Misspent Youth (commonwealth saga)

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Are you with this lot?” a policeman shouted at him as they got to the end of the platform. The man’s voice was muffled by his helmet filters; he was jabbing a gauntlet toward the yelling, chanting protestors packed into the concourse.

  Vanessa pulled herself tighter against Tim, her face anxious as she took in the huge mass of bodies.

  “No,” Tim yelled back. “We’re here to visit some friends.”

  “Wrong day,” the policeman said. “Get out over there. This lot are all going to Docklands. You don’t want any part of that.”

  The two closest protestors screamed obscene abuse at him. Tim shoved his way through the throng toward the side exit the policeman had indicated, keeping a close hold on Vanessa. They finally made it outside to the deserted taxi rank. Tim took a deep breath. Vanessa was shaking.

  “I didn’t think it was going to be like that,” she said in a small voice. There was no traffic on the Euston Road; the crowds outside Kings Cross and St. Pancras had spilled over the tarmac as they waited for their march to Docklands to begin. Stewards had long since given up trying to shepherd them along their designated route. Every arriving train seemed to bring hundreds more.

  Tim put his PCglasses on and called Colin.

  “Where the hell are you?” Colin asked.

  “Just got in. Where are you?”

  “Halfway to Docklands, I think. Simon and Rachel are here. We’re in the middle of a march. Nobody knows what’s happening. There aren’t any stewards. We’re just following along.”

  “Can you get out? We should meet up.”

  “Yeah, right. Hang on, my GPS says we’re on Whitechapel. We’ll try and get across to Bethnal Green tube station. Can you get there?”

  “I think so.” Tim’s PCglasses showed him a London street map. “We’ll walk up to Angel and catch a tube. It might take a while.”

  He was right. They had to take a long detour to Upper Street, where the tube station was. Traffic had backed up into a solid gridlock to make way for the various marches. Everywhere they went, tempers were fragile.

  The tube trains were crammed with unhappy passengers. As always, the only air below ground was hot and stale. They had to switch lines twice, waiting a long time for each connection on platforms that became dangerously crowded. This part of the network was nothing like the efficient, modern central zone that Tim normally used when he came down to the city.

  An hour and a half after arriving at Kings Cross they finally met up with their friends outside Bethnal Green station. Tim was relieved to see them. Somehow he found comfort in numbers.

  “What now?” Colin asked.

  “I guess we walk,” Simon said.

  Tim and Vanessa exchanged a look. “You still want to do this?” Tim asked.

  “Sure.” Simon gestured around. The road they were on seemed normal enough, with open shops, pedestrians, and plenty of bus traffic. “This is history, you know. There’s never been a protest this big before. We have to be part of it.”

  “I’m not going with any more marchers,” Rachel said firmly. “Half of them were looking for trouble.”

  “No problem,” Simon said. His PCglasses were throwing up a map. “We’ll just head east, then cut south when we’re above the summit.”

  The five of them started off along Roman Road, with a visible lack of enthusiasm. Tim could hear emergency vehicle sirens in the distance; the sound was near constant in London today.

  “Hey, Tim,” Colin asked. “Is your dad still taking part in the summit?”

  “Yeah,” Tim said glumly.

  BY TWO O’CLOCK they’d reached East Ham, and were heading down toward Beckton. They’d all been accessing the news streams, seeing the protest based around the university campus grow and grow. Any eagerness among them had all but vanished.

  Participants in the Million Citizen Voices were all around them on the street, everybody striding out to join the main protest. They weren’t quite what Tim and his friends were expecting. It was as if they were caught up with a bunch of soccer supporters straight out of the tabloid news streams, the ones that featured tribes and organized violence. For a start, most of them were carrying bottles or cans, from which they were swigging heavily. Ordinary pedestrians were thinning out rapidly, intimidated off the streets. Shops were bringing down their metal roller blinds.

