas said. “It’s early days.” He was looking around, trying to spot SA. “Wish we’d done a plane flight, though.”

Smoke said, in just over a whisper, “The SA’ll be on the airport for sure. They might not’ve come this far looking for us.”

Barrabas said, “I don’t know. I’m surprised they’re not here. They want Jo Ann, and they mean to find her. I know ’em.”

“Maybe they’ll just have the cops arrest us,” Jerome said. Looking over his shoulder; searching the street behind them for someone.

“They’ve got a relationship with the police—but they don’t want them involved in this, I’m sure,” Barrabas said.

Jerome looked small and sorrowful, almost lost in the oversize gray trenchcoat he’d borrowed from Dahlia.

Smoke glanced at him. “You sure about this, Jerome? Going with us?”

“Yeah.” But Jerome looked over his shoulder again.

“You think she’s going to come and talk you out of it?” Smoke said.

Jerome-X shot him a hard look. “Fuck you.”

“Jerome—we’ve got Bones in Paris now. He’s our connection to the Plateau there.”

“I don’t want to be a chip chippie. I want to fight.”

“Your career is beginning to move in the States. If you were a celebrity, you could help us there.”

“I don’t fucking want a career. I want to fight.” Pouting, he huddled deeper into his coat.

Smoke said gently, “Jerome . . . ”

“What?”

“There’s more than one way to fight.”

“Look—I saw something once. When I was linked. When we got out of jail. Saw myself. Like—a kinda personality animation thingie. It was sick, man. Need attention all the time. No belief in myself. Trying to be a performer because I want to get into the media. Like, I’m not a valid person unless I’m making records and on TV and stuff. That’s bullshit, Smoke.”

“This is what you were up all night arguing with Bettina over?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s got good instincts, Jerome.”

“You trying to tell me to stick to what I know how to do? I can learn. I don’t have to spend my life trying to be a fucking spectacle. It’s childish. I got to get away from that.”

“Yes. Rickenharp felt something like that. But it didn’t change him. Everybody’s got drives to be one way or another. You have a drive to be a spectacle—so what? Maybe there’s a reason. You saw only the subjective gestalt. There might be some other reason you’re a performer—if it’s neurosis, well, maybe there’s a higher reason for the neurosis. You only see a small thread on the tapestry.”

“It’s too fucking early in the morning to be mystical, Smoke.”

“She’s back there, Jerome, about a block down.”

Jerome looked at Smoke, startled. “Bettina?”

“Yeah. Sitting in a rental car. I saw her. She doesn’t want to come after you. She doesn’t want to humiliate you that way.”

“Be the first time.”

“You should know her better than that. And yourself. You don’t have to prove anything. I know you’re ready to die for us. I just think you could be more useful to us going on with the other thing. Fight for us as an artist. Public relations, consciousness raising. Be yourself, Jerome. I know that hurts. It hurt me once.”

Jerome stared at him, looking as if he was about to erupt with a fuck you. Finally, he grinned. And said, “Hey, it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.” He slapped Smoke on the shoulder, turned to the others. “Okay. I’m outta here. Good luck, you guys. Keep your head down.”

And then he turned back to Smoke. “What kind of rental car?”

“One of those big Arabian saloon cars that uses lots of cartel oil in its gearbox. I think it was yellow or—”

“Never mind—I’ve got her on chip now.”

He hurried away. Back to Bettina.

Back to his huge black mama, Barrabas thought.

Well, why the hell not.

Barrabas looked speculatively at Smoke. “You going to tell us what the extractor came up with? From Jo Ann, I mean? What was all that stuff they were buggerin’ with in her head?”

Smoke said with flat authority, “No. I’ve got to confirm something first. Bones is in Paris, I’ll talk to him first. He’s got a lot of stuff about genetically engineered organisms stored up. When I know what I’m talking about, I’ll talk about it.”

He looked like something was eating at him, Barrabas decided. Like he’s guessed what this Bones’ll confirm for him. And it scares him.

Quietly scared.

Barrabas knew what it was like to be quietly scared.

“I wish I’d had time to arrange a private boat,” Smoke said, peering southeast, toward the coast of France. Just across the channel, but not quite visible from here. “Anyway, Dahlia said she’d have some people here to cover for us.”

Barrabas snorted. “Dahlia. Bit full of herself, that one.”

Jo Ann shot him a look. “Are you going saying something racist? Because if you are—”

“No, no, no. But—”

“I know what he means,” Smoke said, coming to his rescue. “She’s always talking about herself, her little projects. She can seem shallow.”

Jo Ann shrugged. “She had the crummy luck to be born wealthy. Her parents have a diamond wholesaling outfit. And she’s an only child. Got everything she wanted, almost instantly. She’s never been quite sure of who she was, because she had the freedom to be anyone she wanted. But she’s always there for you. She’s almost the only real friend I had in London.”

Smoke nodded. “She’s always there for us, too. She knows what she’s risking, helping us. She’ll grow up. And in the meantime, she has so many connections—she may surprise you, Patrick.”

Barrabas shrugged. “I been surprised already.” The Hover ferry’s deck hands dropped the gate chain and the crowd began moving onto the vessel, sifting through the bottleneck a few at a time like grains of sand in an hourglass.

And then Barrabas saw the SA chief of London Security, and half a dozen others, all of them in plainclothes, but with hands on guns in their coats. They were getting out of the back of an unmarked green van.

“I see them,” Smoke said. He looked at the ferry. Its gate was still about thirty feet away and there was a heavy crowd in front of them.

The plainclothes thugs started across the street toward them. Smoke reached into his pocket. Jo Ann dug her fingers into Barrabas’s arm.

And then a score of howling teen thrashers on skateboards erupted from an alleyway.

And they made straight for the startled SA heavies.

The thrashers’d look ridiculous if they didn’t look so frightful, Barrabas thought—and so kinetically in control. Their scalp-ups were molded into the sort of fins you saw on mid-twentieth-century cars. And they all wore those absurd mirrored goggles. Despite the chill, they wore nothing but skin-tight neoprene kneepants, no shoes. Every one of them was etched with lean muscletone, and gang-color tattoos. Chrome insignias from cars, from Fuel-Cell BMWs, Jaguars, Mercedes, Mitsubishi 999s, swinging, glinting, on glass chains around their necks. They skated on big, narrow translucent-plastic skateboards edged in super-glued broken bottle glass, patchy with decals; skating half crouched, heads forward, chromed teeth flashing.

Strapped to their calves, hook-shaped blades, razor sharp; spikes on knees and elbows.

And the same expression, like a kind of uniform, on every face: as wide and as evil a grin as human facial muscles are capable of.

Probably a result of their drug combination, their stoke-up rush: 2C-B mixed with methedrine and vitamins, he’d heard. Which was why they were up at dawn, raging and indifferent to the cold.

Some variant of thrash/acid-house, mixed special for the thrashers, whipped the air from a soundbox strapped to the leader’s back as he led the gang into the thick of the SA thugs. The leader—the thrasher cap’n—pumped his legs on the skateboard, its wheels gimmicked to translate the pumping motion into kinetic energy so he didn’t have to kick off from the street. The boys yelled cryptic war cries in the variation of Technicki that English street punks used, “Guhfee muh bleh outcher—”

“Arsebug uh shuva bya fook!”

“Ava gowan yehdir upa shuh!”

(Barrabas and Jo Ann and Smoke were carried on the surging tide of the crowd running from the gang, shoving brutally to get onto the Hovercraft. Barrabas watching the fight over a shoulder.)

What followed was a blur, like a cartoon animation of electrons whizzing around the nucleus of an atom; an atom undergoing fission, maybe, as blood spurted, men screamed, guns fired, all of it punctuated by the ugly thud-crunch of elbow and kneespikes ramming flesh.

“Uh killuhfuh meh me bloo’ole Yiby!”

Two of the thrashers went down yelling, one shot through the neck, another through the groin. A third with a bullet through his ankle rode away from the melee like a crane, one-legged on his skateboard.

The Second Alliance thugs were either on their knees—gashed, clothes like circus-hobo rags—or half running, half limping, back to their van. Their guns were mostly scattered across the street. Their security chief was stumbling backward, fumbling with his gun. The thrasher captain bellowed, “Gowasuckerteetsies yarble ya bollkscunts!” and smacked the gun to spin away in the air, grabbed the SA London Security chief by the neck, bent him back, kissed him openmouthed with tongue, bit off a chunk of his lower lip, spun him, and kicked him in the ass so he fell on his face. The security chief scrambled screaming in horror toward the van.

Doing all this, the thrasher captain never lost his balance on his skateboard.

And then came the seesaw sounds of approaching police sirens, and the thrashers whizzed back into their alley.

Smoke’s party stumbled hurriedly onto the hover ferry.

The boat embarked with no delays. The street’s vendors were there to give the story to the police.

But in the glassed-in café on the upper deck of the craft, Jo Ann was crying at the smudged window. “God, that was awful. Those men cut to ribbons! Two of those boys shot dead.” Adding in a whisper, “Was it for us, Smoke?”

He nodded. “Dahlia sent them for sure. Probably bought them a month’s supply of stoke-up, had ’em watching the place. And the thrashers don’t like the fascists.”

“Second Alliance security’ll ring the SA in France,” Barrabas pointed out. “They’ll be waiting for us.”

Smoke shook his head. “There’s a boat going to come out and meet us before we reach the other shore. I’ve got it set up with a bosun on the ferry. The ferry’ll ‘break down’ for a few minutes, about a mile out from France . . . ”

Jo Ann wasn’t listening. “God. Those boys are dead because of us.”

Barrabas put an arm around her. Gave her a white plastic cup of hot chocolate. “Don’t cry for those kids. They live for that sort of thing, love. They’re dead already, most of ’em, from the neck up. Products of the war, in their way. Out of their effing heads.”

She bit a lip and turned away from the window. “Oh, fuck, what did I do?”

Did she mean What have I done? Or What did I do to deserve this?

Barrabas decided not to ask her.

Paris. Three days later.

The erstwhile drunk tank in the NR’s safe house was crowded, and the sad thing was, Roseland thought, they were all dead sober. He could have used a drink.

Most of the top Paris New Resistance people were crowded into the room, sitting on folding metal chairs, on the floor, or leaning against the wall. The door was open, but the air was sticky. Steinfeld and Smoke sat at a small table with hard-copy printouts on it, at one end of the room; the others sat facing them, in ragged rows. Hand was there, taking notes at the back on a palm device.

“How close are they to using this stuff?” Torrence asked.

Smoke sighed. He glanced at the new people, the English guy Patrick Barrabas and the young woman Jo Ann Teyk. An American. “From what the extractor gleaned from Jo Ann the virus is deployable anytime they want to mass-produce them. They have the facilities. Once the thing is released, it’ll thrive on its own for a while—not infinitely. It’s designed to die out after a certain amount of time. But not before hundreds of millions of people die. They’re still checking its efficiency—but that probably won’t take long.”

Roseland thought: I should be shocked, or bowled over, or shouting in outrage. Or something.

But he wasn’t, because he wasn’t surprised. A new Final Solution had to be part of the equation. Part of their mindset. He’d been expecting something like this. It made sense. A racially selective virus kills only according to your DNA codification—an efficiency the Nazis would have envied.

Father Lespere said, “I believe they have been testing some early variations of it in the detention centers in the last month. People are dying more rapidly than usual. Unusual symptoms . . . ”

“Oh, merde,” Bibisch said. Her eyes filled with tears. Torrence put an arm around her. All of them sat there for a few moments in silence, imagining the suffering.

“You have any trouble getting them out of the country?” Roseland asked, pointing with his chin at Barrabas and Jo Ann. He was mentioning it to change the subject. Right then he couldn’t bear thinking about children dying of the virus . . .

“Some,” Smoke said. “At the docks. There were SA thugs there. Out of uniform, but armed. They hadn’t told the police anything about it.” He gave a sickly smile. “The British kids have a big skateboard-revival thing going. Dahlia made a few calls, had a gang of ’em show up when we were about to board. The SA started to move in, and the kids came out of nowhere on their skateboards—”

Roseland blinked. “Skateboards? Are you kidding or what?” But he wasn’t amused. Nothing was funny just now.

Smoke added with grim satisfaction, “SA tough guys cried like a lot of spoiled children.”

The whole anecdote was told absentmindedly. They were all thinking of that looming Something Else.

Steinfeld said, “Jerome-X and Bettina and Bones . . . ” He nodded at the cadaverous black man leaning, arms crossed, in a corner. “ . . . broke into the SA computer, confirmed they’ve ordered the genetic raw materials to begin manufacturing the viruses. “

“I don’t believe this,” Hand said with a sort of desperation. He was sitting with his back to the wall, to Roseland’s right, tapping at his palmer.

Steinfeld wouldn’t let him record the meetings except for notes. And Steinfeld checked the notes. Just having Hand here was dangerous enough. Roseland hoped Smoke knew what he was doing . . .

“It’s just . . . it’s just too much to believe,” Hand said. “They wouldn’t go that far. That kind of genocide. Whole nations wiped out.”

“You don’t believe it,” Torrence said, his voice lifeless. Face blank. Most of the time, he’d been that way since the massacre at Place Clichy. “You don’t fucking believe it. You believed the processing centers. You saw the Jægernaut chew people up and spit them out. What difference do the numbers mean?”

Hand shook his head. He looked nothing like the slick, poised TV reporter he’d been when he came to Paris. He looked haggard, and ill, and haunted. “Probably they intend to . . . to hold us all hostage, threaten us with the virus . . . ”

“You ever read about the Wansee Conference?” Roseland asked him. “Where the Nazis, in the 1940s, planned the extermination of millions? You have any idea how clinical they were, how calmly they went about it? A psychopathic ideology makes psychopaths of its believers, Norman. They’d use it.”

“But the economic fallout—a collapse—it’s just not practical even for . . . ” Hand’s voice trailed off, trembling.

“As to that,” Smoke said wearily, “our new friend Patrick Barrabas has a tale to tell. They’re developing a sort of home-grown labor force. Genetically engineering a labor pool of stupid, obedient lumpen. People Puppies, I think they call them, with a sick try at a sense of humor. Semi-human things. Subhuman. Their own caricature of an ‘inferior race’ . . . ” He grimaced. “Probably not going to work out the way they think it will. Anyway, Barrabas copied one of their video files, brought it along. We’re giving it to you, Hand.”

“How’d you get away with copying the file?” Roseland asked.

“Barrabas is a former Second Alliance operative,” Smoke said blandly—electrifying the room. “He turned. He’s with us now. He’d copied the file when he started having trouble with Cooper—thought he might use it to blackmail the bastards.”

Barrabas was staring fixedly at his knees, probably aware that everyone else was staring fixedly at him. Anger twitched at the corners of his jaws.

“We put him under extractor, decided we could trust him. He’s pretty disillusioned.”

Barrabas snorted. “Disillusioned.” His voice breaking. “Bugger it. Disillusioned. Shit. They’re fucking maniacs.”

Either the guy was a great actor or he meant it, Roseland decided. Barrabas knew the whole story now. Made him realize things—that people are people and death is forever. And that deep suffering seems like forever.

Roseland said, “Hey, Barrabas. Welcome aboard, man.”

Barrabas reached out, slowly . . . and shook the Jew’s hand.

Torrence had come up to the storeroom to be alone. He sat by the window in the musty darkness, waiting for the moon to come out. Just to have something to wait for. He thought about viruses. Viruses to sicken computers; viruses to annihilate a people.

He thought about Giessen. About Giessen winning. Giessen and Watson and Crandall. If he turned himself in to them, had they won? Hell, no. They’d just snagged one self-important guerrilla. A self-appointed Che without even a people, in particular, to fight for. And then the reprisals would stop for a while.

He thought about Randy Maynard, a friend of his in high school. Pretty close friend, for a while, till he found out Randy was gay. And then he’d distanced himself from Randy, without really cutting him completely off. Well. Maybe he had cut him off.

Still, it’d been a kick in the head when he’d heard that Randy had AIDS-three. Every damn time they had a vaccine for the HIV virus, some other mutation of it cropped up, and the vaccine didn’t work on the new one. AIDS-three killed pretty fast. Anywhere between three weeks to six months of coming into contact with it. It took Randy two and a half months to develop significant symptoms. They kept him going for a while with antiviral treatments.

And Torrence was thinking about something Randy had said when he’d gone to visit him at the hospital. “I open my eyes in the morning, and for a minute or two I’m just here, waking up in a bed, stretching, yawning, looking around. Thinking about, like, what do I have to do today. It’s always a minute or two before I think of it . . . you know . . . remember that I’m dying . . . ”

That’s how Torrence felt, after a fashion. He could get involved in New Resistance planning, in resistance work. And in Bibisch. He could forget his personal doom for a minute or two. But the shadow was never far from him.

He still heard the screams at Place Clichy. In reprisal for the crimes of the terrorist Hard-Eyes.

He blinked away tears, and laughed bitterly, thinking: Hard-Eyes. What a fucking joke.

Some of them died quickly . . .

For the crimes of—

Some of them took a while.

The terrorist—

Fountains of blood . . .

Hard-Eyes.

“Dan?” The creak of the boards under her feet. “Danny?”

“Hey, fuck off right now, okay, Bibisch?”

“I don’t like you to talk to me that way.” She knelt beside him. “Don’t cry. It’s not your fault—”

“Just don’t say that, okay?” Snarling it.

“You are making me ashamed with this sheet.”

“This what?”

“Sheet. Merde.”

“Oh: shit.” He laughed stupidly. “I don’t care if you’re ashamed. Leave me fucking alone.”

“You are a . . . ” She searched for the American term. “Wimp. Pussy.”

“What kind of clumsy bullshit psychology is that? You think I’m insecure about myself? Call me what you want.”

She changed tactics. “You kill those people. They die because of you.”

“What?”

She slapped him. Grabbed his hair and jerked his head back.

“Maybe this time I spank you, ‘Hard-Eyes.’ ”

He pulled loose. “What kind of stupid game—”

She lunged at him, knocked him on his back, straddled him. “Kiss this, you—”

He was a switchblade, triggered. She was flung against the wall.

He saw a flashing red light. (Hearing the screams at Place Clichy.) He struck out—

Then he saw blood—the blood on his hands. He looked at her. She was motionless, leaning against the wall, eyes closed.

“Bibisch?”

She opened her eyes and smiled sadly. “Ça va. I’m okay.” Her lip had split, bled on his hands.

“Oh, Jesus, Bibisch, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. How you feel?”

“Me?” He felt relieved. He should be ashamed of feeling relieved, he thought. Self-disgust oozed like an oil slick over him. “Goddammit. Why’d you—God, I’m sorry. There’s no excuse. It’s wrong, hitting you. In a serious way like that. Your lip. I’m sorry—”

“You hurt me.”

“I’m sorry—” His shoulders shaking with it.

“It is wrong to hurt me. To hit women like that.”

“Yes.” Shaking with the flood of released guilt. “True.”

Torrence thinking: If Claire knew what he’d done just now. Hurt a woman. Not a little roughness in a sexual game. But he’d really hurt her, beaten her, taken out his rage on her.

Guilt seared through him like a lethal poison. Burning through him.

Purging him.

He sat up and stared at her. He was empty and tired. But suddenly, he felt some hope. “I . . . ”

“You feel better.”

“Yeah. You did it on purpose?”

“Oui. Bien sÛr.”

“You liked it, then?”

“Ah, no. Not at all. It was far too much. It scared me. Hurt me. No, it was not . . . No, I didn’t like it. But—” Her voice became husky and she looked at the window. “But—Je t’aime.”

And that’s when the moon came out.

Paris. SA HQ.

“We think they’re back in Paris,” Rolff told Watson. “And there’s something worse. We interrogated a man who says the NR have an important TV reporter. It is a global company with a lot of syndication in the United States. Norman Hand. They’re going to try to get him out of the country—apparently he has some very damaging video. We think they’re going to take Barrabas and this woman along . . . ” Rolff shook his head sorrowfully. “It’s this idiot Cooper’s fault.”

“Is that whose fault it is?” Giessen asked, almost innocently.

Watson ground his teeth so hard he could feel them chip. He sensed Giessen smirking at the other end of the conference table—Giessen not even having to point out that Watson didn’t have the city in hand. “Did you get a location?”

“No. We still don’t know where they are . . . ”

“We can’t let this Hand get out. Or the others. It’s just unthinkable. I suppose Cooper is useless now?”

Rolff sighed. “He’s functioning. We’ve got control of his balancer. He babbled for an hour after he had his little breakdown . . . I’d like to kill him personally.”

“We need him still,” Watson said, adding absentmindedly, “but when we don’t—be my guest.” There was a moment of restless silence. Then Watson slammed a fist onto the table. “Bloody hell! Seal off the city!”

Rolff winced. “Just as things were getting back to normal here. The Party won’t like it.”

“The Party will do as it’s told. Seal off the city.”

• 09 •

Torrence knew something was wrong when the train stopped suddenly and noisily between Paris and Charles de Gaulle International Airport. The usually quiet train sinking down off its electromagnetic cushion, banging down onto the track with a clang and a spine-shivering scree-ee-ee . . .

Clack. And it was stopped.

It was two a.m.; Torrence and Bibisch, leaning on one another in a front seat of the first car, woke and jumped up at almost precisely the same instant. Bibisch hissing, “Merde, quoi—?”

Both of them reaching for their weapons.

Torrence snatching up his beautiful, his pristine, his compact and cunning, his oiled and shined-up AMD-65. A Hungarian assault rifle, developed in the late 1980s, widely purchased by the Arab nations in the 1990s. Old ordnance, like most of the NR gear and yet almost unused. It had been in protective storage for a generation, in Egypt. Part of a shipment of weapons Badoit had gotten to them just two days before. Torrence had only had one opportunity to learn its intricacies and test it out—in Lespere’s underground range. But he’d fallen in love with it immediately. It was a grenade-launching rifle, equipped with a shock absorber in the folding stock, forestock that reciprocated as the 7.62 x 39mm-caliber rifle was fired, and an optical sight. Torrence slung his knapsack on his right shoulder; it carried two antipersonnel PGR grenades and two antiarmor PGK grenades. Bibisch carried a Hungarian Spigon submachine gun—more importantly, she had charge of a US-made Stinger ground-to-air missile launcher.

All this probably wouldn’t do them a bit of good, Torrence thought, because they’d been taken by surprise.

Four hours earlier, Steinfeld had come into the attic of the old police station with Bones. Found Bibisch and Torrence there, naked, asleep in each others’ arms. He sighed, annoyed, and shook them awake. “It’s your watch, Torrence. Bibisch, go downstairs and clean up.”

They dressed silently—Bibisch trying valiantly not to giggle—and went downstairs.

Then Steinfeld sat in the attic of the old police station with Bones. Who put on a headset that double-jacked him into the hidden transmitter on the roof.

Steinfeld and Bones sat in the dark room on two crates near the window, limned in diluted moonlight coming through the frosted glass. Bones was rocking slightly as he communed with the SA’s Paris database: with a mind that was beyond morality, indifferent to the suffering imprinted in its bubbles of magnetism, its crystals of silicon; he was a wolf of the plateau. They sat there for twenty minutes, Steinfeld’s lower back hurting with the tension. He wondered, for perhaps a second of that twenty minutes, if it would have been better if Jerome and Bones and Bettina hadn’t broken into the SA’s London database. If they hadn’t got the code for the Paris database; for decryption and full access. They could have gone on in blissful ignorance, thinking they were making a difference. But some of the things they’d found out made them feel puny . . .

And then Bones sat up straight. “They’ve got a couple of our auxiliary people.”

Steinfeld’s mouth went dry. “Who? How?”

“The reprisals. This guy Giessen’s behind it. Some of our boosters had some relatives shot in the reprisals. Others in processing centers. One of them came forward, just walked into Second Alliance HQ asking for Giessen . . . the other they caught in the tunnels. Giessen put out some kind of a night-seeing bird’s eye that followed one of our people after an action at Montmartre . . . followed him home. Watched the place. Scooped up one of our cells an hour ago, there.”

“Who, I said, damn you.”

“Guy named DeBlanc.”

“DeBlanc. I think he used to be with the Point Cadre—which means he knows—”

“Wait. Wait. It’s coming up. He was Point Cadre—but he was one of those people with extractor-resistant brain chemistry. They couldn’t extract him, so they tortured his kids in front of him . . . Oh, shit. It says . . . it says, Confessed during interrogation of offspring. Fuck. He just broke. I guess . . . The first one, French guy named La Soleil.”

“Not Point Cadre.”

“No. But he helped us get Barrabas and the woman into the city. He saw Hand there. Told them all that shit. Then the other guy DeBlanc cracked maybe . . . less than half an hour ago. Told them—” Bones seemed to listen for a moment. Stiffened. “Oh, motherfucker. Steinfeld, they know where we are.”

Steinfeld had no time at all—but he had to make a critical decision. He found Hand sitting in a corner of the drunk tank that was now a think tank; Hand was cross-legged on the floor, taking notes on paper with a pen. He couldn’t get batteries for his voice recorder and he’d lost his palmer as they’d fled the refugee center.

Nearby, Pasolini and Bibisch and four others standing in a group, arguing politics.

Steinfeld snapped to them, “We’re getting out. Move everyone out through Exit Three, and—” He spoke directly to Pasolini. “After everyone’s gone, see to it there’s nothing much left for them to search through.”

“But what—”

“Just do it! They’re on their way!”

The group burst apart like pool balls at the break, as they raced to follow orders.

Hand stood up, licking his lips. “The SA? They’re coming?”

“Yes. We’re leaving here—some of us will be staying in Paris, some of us . . . ” He stared at Hand. He had about one minute in which to decide. “Let me see your notes.”

Hand hesitated, then passed them over. Steinfeld skimmed through them. Nothing damaging, no specifics, as arranged—Hand’s general take on things. He frowned, reading snippets here and there:

SPOES continues to gain momentum. Distributes food, shelter, jobs to war refugees & homeless who have learned that the more nationalistic they are, the more supportive of SPOES racist policies, the better their treatment by authorities . . . The Refugees find ways to justify fascism to themselves. Not difficult, it can be very appealing in all this chaos. Unity Party offers order and jobs and a satisfying return to national IDENTITY. The war was humiliating, making them feel they were unimportant pawns of US and NSR . . . Crowds respond emotionally at Unity Party rallies; racists and jingoists in full throttle . . . continued reports of isolation and deportation to PCs of troublesome ethnic groups . . . U.P.’s Soldats Superieurs said to be brainwashed into ruthlessness in expediting orders . . . some key officials rumored to have been brainwashed w/extractors . . . NR’s greatest enemy apparently global apathy, the “it can’t happen again” mindset . . . I am unable to find non-native colleagues in Paris, offices of UPI and ITV et al. closed down . . . NATO & SA discourage close reporting here . . . NATO officials stonewalled me . . . American journalists evidently concerned with NATO’s liberation of Eastern Bloc countries & terms of New-Soviet surrender . . . Smoke’s reports mostly carried only in underGrid . . . big Grid, Internet, social media mostly indifferent or closed by (?) SA connections . . . Holocaust Virus story could blow Grid open for NR . . . Critical . . .

Steinfeld nodded briskly and handed him back the notes. Hand was okay. “We need you and Barrabas and his American friend to do some witnessing for us on the outside. We’re going to get you out of Paris.” Steinfeld smiled grimly. “Don’t look so relieved. They’ve sealed off the city. It won’t be easy.”

They’d gotten out of the safe house with four minutes to spare. The fascist troops arrived and found the place empty—and on fire. Four minutes earlier, the last of the NR contingent got out through the abandoned building next door, down through a camouflaged tunnel, into the old Metro. They headed for the one functioning train station. Some of their people were already there, taking over a surface-track magnetic-cushion train.

Bones had tinkered with the enemy’s database, used some of the computer-bug input Jerome-X and Bettina had planted through the Plateau. They had the train cleared as a special transport, supposedly for Colonel Watson. The city was sealed off—but they let the train through.

Only, a little too soon, someone noticed that Colonel Watson wasn’t on a private train, he was in the Second Alliance Comm Room.

“Fuck me,” Watson breathed when they told him. “They have to be on that train. How did they do it? How did they get clearance for it to get past the—Bloody hell. They had to have gotten into our computers. Take ’em all off-line before they—”

Walking, the two of them, Martha’s small hand in Steinfeld’s, through the peach orchard on the banks of the Jordan. Very early. Morning mists. Both hungry for breakfast but in the kibbutz, this time of year, with the fruit heavy on the trees, there is little time for lovers. She is so small, Martha, her hand like a mouse nestled in his palm, but he had seen her strength . . . Now she turned to him and said—

“—they know we’ve got in,” Bones shouted, shaking Steinfeld’s shoulder. On the train. Steinfeld had drifted off. “What?” The dream of Israel. Martha. How long had she been dead now? “What—what is it, Bones . . . ?”

“They know we—”

Then it sank in, and the last vestiges of the nostalgic dream dispersed. The time had come—perhaps they’d waited too long. There had been risk, in waiting before activating the virus that Jerome-X and Bettina had planted through the Plateau—it might’ve been discovered, rooted out. But it had made sense to wait for the strategic moment. The maximum advantage.

Maybe they’d waited too long. Maybe it was too late. Thinking all this, he was saying aloud only: “Then do it! Transmit! Tell the bug to spread!”

. . . And Watson had the report back in five minutes.

The computers were blanked—years of intelligence gathering, erased. Most of the Unity Party’s banks wiped too. The Sicilian center’s database—ditto. Erased.

It didn’t matter. It was an inconvenience, but it was all right, of course, they naturally had everything on backup, copies in the Sicilian Intelligence Center.

And then his minitranser beeped.

The message was too long for the small screen; he tapped its little keyboard so it’d transmit to the printer. It was a transmission from Sicily asking why they’d been ordered to destroy the backups and hard copy. Virtually all their intelligence data, antisubversive information, everything on the NR and related groups, plus a great deal of logistical information. Gone for good. The incendiary bombs had been set off, the work was done, and they’d had two confirmations from the central computer that they were doing the right thing. But when the SA major in Sicily had tried to call Paris to ask, What’s going on? there was some sort of restricted access to fone communication, the computers that made the connections wouldn’t let them through, apparently. So they followed the orders that had come in over the computers, kept trying the fones. No soap—except, after repeatedly trying, they were able to send a call directly to his transer interface through the fone relays. And the message asked, essentially, Why did we destroy the backups and documents? Are we about to be invaded here?

“FUCK MEEEEEE!”

Watson in a rage, backhanding the aide who’d brought the printout, literally knocking him down, kicking him. “THEY’VE BUGGERED OUR FUCKING COMPUTERS! FUCK MEE-EEE-EEE!”

As behind him, Giessen said calmly to Rolff, in German: “It appears to be up to us. I suggest we stop that train.”

The train track’s electric power was shut down, and the track was blocked—and it was blocked by a Bell-Howell four-man Antipersonnel Forward Offensive Armored Vehicle equipped with 23 X 152mm automatic cannon, two 7.62 X 63mm H & K machine guns and a NATO heat-seeking missile launcher.

“That,” Dan Torrence muttered, “is a problem.”

So were the two hundred SA soldiers scrambling from trucks to the west side of the train. And there’d be more on the way.

The east side of the train was just seven inches from the concrete outer wall of a storage warehouse. There was no getting out on that side. The enemy had picked the spot carefully.

The train was not quite dark inside; the only light a red glow from the emergency-battery bulbs above the luggage racks. It was hard to make out faces. It could have been the inside of a wrecked submarine.

“Come on, Bibisch . . . ”

Torrence and Bibisch found Bones in the next car back. Torrence ran up to him, gear clacking, shouting, “Bones—got some transmission for you! Bibisch has the transmitter if you can do the control and calculations. She’ll give you the frequency. Basically aim the transmitter back the way we came . . . ”

Leaving Bibisch with Bones, he ran to find Steinfeld.

Up and down the three-car train, the guerillas, with the train to themselves, were deploying weapons, taking up firing stations at the windows and door. Their faces were bleak. They expected to die here.

Steinfeld was up front, peering out a window like a commuter trying to figure out why his train was delayed—looking like that except for the Israeli carbine in his hands.

He was thinking how vivid the dream of the kibbutz had been; the dream of Martha. Maybe a kind of omen. He had come to believe in them. Maybe Martha, on the Other Side, saying that the transmission to the Badoit Arcology was going through . . . That they wouldn’t have to die here . . .

He shook his head. Funny, the ludicrous things you think, right before you die . . .

An announcement through a bullhorn from a Second Alliance official with a German accent blared and rattled in the windows, his English largely unintelligible in its particulars, but clear enough in general:

You have two minutes. Surrender or we’ll kill you.

“Two minutes,” Torrence muttered.

Torrence hurried up to Steinfeld. “Where’s Pasolini? She should be on radio call. We should be trying to—”

“She’s in Paris. Left her in authority.”

Torrence stared at him. “Pasolini? In charge of Paris—? Steinfeld, she’s—”

“She’s the most qualified, apart from you. And I need you. I’ve taken care of the radio call to . . . ” He swore in Hebrew, hearing the sound of a helicopter gunship. “That’s too soon to be our people.”

Torrence looked back along the car. Everyone was crouched, guns at ready. No one was making a move to bolt. He didn’t see Roseland. Probably left behind in Paris, in the old Metro station Steinfeld had picked as an emergency safe house. “I figure we’ve got maybe sixty people . . . ” He shook his head, peering out a window. He could see them out there in the dull-red light from the train and in the headlight shine of the armored trucks behind them. And around them . . .

“Christ,” Torrence muttered. “Flowers.”

They were stopped beside a field of flowers. It was a flower farm. Rows of verdant red and yellow carnations—cultivated in straight lines till they came to the shell holes left from some New-Soviet assault on the area. The rows curved neatly around the shell craters. Tenacious farmers.

The Fascist soldiers were digging in, in beds of flowers.

The carnations’ color seemed flat and dusty in the dim light. As he watched, the SA switched off the truck lights—after a moment he could make the troops out as gray silhouettes in the moonlight. A mix of Soldats Superieurs and SA armored troops. The French Soldats had carried Eagle-Feather Brand fences of foamed kevlar from the back of the trucks, set them up around the truck in seconds. They kneeled behind them, to aim their weapons through the gun notches in the white fences.

The stuff looked—and weighed—like Styrofoam, but deflected most calibers of bullet, once its grippers were dug into the ground.

Torrence wondered why Steinfeld hadn’t ordered his people to open fire immediately. Now the sons of bitches were dug in behind their cheap bullet-proof walls. He looked at Steinfeld and guessed the reason. He’d needed time to get Hand and Jo Ann Teyk and Barrabas under cover. “Where’s Hand?”

“Over there. Crammed down behind those seats. We put baggage around them, to protect them.”

“Maybe we could . . . ”

The rest was drowned out by the tympanic drumroll of the chopper gunship as it barnstormed the train, firing its 16mm Jæger-sevens to announce that the NR’s two minutes were up.

The windows imploded. Glass made a jagged snow-flurry in the car. Someone’s head vanished in a welter of blood.

Torrence instinctively shouted orders, firing a burst through the window to suppress the soldiers on his side. He tried not to worry about Bibisch.

The guerrillas fired at the soldiers, the SA/SS fired back. Exchanges of chaos; gunfire and ricochets making a wall of sound; the noise of a hundred iron foundries compressed into a few railroad cars. Bullets smashed through the windows on the west side, passed through the train, smashing through the opposite windows, pocked the concrete wall.

The resistance fighters took the worst of it. Once they were activated, the SXs “smart” rifles were devastatingly accurate. Men and women fell, writhing, screaming; or lay silently where they’d fallen, looking as limp and inconsequential as discarded clothing. One-armed Dr. Levassier and the young Lebanese woman who was his medic scurried to the wounded, crouching as they went to stay below the lethal hailstorm that came through the windows.

An enemy commando stuck his head too far above the protective barrier to take aim—and Torrence dropped his crosshairs on the blurred oval of the man’s head, squeezed off a burst—the head vanished; the body staggered back and fell. Torrence fired at someone else but knew he hit the barrier. He wasn’t likely to hit many more of the enemy. Torrence shouted over the noise at Steinfeld. “They’re chewing us up! We’re just wasting ammo!”

Steinfeld shook his head, yelling, “If we stop, they’ll charge us!”

“No, not for a while! It’ll give us a chance to—” He broke off, exasperated with trying to explain under these conditions; he saw another guerrilla shot in the face—his teeth flying out through the back of his head. Heart hammering, Torrence felt like he was exploding himself. Bibisch. Claire.

Steinfeld changed his mind. “Hold your fire!”

It took a full minute for the word to pass down the train. The guerrillas stopped firing. The Second Alliance barrage continued—and then stopped, the enemy waiting to see if the resistance fighters were about to surrender.

The train car was cloudy with gunsmoke, turned violet in the red emergency lights; it stank of cordite and blood and the burning smell of metal sparking metal. Bodies strewed the aisle; men and women begged for help and raised a dissonant chorus of moans.

Others crouched just below the windows, their faces white with fear and anger, quivering with suppressed emotion, knuckles white on their guns.

All of them were looking to Steinfeld and Torrence.

And Torrence wondered what to do next; and wondered if Bibisch were still alive. She might be lying in that next car, hugging herself. Gut-shot.

The bullhorn was booming out some sort of demand, garbled and echoey, mostly lost in the battering noise of the chopper gunship hovering over the train.

What next, what next, what next?

Torrence wanted to scream it.

Instead, he turned to Steinfeld. “I’m going to see what’s happening with Bones and Bibisch—maybe they’ve got something set up.”

Steinfeld nodded and went to the window. He crouched out of the line of fire, tried to stall the enemy, shouting, “We cannot surrender our entire force! But we will negotiate something!”

The bullhorn replied with a demand for unconditional surrender. Steinfeld shouted back, suggesting they were considering it—another time-wasting tactic.

Torrence worked his way past sodden bodies and the shaking, squirming wounded. Past sobbing men and grim-faced women. He sprinted between cars.

He found Bones and Bibisch hunched by the rear door of the car; Bones was aiming the transmitter antenna of the radio programmer out the doorway at a slant, holding its metal box in his hands. His face was lined with concentration, eyes squeezed shut, headset jacked into the transmitter box; using the transmitter to get to the Plateau—he couldn’t augment directly into it from their present position. Bibisch hunkered beside him, her submachine gun still smoking. Tears streaking her face.

She saw Torrence, scrambled to him on her haunches; came into his arms. “We all of us die now.”

“Did you link up? Did Bones get there?”

“He linked, sent two transmissions, but I don’t know if it’s—” She broke off, tilting her head to listen.

He heard it then. The hum and rumble.

Looked out the window and saw it—the autotank they’d stolen from the refugee camp; the autonomous weapon they’d hidden in the abandoned factory. It was responding to Bones’ chip-implanted control and Bibisch’s recording, rumbling up the gravel utility road that ran between the train tracks and the flower fields.

The Fascists cheered, thinking that they had robotic reinforcements.

Maybe they did, Torrence thought with a chill. Maybe this wasn’t the one he thought it was. Maybe—

The autotank opened fire at close to point-blank range . . .

It opened fire on the SA, from behind them, blasting with cannon and machine guns.

The autotank fired the cannon again and again, like a semiautomatic rifle; thud thud thud thud thud thud, blowing soldiers and broken Eagle-Feather deflectors into the air, strobe-lighting the countryside with muzzle flashes. Steinfeld bellowed an order and the guerrillas resumed fire, catching the panicked SA in a cross fire. Torrence popped up like a jack-in-the-box, firing with the AMD-65, using up his clip, instantly ducking down and attaching a rifle-propelled rocket-grenade. Popping up, firing the grenade at a high angle so that, on its way back down, it detonated in the midst of the SA. Bullets sucked air around him. Crouching, he attached another grenade, hands trembling but efficient. He fired. Attached another. The train shook as the enemy gave up trying to keep it intact, fired rockets into the third car. The whole train shuddered, rocked as the car was torn from its coupling. Tilting off the track, falling half onto its east side, smashing into the concrete wall. The west-side windows tilted up so the Second Alliance helicopter gunship could fire into them, 16mm rounds ripping the inside of the third car. Men screamed . . .

And then the Bell-Howell armored car swung away from the front of the train, jouncing and clanking over the tracks, its cannon swiveling smoothly, computer microprocessors aiming it precisely—at the autotank. A flash as it fired; a thud as the round impacted dead center in the autotank—stopping it, totaling its engine and wheel system. Leaving the turret and command center intact. The autotank fired back, four times in succession.

Exploding, the Bell-Howell blossomed like a heavy-metal flower, flame its stamens. A man on fire, a figure made of flame with a human core of shadow, streaked from the burning wreck with a high-pitched wail that was all one long note. The French SS fired an armor-piercing round and the autotank heaved itself into scrap iron and an oily twist of smoke. Shivering stalks of flame from the burning wrecks and burning sections of train cast a jittery light, made the battlefield quiver, made the bodies lying on the blasted turf seem as animated as the living soldiers: the dead doing a hideous horizontal dance among the cloying, blackening flowers.

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 . . . ”

“We do matter—we liberate concentration camps. We give people hope. It matters. And the race-selective virus—they are far from being ready to deploy it, so far as we can tell. There’s still time. I understand how you feel, Danny. We all feel that way sometimes. But we’ve saved lives. We’ve saved other lives by destroying their computer files. We’ve delayed them seriously. And Bibisch saved Hand and the other witnesses. They’re important—especially Hand. He could make the difference. We’d never have got him through if she hadn’t taken out that gunship when she did. It would have shot the transport out of the sky—the SA reinforcements would have come. We’d all be dead and all Hand’s witnessing would be lost, if not for her. She was the only one who reacted fast enough. She wasn’t wasted, Dan. Her sacrifice mattered.”

Torrence leaned back and closed his eyes. And tried to believe it.

Steinfeld went on. “Listen—she asked for something just before she went into surgery. It’s kind of . . . perhaps a little grotesque. But it seemed important to her. She said if she didn’t make it . . . ”

Torrence opened his eyes, saw Steinfeld looking confused and embarrassed. “Well?”

“She wants you to have one of her ears.”

“What?”

“With her love.”

“Her ear?”