  “Where have they all come from?” Vanessa asked. There was a nervous edge to her voice, which she was trying to disguise. The voices and shouts around them were mostly foreign, with German and Spanish in the majority.

  “Same places as the delegates, I guess,” Colin said.

  Rachel was staying close to Simon. “I wonder why they’re really here,” she muttered disapprovingly.

  “Come on,” Tim said generously. “Everybody’s here for the same thing.”

  “You reckon?” Simon said.

  Over on the other side of the street a middle-aged Asian woman with a scruffy tartan-print shopping cart was trying to avoid a group of drunk young men who had their arms around one another, chanting and jiving as they hurried along the pavement. One of the cart wheels got stuck on a cracked slab, and the woman struggled to free it. The next second she was sprawling on the tarmac, and the men were screaming and jeering in Italian as they jostled on past.

  Tim rushed over to help, the others following right behind him. When he reached the woman he was horrified at the way she cowered from him. “I’m helping you,” he protested. At the back of his mind he realized that nobody else had hurried to lend a hand. The protestors surged past, either ignoring the teenagers or sneering.

  Oranges and tins of beans had spilled out of the woman’s cart to roll along the gutter. Rachel and Colin scampered after them, picking them up. Tim took one of her arms, and Simon the other. They gingerly lifted the woman to her feet. “Thank you, dear,” she said uncertainly. Blood was oozing from a graze on her wrist; she dabbed a handkerchief at it.

  “You should go home,” Vanessa said.

  “I was trying to,” the woman said, close to tears. “Thirty years I’ve lived here. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Not even on Cup Final day.”

  “It probably won’t happen again,” Tim said. “I don’t think I’ll be bothering to support them next time round.”

  “Support who?”

  Rachel was stuffing battered tins back into the woman’s cart. “The Million Citizen Voices, down at Docklands. It’s a big political rally.”

  “Oh, I don’t pay attention to any of that stuff,” the woman said. “Politicians, they’re all as bad as each other.”

  They walked with her for another dozen meters or so, until she headed off down a little side street. She gave them a halfhearted wave as she left, still not sure if they weren’t hooligans like everyone else. Almost everyone on the street now was a protestor. All the shops were shut.

  “Come on,” Simon said. “Let’s go with the flow.” It sounded like the last thing he wanted to be doing.

  Tim’s PCglasses threw up an incoming call icon. It was Jeff.

  “Hello, Dad,” he said cautiously.

  “Tim, where are you?”

  “Uh…just outside Brampton Park. We should be there in twenty minutes or so.”

  “Son, please, don’t. It’s getting nasty outside.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t want you to be part of it.”

  “We’re not going to accomplish anything by sitting at home doing nothing.”

  “Believe me, your side is achieving quite a lot without you.”

  Tim came to a halt in the middle of the pavement, and put his hands on his hips. “That’s so typical of you to patronize me like that.”

  “I am not patronizing you. I’m concerned about you, actually. Very concerned.”

  “Look, I don’t want to walk into any kind of trouble. But this is all we’ve got left to us. You people just won’t listen.” Shouts broke out up ahead. Tim peered through the graphic icons to see a fight, nothing like the p
ushing and shoving when tempers got lost at school. These men were trying to kill each other. Fists flew, and boots kicked. A bottle smashed, glass flying in wild arcs. Then they were wrapped together, rolling over and over along the road as they mauled at each other like a pair of dogs. Blood began to flow over their clothes. He could see one biting at the other’s ear, jerking his head back to try to rip it off. A gang of men formed a circle around them, cheering them on and pouring beer over them.

  “Don’t include me in this,” Jeff’s voice said in his ear, a sound now so remote it could have come from New Zealand.

  “You’re there, aren’t you? You’re going to decide our future for us.” The brutal fight was over. One of the men climbed to his feet, swaying badly. Blood was pouring down his face. He aimed a kick at the head of his unconscious rival. It connected with a sickening crack. Tim spun away. Vanessa’s hand was covering her mouth. She’d turned pale, on the verge of being sick. Tim hurriedly put his arm protectively around her shoulder.