“Something about Van Gogh. And you missing an ear. She said you looked like an alley cat after a bad fight all the time, with that ear shot off. What I mean is—she wanted to have one of her ears transplanted onto you, to replace the one you lost. The visible ear. They’ll mold it with surgery to make it symmetrical with your other one, use grafting and tissue-bonding agents to get it to, ah, take once it’s implanted and . . . You see, it would actually be quite helpful. We’re tired of looking at you. Frankly”—he smiled grimly—“we’re sick of your face.”

New York City.

“Apparently, I got out of Paris in the nick of time,” Smoke said. “They had some trouble there after I left. Just a day after.”

“You are okay?” Alouette’s image compressed and expanded like an accordion, yawed left and right, and then stabilized. Mexico had notoriously bad fone transmission.

“Yes, I’m all right. No one even shot at me. But some of the others . . . ” He broke off, wondering how much to tell her. She was still just a kid. She’d stayed in the hospital with him after he’d been wounded in D.C.; she knew about the danger to him, and to the resistance. But maybe it was best he didn’t tell her about the massacre at the train. “It’s worked out all right,” he finished lamely.

Smoke was in the relatively modest suite Badoit kept at the New York Fuji-Hilton, leaning back in an easy chair, looking out through the glass wall at the sunset breaking though the Manhattan skyline. In this smoggy sunset light, the city looked like a cluster of red-hot smokestacks. He was tired, jet-lagged, but was fighting sleep. He had too much to do. He hadn’t even unpacked yet. He tapped a console to order espresso from a serving table beside the chair. A plastic cup emerged from a chute; a jet shpritzed hot black espresso.

“Are you okay, Alouette?”

“Yes. I miss you. Someone here, he wants to see you.” She clucked her tongue, chirped in Merinese at someone off-camera. The crow hopped onto her arm, tilting its head with one of those birdlike movements that was like bad cartoon animation: not enough frames per second.

“Well, hello, Richard,” Smoke said.

The crow shook itself and made a raucous noise in its throat. Smoke grinned. He remembered when the bird had come to him in Amsterdam on that ruined balcony. They’d both survived a great deal since then. The crow was a link to a Jack Smoke who seemed like a dream now—a homeless, half-mad babbler to birds.

“Are you going to come and see me?” Alouette said. Sounding as if she might cry.

Smoke said, “Soon! Um—as soon as I can. I’m about to start a media blitz, try and get Grid-Entry for . . . ” He hesitated, unsure as to how secure this line was. Especially since this was Badoit’s suite. Badoit had his share of enemies. He didn’t want to even say Hand’s name. “A campaign to explain to people what’s really going on over there.”

She nodded. “You have a guard?”

“Yes. A bodyguard.” He sipped espresso. Not bad for out of a cred-vend machine. “He’s doing push-ups in the next room.”

It was a lie. He should have a bodyguard, and didn’t. Bodyguards made him feel conspicuous, and that feeling was scarier to him than the risk of going without a bodyguard. And he didn’t think the enemy knew he was here.

“Okay. You come and see me soon?”

“Yes. Are you studying hard?”

“I’m learning so much. You want me to show you some chip readouts? Ask me a math question. I can tell you what day of the week it’ll be, any day of any Year—like April twelfth, the year 3503.”

“Never mind.” Thinking that the chips made people into a variation of autistic savants. “I believe you. I heard you did some trans-Atlantic work with our Jerome-X.”

“They didn’t have anybody in London that processed genetic cores as good as me.”

“Do you know what it was you were processing?”

“No. Something about germs.”

“Uh-huh.” Good. He didn’t want her to know what that was about if she didn’t have to. She had enough to be afraid of. He sipped more espresso. The sun went down, the sunset drawing in on itself like a hermit crab into a shell; the adumbration of night made itself known over the city: lights became more brilliant, shone out of the city’s deeper places like the reflective pupils of Rousseau jungle animals. More and more lights shone, more clearly electric now; each one marking a person, or people.

He wondered how close the SA was to using the racially selective virus. He wondered how many of those lights would be switched off when they used it.

It might be a dark city soon.

“On satellite news they said you had an acid rainstorm there,” she said. Looking more excited than worried.

“Yes. It delayed the plane. A particularly acidic storm. That sort can be deadly for the homeless over a period of hours, I hear. The rains aren’t so bad this year, though, as the last five years. The stuff’s finally beginning to work its way out of the biosphere, I suppose. Global warming complicates things so it’s hard to say for sure . . . ”

“They waited too long to make the laws.”

“Yes. For those kinds of laws, they always do. Have you got someone to play with there?”

“Julio plays with me. He showed me how to catch a scorpion in the desert.”

“What! Isn’t anybody watching the kids in that facility? Is Bettina there?”

“She’s not back from London yet. Tomorrow.”

“Tell her to call me. And don’t go playing with scorpions in the desert, Alouette.”

In any sense, he thought, don’t play with scorpions in the desert.

Paris.

Roseland wanted to hit Pasolini. He wanted to scream at her. She was so fucking sure of herself. And God, she loved being in charge.

They were in what had been a security monitoring room for the old Metro subway system. The portable, caged electric lights were hanging on the hook in the doorframe by their orange industrial extension cords, parasitically drawing on cables NR techs had exposed in the cracked concrete ceiling of the old station. Roseland and Pasolini and two other NR were sitting cross-legged on the floor across from the little computer screen they’d patched into the city’s one working channel. Watching the Unity Party news on “unconfirmed reports of the capture of the terrorist Hard-Eyes.” The Fascists, gloating about their omniscience. No one escaped the long arm of the Special Police. And so forth.

Fuck you, Roseland thought. I got away. Torrence will too.

“Pasolini—Torrence is important to us. He’s like a linchpin. Ask Lespere if you don’t believe me. I don’t think you’re considering this in an unbiased way. We’ve got to get him out.”

“And lose how many people? It’s foolish. He got himself caught—he walked into it like an imbecile.”

“He was trying to liberate some prisoners—”

“He should never have come back to Paris so soon. It was stupid! He had a bandage on his head in that picture. I think he must have had some brain damage. Stupid. No, I will not risk everything to try to get a single man out of SA prison. Do you know how many political prisoners they have? They are all important to me. Just as important as Torrence. They have children in prison—”

“Torrence is valuable to the Resistance.”

“Not that much.”

“You’re prejudiced against him. You were rivals. Think past your own biases, Pasolini.”

“I said no. Steinfeld made the chain of command quite clear. If you don’t like it—” She waved her stubby Russian cigarette imperiously. “—find another cause.”

“This is more my cause than yours—”

“Oh, your precious Jewish heritage. The martyrs of the world.”

“Don’t give me any of your anti-Semitic shit, Pasolini, or I swear to God I’ll put a . . . ” He broke off, staring at the TV. “Oh, shit.”

They saw Dan Torrence on TV. He was marched out across a prison compound. A doll-size Torrence on a little, snowy TV screen in the corner of a concrete floor—an image of someone they knew intimately, seeming like a stranger, like some video-abstracted figure from TV news. Treated like just another faceless terrorist caught out in the floodlights.

And marched into the featureless brown building. The camera, hand-held and wobbling, following them into the gas chamber. Something more ignominious about gassing an enemy of the state—less heroic than putting him in front of a firing squad. The Second Alliance had chosen the means of execution thoughtfully.

“And what have they learned from him, with their extractors?” Pasolini was saying.

The commentator speaking in a low, serious voice, and in French, but Roseland knew the sort of thing being said. The criminal shows no emotion as he is taken to his death; he has had every opportunity to express remorse, and has shunned those opportunities . . . There is, perhaps, even a sneer on his face as he is led into the chamber . . . But now we see the truth behind the mask as his cowardice shows, and he begins to panic . . .

Roseland thinking: God. Dan looked awful. Sunken, sick. What have they done to him? Broken him with torture. Must have been dead for days, psychologically.

Roseland stood up, walked to the screen, and kicked it in.

Whop, the screen imploding. Glass tinkling to the floor. Sparks and a burning smell.

“Idiota!” Pasolini shouted.

Roseland turned and started for the door—then he stopped, staring at the monitors on the old Metro security console. The resistance techs had rigged the cameras to work again—and they showed armed men coming down the corridor, too far from the camera to see clearly.

“Intruders,” Roseland said, grabbing his Royal Army surplus Enfield. He ran out onto the disused Metro platform, scuffing through the plaster dust that had fallen during the shellings, shouting at the guerrillas playing cards near the stairs. “Company coming!”

Pasolini was beside him, shouting orders. Roseland was rounding a corner, running up the ramp the intruders were coming down. Somewhere in the back of his head, Roseland as thinking, Do it now. Take some of these assholes out, push ’em. Not quite thinking, consciously, the rest of it:

Make them kill you.

Because seeing Torrence marched into the gas chamber had been one death too many. It was time to join his friends . . .

He was halfway up the ramp when the intruders rounded a corner. He raised his rifle.

And recognized Steinfeld. “Shit!” He stopped, staring. Steinfeld and four other guerrillas, including a Japanese guy. “I almost blew you assholes away! Why didn’t you signal down?”

“We did,” Steinfeld said. “No one acknowledged. Where’s your communications man?”

“Uh—watching the execution on TV, I guess. We were distracted. Torrence . . . ”

“I know.” Steinfeld came closer, the others at his heels. Put a big hand on Roseland’s shoulder. “It was terrible.”

“Steinfeld,” the Japanese guy said, sounding exasperated.

Tall for a Japanese, probably a half-breed. Bandage on one ear. Something familiar about his voice.

The guy smiled. A familiar smile.

Roseland stared at him.

Blurting, “You sons of bitches.”

Steinfeld laughed.

“You fuckheads.”

The guerrillas chortled.

“You shit-eating putzim!”

Daniel Torrence embraced him.

Roseland didn’t try to stop the tears. He laughed as they rolled down his cheeks. “You motherfucking assholes!”

He stood back, and looked at Torrence. “Who are you supposed to be?”

Torrence grinned. “John Ibishi. Son of a Japanese businessman and an American masseuse. Microcomputer consultant to several French companies.”

Steinfeld put in, “The kind of foreigner the French Fascists leave alone—for the moment—because they need them for the economy.”

Roseland admired the surgical craftsmanship displayed in Torrence’s new face; the epicanthic folds on Torrence’s eyes, the higher cheekbones, the faint tint to the skin. “Badoit hired the best.”

“You guessed it.”

Roseland looked at the other guerrillas. Started to ask where Bibisch was, and didn’t. He could see it in the sag of Torrence’s shoulders, hear it in the strain that went in his banter. Bibisch was dead.

But Torrence was alive. And free from the reprisals.

“Who the hell did they execute?”

“One of their own people,” Torrence said. “A processing-center guard we captured. About my size, close to my looks. We wiped his brain with an extractor, planted a bunch of stuff that seemed to be garbled-up Torrence memories in him. Nothing useful to them. Just tantalizing stuff. Levassier gave him a nasty bash on the head—making it look like he was garbled from brain damage. From a gunshot wound. And whacked off an ear. Planted him where he’d be captured . . . ” He shrugged. “Was an American, too. Some real asshole. Never knew what hit him.”

“Must’ve been confused as all hell.” Roseland tilted his head to one side, rubbed his chin, and looked Torrence over thoughtfully. “You know something, Dan—”

“Don’t say it.”

“Now that I look you over—”

“I’m warning you.”

“You really—look—”

“Don’t say it!”

“—much better as a Japanese.”

“I told you not to say it.”

“If only they’d made you Jewish.”

Paris, a boat on the Seine.

Watson sat in one of the rows of canvas chairs on the afterdeck of the big patrol boat, between Giessen and Rolff. Just behind the boy Jebediah.

You deal with one problem, Watson thought, and five more crop up to take its place. The Hydra of chaos. The sword of order, the Second Alliance’s new order, must keep chopping at the proliferating heads of the Hydra of chaos—cutting short the vector of disorder they called subversion. That was just part of the job—a perpetual tidying-up.

Giessen wasn’t making it any easier.

It was time to see if Giessen could be transferred out. “You’re needed in America, Giessen,” Watson said. “That’s where Hand is hiding out, where this Barrabas traitor is, where the gadfly Jack Smoke is—if you’ll excuse the pun, it’s where he’s blowing smoke up the asses of the American public. We need you there.”

Giessen shook his head. “America is unfriendly to our people these days.”

They were in the back of one of the new UPSS patrol boats, moving upstream on the Seine. It was a warm evening. There were silver and black clouds wreathing the horned moon, and streetlights glowing softly from the bridges; the natural and man-made light melting together in the silk fan of the boat’s wake. The living smell of the river melded with the boat’s methanol vapors.

Watson could have enjoyed it, as a tourist, under different circumstances. But he had to deal with Giessen and the Unity Party officials, and the blasted kid Jebediah.

“A little wine, Colonel Watson?” Bisse, the party’s general vice secretary, was acting the steward. He was a stooped, vulpine man with bad teeth and a cheap government-issue suit—which he wore piously to show his dedication to the U.P. austerity program.

“No, thank you,” Watson said.

Bisse’s corroded smile didn’t waver; he took his tray of plastic bubbly to Rolff, who accepted politely.

There were guards to either side of them, of course, in armor, standing at the rail, wearing night-seeing goggles; they were watching the stone walls along the banks of the river, and scanning the bridges. The U.P. had invited them along on this ceremonial boat ride at the last moment. Chances were small the Resistance had found out about the cruise. But it was a bit of a risk here. Put a man on that bridge coming up, say, crouching with a sniperscope behind the big ornately laurel-wreathed N for Napoleon . . .

Watson and most of the others were wearing bullet-proof vests. He would like to have worn a helmet too, but he needed to project a certain confident bravado today. And of course a helmet was no use in the event of a hit from a missile launcher. The bastards were just as likely to use a hand-held launcher as a rifle or a machine gun . . .

Giessen interrupted his thoughts. “This man Torrence was not my only assignment here, Herr Watson. I was under orders from Rick Crandall to do a general review of the security arrangements . . . ”

“Were you indeed? This is the first I’ve heard of it.” This was interesting. Why hadn’t it occurred to him before? He could work up an animation of Crandall “ordering” Giessen to get out of his hair. “Crandall” could have Giessen arrested. But no—Giessen was useful. Would be quite useful—in some other arena. Mustn’t allow himself to waste resources. He’d simply have Crandall order him out of the country.

Watson smiled in relief, knowing he’d soon be rid of Giessen. Who looked at him with suspicious puzzlement, wondering why Watson was so much at ease of a sudden.

Watson stretched, pleased with himself. Sometimes you didn’t see the forest for the trees. Elegant simplicity. That was similar to the RSV. The Racially Selective Virus was elegant simplicity—would be, anyway, once it was deployed. So much simpler than the old Nazi Final Solution. And, should things go awry, so much more difficult to trace.

He wondered if he should move up the date for the viral dissemination. And he wondered whether people like Bisse, who likely had some Jewish blood in them, would blow a gasket if they knew about the virus. Oh, yes.

Watson noticed the boy Jebediah watching him. Was it his imagination, or was the little martinet glaring at him?

Watson shrugged. He turned to Giessen, feeling at ease enough to bait him now. “You’ve been crowing about capturing this Torrence, who essentially just blundered into our hands—but really, my dear fellow, it was you who took matters into his own hands to retrieve Steinfeld and Hand and this Barrabas creature—and then lost them.”

“Barrabas—A man notably well named,” said Jebediah with the casual pretentiousness only a boy could come out with. “His first name ought to be Judas. But maybe that name ought to be reserved for someone else.”

What the devil did he mean by that? Watson decided to ignore him, going on, “And it was you, Herr Giessen, who lost them. By now they’re probably in the States.”

“I am not a specialist in military strategy,” Giessen said stiffly. “That is Rolff’s work. I located them—and pinpointed the place to stop them. I could not do everything. We had logistical problems getting enough troops there.”

“I think that what we’re hearing from you now, Giessen, is what the Americans call ‘passing the buck,’ ” Watson said.

“Giessen’s right,” Rolff said. “It was my failure. I did not anticipate that the autotank was controlled by the NR. I can only say that one cannot anticipate everything.”

“Well, you will have no military stresses on you when you work in the States, Giessen,” Watson went on relentlessly.

“I could not possibly work in the United States, the way things are there now,” Giessen said, prissily adjusting the set of his antique tweed jacket. He showed his irritation in the excessive briskness of the movement. “America is awash with liberalism now.”

“Yes,” Jebediah said, nodding, trying to be part of the adults’ discussion. “Secular humanism.”

Giessen said, “They’ve done away with the AntiViolence Laws—no more public executions, no more public beatings. Scrutinizing every court case with maddening slowness. In such an atmosphere one cannot work fruitfully with the police. One is on one’s own.”

“Liberalism? America?” Watson laughed. “Only on the surface. A little media oil to quiet the turbulent waters of the Grid, my dear fellow. So long as Mrs. Anna Bester is still president, so long as her administration is still in place, America will be functionally a conservative nation. And that means we will have sympathizers in high places. There are many of us still in the CIA, the NSA—you will have help, Giessen. I rely on you to find Hand and this Smoke before they poison the waters of the media—”

“I am taking orders from Rick Crandall,” Giessen said. “He is my employer. We shall see what he says.”

Giessen stood and walked forward, to join the U.P. officials in the pilot’s cabin.

Yes, Watson thought with some satisfaction. We will see what Rick Crandall says . . .

They sat on the edge of the subway platform, Steinfeld and Torrence and Roseland, feet dangling over as if they sat on the bank of a dry underground river, waiting for a ghostly UPSS boat that would come only in fancy.

“And he’s on the boat with Watson now?” Torrence asked.

Steinfeld nodded. Looking into the shadowy riverbed of the subway tracks, as if seeing the boat there. Seeing the boy Jebediah on it.

“How did you get the story to him?” Roseland asked.

“Through Cooper. When we found out that Cooper was Witcher’s Second Alliance contact, we were able to use the same intermediary to inform Cooper. And Cooper saw the potential; he’s scared of Watson and Rolff. We knew Cooper was in touch with Jebediah’s father. Father told son, trying to decide what to do about it. The boy, being a boy, will probably confront Watson—some sort of interesting schism should develop.”

“How did you get onto this thing in the first place?” Barrabas asked.

“Why do I feel as if I’m on one of those talk-show things,” Steinfeld said, tugging his beard. “Well, now. We found out by accident that was not entirely accident. We had our video-propaganda man scanning all the SA output. Our man Kessler. He’s very good. When we got the vid of Crandall talking about his new version of the Bible, Kessler noticed a few telltale signs. He realized that Crandall is now animated. Which might mean that the real Crandall is too paranoid to go to wherever it is he does his video recording—but we think it means he’s dead. There’ve been changes out at Cloudy Peak Farm. No sign of him out there. None of his favorite foods ordered in . . . Lots of secretiveness . . . We think Watson may have, well, taken over by puppeting the image of Crandall. The one we see on the net is most definitely a phony.”

“A computer animation? Maybe he was all along,” Roseland said.

“No,” Steinfeld said. “He was quite flesh and blood, I assure you. At one time.”

“Now he’s ascended to video heaven,” Roseland said. He grinned. “TV-evangelist heaven.”

Torrence looked at him. “Having fun? You don’t snow me. What the fuck were you doing running up there by yourself when we came in? If you thought we were SA.”

“Uh . . . I don’t know.”

“Bullshit. You were taking them on alone. Confronting what you thought was the SA. What was that all about?”

Roseland shrugged. Looked at them with raised eyebrows. “Uh . . . heroism?”

Steinfeld snorted. “The opposite. Cowardice. You wanted to be killed, man. And I understand how you feel.” He put a big, clumsy hand on Roseland’s shoulder. “But . . . if you desert us that way, you are a coward. You paid attention when they trained you. You are a good shot. You are motivated. We are undermanned. We need you, Roseland.”

Roseland swallowed, hard. The lump didn’t go away.

Across from him was an old subway billboard advertising a cocaine fizz. “COU-COU! La Boisson De Vos Jeune Petiller!” A swatch of light from behind them fell onto an old, dusty billboard photo of a young woman’s sparkling eyes seeming to fizz the same color as the drink in her hand. She was a satire of being alive, he thought.

Seeing, in his mind’s eye, her pretty blond head exploding the way Gabrielle’s had. Gabrielle falling . . .

What was that old Rickenharp song lyric?

Something like: Just bein’ alive is the Original Sin . . . And steppin’ outdoors is givin’ in . . .

But Steinfeld needed him. Torrence needed him. They needed him alive.

“Yeah,” Roseland said. “Okay.”

He looked down at the subway tracks, into the river of shadows.

The boat was heading downstream, back to the gendarme marina. The other guests had gone forward, were standing at the rail of the prow, praising the sleekness and speed and stability of the boat. But they held on to the rail for dear life, fighting queasiness as it went through choppy water set up by another boat.

Watson had decided he wanted a drink after all. He went down the stairs to the afterdeck, made himself a Scotch and water at the temporary bar set up there. He was alone on the deck but for the solitary silhouette of an SA bull, standing guard at the rail, staring out over the wake, his back to Watson.

And then suddenly the boy Jebediah was there. Coming from the bathroom below, Watson supposed.

Jebediah was staring up at Watson accusingly. “You didn’t think God would let you get away with it, did you?” the boy asked smarmily.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’ve been trying to talk to Rick Crandall for two months. He always took my calls before. He was always willing to see my father. Now he won’t see anyone, won’t take calls. And those videos of him. They’re fake. I’ll tell you what we think, my father and I. We think he’s dead. We think you killed him.”

Watson was unable to resist looking around to see if anyone was within earshot. The noise of the boat would prevent the guard from hearing. The others were well forward.

“It’s true, isn’t it,” the boy said, with his childish self-righteousness. “I can see it in your face.”

Watson took a deep breath. To think that once he had rather admired this pestilential little bugger. Well. This was a sticky wicket, as his father had been fond of saying. He sipped his Scotch, and then said, “Don’t be absurd. I can arrange a meeting with you and Rick, if you like.”

“You can?” The boy’s eyes widened.

“Quite.” Thinking: Can’t even stall this thing. He mustn’t so much as breathe a word of this to anyone. “And anyone else you’ve told. We’ll bring them along, have Rick reassure them.”

“It’s just me and my dad. He didn’t want me to tell anyone until he’d decided what to . . . ” The boy’s voice trailed off as he realized he’d said more than he should have.

Watson looked at his watch. They’d be at the marina in ten minutes. There wasn’t much time. “Wait here. That guard is carrying the, ah, communications codebook for me. He always contacts Crandall for me, you see, it’s a security, ah, method.”

The boy nodded. One good thing, despite his precocity, he was still a boy. He’d swallow any technical-sounding spy gibberish you fed him.

Watson went to the guard at the taffrail. What was the man’s name?

Stuart. Jock Stuart. Big, muscular, balding fellow with bristling red eyebrows. He’d been hinting about a transfer to England.

“Jock,” Watson said. “Open your helmet.”

Stu moved the curved mirror of the helmet aside, looked at Watson. “Jock—I can fiddle you a posting in England, anywhere you like, but there’s something messy you’ve got to do for me. Not only will you get the posting you want—you’ll get a promotion. And even a nice bit of cash. This little thing you’ve got to do, you’ve got to do very discreetly. It’s a sort of purge, in a small way. Something only you and I will know about . . . ”

Jock nodded. “Very good, sir. How can I be of service?”

A minute later, Watson returned to the boy, waiting at the bottom of the stairs. “Hold on here a moment, Jock will explain the top-secret procedure for seeing Rick. Maximum security these days, you see.”

The boy did a poor job of hiding his skepticism. “But why the video animation . . . ”

“It was a security procedure. Rick will explain. Actually—best you come forward with me a minute. See if we have time to arrange this now.”

The boy frowned, not quite believing Watson, but following him up the ladder. They went to the small crowd at the forward rail. Wind and fine spray on their faces. The others greeted them. Clearly saw Watson arriving with the boy. Watson looked around as if gauging the boat’s whereabouts, then nodded to the boy, pointed his chin aft.

Puzzled, the boy shrugged and returned to the aft deck. Alone.

Right, Watson thought, you wanted to see Rick, boy, you’re going to see him.

No one but Watson, who was listening for it, heard the faint sound of a cry, and then a splash coming from the rear of the boat. The others were a little tipsy, and busy drinking.

All but Giessen, who was watching Watson closely.

• 11 •

London.

The loading dock at the lab was a drafty place. It was a chilly, damp evening, an unseasonal mockery of summer, and Cooper wanted badly to be indoors. He didn’t take to cold well. He fantasized again about moving to some place warm. Gibraltar, say. Only, in a warm clime the hot sun was dangerous for an albino. There was always something wrong with any place he chose to live.

Where was the sodding bastard who was bringing his supply?

Cooper hugged himself, glaring at the bugs, bugs dusty white as an albino, banging themselves against the single two-hundred-watt bulb overhead. The insta-platform was barren; the alleyway was empty but for a few bits of gravel. There was nothing to look at. One could only wait, growing more impatient with each passing second.

He wished he could have brought his coat, but they’d have noticed that in the lab.

For the fifth time in five minutes, he thought of getting past the checkpoint at the other end of the alley by sneaking out with his supplier, hide in the back of his truck. But he was frightened to try it. Frightened of the SA, frightened of what the supplier might do later. Might blackmail him, hold him hostage or something. Some sort of criminal drug dealer, after all. Capable of anything, he supposed.

Soon the Security chief would check up on him and notice he was not in the building.

Cooper tried to think of his projects—of his triumphs on two fronts.

Experiments in crowd control through activation of socio-biological triggers; development of the primary Racially Selective Virus. And then there were the “puppies.”

He was a bloody Renaissance man, a Da Vinci, is what he was, with these interdisciplinary triumphs, and no one appreciated it! Of course, he was only a partner on the Viral Program and the development of the subhuman work force, not too terribly hands-on. But he’d helped conceive it, helped guide it, and he was head of department. They were his projects too.

But not only was he underappreciated, he was in effect incarcerated. Had been under house arrest in the lab living quarters for weeks. It was enough to drive a man dotty.

They might kill him, because of the Barrabas thing, if he became less than vital to their plans . . .

And suppose they found out that he’d been selling some of the earlier viral gen-codes through the supplier? God only knew who was buying them on the other end. Some wog terrorist, he supposed. Probably use them on another faction, kill more of their own people, do everyone a spot of good.

It was not as if he’d sold the calibrations for the Racially Selective Virus. No, indeed. That was sacred, don’t you know. He’d sold them a failure, really. A virus that was short-lived but non-racially selective. A throwaway.

But would Rolff appreciate that? No. Would they be furious with him, perhaps punish him dreadfully, if they found out he’d sold the S1-L? Yes. Dreadfully, don’t you know.

He began to pace, whining faintly to himself to relieve the tension, the chill. The frustration.

He needed to get off. It was that simple. He needed to get out of himself. To have the orgasm of the nervous system that would get him free for a while. Open the spillway, let the pressure drop.

But where was the supplier?

The whir of the electric fence opening, down the alley. Headlight beams pooling on tarmac. The lights swinging toward him. Relief and exhilaration.

The supplier left the panel truck’s headlights on, its electric motor humming. He got out of the car . . .

Who the bloody hell?

Not the usual chap. Not the little cockney fellow this time. Damn damn damn. Someone delivering lab supplies, he supposed—and only lab supplies.

Someone big as a house. Big, bulky, dark silhouette behind the headlight glare. “Dr. Cooper, I presume.” A husky woman’s voice, with an American accent. Southern States, he thought.

She came into the light. An enormous black woman. Good God! Why had the guards let her through?

But of course they were used to seeing Negroes in service jobs. She was supposed to be delivering chemicals for the lab. Same truck as usual.

“Yes . . . ?” he said tentatively.

“I got yo’ supplies. You know? Sarky couldn’t make it. Sent me over. I work wid him. Know what I mean? De whole deal.”

She was carrying Sarky’s little black belt pouch in her hand. Sarky usually wore it, but this woman would have a bit of a struggle getting it around a leg, let alone her middle.

She climbed the insta-steps with some effort, grunting and cursing under her breath. “Oughta make you come down to me,” she muttered. But she came up, and simply handed him the belt with his drugs on it. “It’s all dere. Some lab supplies in de truck too, natcherly, make it look good.”

He stared at her. An American? A black? A woman? He took a nervous step back from her. “What’s happened to Sarky?”

“Got inna tussle, couldn’t make it. I’m doin’ de deal for him, is all. It’s the righteous shit, man, jus’ de same zalways.”

His heart was banging in his chest. This felt wrong. But he wanted to get off ever so badly. And this woman couldn’t be a revolutionary agent, or a police agent. She was too odd to fit the profile. The New Resistance used the inferior races for their cannon fodder, he was quite sure, but never, he assumed, in so sensitive a position as an undercover agent of some kind. They didn’t have the brains to pull it off.

Fingers shaking, he zippered the canvas pouch open, found the little bottle and the balancer-charging unit. Without the one-shot unit, the bottle was useless—he couldn’t get another charge for his balancer without leaving here. And Security was supposed to monitor his balancer, officially, while he was under house arrest. And they wouldn’t let him get really high.

Addictive that way, they said. Made you prone to unsound decisions, they said.

Sod ’em. He gave her the cred number for this week, for the floating account he’d set up for this sort of thing, and she turned and waddled away, making an inordinate amount of noise. She began to unload a few cardboard boxes from the back of the truck, for the sake of appearances.

“Just leave them on the dock,” he said, hurrying to the door. “I’ll get them later.”

He went eagerly into the building, directly to the men’s restroom and locked himself in. With fingers that worked all on their own, so exactingly and quickly they were almost a blur, he charged the balancer on his thigh.

Oh, yes. There it was. Yes. His friend was back. Yes, yes, there it was, that’s it, that was . . .

Was something else. Something different.

There was something else in with the euphoric. Something . . . What was it? Some minor impurity. It would pass.

But it made him restless. Normally he got off in the bathroom, stayed there for the rush. But it seemed so cramped now, cramped like his life under this bloody house arrest. Trapped in the lab like one of his own lab mice. Suddenly he was claustrophobic. Needed badly to get out.

Cooper found himself stalking down the hall, his pants not even done up properly. Not caring, feeling a tidal push behind him, a growing swell of inchoate rage.

How dare they treat him like this. A Da Vinci, a Newton, a Mendel. A genius. Treat him like a half-breed, like some pathetic wog who’d cocked things up.

He’d straighten them out. Knew just the thing.

He had the presence of mind to put on the protective helmet before he smashed the vial containing the universal-kill virus in the coffee room, where the others were on their break. Had the pleasure of watching the virus take effect immediately—that immediacy was his own addition to the molecular design—watching them writhe on the floor, screaming.

Spitting blood. Dying.

But then realized he hadn’t done up the protective helmet properly, either.

Oh, bugger.

Paris, the old Metro station.

“I shot this in the tunnels,” Roseland said.

He held up what looked like a smashed electronic clock. Aluminum and silicon and glass and a lot of micromotor parts: a machine the size of a small bird, lying in the palm of his hand.

“It’s a bird’s eye,” Steinfeld said. “Where did you spot it?”

Torrence walked up then, into the monitoring office, looking around. “Anyone seen Pasolini? She’s late for her watch. Not like her. “

Steinfeld was distracted by the bird’s eye. “Pasolini? No. Look at this, Dan. Roseland shot it like a quail.”

“That was the shot I heard? I thought it was another of those fucking pipes exploding. Yeah, that’s a bird’s eye. Shit. Maybe we should just get the hell out of here now. Did it see you first?”

Roseland shook his head. “It was a quarter mile down the tunnel, on the other side of the barricade. I was on watch, thought I heard something, so I looked through the barricade and saw it looking around. Shot it from behind. They’ll figure it just ran into a wall or something. They must lose a lot of them, they break down all the time.”

“That barricade’s well camouflaged,” Steinfeld said, nodding. “Looks like shelling debris.”

“But they’re getting close,” Roseland said.

“A miss by an inch’s as good as a mile,” Torrence said. “Where’s Pasolini?”

“I really don’t know,” Steinfeld said. “We’ll probably have to move again soon anyway. Things are in place, events in motion. Latest is, our good Dr. Cooper’s dead.”

“Is he?” Torrence smiled. Something you didn’t often see.

“Bettina got onto his supplier. Decided she’d be the one to give him the stuff, figured he’d never believe someone like her was an agent. Used an OD of the Army’s aggression drug. He killed a bunch of ’em with his own virus. The S1-L. Non-racially selective. We were counting on them to shoot him, but it didn’t happen that way. Accidently exposed himself to the virus.”

“Dead is dead,” Torrence observed.

“Not only Cooper, but half a dozen other SA researchers. Plus three SA Security men.”

“Should put a crimp in their racist-virus project.”

“One hopes.”

“Maybe Smoke’ll come through in time,” Torrence said.

Absently, Torrence put a hand up to touch his new ear. Unless you looked close, it was symmetrical with the other. The skin color was a little different, but only a little. Torrence caressed it once, with the tip of his index finger.

Roseland watched in morbid fascination. Shuddered. Weird keepsake to have.

Steinfeld glanced at the calendar on his watch. “I only wish we knew how much RSV they have in storage. In the meantime, at least, they’re going to have to put a new scientific team together, to work out the vectoring.”

“It’s just a delay,” Roseland said lugubriously. “It’s coming.”

“Where’s Pasolini?” Torrence asked again.

The other two turned to look at him. And then looked around.

Where was she?

FirStep, the Space Colony.

There were three women in Witcher’s little Colony apartment, and they were all beautiful, and all in various states of undress.

It was a little crowded, certainly, a little claustrophobic for his taste. He didn’t like being pushed in so close to them. Not this much. But then, if you have to be stuck in a small apartment with three people, Marion, Jeanne, and Aria were the sweetest kind of discomfort.

Administrative assistants, that’s what he’d called them when he’d filled out the forms to bring them to FirStep. They’d arrived a long, lonely week after he’d settled in here.

He felt so much safer now.

Speaking of filling out forms, Aria filled out hers marvelously, he thought, in that off-white negligee. It had been a good choice. Deliberately one size too small for her. She was oiling her Walther, the gun-cleaning kit open beside her. The strong smell of its solvents annoyed him in the close quarters, but it was important, today, that the gun be ready.

It had been, he reflected, more difficult getting permission to bring the girls in than it was smuggling the guns in. The colony people had strange priorities. Well, he supposed, perhaps it made sense. Guns don’t use up air or food or water.

Jeanne was in the shower. He considered going in, scrubbing her with the brush. No, she was moody this morning, best leave her alone.

And Marion. Sitting cross-legged in a corner, in her tight black neoprene skirt, neoprene bikini top with brutal uplift. Watching a minimono show on video. “Whatabuncha assholes, these minimono dwips,” she said. Clicking her black nails against the barrel of her 9mm H & K. But she didn’t turn the console off. “You know what I heard, I heard the minimonos wanta come here, think the Colony’s their intended homeland. Like the Rastas were with Ethiopia. They think they’re destined to live on the Space Colony, like, but they can’t get permission to come here because this Claire bitch, like, thinks they’re half crazy or something. Whud she say . . . ‘psychologically inappropriate.’ Fuck, that ain’t half. I mean, Gridfriend, gimme a break, they’re fucking out of their weaselly little minds.” Marion pretending to play a guitar solo on her submachine gun; like the gun was an air guitar. “Pisses me off,” she said, “they won’t let me smoke here. Couldn’t I sneak one, Dad?”

Witcher said, “Uh-uh. They have smoke detectors.”

“But we’re locked in here anyway. Under siege, like.”

“I was referring to even the possibility of your smoking it in the hall. You know I don’t tolerate smoking in the house with me.”

“In the bathroom? Please, Dad? When Jeanne gets out?”

“No. Take another pill if you need nicotine. Get a patch.”

“Not satisfying that way.”

She was pouting now. He liked seeing her pout. It was sexy.

He imagined taking her, then. Her and her pout. Actually, really fucking her. He almost got a hard-on thinking about it. The excitement was like a vibrating piano wire in him.

“I’m thinking about this plan, this locking ourselves in here,” Aria said. “I don’t like it. I want to go to the pool, and go jogging.”

“It’s just for a few hours, till things cool off,” Witcher told her. “They want to arrest me. It’s that simple. In a few hours things will be different. It will be a fait accompli, and they’ll see the error of their ways, and we’ll negotiate with them.”

“There’s just the three of us, against all their people. And that Claire woman doesn’t approve of us. How you keep us. She was here, she saw us. She acted very superior. I don’t know if she’s going to negotiate much.”

“Oh, she will.”

He wondered if he should tell them about the strategy. The purging. No. Unknowable, how they might react. They would have relatives on Earth.

“Don’t worry about it.”

Jeanne came out of the bathroom, nude except for the towel on her hair, bringing a scent of soap and scrubbed skin with her.

Witcher added, “Why don’t you go take a shower, Aria? You’ll feel better.”

She sighed. On the Colony, he made them all shower two or three times a day. Not so he could watch, but because he liked them clean in this crowding. Completely clean. She went to the bathroom, muttering in Scandinavian.

“And douche while you’re in there!” he called after her.

Thinking that he might have them play with one another, while he was waiting to see if the Colony would break down his door.

Paris, the Hôtel de Ville.

Watson felt a little better, seeing his new suite of rooms. It wasn’t a proper suite at the moment, of course, since most of the furniture had been moved against the walls to allow for the cardboard boxes the movers had left in the middle of the sitting room. They hadn’t even bothered to put the boxes marked “bedroom” in the bedroom, blast them. Frog bastards.

But God, what a beautiful room. He had developed a taste for ornate French decor lately. This one was 1890s, Belle Époque he supposed, ornate almost to a fault and yet lovingly composed, lovingly preserved. Perhaps he ought to purchase some paintings for that wall, though, it looked a little—

“Colonel Watson?”

Giessen. Always breaking in on him. “Yes?”

The natty little German was standing in the doorway. With him were two SA guards.

“It should be obvious, Giessen, that I’m quite busy. Is it important?” He was sorry he hadn’t yet made up the video-animated “message” from Crandall informing Giessen of his new posting. Shouldn’t have put it off till the evening. But he’d been eager to get into his more spacious flat.

“It is, ja, quite important,” Giessen said. Adding, “Herr Watson.” Knowing it irritated Watson. “We found the boy’s body in the river this morning. Bruises on his neck. From a man’s hand. Apparently he’d been strangled, although not quite successfully, before being dropped in the Seine.”

“Indeed.” Stuart! That bloody idiot. Supposed to make it took as if the boy fell in by accident. Another cock-up.

“So I decided to have another talk with the guard who was the last one to see the boy. A Sergeant Stuart. I became convinced Stuart was lying—so we had him extracted.”

“What! No one is to use an extractor without my authorization!”

“Or Rolff’s.” Giessen smiled.

Rolff! The bastard had betrayed him. Or possibly Giessen had intimidated him into it. The bloody fool should have realized that if Watson went down, Rolff, his co-conspirator, went down with him.

“And the extractor told us some very interesting things,” Giessen said, insufferably smug. A very faint smile on his liverish lips. “That you ordered the boy killed. That you asked Stuart to do it. And the boy tried to tell Stuart something, to talk him out of it. He didn’t get out much. Enough. Something about Crandall being dead. Video animation. That would explain why Crandall always seemed to take up your case when things were not going your way . . . ”

Watson felt the warmth and comfort of the room recede from him, like an elevator failing down a shaft. “Disinformation,” he sputtered. “NR disinformation. Planted in Stuart, in the boy . . . ”

“No. We’ve had the Crandall video decrypted. They’re animations. Is he dead?”

“Certainly not. He—he wanted animations. Security reasons. Can’t reveal.”

“Oh, yes? Very improbable. I’ve spoken to the Inner Circle. You are to be detained pending an investigation. Please come along.”

Watson pointed at the guards, spoke in his most authoritative tone. “This man is attempting a coup. Drag him out of here and lock him up.”

They didn’t respond. They walked across the room, stepping around the boxes, but working their way implacably to him. Giessen had chosen men loyal to him.

The mirror-visored helmets reflected his face as they came toward him. He saw himself, doubly reflected. Shaking, angry.

Saw his own image get closer and bigger. And saw the expression on his face change as they took him by the wrists.

Change from anger to fear.

FirStep: the Space Colony.

Russ Parker blurted the whole thing as he rushed through the hatch of Claire’s office, barely clearing the low doorframe with his head as he came in. “He’s frozen the doors! He brought one of those autohacker programs with him, booted it into the door control. They’re locked but good. Permanently. Shutting off the power wouldn’t help.”

Stoner, sitting on the only other chair in the little office, was staring at the monitor that showed Witcher’s apartment door. Two Colony Security guards were there, working at it with tools. “How long will it take them to get through?”

Claire, sitting at her desk nursing a cup of cold coffee, said, “Two hours. It’s pretty well reinforced. Could take even longer, in fact. We can’t blast through—he’s too near the outer hull. Too much risk we’d rupture the Colony. Anyway, he’s got bodyguards in there. Those women—with their guns. They could hold off our people indefinitely from in there.”

The fone on Claire’s desk chimed. Witcher smiled out of the little monitor. “Hello, all,” he said. “And how are we today? One big happy family?”

Claire switched on the fone’s cam so Witcher could see her. “We’ve got the full story now, Witcher,” she said, trying to control the tone of her voice. Best not to provoke this paranoid. “We know about the S1-L and the timetable. What we don’t know is why. You want to tell me about it?”

“Is this some sort of delaying tactic till they can break through the door? They’ve got a long way to go. You can tell them to stop, though. First of all—I’m well protected here.” He gestured, and the big busty blonde stepped into the shot, brandishing an autopistol.

God, Claire thought, what an arrested adolescent this old man is. Keeping walking-talking soft-core porn foldouts around him. Barbie-on-Her-Honeymoon dolls with GI Joe accessories. Too much James Bond in his youth. Why hadn’t she realized before how sick he was? Psychopaths are clever. That’s why.

“Second,” Witcher went on, “don’t try it, because if you do, I’ll transmit the signal ahead of time, if anyone interferes with me here. I prefer to time things my way, to get all my people under cover, but if I have to . . . ” He shrugged. “And don’t think about interfering with my transmitter. I have a monitor on it for spacecraft. If any of your EVA pods come near it, I’ll know. I’ll transmit.” He clapped his hands together once. “You’ve got thirty seconds to tell them to stop.” He kept smiling, pleasant as a kiddy-show host.

Claire hesitated, then said, “Hold on.” She cut to another line, called the guards, gave the order and quickly came back to Witcher.