  “I’m presenting a physics paper, for Christ’s sake. There’s only thirty people in the world who really understand the math involved.”

  “Then you don’t need to be there, do you? You’re just helping Brussels.”

  There was such a long pause before Jeff answered that Tim wasn’t sure if the connection had failed. The gang of fight spectators was breaking up, leaving the body sprawled on the road, soaked in blood and beer. Eventually his father said: “I’m not helping Brussels, Tim. I had no idea this summit had become such a symbol, nor that it meant so much to you. You know damn well I don’t want to make things worse between us.”

  “Then leave.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll do you a deal. I won’t go, I won’t take another step forward if you leave; today, now.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Then look down, I’ll be there waving at you. Click, end call.”

  “You did the right thing,” Colin said. He kept glancing at the motionless fight victim. “We can’t show any weakness.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s just…” Tim gave Vanessa a quick squeeze; she was shivering as she pressed up against him. “He did sound worried.”

  50. FREE SPEECH

  ROB LACEY ARRIVED at the Marshall Centre by EuroAir Defence Force helicopter at half past five that afternoon. He was due to make the key welcoming speech at the opening ceremony. When he alighted, the numbers of the Million Citizen Voices laying siege to the Centre had begun to grow to alarming levels. The first eight columns of marchers had wound their way through central London from mainline and tube stations to bolster the mass of protestors who were already there. By four o’clock the police squads on the security cordon enforcement duty were having trouble holding the line at the end of the Connaught Bridge circle. The senior district officer gave the order to fall back, and form a new line on the middle of the bridge itself. The concrete dual carriageway was narrow enough for his officers to hold indefinitely.

  With estimates of the number of protestors already at Docklands now nudging the eighty thousand mark, the Metropolitan Police Chief ordered the remaining eleven marches currently converging on the Marshall Centre to halt and disperse. Police on escort duty weren’t prepared to enforce that kind of order, even if they’d had enough officers to implement it successfully. When they tried to stop the marchers, scuffles broke out, quickly evolving into fights. Most of the marchers were able to break through and rampage along their route. Shop windows were smashed. Looting distracted large gangs, who then set about beating up camera crews and local bystanders. Police retreated quickly from a barrage of missiles. Parked vehicles were overturned and set on fire. The lines of conflict began to snake their way across the city, converging on Docklands.

  News of the attempted restrictions against the marchers flashed through the protestors already swarming through the university campus, and they began to get angry. Smoke bombs were fired from homemade launchers, arching out over the calm dark water. The entire length of the Albert Dock was soon smothered in a haze of red smog. Real fireworks were set off, big rockets angled low to burst against the Marshall Centre’s sturdy glass cliff face. None actually penetrated, but the vividly colorful explosions writhing against the reinforced windows frightened the hell out of the delegates inside.

  Wavelike surges among the agitated crowds sent people tumbling over the side of the dock to splash into the water, where they started frantically yelling for help. Inflatable dinghies were quickly lowered, although the small crews ignored those thrashing about in distress, and eagerly paddled their way toward the Centre. Fast police launches raced in from the Thames to intercept them.

  That was when Rob Lacey’s helicopter drifted down out of the cloudless sky to settle on the Marshall Centre’s rooftop landing pad just above the layers of red smoke. The protestors knew exactly who it was carrying. His arrival was the final act of provocation. What until then had been a perilously wild demonstration detonated into a full-blown riot.

  London became the principal topic on all of the primary European news streams, and a majority of the big internationals. For Jeff and Annabelle, sitting up in their hotel room, it didn’t matter which company they called up from the datasphere, every grid on every news stream had a different camera shot of the same thing. Helicopters hovered over the Royal Albert Docks, showing cloying strands of smoke and tear gas mingling before flowing like mercury around the roads and buildings on either side of the water. Every now and then Jeff would sneak over to the window and get a different perspective on the same scene, almost as if he didn’t believe the camera coverage. It was very strange having such an event unfolding a few hundred meters away, yet remain totally insulated from it. Half the time he imagined he actually did catch sight of Tim down there amid the chaos.