“It sounds as if they’ve stopped,” he said.

“They have. So now it’s not a delaying tactic, you can tell us what the fuck you think you’re doing.”

He looked at her with a little surprise. “Hanging out with those streetfighters affected your speech mannerisms. Well, yes, I’ll tell you. I was planning to tell you, a little later, anyway. I was going to warn the resistance people to take refuge just before it all went down. Minutes before.”

“Killing how many others?” she asked hoarsely.

“With luck, ninety percent of the population of the world, Claire. Across racial boundaries. Across the spectrum. The S1-L virus is not racially selective. And I’m no racist. I will, in fact, be killing most of the racists. I’m having the canisters placed that way. This will eliminate the Second Alliance. And that’s just the beginning. We’ll have a chance to make the world a just place to live, for the first time.”

“Yeah,” Russ muttered, “you’re real morally uplifting.”

Claire gestured at Russ for silence. She bent closer to the fone-cam. “Go on.” Thinking that if she understood his logic, maybe she could talk him out of it.

Witcher sipped a mineral water reflectively, and then said, “Why do you suppose racism arises? Why conflicts of any kind, really. It’s all instinct. Sociobiological necessity. Xenophobia coming out of territoriality responses. Ultimately, from a territory that’s overburdened by population, strain on its resources. Smoke believes much the same thing.”

“Up to a point, maybe.”

“But, you are implying, he would never advocate mass extermination for population control. Ah, now. True. It’s an ugly thing for me to do. It will create, in fact, major health problems on Earth due to all those decomposing bodies. For a while. But I’ll be up here, and most of the survivors will manage to protect themselves. The virus will die out. The bodies will be dealt with. The population of the Earth will be a tiny fraction of what it was—and suddenly, for the first time, Utopia will be possible, Claire.” Real fervor was coming into his voice now. “We’ve had the technology for Utopia for years—but population stresses made that technology more a disadvantage than an asset. Wipe out most of the population, and suddenly everything becomes manageable. We can let most of the planet revert to its healthy, natural state. We can afford to end pollution. We can organize a world government at last—in this situation, it would be inevitable. Think of it! One world! My company’ll be ready. My trained security people. We’ll take control. Slowly we’ll bring the population back up—but only a bit, to manageable levels. Most of the people in the world, Claire, are suffering—they are better off dead. We have to think of those who will come: they’ll live in a world without racism—I’ll outlaw even the faintest tinge of racism! A world without organized religion! I’ll outlaw that, too! A world without crime, because there’ll be abundance. A world without pollution. Without urban sprawl, or suburban blight. All those damnable housing projects. Gone, all of it. Look at that side of it. I’ll restructure things for real social justice. No more slums. An end to exploiting the Third World.”

“Christ,” Stoner said. “A liberal’s version of fascism.”

“It’s order, is what it is, order and peace. No armies when I’m done,” Witcher went on smoothly. “No more fighting. No wars! Not one more war!”

“Not one more word,” Russ interrupted. “I can’t handle one more word of this crap. This is some kind of special blasphemy against God. It’s as bad as the Second Alliance and as bad as Hitler.”

Claire nodded. Numb with disbelief. “You’ve been planning this all along, Percy?”

“No. I expected the NR would be a vehicle to overthrow the competition. Rid me of the other ones who want to unify the planet—enslaving it is their way of unifying it. I thought I’d see my chance at some point. And then one of my people made contact with Dr. Cooper, and after our London computer break-in cued me on their viral experimentation . . . Well, the S1-L has a short life. The other bioagents are too unpredictable, too long-lived. And of course, I didn’t want the racially selective one.”

Claire thought: All males get crazy when they get powerful enough. “You’ve got agents who’re going to release this stuff on your signal—all over the planet?”

“Not precisely,” Witcher said, glancing away.

“What it is, most of them are in two central locations, where the labs are,” Stoner said. “They’re supposed to pick up the stuff, spread out from there. Most of ’em don’t know what they’re going to release.”

Stoner was at another fone, watching the chronometer digitalizing the seconds and minutes in the corner of the screen. A text message flashed onto the screen then. Something he’d been waiting for, Claire thought, judging from his expression.

“That’s it. It’s all over.” Stoner turned to the other fone. “It’s already over with, ‘Dr. Strangelove.’ We traced your operation, busted your labs. I hipped some old acquaintances in the NSA to it. You can transmit all you want. We’ve got your people. And your viruses.”

Claire sagged with relief.

Stoner went on, “It was too fucking ludicrous to work.”

“You people . . . ” Witcher shook his head, tears in his eyes. Gaping. “You have no perspective. Well, I’m cutting the NR off. Not one penny more, not one page of intelligence more.”

“We don’t need you, it turns out,” Claire said. “We’ve found . . . another backer.”

“Have you.” His voice shrill. Breaking as he went on, “Have you now. The New Resistance was practically my creation. It should be under my guidance. And if it’s not, it’ll go completely wrong. It seems it already has! Fine. We’ll see how much credibility the NR has after tonight. Stoner, you didn’t get all the agents there were to get. There was one who was already deployed. Already has the canister at ready. She’ll be at the receiver in about two hours. I’m going to signal her. I’m going to tell her: Use it!”

“Who is it, Witcher?” Russ asked. “Where are they?”

“Oh, she’s ostensibly an NR agent,” Witcher said. “I have an arrangement with her. To release the virus in a certain population center. She doesn’t know the whole of my strategy.” He wiped his eyes with a sleeve. Gave a cavalier smile. Had his aplomb back. “I’ll make a start and I’ll destroy you people. And then I’ll start over.”

“Where’s the virus?” Russ asked.

Witcher chuckled.

That kiddy-show-host smile came back.

And then he switched off the fone.

• 12 •

Mexico.

Smoke was there. Jerome was there. Bettina was there. Kessler was there. Richard the crow was there.

Kessler was a medium-tall, round-faced man with short black hair, streaked blue-white to signify his work as a video tech. Big brown eyes, rather girlish mouth. Looked soft, Smoke thought, but he was sharp and tough as nails. He wore, like Smoke and Barrabas, feather-light white peon pajamas, and sandals. Jerome wore jeans, no shirt, mirror sunglasses.

The crow was on Smoke’s shoulder, Jerome was sitting across the terrace table from Smoke, Kessler on one side of Jerome, Bettina on the other. All of them on the sun-baked, stone-flagged terrace outside the NR’s chip-training installation. It was only eleven in the morning, but the day was bright and already hot; the big table umbrella didn’t make enough shade. The tall glasses of iced tea they were drinking weren’t cooling enough. Especially for Bettina, who wore a ghastly little orange-print housedress and thongs. She got up and moved gelatinously to the other terrace table, dragged it over, making it squeal across the stone, so its umbrella blocked the sun at her back.

She heaved herself back into the creaking wrought-iron chair and, wiping sweat from her face with a dish towel, said, “Where Patrick and Jo Ann at?”

“Here they are,” Smoke said, nodding toward the glass sliding doors that let onto the terrace.

Carrying ice teas, Barrabas and Jo Ann came blinking out into the sunlight; pulled chairs up from the other table and hunched beside Smoke in the shade.

“It’s hot out here,” Jo Ann said, “but it’s worse indoors.” She looked out at the desert stretching away brown and purple to her right. “Smells good. Smells like sage. What’s that noise?”

“Cicada, or something like it,” Smoke said.

“You nature boys done with de vague entomology, let’s get on wid dis shit,” Bettina said. “I wanna get in de wading pool. Alouette’s filling it up for me ’n’ her.”

“Won’t be room for her in it,” Jerome said.

She took a swipe at him; he was prepared, and ducked it.

“I get yo’ skinny white ass later,” she said. She turned to Smoke. “Let’s talk and get it over wid.”

“Things are serious now,” Smoke said. “Find some patience, Bettina.”

“Things always serious. Serious for years now.”

“It’s come to a head,” said Smoke. He sipped his tea, his ice clinking, looking at the horizon. A distant jet doodled a curly contrail on the blue-white sky. He went on, “It’s all timing, you see. And the timing has to be decided now.”

Jerome said, “I think you oughta just go ahead, let Hand spill the beans, let Barrabas witness for us, hit ’em with a frontal attack. Now. Their computers are fucked up, their bosses are arresting each other, fighting for top control. We ain’t sure what the timetable with the RSV is. Why don’t you just go for it?”

“Because of certain military factors. And because of the Leng Entelechy.”

Jerome groaned. “We’re not really going to try that, are we? You’ll have us wearing crystals for good vibes next.”

Bettina ducked her head in a way peculiar to her that signified bafflement. “The Leng what-uh-hicky?”

“Don’t play dumb just because you’re not in a mood to work today, Bettina,” Smoke snapped. Thinking: The heat’s making us all irritable. “The word is ‘entelechy.’ It means fulfillment of potential—a system coming to a fulfillment that something in it is . . . is reaching for.”

“A term from vitalism, isn’t it?” Kessler asked.

“Yes. But in this case we’re interested in the entelechy of the collective psychic field.”

“The collective psychic field?” Kessler smiled, chuckling urbanely. “You mean the one which probably doesn’t exist?”

Jo Ann said, “This Leng guy—is he the Shrimp Man?”

“I doubt he’d appreciate that nickname, but yes. Dioxin birth defects, born without arms and legs. Body shaped sort of like a shrimp. Gets around in a very nice exoskeletal prosthesis. One of the best microbiologists around. Combined Earth science with microbiology and physics. Nobel prize in 2016.”

“Nobel prize doesn’t mean he couldn’t have a crank idea,” Kessler said.

“You work hard on being cynical, Mr. Kessler?” Jo Ann said.

“I just think that ‘supernatural’ phenomena is psychological, not psychic,” Kessler said. “It’s a question of conditioning input, shared psycho-programming symbols, myth-symbol projection, that sort of thing.”

“I don’t think this is a supernatural phenomenon,” Smoke said. He reached up and scratched under the crow’s beak. It bit his finger, but only playfully. Then cocked its head as something rustled in the sere grass and stony ground beside the patio. Smoke went on, “Leng doesn’t regard it as supernatural. He regards it as a weak bioelectric field uniting all life on Earth. He got interested in it as a young man when he read about a study done in the 1980s. The study found that under certain circumstances, if you taught a trick to a group of rats . . . ”

“Come on, man,” Bettina interrupted, swabbing her forehead and jowls, “I don’ have time for scientific studies about no damn rats. Get to de fucking point.”

Smoke went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “—then other rats who weren’t around suddenly knew the trick too . . . as if it had simply been in the air. The effect was more pronounced when there was a greater conductivity in the air. And among people we have the phenomenon of an ‘idea being in the air’—sometimes it’s because of parallel stimulus, social reasons, but other times it happens with disparate cultures at opposite ends of the Earth who had no contact at all. Simultaneously. What it all boils down to—”

“Yeah, boil it down before I boil down,” Bettina snapped.

“—is a body of evidence that indicates there’s a collective unconscious mind of some sort linking people.”

“Well, fuck,” she said, “who don’t know that?”

Jerome nodded. “I’ve felt it at gigs.”

Smoke nodded. “Rickenharp used to talk about that. The field is weak and it’s subject to a variety of stresses, but it’s there. Leng found a way to sense it and measure it and predict its cycle of intensity. Its impulses travel around the world in waves. Like a big psychic tsunami. Subtle, but affecting the brain of every human on the planet—on some level.” He saw Bettina’s impatience about to erupt, and he added hastily, “We can use this stuff ourself, perhaps, yes, Bettina. I’m coming to it. It might be possible to introduce electromagnetically encoded information into the Group Mind Wave at certain times—and use it to communicate an insight to everyone on the planet. Just a little psychic nudge, you see. Through the Plateau. Leng has the technique—there’s a specific frequency . . . ”

Kessler turned Smoke a pained and puzzled look. “You’re going to delay our move just to wait for the optimum time for this . . . this entelechy? What about the virus? You’re going to risk the life of every person of color on the planet just to test your theory?”

Smoke shook his head. “No. We’re waiting for Torrence and Steinfeld to line up their strikes. They’re working things out with Badoit, getting some gear together for the EMP action.”

“The what?” Jerome said.

“Electromagnetic pulse. They want to completely pull the plug on Second Alliance finances so they can’t finance counter-propaganda, can’t pay their people, whole SPOES falls apart.”

“Electromagnetic pulse. I was afraid that’s what you meant,” Jerome grimaced. “Don’t be doing that shit around me. Or around anyone else with a chip implant.” He tapped his head. “Fuck ’em up.”

“The military operations are supposed to get us some hard evidence about the virus, to back up Jo Ann here,” Smoke said.

Kessler was shaking his head. “No. You’re gambling they won’t use the thing before you get this all set up. You can’t gamble that way. We should announce the thing now, start raising people’s consciousness about it, do our best with what we have. Now.”

“De man’s right!” Bettina burst out. “You ain’t gambling wid you own motherfucking race, Smoke! It’s wid mine! And a whole lot of de rest of de world!”

“We don’t think we’re gambling. We know a bit about the Racially Selective Virus. We know it’s isolated now in one lab and one storage facility. Both in London. It’s not the sort of thing they can simply release in any city and let it do its work. Temperature conditions have to be optimal. Plus they have to have multiple simultaneous releases—the virus dies out fast. They designed it that way so it would be less likely to mutate. And they’re worried that it might not be as selective as they think—one gene wrong in your DNA and it could kill you. They’re not all certain about their own ancestors. How much Jewish blood is enough to make the pathogen kill you? They’ve got those technical problems. I heard they thought they had that under control, but they’re still testing. It’s going to take them a while to set this up—”

“That’s what your intelligence tells you. Your Badoit, your NR espionage,” Kessler said. Shaking his head. “That’s basically hearsay. You’re just gambling that it’s true. I say don’t gamble.”

“I think he’s right too, Smoke,” Jerome said.

Barrabas spoke for the first time. “The thing’s got to be stopped. People should be told with all speed. Maybe there’s some sort of preventive antiviral measures . . . ”

“If it comes to that. We’re watching them. We have a man on the inside. We’ll know if they start to move.”

“You hope you’ll know,” Kessler said. “You hope you know about where they’re storing the stuff. You’d better be right. He stood up and walked away from the table, into the building.

Bettina drank the rest of her tea and most of Jerome’s, then began crunching up the ice in her teeth. All the time eyeing Smoke balefully.

“Man’s right,” she said. Crunch, crunch. “You gambling.”

“It would be gambling to do things precipitously,” Smoke said. “Gambling that it’d work best that way. We don’t think it would.”

In the silence that followed, something rustled in the dry grass again.

“You know what, Smoke,” Jerome said finally, “when you were talking about the entelechy, you sounded like a religious convert, man. It’s something you’d like to believe in. Maybe some connection to God. Makes you feet less lonely. That’s cool. But maybe it’s slanting the way you’re planning things.”

“It isn’t just me,” Smoke said. Feeling odd. Wondering if Jerome was right. “It’s Torrence and Steinfeld and Badoit. Witcher approved it. Steinfeld and Badoit . . . ” He paused, allowing himself to look a little hurt. “ . . . are threatened by the virus, too. Their races.”

“Look, man,” Bettina said, “I don’t mean to say you don’ give a fuck about black people, but let’s face it—”

“My race is threatened by this thing,” Smoke said. “The human race. Homo sapiens. That’s my race, Bettina.”

They looked at him; he looked out at the desert.

A rustling. Then a dusty-gray tarantula, bristly and kinklegged, crawled up onto the edge of the flagstones about thirty feet away. Jo Ann saw it and cringed in her seat. “Oh, God, I hate those things. I can’t stand them, I really can’t. I hate spiders, and those are the worst. Patrick—”

Barrabas said hastily, “They give me the willies, too, love. Can’t stand spiders, not me.”

“Why’s it comin’ out inna daytime?” Bettina wondered. “They nocturnal.”

“It’s supposed to be an omen,” Jerome said, “when animals act unnaturally.”

Jo Ann looked at Smoke. “Could you . . . ?”

Smoke was thinking about something else. About gambles. About death.

Jo Ann had gone white. She said, “Oh, God, it’s coming this way. Somebody. I can’t move. I’m really arachnaphobic. Please.”

Bettina said, “Jerome, git that damn thing so this woman’ll shut up.”

“Me?”

Bettina made a snorting sound of disgust and stood up, the suddenness of it knocking her chair over with a clang. She stalked over to the tarantula—and stomped it, once, hard, with the bottom of her thong. Squish.

Jo Ann looked away, covering her mouth, as Bettina took off her thong, scraped spider mush off it onto the edge of a flagstone, and flicked the mess into the grass. Then she went to the spigot in the side of the building to wash the thong. There were still pieces of tarantula legs sticking out from the bottom of it.

The crow fluttered up into the air, flew over to the edge of the flagstones . . .

FirStep, the Colony.

Russ had never done EVA work. He didn’t think he was going to like it. He was right.

Russ Parker was walking ponderously through a vacuum, across a steel plain. His magnetic boots grabbed the hull with a clink that rang inside his suit. Every step was an effort; he was only a quarter mile along and already getting winded. He looked for Lester, panicked for a moment when he didn’t see him. Then realized the crappy peripheral vision on this old helmet had lost Lester in its blind spot.

He turned his head, saw him a stride or two behind, plugging on strong. It made him feel better to see Lester there. He was a good man, and knew what he was doing out here. He had a fair amount of EVA time.

Coming out of hull airlock 70 had been a thrill, despite his fears about Witcher. They were on the cold side, facing away from the sun, and there was no solar glare. The stars out there . . .

You saw the stars in the shuttle, and from inside the Colony. But the parallax here, the horizonless openness of it, made him feel that the Colony—millions of tons of crystallized alloy—was a single spore of pollen, and he was less than a dust mite clinging to it. The stars out here had a certain regal brittleness to their shine, sharp-edged as the tone of a synthesizer’s high-C. The Earth was a Christmas-tree bulb. The moon a night-light.

After that . . .

His pressure suit was ballooned-out in the pressureless void, the arms becoming stiff, almost rigid. It was one of the cheap, old-fashioned kind the Colony got surplus from the Korean moonbase. Would have been nice to have one of the more flexible gas-permeable suits. This one smelled like the inside of a tramp’s shoe, for one thing. The lining fibers were coming loose, prickling him, the rest of the interior feeling faintly vitreous from years of bodies in it. And there was no telling when it might decide it couldn’t maintain airtight integrity any longer. In which case, he’d be dead in seconds.

Russ kept plodding, clinking, on toward the distant abstract tree of Witcher’s antenna. His limbs fighting the restraint of the clumsy pressure suit, his own breathing rasping loud in the helmet. Rattles and tickings came from the clamps for the backpack control box against his chest, the electric cable angling across his rib cage, the communication and ventilation umbilical bumping his hip; the small cutting torch clacking against the zipper of his utility pocket. A crackle came in the headset: Lester’s voice, once, “We can stop if you need to, Russ. It’s . . . ” Something more, fuzzed out by static.

“I ain’t that goddamn old yet.”

“This shit takes getting used to. I’m tired already, and I’m pretty used to it. You sure we can’t take the maneuverers? The guy’s probably bluffing about being able to detect anything flying over the hull.”

“I don’t want to take the chance he’s not bluffing.”

”I’m gonna make my oxymix a little richer, Russ. You might wanna try it. It helps when you get tired.”

“You think I don’t know you’re patronizing me, Lester? I ain’t that goddamn old yet, I’m telling you.” But he reached down and turned the knob on the backpack control, enriched his oxygen flow.

It made him feel a little light-headed; not particularly stronger.

Sweat itched between skin and suit lining. He had to hit the defogger switch on his helmet about every thirty seconds now.

Maybe there was a better way to do this. Maybe Lester was right and the guy had been bluffing. But they were committed now. And if he hadn’t made the right decision, fuck it, the decision couldn’t be unmade.

The chrome tree—though stark and clearly defined against a pocket of starless black—never seemed to get any closer.

Maybe they’d figured the air wrong. People didn’t normally walk very far across the outer hull. They used maneuverers or a repair module, usually. The amount of air they’d taken had been a function of guesswork. Maybe they’d run out before they got there. Or before they got back.

Just keep going.

His breath was rasping louder and louder in his ears. Sweat stung his eyes, blurred his vision. His heart pounded. His lungs heaved. This was no time for masculine pride. This was something like crossing a bad stretch of the Sahara on foot. Exhaustion out here could mean death.

He spoke into his headset, “Lester—wait a sec.”

Crackle. “Sure.”

They stopped. Empyrean jewelry wheeled around them. The occluded sun lit the stunted horizon.

Russ’s breathing quieted. The ache in his muscles subsided a little.

“Okay.” They plodded onward.

He wished he could talk to Claire. Damn, what a babe. Tough as nails, but when she wanted to be, pliant as a willow. Be nice to get a report from her, but she was afraid Witcher might have a way to monitor a long-range EVA transmission.

Hell. He had to pee.

The urine transfer collector was cinched onto his dick. It was supposed to work. But if it didn’t work right, he’d have piss floating around in his suit . . .

Maybe it was nerves, but he couldn’t wait. He pissed. It took an effort of will—bucking a lifetime of inhibition against pissing his pants. That’s what it felt like: infantile self-wetting. Except the collector got most of it.

Only a few drops of golden urine floated past his eyes, wobbling with surface tension.

Distances were playful out here, and suddenly the antenna was there, glazed by starlight so it looked like an ice-bound, leafless tree in the dead of winter. Bigger than he’d thought it was, forty feet high. Must have been a major conspiracy and a lot of payoffs to get it out here, planted right under his nose. But then, there was a lot of EVA work that went on, and the hull wasn’t security-monitored much.

He glanced at his chronograph. About twenty minutes left to deadline. Pretty soon now they’d be breaking through the door of Witcher’s apartment. This had to be done fast.

He and Lester set to work, one on either side, burning through the ten-inch metal trunk of the “tree.”

The cutting torch, spitting its own oxygen in defiance of the vacuum, eating slowly but steadily through the gray alloy.

Time eating steadily away at their margin of error . . .

“I just don’t like it, is all,” Marion was saying. “It’s fucked, that’s all. It sucks.”

“You’re so articulate, dear. How very charming that is.”

“You’re pissing me off, Dad.”

She’d never spoken to him like that before.

Witcher swallowed the hurt and leaned back against the wall, drawing his feet up onto the bed, knees against his chest. “It’s getting rather close in here.”

A renewed whi-ii-ine came from the door, a noise that set his teeth on edge: the moronic techies, boring into his privacy.

“I don’t think we should think about all this now,” Witcher went on. “We’re all rather claustrophobic and under pressure. Marion, why don’t you sit down, hmm?”

She was pacing past Jeanne and Aria, who were sitting on the edge of the bed, at Witcher’s feet. Guns in their hands. Their heads turned to watch her pace, as if they were at a slow-motion tennis match.

“I don’t want to sit down, I’m thinking, I’m deciding, I can’t do it sitting down. I just wish there was more room to walk in here, you can’t go but three steps without fucking having to turn around.” She reached into her pocket and, to his amazement, took out a cigarette, triggered the end with a thumb so it flared alight.

“What are you doing?” he asked in his most emotionless voice. A voice he rarely used with them.

“I’m smoking a fucking cigarette.”

“I don’t allow it and the Colony doesn’t allow it.”

“I don’t care what Mama don’t allow, I’m gonna smoke my cigarette anyhow.”

“What?”

“Forget it.” She stopped pacing with startling abruptness, and turned to squint past a curl of smoke at him. “Dad—you were really gonna let that shit go, the virus, or was that, like, a bluff. Or maybe a fantasy . . . ”

He glared at her. If he pretended it weren’t true, she’d have won a challenge to his authority. He’d have backed down. And his authority must be absolute, because these girls were armed.

He hedged. “Marion, you’re a very lovely girl, and very talented, but it’s a big, complex world—too big and too complex, that’s it’s chief problem—and . . . and it’s just not something you’re going to understand.”

“Is that right.”

Aria stood up, took the cigarette from Marion’s hand, flicked it through the bathroom door into the toilet bowl.

Witcher felt some relief. Aria was still with him, then.

But she kissed Marion on the cheek and said, “It’s just too close to smoke in here, pretty doll. Take a pill and you can have a smoke when we get into the Open.” She sounded too conciliatory . . .

Aria turned to Witcher. “Answer her question. Is it true or not? About the virus?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“I take that to mean it is true.”

Stall them, Witcher thought, glancing at his watch. In a few minutes, Pasolini would be in the Paris sat-receiving station he’d set up. And he could signal her. He wished he’d set up some sort of repeating loop signal.

“The world stinks with suffering,” Witcher said. “I want to free it from suffering, lead the survivors into Utopia. Into the first real possibility of freedom. But freedom needs room.”

Not turning around, Jeanne said, “I don’t think freedom needs mass murder . . . Merde. No. I just didn’t know you’d go that far . . . ”

There was a red light blinking on his transmitter console. He was grateful for the interruption. He swung his feet off the bed, moved to the console. Stared. “There’s someone tampering with the antenna.” He hit the transmit button. Another red light. The antenna was too damaged to transmit.

“They’ll go to hell,” he said, “if there is one.”

He tapped the keyboard for antenna adjustment . . .

It was standing up on not much more than a finger’s width of metal now, holding upright in a way that would have been defiance of gravity—if there had been much gravity . . .

The torches were whittling at that metal finger from either side.

And then a vibration tickled up through his boots, and the antenna torqued suddenly.

Clop. Crunch. Pain in Russ’s chest. His feet kicking nothingness.

Seeing the impossibly right-angled tree receding from him; the stark shadows sucking into it. Lester suddenly looked like a midget—and then a doll. Receding.

“Russ!” Crackle. “Russ! Fuck! Don’t thrash around like that, you’ll use up oxygen! We’ll come and—” Crackle.

The fucker had detected them; had swung the antenna with its angle-adjuster, knocked Russ off his feet. Into space. With enough force to best the small gravitational pull of the Colony . . . (Please, God. I know I’ve fucked up in my life.)

Lester was getting smaller and smaller. The sun was rising like the blazing furnace of Death as he angled out into space. Into the restless nothing.

His heart was like an amateur drummer playing an inconsistent drumroll. (Look, God, I’ll try to be a better person. I’ll marry Claire. I’ll get closer to Jesus. Please.)

Seeing the edges of the Colony, the whole place shrinking to fit into his field of vision.

He said it aloud, a hoarse whisper. “Please . . . ”

Claire’s office. Claire and Stoner. The smell of fear.

Claire said, “Witcher didn’t transmit. The antenna has to be down by now. I’m gonna call Russ.”

“Maybe you should wait,” Stoner said. “We can’t be sure—”

“I can’t wait.” She patched into the EV radio. “Russ? I mean, uh, Admin One to EVA Two and Three.”

Static like spittle spraying. “Claire?” Lester’s voice.

“Is the antenna down?”

“Yeah, but—Claire, get an RM out now, track Russ. Witcher knocked him into freefall. He’s floating free . . . ”

Claire’s eyes blurred. She hit a switch, a siren hooted throughout the Colony. She hit a button and spoke to Airlock Supervisor Six: “EVA 2 is adrift, repeat, adrift, you should be able to get a fix from his transmitter . . . ”

“We’re not getting anything. Where is he?”

“Russ?” She waited. “Russ? Are you reading me. Russ, it’s Claire . . . ” She changed bands. “Oh, shit. Lester? They’re not picking up a signal from him, and he isn’t answering me.”

“The damn antenna hit him in the control box. Busted it—” Crackle. “I can’t even see him anymore. Man, I feel helpless. Get somebody out here!”

She spoke to Airlock Six. “Fix on EVA One, spiral outward from there and do a search. Get everything you’ve got out there. Is there a shuttle in the vicinity?”

“No.”

“Do your best.”

A buzz from another fone. “Claire? We’re through the lock in the door . . . ”

What did she do now? If she didn’t supervise the taking of Witcher’s quarters, people would probably get killed in the confusion. If she didn’t supervise the search for Russ, they might lose him. Someone had to be there to push them into doing everything fast.

“Stoner—can you handle the Witcher thing?”

“I can try. It’s not my expertise. You’re the one with the combat experience.”

“Shit!” They’d do all right on their own, looking for Russ.

She yelled at the fone. “Leave Witcher alone till I get there!”

She ducked through the door, ran down the corridor.

She wanted to be outside, herself, in an RM, looking for Russ. She wanted to scream.

Now she knew why her father had gone off the deep end.

One minute of air left. Spinning around some axis he’d never known he had before. There was the Colony. A bar of light. Now it was gone. There it was. Now it was gone.

Thirty seconds of air left.

No one coming. His transmitter was broken.

You want to choke to death in the suit, Russ?

He said, “Okay, Lord Jesus, if that’s the way you want it. Take me, please, warts and all. I’m sorry for anything I did that I shouldn’t have done. I love you. I love Claire.”

He opened his visor.

“They’re gonna rush the door,” Marion said. A little sweat ran from her palm, running down the gun-grip.

She stood rigidly in front of the door. Aria and Jeanne beside her. Three guns, three women, focused on the door.

“Maybe we block it off some way,” Jeanne said.

“Nothing here to move big enough for that,” Marion said. “Bed’s built into the floor.”

“When they come through,” Witcher said, deciding it right then, “shoot to wound one, kill the others. Then we’ll pull the wounded one in for a hostage. They’ll have to make arrangements with me.”

Marion said, in a voice that, somehow, he knew was meant for the other women, “Don’t do anything.”

The door was kicked, clang, and swung inward.

Marion moved at the same time in a blur, to one side of the door, using the gun like an aikido staff, the speed of a scorpion’s stinger, hitting the Colony Security heavy in the side of the head. The guy went right down, out cold. She kicked the next one in the gut. He folded up, fell back.

She pushed the unconscious one out. A hostage set free after only one second of captivity.

She kicked the door shut.

Witcher was standing ramrod straight, back against the wall. Staring at Marion in hurt disbelief. “I told you to shoot!”

“Not taking your orders anymore, Dad.”

“You low-class little bitch. You whining little punk cunt.” He turned, reached under his pillow, drew out his little explosive-bullet pistol.

Regrettable, the mess it was going to make.

“Don’t even think it, Dad. We’re gonna give ourselves up to ’em, all of us. This shit is all over. So put that down.”

He swung the weapon toward her.

Her Spigon submachine gun spat like an angry cat.

Witcher was slammed back against the wall, his face bleary with amazement.

He slid down the floor, the gun dropping from twitching fingers. He stared a question at her.

“What’d you think?” Marion said. “We’re stupid little chicks that shit when you say shit? We’re people, man, and we’re not stupid and we’re not robots and we didn’t take this job to murder a bunch of children we never even heard the names of. You know?”

But he couldn’t hear her.

A thunk, and running feet, then the door swung in again, more cautiously this time. Claire and a heavily armed man in a cowboy shirt looked in at them from behind a transparent portashield down the hall.

Marion took her gun to the door, put it on the corridor deck, slid it well out of reach. Aria and Jeanne did the same.

Claire stepped out from behind the plastic wall. She looked drained, scared, lonely. Marion raised her hands. “You going to put us in some kind of brig, or kill us, or what?”

Claire sighed, stepping into the room, looking at Witcher’s body. Seeing the gun in his hand.

“We didn’t know what he was doing until just a little time ago,” Aria said.

Claire nodded. “If that’s true, no one’ll bust you. In fact . . . ” She turned and headed out the door, off on some other mission. Saying almost as an afterthought, “If you want a job, you can stay here. We can use some more intelligent women.”

• 13 •

Paris.

She knew that something had gone wrong when the signal didn’t come through. This Witcher was anal, fanatically punctilious. If his timetable was out of kilter, something had interfered with him.

Shit on his timetable, Pasolini decided. I don’t need it. I have my own agenda.

She turned away from the sat-link and walked out of the old tenement, carrying the pouch containing the glass canister. And carrying the ID and the bogus Nazi manifesto that would make her seem to be a Second Alliance agent.

She headed for the train station, for the one working train to Germany. To Berlin. To NATO command center, Berlin.

It was a warm night outside. The stars were pretty. She thought about a beach on Sardinia, and a little blue fishing boat, and a poem she’d once buried in the sand. Now the poem would come true.

There was a glass canister in the pouch, and in the canister was death, and in death was freedom, and the end of all loneliness.

Freezone, off the coast of Morocco.

Torrence hated being in West Freezone.

Part of it was the way this section of the floating artificial island reminded him of the USA. These truncated skyscrapers, only thirty or forty stories but the same kind of combination of tinted-glass monoliths and revisionist early-twentieth-century-style architecture, humorous and faintly deco embellished—with their excruciatingly well-planned little malls around the foundations.

It was a hot day, too, and the African coastal sun blazed from the ten thousand reflective planes. He was glad of his mirror shades, but they weren’t enough. Need a mirror suit, he thought.

What he was wearing, though, was the cheap blue printout jumpsuit of a delivery boy, and a hat, covering the bandage on his head. The hat said “West Freezone Messengers” on it. He was carrying a book-size package and a teleclip. The package in his hands, addressed to Freezone Savings and Investments, was standard FedEx cardboard envelope, supposed to be records coming from the East Freezone branch of the Bank of Brazil, one of the biggest banking multinationals. A standard delivery coming though a messenger service they used regularly. It should work. In case it didn’t, he had a pistol in a side pocket that fired sedative darts, and he hoped they were as quick-acting as Badoit claimed.

He rode up in an elevator. The Muzak was playing a treacly version of the Living Dead’s hit single, “My Death is Your Death Because It’s the Whole Fucking World’s Death.” An entirely nihilistic and anarchist-rooted song, subsumed, in equal entirety, in glutinous co-optation. We’ll be hearing Jerome-X on Muzak soon, he thought. Jerome won’t care as long as he gets the residuals.

He reached up and stroked his new ear. It had taken very nicely. His body wasn’t going to reject it. No.

You bitch, you just had to be a hero.

Then he was on the fifteenth floor, walking down the hall to the receptionist. Seeing that long hall as if through an old suspense movie’s long-shot movie camera. Hitchcockian, getting closer and closer to the secretary, as she looks up; the walk down the hall seeming to take forever. Maybe the limp from his wounded leg would make them wonder about him.

What am I nervous for? What’s this bimbo going to notice about a tallish half-Oriental delivery boy? She sees every mongrel kind of delivery boy every day. They don’t use the same one all the time. Nothing to worry about.

There was a guy standing behind her with a little plastic card clipped to his real-cloth gray jacket, looking at Torrence with the flat but interrogatory gaze of professional security. SA trained, probably.

This bank was owned by a Bolivian firm. Probably founded on last century’s cocaine money. Bolivian Nazi war criminal connections.

Maybe. So if the SA had those kind of connections with these people, then maybe the wipe wouldn’t stop the bank from giving them their money and all this shit was for nothing.

Or maybe it was a legitimate bank. In which case—

Don’t think about that stuff. You’re a delivery boy. Smile vacantly. Chew gum. Look like you’re in a hurry to go on your break.

“Gotta delivery for Yost,” he said, glancing the address. “Henry Yost. Vice manager of something-or-other-I-can’t-read.”

“You kind of old for this work,” the Security guy said. No particular accusation to it, maybe just thinking aloud.

“Yeah, by now I should have a job standing around noticing crap like that,” Torrence said.

“Oh, I see. You’re just stupid. Okay.”

Torrence gave him a fuck you look and put the package on the girl’s desk. She had the light-pen ready, absentmindedly scribbled her signature on the glass of his teleclip. “Here you go, then,” the secretary said. English girl. How come having an English girl receptionist was so damn de rigueur. It had been fashionable ever since he could remember. Some kind of unconscious class thing, he supposed.

Her signature vanished into the records. It was the only thing in the teleclip records, but they didn’t know that.

What if this security dude wants to look through the clip’s records, or wants to call the company, see if I’m on the level? Torrence thought. Why’d Steinfeld pick me for this? Fuck. I’m no actor. It should have been Roseland. More the show-offy type.

But the security guy was watching a woman executive walk by; watching her bare legs, the way her ass snugged into the West African business exec’s bathing suit. Bathing suits in the office. It’s a Freezone thing, he thought.

“There you go,” the secretary said.

“Thanks.” Torrence tried not to hurry to the elevator.

He was in, the doors shutting, when he heard the alarm go off. Goddamn it to hell, goddamn it to hell, Steinfeld told me the fucking thing was supposed to be insulated against detectors.

And then he felt the ripple. And the elevator stopped. The light went out. He was in pitch darkness, stuck between floors.

Oh, great.

The EMP had done its thing sooner than it was supposed to, which was good, maybe, because that meant that its work was probably done. The Electromagnetic Pulse generated by the gear in the package had wiped out their records, completely destroyed their computers. Fried their chips. They were limited to hard-copy records, and that would take time. The bulk of the SA’s assets—if Musa had done his own delivery-boy acting in Geneva—would be frozen, maybe indefinitely gone.

Very cool, only now the fucking pulse had wiped out the elevator’s controls and he was trapped in it and building security would be looking for him. They’d have it all sealed off downstairs.

No, wait. Fones would be out too. It’d take them time to get down the stairs by foot.

Thinking all this, he was ripping at the ceiling panel with the teleclip, finding no exit that way. Try the door.

Torrence had a ballistic knife strapped to his right ankle, a hardened plastic blade, for getting past metal detectors. Tough as steel. He tossed the teleclip aside, felt for the knife, feeling sweat gather on the tip of his nose, his cheekbones. He found the knife, carefully disengaged the launch spring, then used the blade to pry at the door. Got it open an inch, got his fingers in there—pushed the doors apart without a little effort. Blank wall—between floors. There was maybe just enough space to shinny through, between this side of the elevator and the wall, down between two shaft buttresses. A washed-out blue light came from a skylight somewhere above. He thought he heard shouting somewhere below him. He put the knife back on its launcher, sheathed it, and began to wriggle downward, between the floor of the elevator and the wall, kicking his feet over to the metal rungs of a maintenance ladder off to the side. He missed the ladder; the leg wound was burning, throbbing.

And his chest was stuck. He wasn’t going to get through. He was fucking stuck. And they’d get the power back on and the elevator was going to squash him against the wall, crush his head against the cold concrete.

He swung a foot over, again—caught a rung with his toe. The ladder was about three and a half feet to the side. He hooked his foot on the rung and pulled himself downward, forcing his chest past the bottleneck. It hurt. Thought he felt his breastbone crack—

Falling through. Flailing at the rungs.

Ouch. Caught them but felt like his arms were wrenched from the sockets. He got his footing, took the pressure off his arms. His arms were still in their sockets. But maybe he had two more inches of reach he hadn’t had before. Roseland would make some lame joke, if he were here, about becoming a basketball player.

He climbed down the ladder, into deepening darkness.

A hundred feet below him, a square of light opened. Someone stuck their head from the square, looking up. He didn’t see the guy’s gun, but there must have been one, because a bullet whined and ricocheted, and the crack of the shot echoed up the shaft.

Torrence, holding on with one hand, drew his weapon and returned fire with the other.

Sedative gun was all he had. Shit. Like that would work fast enough.

But the guy was falling. The sedative did work fast.

What was the point of using a sedative to save their lives if they fell down elevator shafts?

He hoped the guy was Second Alliance and not just some Security guard. Either way, he was dead now.

Torrence kept going, fast as he could, his leg wound aching. Once he slipped, started to fall, caught himself, kept going.

Then he reached the open elevator door—tried to swing through.

Someone in the hall fired a shot at him and he lurched back, around the edge of the door, back onto the ladder—and dropped his gun, goddamn fuck it, in the process. He held on with one sweaty hand and grabbed the ballistic knife with the other as the guy in the hallway moved into a shooting angle, off to the side of the door, aiming carefully at Torrence’s head through the elevator doorway—Torrence fired the knife without taking time to aim. The spring hummed, the knife-blade whistled softly, the guy went down with the knife in his belly, screaming, his gun shooting holes in the ceiling tiles.

Torrence thought, Man, I hope they’re SA—not just family men hired on for this . . .

Suppressing the twinge of guilt as he swung through the door, he kicked the guy’s gun aside, ran down the hall to the stairway . . .

Should have taken the gun, he thought. I’m defenseless now.

He clattered down the stairs to the lobby—and then he was in the lobby. The lobby guard stood across from him with his back turned, cursing at the fone, trying to get it to work. Torrence ran quietly past on the balls of his feet, out the door—it was frozen halfway open—and into the crowd.

Paris. The old Metro station.

“Smoke’s not going to wait any longer?” Roseland asked.

Steinfeld shook his head. They were in the storage room they used for computer work, Steinfeld sitting at the console, Roseland looking over his shoulder as the decrypting program unscrambled the latest message. “He got worried. I guess Jerome-X talked him into going ahead. Not waiting for the whole Leng Entelechy thing. They’re going to do that later, but—I always thought it was pretty doubtful. Witcher liked it, he had a mystical streak, so that’s part of the reason he went along with Smoke on that—” He broke off, staring. “What the hell?”

An image of a man appeared in the corner of the screen, in a box, as the copy scrolled by—a digital image of Bones. “Steinfeld,” Bones said, voice coming from the computer’s speakergrid, “I didn’t want to use the fone—Um—I don’t know if you’ve gotten to that part on the copy but it boils down to this: Two hundred thousand people died in Berlin today. Witcher’s Sl-L pathogen. Not racially selective.”

“Oh, God,” Roseland breathed.

“I saw a picture of the agent who released the stuff. The agent was dead too, of course. It’s Pasolini. I guess she did it wrong, only got one of the canisters open. She had some ID and some racist pamphlet shit in her pocket, so the NATO authorities—she released this in the Berlin NATO offices—so they, you know, think she’s a Second Alliance agent. Fake name and everything. I mean, she did it to hit the SA, to set them up but—Christ, Steinfeld, two hundred thousand people are dead! I want to know, man. Did you authorize this?”

Roseland looked at Steinfeld. There was no use his answering now—Bones couldn’t hear him, this was a computer-animated recording of Bones, not a fone transmission. But Roseland wondered what the answer would be . . .

“I mean, this could hurt the enemy. Will hurt them. But didn’t you—or Pasolini, if she was acting alone—think that this might force their hand? They might decide to release the Racially Selective Virus ahead of time. Anyone think of that? Tell you the truth, hodey, I’m scared for my own ass now . . . That RS pathogen’s got my DNA written on it . . . ”

He gave the reply code, and his image rezzed out.