  The marches that had turned to pandemonium and violence were covered by camera crews on the tops of buildings, who focused on the people rampaging along the streets below. Balaclava-clad anarchists flung Molotovs, creating avenues of fire down the city’s broader thoroughfares. Meandering contrails of black smoke began to rise above the rooftops, marking their progress. On-the-ground reporters tried to follow the fire engines, but the police were dangerously overstretched and unable to guarantee the safety of the emergency crews. Fires were left to burn unchecked in several areas as the engines waited impotently in side roads hundreds of meters back from the roaring flames.

  Blurred, shaky camera shots from inside the packs of marchers showed canisters of tear gas twirling through the air toward them, bouncing and spinning off the roads and pavements. Equally erratic views from behind police lines showed a deluge of stones and smashed timbers descending on riot shields.

  “My God,” Annabelle murmured. “It’s like watching the fall of Rome.”

  “Not quite that bad,” Jeff said. He wished he could sound more convincing.

  An aerial shot of Trafalgar Square exposed people flowing into it from western and northern streets, before merging together to flood along the Strand. The camera zoomed in to reveal a gang of men armed with scaffolding poles attacking one of the fountains. Hundreds more stood around watching and cheering. Then a group waving Union Jack flags approached the fountain. A violent fight started. The water in the fountain’s pool swiftly turned red.

  “They’re turning on each other,” she said.

  “There’s a lot of different groups down there. They don’t all share the same views.”

  Annabelle was flinching as the screen displayed the violence in high-resolution detail. “It’s awful.”

  Jeff ordered the screen to go back to a news studio. The anchorwoman was busy receiving updates from police and government sources. Prime Minister Lacey had left the Marshall Centre after barely ten minutes; his presence had been deemed counterproductive by his security team. The police guarding the summit area exclusion zone absolutely refuted the allegation that they were in danger of losing control of the docks to the protestors.

  An o
fficial estimate of the number of protestors in London was a hundred fifty thousand, although the reporters were hinting it was actually closer to a quarter of a million. Other, more localized trouble spots were flaring as people realized there were no police left on the beat to enforce law and order. The Metropolitan Police chief had officially requested reinforcements from Europol. Even with the express Eurostar link from Paris and Brussels direct into St. Pancras, it would take the new troops several hours to arrive, and then they had to deploy. Full order would be enforced by the next morning, the chief promised.

  “Ye gods, they must mean the Europol Riot Suppression Force,” Jeff said in dismay. “They’ve never been deployed in England before. People aren’t going to like that.” He glanced anxiously toward the window.

  An unconfirmed report from Downing Street suggested that when the scale of the protest was assessed last week the Metropolitan Police chief had asked for Europol reserves to be moved to standby positions in England. He’d been turned down by Brussels on Central Treasury orders.

  The marchers that the police had wanted to halt earlier were now arriving, moving through Canning Town and East Ham to swell the ranks of the existing protestors in the university campus. Beacon lines of fires marked their sporadic progress out of central London. Halls of residence and faculty buildings had also been broken into, with large-scale looting now in progress. Up on the Connaught Bridge, the police line was holding, though it was almost invisible to cameras beneath a pall of smoke and tear gas. Dark military-style vehicles with water cannon were rumored to be moving along roads in Beckton, Silvertown, and North Wollwich, though the camera crews seemed unable to track them down.

  “That does it,” Jeff said. “I’m calling Tim again. He’s got to leave.”

  “Do you think he will?”

  “I don’t know, but I can’t just stand back and do nothing.” Despite the bedlam raging round the Marshall Centre, the datasphere interface with Jeff’s hotel room was perfect. The call went through immediately. There was a lot of noise and background shouting coming through the link; Jeff automatically raised his voice. “Tim, are you all right?”