Roseland looked at Steinfeld. “Did you tell her to do it?”

Steinfeld, after a scary second of hesitation, said, “No. I didn’t tell her to do it. I had no idea she was going to do it.”

He just sat there, staring into the blank screen. Shoulders slumped.

Two hundred thousand dead.

Killed by an NR operative.

Mexico.

They were in the cool cinder-block rec room. Kessler and Bettina sat at the card table, Jerome on the ratty, legless sofa, Alouette on the floor. Kessler and Bettina were playing chess. Bettina was winning. She moved her rook, shifting her weight at the same time. Her folding metal chair groaned under her as she shifted; Kessler groaned at the same moment, seeing the chess move.

Jerome was drinking a San Miguel and watching console TV. Alouette was singing to herself, sitting Indian style on the floor, and drawing with colored pens in a sketchbook, complex geometrical designs executed with inhuman exactitude; she was using her chip for the straight-edged geometry, her right-brain for the design. The crow was perched on a high bookshelf, on a copy of Crandall’s bogus Bible, sleeping, its head tucked under a wing.

The satellite broadcast of Nicholas Roeg’s Performance ended. Jerome said, “What a fucking great flick. They don’t make ’em with that kind of detailed mastery this century, no way no mo’.”

And then a news special came on. With Smoke. With Barrabas and Jo Ann.

“Bettina—Kessler—!”

They were already looking up, riveted to the big screen.

Smoke was being interviewed on InterNet TV, the Biggest Grid station in the world. The interviewer was a smooth, composed black Creole in an understated Japanese Action Suit.

And with him were Barrabas and Jo Ann.

“Thank you, Gridfriend,”

“It’s about time,” Kessler said.

“Shhhhh!” Alouette told them.

Smoke was saying: “—the new Holocaust has been ongoing for months. The video that Norman Hand has just shown you is available for examination, to determine computer enhancement or animation—”

“Some of it could simply have been staged,” the interviewer pointed out.

Hand, sitting beside the interviewer, snorted. He didn’t have much of his TV journalist’s persona left. He seemed simply tired and scared and angry. “Staged?” he said, a little shrilly. “We staged a Jægernaut crushing a building? Crushing those people? What are you saying, we made miniatures and matted in the people? Look at it closer. Watch it again.”

Barrabas was squirming on his seat, eager to say something. Finally he put in, “You can check the video of the subhumans. That’s all quite authentic as well.”

“And quite sickening,” the interviewer said.

“You think that’s sickening?” The camera moved in close on Barrabas, the director sensing emerging emotional drama. “That’s nothing. What’s sickening is how they make you part of it. I mean—how they could do it to anyone?” He swallowed. “To me! They—you have buttons you don’t even know you have. And they push ’em and you find yourself hating anyone they want you to hate! I mean . . . I mean, some of it, right, was in me already. My parents and . . . But they . . . it’s like they inflated it, made me . . . ” There were tears in his eyes. “Took advantage of me.” Jo Ann took his hand. It was obvious he was fumbling along, trying to find his way out of the maze of guilt, trying to see himself as a victim. “The scary thing is—how easily they can do it to people . . . ” He slumped back in his seat, embarrassed.

Smoke said gently, “Patrick is right—we’re all of us too vulnerable to this kind of manipulation. Media-cultivated racism. It makes any kind of atrocity thinkable—because they think it for you first, in the media. By dehumanizing other races, nationalities. And by laying down a foundation of rationales to build on . . . ”

“Now you have your own media reply,” the interviewer said. “The video of the Jægernaut destroying the apartment building does seem very . . . authentic.”

“We also have corroborating documentation,” Smoke said. “And when NATO does some investigating they will find they have hundreds of thousands of witnesses.”

“And we have this . . . ” He nodded to a technician. The screen’s image changed to show victims of the Berlin mass murder. Smoke said, “The canister had been set off near the ghettos—but not directly in it. Between NATO headquarters and the ghettos.” The unsteadily panning eye of the camera showed hundreds of people, many of them black and Arab, dead on a street, sprawled and splayed and in some places heaped, fallen in the midst of their workday. A small portion of the two hundred thousand dead. “This is actually NATO video,” Smoke added. “We obtained a copy . . . Here’s a shot of the pathogen canister on the street. You can see there’s a minidisk taped to it . . . ” The vid ended, the screen showed Smoke again. “On the disk is a recorded manifesto from a right-wing terrorist. She was probably—and this conclusion is in NATO’s report too—probably associated with the Second Alliance. A follower of Rick Crandall’s, in fact, who’d worked at a lab run by the Second Alliance International Security Corporation lab—the two hundred thousand dead in Berlin is the end result of one of the Second Alliance’s viral warfare experiments gone wrong. At the very least, the SA’s leadership, even if they didn’t plan this, are guilty of the negligent homicide of two hundred thousand people . . . ”

“There were white people as well as people of color, dead, in that film . . . ”

“All whites who are not allies are enemies, from the SA fanatic’s viewpoint,” Smoke said. “But when they deploy the Racially Selective Virus—if we let them—they believe they’ll be killing only people of color. Perhaps it’ll work . . . ”

“This Racially Selective Virus—that whole business is a bit hard to believe,” the interviewer said. “It’s something you’re going to have trouble backing up.”

“No, I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” Smoke said. “Not after—” He looked at his watch. “After, say—another ten minutes.”

London.

Early evening on a dark, rain-wet South London street. The streetlights had been smashed out in a food riot the previous winter. The street was consigned to blank warehouses and abandoned buildings. And three identical vans, parked in a row, lights out.

Torrence sat in the driver’s seat of the front van, huddled into a brown leather flight jacket that was a size too big for him. He’d lost weight. He rarely ate.

His assault rifle was behind him, leaning up against the metal wall. On his lap was a canvas bag of noise grenades. Roseland and Steinfeld and two other guerillas were in the back of the van.

Torrence was both tired and wired. He hadn’t slept since before the action in Freezone. He’d met Musa and Roseland and Steinfeld at the airport. The airport had been unprotected, at least by Second Alliance people—because they’d lost two-thirds of their auxiliary staff after the bank-records action. No money to pay them. Only the ideological hard core were left.

Now Torrence and thirty others were poised a block away from the SAISC’s second London storage facility. It was night and it was drizzly, and imminence crackled in the air. Or maybe it was only in Torrence’s head.

A dark limosine turned the corner up ahead, cutting its headlights as it came. The limo pulled up, a car length away, facing the van. Two men got out, one a big white guy in a long brown mac, carrying a riot shotgun, looking sharply up and down the street. The other, in a long coat and shiny black shoes, was a tall black man with hair shaved close to his head, a suit and tie under the great coat. He walked confidently up to the van.

“That’s Bill Marshall,” Steinfeld said from the back. “Open the door for him.”

Torrence reached across and opened the passenger-side door. The tall black man climbed in, stooping, bringing the smell of wet streets with him. The bodyguard waited outside the door, standing in the drizzle, the auto shotgun resting in the crook of an arm. Marshall closed the door and said, in tones as modulated as his expression, “Good evening, gentlemen. A light rain, tonight, but it’s not at all cold. Rather a relief from last night, don’t you think?” With precise, delicate motions of his hands, he tugged off thin ocher calfskin gloves. It wasn’t cold enough for gloves, but the well-dressed man wore gloves these days in London. “I mean,” Marshall went on, “it was dreadfully humid last night,”

Eton and Oxford, probably, Torrence guessed. The guy was MI-6, according to Steinfeld, which was run by Lord Chalmsley: a closet liberal and New Resistance sympathizer. Chalmsley was the only major figure in British intelligence who wasn’t either a rampant conservative or a Second Alliance puppet. The fascists, Steinfeld had said, were walking a narrow tightrope, however, in British politics. They were losing more supporters every day, in light of the recent revelations; were already political poison to many. And there had always been those who’d regarded the SA and SPOES as a threat to British sovereignty.

Marshall was as black a man as Torrence had ever seen. He had an immaculate tie and diamond cuff links. Marshall had been sent to school in England after his parents had seized a diamond mine from its white owners in Zimbabwe.

Marshall looked at Torrence expectantly.

Torrence decided the guy was waiting for him to respond to the small talk. He said, “Yeah. It’s, like, humid.”

Marshall smiled. “An American. And one resonant with charming authenticity.” He put the tips of his fingers together, making a little cage with his hands and pressed his thumbnails against his lower lip. His diamond-crusted Rolex counted off the minutes and seconds. “The situation is somewhat precarious,” he began.

“Do we have the green light or not?” Steinfeld asked.

Marshall turned sideways in his chair so he could see Steinfeld. Or anyway, Steinfeld’s silhouette. Somehow even in the cramped space of the van’s front passenger seat Marshall managed to strike a modelesque pose.

“You have the green light if you turn up something that can be verified without question. If this is a red herring, the green light never existed. We’ll lie copiously and persistently, and the Ministry will believe us over you.”

“Clear enough,” Steinfeld said.

Torrence was thinking: Yeah, clear as mud. “You got people ready to take the stuff, make the ID and everything?”

“Yes. Quite nearby.”

“Why don’t you just get a warrant or some kind of surprise building inspection or something? Check it out yourself. Say it was the wrong address if it turns out bunk.”

“Political subtleties make it difficult. If we came up wrong, the SA’s supporters would put two and two together . . . A New Resistance sympathizer—yours truly—would be identified in MI6. And there’s no time to go through the courts.”

Steinfeld said, “Torrence, let’s go.”

Torrence nodded, took a headset from his jacket pocket, and put it on. He pressed the stud. “Let’s go, Blue Flag.”

He heard the reply in his headset as he reached back for his rifle and soundproof helmet.

Marshall was already on his way back to the limo. By the time that Torrence and the other guerrillas were moving down the street, Marshall’s limo was already gone from sight.

Torrence and Roseland went ahead of the main group. They kept in the lee of the seemingly broken-down, robot-driven semitruck which an NR operative had remote-stalled slantwise on the street an hour before. Orange lights blinked on the semi. The Second Alliance guards had long since looked it over and decided it was harmless. It was. Except it was crucial cover for the two guerrillas, enabling them to get within thirty feet of the side door without being seen.

There were enemy sentries on the roof, so there was no coming in on a helicopter. But this side door was remote enough from the others, they might not see what happened there if the truck did the rest of its bit.

The truck cab’s emergency lights strobed wobbly golden streaks on the rainy street. Torrence ran hunched over up to the semi’s cab; rifle tightly strapped across his back, noise grenades in one hand and ballistic knife in the other. Roseland close behind him. Torrence spoke into his headset, and the guerrilla on the roof of the building to his left responded, throwing a switch on a remote-control unit. The truck suddenly started itself up. The cameras on its robot snout swiveled as if it were coming back to consciousness and wondering just where it was.

Torrence was cheek by jowl with the truck cab when it began to roll toward the SA storage building. He ran along beside it in a crouch, the truck hiding him from the building as it drove past. Then he hung back when he was parallel to the corner of the building, let it go on, honking and revving, rolling past the SA guards—holding their attention, he hoped, distracting them as he sprinted to the side door. But the guard there saw him coming, raised a gun, and opened his mouth to shout.

The shout came out in a bubbling moan as the ballistic knife parted the man’s windpipe. The cry was lost in the roar of the truck vanishing down the street. Torrence finished the guard, then he and Roseland plunged through the unlocked door, Torrence hissing orders into his headset, blinking in the sudden light of the bright interior. He sealed the soundproof helmet, was now locked into silence, except for headset crackle—and he flung the first of the noise grenades at a group of guards at the end of the hall. They went down, thrashing, clutching at their heads. The noise grenades were designed to put them out for a while with a vicious sonic pulse. Couldn’t risk major explosions in here, where the virus was kept.

“Those things really work,” Roseland said over his headset. “I want some for next time I got to visit my relatives at Passover. Stun my Uncle Irving . . . ”

Torrence kept going, in eerie silence. Not hearing the gunfire as outdoor SA sentries spotted the follow-up guerrilla strikeforce outside. They were intended to spot them; intended to think they were the point men.

Torrence ran down the corridor. Again he had a sense of seeing things as if through a camera, a length of the corridor panning past him. He wondered what that kind of distancing from the world meant psychologically. He unslung his rifle . . .

He caught peripheral flashes, Roseland firing behind him at someone at the other end of the hall. There: the door to the central storage room. Torrence burst through, tossing noise grenades. Like toys, with no explosion—but four men went down. There: the walk-in vault. And it was open. Torrence and Roseland opened their helmets as they jogged toward the vault . . . And then there were two more Second Alliance guards coming in through a side door a few yards away. Bullets sizzled the air. Torrence ran at the enemy, worried about bullets hitting viral canisters, but firing his weapon. The guards were armored, but the bullets made them stagger, cracked one of the helmets, and then Torrence was upon them, slapping the suction disks onto them. The guards screaming as the disks drilled and detonated in them. They fell, writhing, blood pooling around them; thrashed a bit and then lay quiet . . .

Roseland was already inside the walk-in safe, carrying out a crate of viral canisters.

There was gunfire outside, but it was becoming sporadic. And the guys in here who were stunned weren’t getting up. They were coming out of it—but they just lay there, staring up at Torrence’s rifle. Torrence stood guard over them, letting Roseland get the goods.

Roseland walked past him, carrying the crate, and said to the guys huddled on the floor: “Better lay still. My friend here’s from the Half-British Half-Japanese Liberation Front for the Free Distribution of Sushi and Chips to All Underprivileged Gaijin, and he means business.”

Torrence sighed. After Roseland was gone from the room, he allowed himself to laugh.

The gunfire from outside ceased completely, and in another two minutes Torrence heard Steinfeld’s voice in the hall. And then Marshall’s.

New York City.

Jerome and Bettina held hands. That was one connection between them. The other one was on the Plateau.

They were remote-jacked into the consoles in Badoit’s suite in the New York Fuji-Hilton Hotel; most of the year, the suite was empty. Badoit kept it just in case he should need it.

The gear had been moved in this afternoon, all of it selected and tweaked to Leng’s specifications. It was ten p.m. Outside, there were sirens and traffic and the yellow guttering on the horizon of a fire in one of the rooftop shantytowns.

But here, the shades were drawn, the suite’s sound-block fields dialed to silence. And the two of them sat in a dark room, closed eyes sealing them into deeper darkness, consciousness turned inward, fixed on the particular continuum of sheer data and signification that was the Plateau. They roamed a cybernetic steppe where there was no night or day, and eyeless wolves stalked and sniffed, sensing everything. For Jerome and Bettina, there was only the Plateau and the communion.

At first it was a communion with one another, through the chips. Like jamming on instruments together, only it was the riffing of an immaculate symmetry of numbers, of frequency coordinates and geometrical imagery; of key words and phrases and rippling concatenations of triggered mental associations. Then a new stage, the joining: they were working as one unit, moving into the System, finding their way together into the computer linkage that informed the Grid.

There they met the others.

From all over the planet: the wolves of the Plateau, tolerating, now, intruders on their turf; certain computer criminals with an urge to tinker with global politics. And the anarchist underground, the Libertarian information networks, the revolutionaries with other orientations: Communist, Socialist, anarcho-syndicalist; the Liberal Democratic Capitalist party; the apolitical who simply hated the Fascists; Catholic nuns and other Christians acting out of Christ-inspired conscience; the Buddhists; the Mossad; reps from the intelligence service of the People’s Democratic Republic of China; chip-aug’d agents working with Marshall at MI-6; agents from Sweden, from the NSR, from India, from Egypt; Badoit’s own chip-aug’d agents; agents from the People’s Republic of South Africa; from Cuba; from Iceland; from Mexico, Brazil, Nicaragua, the People’s Democratic State of Chile; from Canada’s intelligence service; from the Democratic State of Unified Korea; from Australia, from New Zealand; from Arabia, from the Palestinian state; from Libya, Chad, and Algeria. And one from Luxembourg.

Many were normally enemies. Now they were united in fear, hatred, or repugnance for the Second Alliance.

Each of them was cerebrally implanted, chip-augmented, skilled on the Plateau. All were linked to the Grid through the international televid system. Each performed two functions at once.

Top function: transmitting the media capsule that Smoke had put together.

The ground had been prepared by Smoke’s media conferences, the furor over Hand’s testimony; by the images of the subhumans, of the Jægernaut, of the Processing Centers. And there was a sudden interest by the Internet newspaper, the Washington Post, kindled by Hand’s connections there.

Worldwide curiosity was whetted. Now came the blitz, entirely illegal but grounded in an inarguable moral foundation: the warning about the Racially Selective Virus.

The blitz, the capsule:

Poignant selections from Hand’s video. Hand’s testimony. Barrabas’s vid. Barrabas’s testimony. Jo Ann’s testimony. Her extractor data (editing out some of the key specs for the racially selective pathogen). A spokesman for Lord Chalmsley and British intelligence confirming that the captured viral samples were large amounts of lethal racially selective pathogen—an announcement sponsored by the British Labor Party, the opposition. Over the objections of the prime minister’s staff. Quotes from Jerome’s computer-break-in documentation further linking the SA to the pathogen. The relationship between the SA and the virus that killed two hundred thousand people in Berlin overnight: something the world was still reeling from. Then there was the strong implication that the SA had been testing a variation of the Racially Selective Virus that went wrong. There was digi-vid from the Processing Centers, testimony from Processing Center survivors, testimony from escaped SA political prisoners. The information that Crandall was dead, his version of the Gospel as fallacious as his appearance on television: an animation put together by SA’s Inner Circle; evidence that Larousse’s appearances were computer and holographically enhanced. The true relationship between the SA and SPOES. The Second Alliance’s hidden agenda for Europe . . .

And then they saw the video of the dead in Berlin—Army trucks carting their stacked bodies . . . A wide camera angle on the square outside the Brandenburg Gate . . . An unconstructed jigsaw puzzle of corpses; a field of the dead. The street curb to curb a river of vomit and blood, an archipelago of the dead in the monstrous flow of it; the dead in cafés and shops . . . The dead in their cars, in frozen traffic, still sitting at their steering wheels . . . In one section of Berlin, around the NATO headquarters and near the ghettos, it was a city of the Dead. A necropolis.

Statements crackled from angry NATO authorities. NATO officials who’d previously collaborated with the Second Alliance were now carefully distancing from them. The political tide was turning.

The pirate blitz was slickly put together, edited for minimum dryness and maximum impact. Three versions had been worked up by Hand—all of it narrated by Hand—in A, B, and C formats: versions dubbed into seven languages.

And all of it went into the Grid whether the Grid wanted it or not, carrying, somehow, the immediacy and urgent authority of a Civil Defense alert. The aug-chip conspiracy worked together, overwhelming the cybernetic defenses of the media network. It broke in all over the world, effecting political revelation through media piracy, simultaneously and continuously, over and over, saturating the world with truth. Even the billboard-size propaganda TV screens in Paris and in other SA-held territories were co-opted, taken over, pirated: appropriated. Liberated. In most cases, the viewers saw the whole thing twice before the Second Alliance gave up trying to block it cybernetically and simply switched off the power.

Via satellite. Via ground-based transmitter. Via cable. Via wifi. Via microwave and even radio. The truth as guerrilla action.

And each media capsule ended with a challenge to the Second Alliance: Meet us at the United Nations to repudiate us. Bring your evidence that what we say isn’t true. Meet us in Geneva. Meet us in the International Court. Anywhere! Our facts against yours. Let the world decide who’s telling the truth. We challenge you!

No, that’s not the absolute end of the capsule; there was one thing more. Video of the Jægernaut that smashed the Arc de Triomphe; of Rickenharp and Yukio, rocking and fighting, as the inexorable juggernaut of oppression crushed them into the rubble . . .

At the climax of the video, coming up gradually from a soft background whisper to consummate as a thunderous, echoing chord: Rickenharp’s music, his Song Called Youth, his electric guitar playing the score for this movie, this documentary that was also a military assault. Rickenharp’s composition as martial marching music. The beat of an insistence on justice; the squeal, the rock ’n’ roll peal, of a demand for freedom; the medium as the message.

All of that went into the Grid, the worldwide media network.

And all that was just the top function of the aug chips working on the Plateau. Pumped out by a kind of electronic, on-line telepathy; by fakirs of the chip, deep in silicon contemplation; electromagnetic communion: the framework of an electronic global mind.

There was—or so Smoke and Leng believed—another kind of global mind, one accessed during the secondary function of the aug-chip communion.

Impulses sent out at the peak of the collective mind’s cycle of intensity—or in accordance, anyway, with Leng’s calculations—carried electromagnetically encoded information that would be instantaneously received by human bioelectric fields, drawn into the unconscious mind of every human brain on the planet. An idea, a living meme, launched on the great, ethereal psychic tsunami that invisibly paces the globe at predictable intervals . . .

“Man, this is probably bullshit,” Jerome-X said. “But if it isn’t, could be it’s something worse. Some kind of brainwashing.” Smoke told him that only the truth can be introduced into the entelechy wave. Anything else breaks down from misalignment with the wave’s internal structure, made up of consensual observation. The wave is accreted from agreed-on perceptions, and those perceptions have gradually evolved from superstition to consensual truths. There are exceptions, Smoke said, but for the most part the Collective Mind harbors truth. This Truth is usually submerged. But coupled with the information coming through the Grid, at the right moment, it would surface, emerge as an idea. An insight; a repudiation of racism; a recognition of oppression; a vision of all humanity’s kinship with the oppressed; a realization that the time had come to confirm that kinship.

It was like the 1989 student-led rebellion in China, coming in alignment with Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, and the triumph of Solidarity in Poland. Or later, the Arab Spring: Partly a function of global telecommunications, social media; partly emerging from a shared idea riding the wave through the collective mind . . .

Jerome had thought about it—and decided to take part. It was an intuitive decision. It felt right.

And now he let his chip transmit the program Smoke had provided, impulses that his brain would transmit to the global psychic field, adding its microscopic ripple to the Big Ripple.

Maybe it was bullshit. Maybe it was wishful thinking. Maybe Smoke was still a little crazy, hungry for meaning in a world of random violence.

Maybe it was just more psychological comfort, the way a prayer was.

Like a prayer, it was worth a shot.

Paris.

They came from the surrounding countryside; they poured in from the south of France, from Spain; they’d come from North Africa, some of them, just across the Mediterranean. They came out of their hiding places in the city. They came from certain Processing Centers deserted by panicked and unpaid SA guards, where the cameras and automated guns had been neutralized by the New Resistance hackers. They came across the Channel from England. They were led by Badoit’s troops, and by the NR, but most of them were civilians, armed with whatever was handy or nothing at all.

They were Jews and Arabs and Iranians and Indians and Blacks and Orientals. They were people of color, people of varied religion. They were Judaic and Muslim and Hindu and Buddhist and Sikh and Sufi. And there were thousands of sympathetic Christians.

In all, about half a million people came, that morning.

It was a sunny morning in the Place de HÔtel de Ville. The sky was a cloudless expanse of blue like the New Resistance flag. The great, ornate building the Second Alliance had taken as its headquarters was inscrutably unresponsive to the chanting, surging crowd outside. The chant Roseland had initiated: JAMAIS PLUS! NEVER AGAIN! JAMAIS PLUS! NEVER AGAIN! JAMAIS PLUS! NEVER AGAIN! As they waved their blue flags, most of them homemade. Fists pumped the air, charged with consensus.

Inside the HÔtel de Ville, Watson sat in the janitor’s room that constituted his jail cell, watching the event on the watery image of an ancient portable television.

He could hear them, chanting and shouting, outside; could see them on the console, could hear the excited voice of the commentator who sensed he was witnessing a turning point in history. There had been a few skirmishes that morning—resistance fighters clashing with the Soldats Superieurs, and the Paris skinheads. But most of the Unity Party’s “fighting elite” had deserted, were in hiding, or running, trying to buy new identities. They’d panicked after NATO investigation teams closed down the remaining Processing Centers that morning. There were about five hundred refugee Second Alliance in the building. The hard-core five hundred inside against the five hundred thousand outside. There were autotanks lined up in front of the Hotel, of course—completely impotent. The New Resistance had taken over their guidance systems, overridden them with their remote-control hackers. This Badoit had provided the money that in turn provided the technology. Surgical strikes from the Mossad and Badoit’s forces had rendered the Jægernauts inoperable, if not entirely destroyed.

Watson changed channels, came to another report from London, showing another kind of rabble loose in the streets. Watson laughed bitterly, seeing the subhumans; the “Puppies” wandering about. Resistance provocateurs had incited a riot outside Second Alliance research facilities—looters had broken in and smashed into the cages—recoiling in horror at what they’d seen. They’d left the gates open. The subhumans, the late Dr. Cooper’s pets, shuffled and crawled and toddled out of the lab, into the street . . . were wandering, starkers nude, down the street.

The commentator babbling it all: the SAs genetic research experiments, gotten loose; attempt to create a race of subhuman lumpen-workers; the commentator’s impromptu editorializing called the experiment illegal and ethically deplorable . . .

The Puppies. Pausing now and then to defecate and lick a filthy wall, or to paw through a heap of trash. Looking repugnantly stunted, physically warped, like animated wads of much-chewed pink bubble gum badly sculpted into something almost human. Making noises like donkeys and monkeys and . . . hairless bipedal stunted subhumans . . .

God, what a sight.

And down in the corner of the screen a prompter flashed: “3D AVAILABLE.” Lovely. If you had a holoset, you could watch the twisted little wankers defecate in 3D.

Watson began to laugh. He laughed for a long time. There were tears in his eyes, and his sides were aching, when he heard the click of the lock at the door and looked up to see Giessen there, with Rolff.

So Rolff had worked out a deal with him.

Both men, Watson noticed, wore ordinary printout street clothing. Giessen had abandoned his curious antiquated costume.

Watson stopped laughing, but only for a moment. The look on Giessen’s face made him laugh again. The little prig was scared.

“Rolff, he’s hysterical,” Giessen said in German.

Rolff, gun in hand, expressionless, advanced on Watson, and pistol-whipped him twice, hard, splitting his lip and knocking the laughter from him.

“Rolff,” Watson said, tasting blood, blood mixing with the words, “you are a traitorous coward.”

Rolff stared at him impassively then took him by the elbow and pulled him to his feet. The other hand pressing the gun against Watson’s side. “Come along.”

“You think you’re going to trade me to them? To the mobs outside?” Watson asked, his voice going shrill. “Do you really think they’re going to mistake you for their kind?”

Giessen murmur, “It all depends on what is said, and who it is said to, it seems to me. Bring him into the hall, Rolff.”

“They’re not going to let you leave,” Watson said as they dragged him out. “And if they do, then what? We’re bloody war criminals now.”

“The dead can’t hold us to trial,” Giessen said. “There’s still the final phase of Total Eclipse.”

“Is there, indeed?” Watson laughed as they shoved him into the hall. “Total Eclipse is Bugger All. The RSV is done, Giessen. The only cultures of the virus we had have been taken from storage by the Resistance, before we could deploy them. There is no more of the virus, Giessen. They got it all. You understand?”

Giessen stared at him. “You idiot. Keeping it all in one place!”

“It was only for a day,” Watson said, shrugging. “But they knew which day. Their hackers were into our logistics schedules . . . ” He shrugged once more, hugely, imitating a Frenchman, and then burst out laughing again. “The dead can’t hold us to trial? You’d be surprised at how the dead can speak, Giessen! And I’ll speak too! Let’s put all our cards on the table and see who’s cheating, eh?”

“One thing won’t go wrong,” Giessen said. “You won’t speak.” He nodded to two burly SA guards in armor and mirror helmets. They helped Rolff hold Watson down as Giessen drew a scalpel from a coat pocket, pried Watson’s mouth open with a gun barrel, and cut off his tongue.

Larousse had gone on TV, of course, to try to calm things down, pour the oil of rhetoric on the troubled waters, but not one of his transmissions got through without NR jamming. The NR pirates were everywhere now, it seemed.

The Inner Circle were waiting pensively in the HÔtel De Ville, for the helicopter that was supposed to take them out of there . . . until they got word that the Mossad had shot it down. And that two Israeli gunships were circling the building.

The Inner Circle had come to Paris to discuss the crisis. None of them had been expecting this spontaneous—or perhaps not so spontaneous—eruption of the masses. It was Larousse who stepped out onto the front steps of the HÔtel de Ville, raising the bullhorn to his lips to speak to the sea of faces. Trying to tell them that the giggling, bloody-mouthed man the guards held beside him was the perpetrator of the great infamy, the terror carried out under the nose of the French government, concealed from Larousse, who had not been “in on the loop,” who’d not known what was going on in the processing centers or the Second Alliance labs . . . this man, this monster, this Colonel Watson was their villain . . .

Watson just stood there, giggling in his throat, blood bubbling from his mouth. Speaking blood, he thought. I’m speaking to them, speaking with deep sincerity, speaking the truth: Speaking with blood.

Larousse got only a third the way through his speech—which was lost under the noise of the crowd—before the gunshots rang out, and he fell, and the crowd surged forward, and the guards were trampled and crushed . . .

The rioters had Watson, then, had him down and underfoot; they kicked in his ribs, his skull, crushing ideas and being into meaningless pulp; wiping out information the old-fashioned way.

He was brain-dead, but life still pumped through him in a desultory, automatic way, until he was killed, almost as an afterthought, by an old Afghan woman wielding a pair of scissors,

She used the scissors working in the garment district every day. With the same methodical precision she brought to her craft, she used the scissors to snip Watson’s jugular.

Steinfeld was there, of course, at the edge of the crowd, sincerely trying to keep some order. Lespere—emerged from his deep cover—was with him, both men with Mossad-issue Uzis in hand. They were hoping to take the Inner Circle alive, make them stand trial, get the whole truth incontrovertibly out in the open. Shouting at their men to contain the crowd. But the New Resistance troops were pushed aside, were overwhelmed, unwilling to open fire on civilians. And the Muslim contingent was particularly inflamed, the Muslim world enraged by Crandall and Watson’s spurious Bible, the Bogus Jesus’ slandering of Mohammed. In the face of this outrage, military strategy became irrelevant.

“Attente!” Lespere shouted. “Wait!”

But hunger fed hunger: a hunger for revenge; outrage became true rage. The frustration of war, privation, and persecution erupted in one. The doors were smashed in, the crowd surged across the lobby, bullets and bricks smashed the painted moldings and knocked the ancient portraits down, shattered the receptionist’s computer console, exploded windows—and struck down startled guards. Most of the guards were armored, but it was no use against ten people prying at them, like psychotic starfish prising seashells, tearing the armor open, getting at the soft and vulnerable men inside; at men who wondered how they’d come here, to this, as they were clubbed to death . . .

The SA switched off the elevators, but soon the crowd boiled up the stairs onto the upper floors, smashing through the Comm Rooms, and through the rooms containing the controls for Larousse’s faux image. An assault, as W.S. Burroughs had longed for, on the reality-control room.

Here they found Giessen and Rolff.

Giessen they pulled from under a secretary’s desk. He spat insults at them until the first gunshot smashed into his gut, and then he folded up, all his brittle punctilio shattered by the bullet, and he cried out like a lost child, and took a long time crying and whimpering . . . Steinfeld and Lespere tried to get through to him, hoping to save him for trial, but the crowd shoved them back and bore Giessen up, toted him to the window . . .

He had been recognized. The Thirst. A man—a person whose interrogations Giessen had supervised . . . a torture victim . . . this man recognized him—and was the first to shout, “Throw him out the window!” Giessen went flying head first, trailing a streamer of blood, out the window and into the crowd chanting in the square.

In the hallway, trying to get to the roof, were several hundred Second Alliance, some in armor, some in fine suits. The rioters found them harder to get to. But partisans with guns were brought to the front of the mob and opened fire, killing methodically. Some of the fascists returned fire, rallied by Rolff, who came howling Aryan blood oaths down the hallway, firing a carbine, shrieking about Juden Swine . . .

Steinfeld and Lespere sighed as one, and—also as one—opened fire themselves. Steinfeld’s Uzi ripping into Rolff’s mouth, flinging his racist epithets back into his skull on a fist of bullets. A reply that couldn’t be argued with.

The ancient building was looted. Everyone found in it was killed including some who were relatively innocent. The place was sacked and burned to the ground.

Most of the top Second Alliance administrators died in the first twenty minutes, and died with great suffering.

Steinfeld was sorry he couldn’t bring them to trial somewhere. But as to their suffering—he didn’t give a hang about that at all.

The thing was won, so there was no reason, Torrence thought, for what Steinfeld did on the rooftop helicopter pad.

The Inner Circle SA were there—those four who’d survived thus far, including old Jæger himself—surrounded by the fanatic elite of the Soldats Superieurs and half a dozen Second Alliance bulls in full armor. They were entirely at the mercy of the uprising. They could be captured, or, if they refused surrender, their escape choppers could be blown up with grenade launchers. There was really no reason for Steinfeld to lead a charge into them. None at all.

But that’s what Steinfeld did. He ran at them, rather clumsily, since he usually left this sort of thing to Torrence. He charged them with an assault rifle in his hands, firing, the gun spitting the only kind of rhetoric that mattered today.

Torrence shouted, “Steinfeld, what the hell are you—?” Hobbling up behind him, trying to give him supporting fire, but moving slowly on his wounded leg.

Jæger went down, and another fascist too—and then the bulls opened fire on Steinfeld and Torrence. Steinfeld staggered as a dozen rounds tore into him. He spun and fell, still firing. Torrence blowing away the guy who’d shot Steinfeld.

Torrence got it then. Feeling a punch in the chest, another in the right hip. Going down.

Steinfeld, what the hell did you do that for? It was pointless. We had them. We had them. There was no reason . . .

“There was a reason,” Roseland said.

Roseland was sitting beside Torrence’s hospital bed in an overburdened government hospital run by the new French Republic. Four other beds were crammed into the room. Torrence didn’t respond aloud, because of the tube going down his throat, into his right lung—the lung the bullet had gone through—but he looked at Roseland in a way that meant, What the fuck are you talking about?

“He kept a personal journal, written in Hebrew,” Roseland said. Roseland looked as ill as Torrence, though he hadn’t been wounded. He looked as if he was having trouble sitting up straight. Hadn’t slept in a few days, Torrence guessed. “I found the journal in his stuff when I was getting it together to send to the Mossad. I couldn’t help it. I read it. Most of it wasn’t anything the enemy could’ve used for intelligence if they’d found it—all that part was real elliptical and general. It was mostly personal thoughts, ideas, feelings. And he talked about Pasolini at the end. Turns out he had been having Pasolini followed.

“Steinfeld knew she was in touch with some of Witcher’s operatives. He found out about the virus—had one of Witcher’s contacts picked up and extracted. He wrestled with himself about it. He knew she was the only one left with the non-racially-selective virus. Thinking that if she went ahead and did it, released it in Berlin with the fake manifesto recording, it would hurt the enemy bad, and in the long run that’d save lives. Then he decided he was being as bad as they were—that there was no excuse for allowing tens of thousands of civilians to die as part of some damn political strategy. He came to this, see, he really did. But by the time he’d made up his mind, it was too late. She was on her way to Berlin. He tried to find her, tried to stop her . . . ” He shook his head. “I saw his face when we got the news about Berlin. I never saw such open emotion in the guy before . . . ”

Torrence nodded, very slightly. But he thought: Steinfeld could have stopped it. He let hate for the SA get in the way of saving two hundred thousand lives.

Steinfeld knew that, of course. Which is why the charge on the rooftop.

He had joined those he had failed. The guilty dead had joined the innocent dead.

The Island of Merino.

“What are we going to do today?” Alouette said, kicking spray into the air with her bare feet. She ran from the lapping fringe of ocean, chased it back to the surf, ran from it again.

“Anything you want,” Smoke said.

“How about tomorrow?”

“Anything you want.”

“You’re going to stay in Merino?”

“This is my home now. That’s why we came back here. It’s my home, with you. I have a grant, and I’m going to stay here and write a book just to have something to do, but mostly I’m going to go swimming with you, and tell you to do your homework, and tell you: no, you can’t watch satellite TV.”

“Can too watch TV.”

“Cannot either.”

“Can too. Sometimes a little.”

“Maybe sometimes a little.”

She danced happily around him. He smiled sadly, looked at the sunwashed beach, the palms along the beachside road, the high shaggy trees nodding in the easy breeze. Here and there were stumps of palms left by the shelling—but most of the trees had made it. And so had most of the islanders.

“Alouette,” he said, “did the crow really die at that moment?”

“When we sent out the message into that entelechy thing? That Leng field thing?”

“Yes. Did you make that up?”

“No. That’s when he died. He flew down onto my shoulder and then fell in my lap. I didn’t really notice it much, I was in chip communion, see, but afterward it made me cry when I found him. But part of me notices things around me, those times. That’s when he died. When we sent that message.”

“Huh. Be damned.”

“Daddy Jack?”

“What?”

“Mr. Kessler says that entelechy thing is ‘hooey.’ He says it does not work. Do you think it worked? It seemed like it worked. Everybody saw what was happening and they did something.”

“But maybe that was just the media, the timing. I don’t know if it worked. With those things, it’s hard to tell if they’re real or not. And if they are real—whoever made them, whoever put the world together, must want it this way. I mean, they must want it, so we can’t be sure if it’s real or not: The things people call spiritual . . . ”

“Can we get some ice cream?”

“You’re too fat for ice cream.”

She wasn’t even remotely fat, but she pretended outrage. “I am not! My metabolism rate likes ice cream!”

“Your metabolism rate. Oh. Well, in that case. Yes. Let’s get some ice cream.”

“And can we get another bird?”

“Another crow?”

“No. A cockatoo. A yellow cockatoo. I know a man who is selling one.”

“Yeah. Ice cream and a cockatoo. Why not.”

He took her hand, and they walked back to the hotel.

FirStep: The Colony. Four months later.

Claire was pruning roses.

She was working on a patch of red roses at the new technicki housing project. It was her way of taking a day off. The sunlight was coming strongly despite the filters, and the air was sweet with rose scent, and the protestation of her muscles felt good. Maybe afterward she’d go for a swim.

“Can I help?”

She looked up at the stranger and smiled politely. An Oriental, maybe Japanese. But tall for a Japanese. He was probably half American, judging by his size and accent. Rather thin and tired. Vaguely familiar. She’d probably seen him around the Colony somewhere.

“You can help if you like,” she said. “I don’t have any extra clippers, though. Do you know about gardening?”

“Not a damn thing.”

His voice . . .

He smiled. And that smile was familiar. She found herself staring at one of his ears. It was slightly off-color. There was a faint scar around the base of it.

“My sister,” he was saying, “used to try to get me to help her in Mom’s garden when we were kids. I’d tell her, ‘Kitty—I’ll garden when I haven’t got anything else to do. Which’ll probably be never.’ ” He shrugged. “I guess it’s never now.”

“Your sister’s name is Kitty?”

“Yes.”

“Danny?”

“Yes.”

“Danny?”

“Uh-huh. I—”

He didn’t get the rest out. She nearly knocked him over when she threw her arms around him. “Danny . . . ”

A while later, maybe an hour and maybe three—neither of them could have told you how long they had been talking—they were strolling through the little woods, next to the old monument to space techs who’d died building the Colony. She looked up at it, and real pain flared in her eyes. “Dan—when I was . . . while we were separated, I had a relationship with someone.”

“Did you? So did I.” He touched his new ear.

“He died, though. In space.”

“Yours died? So did mine.”

They were quiet for a while, just walking, strolling slowly through an artificial twilight, till Torrence said, “Listen—I didn’t come alone. There’s a friend of mine, guy named Roseland. Abe Roseland. He . . . he’s kind of suicidal. He was one of the best NR men. After it was over he was going to join the Israeli army—and there’s a good chance Israel’s going to have a war with this new fundamentalist loon that’s running Libya, if Badoit can’t make the peace. Abe’s just looking for a way to get killed. He’s just like Steinfeld, except he’s got a different kind of guilt. Or maybe not so different. I practically had to shanghai him, but I talked him into coming up here. He needs . . . sanctuary. A place to start over. So do I. Abe, though, won’t come out of his room. I thought maybe if you offered him a job here in Security, he’d—”

“Consider it done. I’ll send our new chief of Security over to talk to him. She’ll recruit him. In fact, he sounds like her type. She might recruit him for more than a job.”

“She who?”

“Her name’s Marion. Listen—you recovered from those wounds?”

“Mostly. I’m working on it. I’m supposed to do aerobics to build up my lungs.”

“I know just the thing. You ever been in freefall?”

“Freefall? Weightless?” He grimaced. “On the ship over here, briefly. Made me sick.”

“That’s because you weren’t adapting right. Got to get the blood moving, see. Get a feel for it.”

He looked at her. There was something mischievous . . . “Yeah?”

“Yeah. There’re parts of the Colony that are low-grav, so low they’re almost freefall. Some real nice rooms there. Private rooms.” She stopped and looked into his eyes.

He was still Hard-Eyes. He was Daniel Torrence behind the Oriental mask. Her lover was in there still.

“Okay,” he said. “Where’s the freefall room?”

She took his hand. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

The End

About the Author

John Shirley is the author of more than thirty novels. He is considered seminal to the cyberpunk movement in science fiction and has been called the “postmodern Poe” of horror. His numerous short stories have been compiled into eight collections including Black Butterflies: A Flock on the Darkside, winner of the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and named as one of the best one hundred books of the year by Publishers Weekly. He has written scripts for television and film, and is best known as co-writer of The Crow. As a musician, Shirley has fronted several bands over the years and written lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult and others.

The father of three sons, he lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife, Michelina.

To learn more about John Shirley and his work, please visit his website at john-shirley.com.

Also by John Shirley:

Novels

Transmaniacon

Dracula in Love

City Come A-Walkin’

Three-Ring Psychus

The Brigade

Cellars

A Splendid Chaos

Wetbones

Silicon Embrace

Demons

The View From Hell

. . . And the Angel with Television Eyes

Spider Moon

Crawlers

The Other End

Black Glass

Bleak History

Everything Is Broken

Collections

Heatseeker

New Noir

The Exploded Heart

Black Butterflies: A Flock on the Darkside

Really Really Really Really Weird Stories

Darkness Divided

Living Shadows: Stories: New and Pre-Owned

In Extremis: The Most Extreme Short Stories of John Shirley

Nonfiction

Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas

Table of Contents

Prologue

01

02

03

04

05

06

07

08

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10

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About the Author