Theories of Flight

11

Chain lived—had lived, past tense—in an apartment in a town house facing the main road. They gained access to the communal stairwell by one of the keys on the keyring, and swarmed up the stairs to the first floor.

In the shifting, shadow-battle against the Outies, Finsbury Park was behind the front line, but not so far as to be safe. The occasional pop of gunfire from further north was an aural reminder of that. Most of the residents had already fled, heading deeper Inzone or fleeing the city altogether. Only a couple of shops were open out of all the row of shuttered and bolted frontages. Where they got their customers from was a mystery.

Petrovitch didn’t like it. “Let’s not spend any longer here than we have to,” he said, inspecting the blank faces of the two doors that led off the landing.

“Nervous?” asked Grigori. He was holding his automatic in plain sight, not that there was anyone else to see it.

“I seem to spend my life like that.”

“It’s not like your heart is going to pack up any time soon. Not anymore.”

“No. It’ll keep on pumping blood out of whichever arterial bleed I die of, long after I’m actually dead.” He held up the magnetic key toward the pad on the door frame, only to have his arm held in place by Valentina.

“No,” she said.

“No?”

“No.” She laid her metal briefcase on the floor and clicked it open. The catches sprang and she lifted the lid. When she reached inside, she ignored the explosives, the wires and the detonators in favor of a stiff black cable.

“Tina,” said Grigori, “Petrovitch is right: we don’t have time for this.”

“What? You want to open door?” She looked up over the top of the case. “Petrovitch, give him key.”

Grigori took the key from Petrovitch’s hand, and made two abortive attempts to bring the rectangle of metal toward the sensor. Each time he drew it back.

“What do you know that I don’t?”

“Plenty,” said Valentina. She carried on assembling the fiber-optic wand, attaching a small screen onto the back of the cable, and now she turned it on. The picture was of the foam packing inside her case, magnified so that each individual gray bubble showed. “But I would ask you to think for moment. Chain is dead, and perhaps only by accident.”

“What if they wanted to make sure?” said Petrovitch. He pressed his palm against the wall separating him from the inside of Harry Chain’s apartment. It didn’t seem anywhere near bombproof enough. He regained the key and put it in his pocket.

Valentina slid the end of the fiberoptic cable through the crack under the door. The screen went black, and stayed that way before she changed the settings and dialed up the night vision.

The image resolved: through the shifting noise of the signal, they could make out shelves that stretched floor to ceiling, corner to door.

“Anything?” demanded Grigori.

“Wait,” she said, manipulating the end of the cable. “Do not hurry me.”

The shelves, pregnant with box files, slid by. The bright rectangle was a window, covered by drawn curtains: light leaked in nevertheless and gave definition to the rest of the room.

“What was that?” Petrovitch got down on his hands and knees next to Valentina, and tried to gain a sense of the layout. “Middle of the floor.”

She pulled the cable back and redirected it. There was something—angular, thin, constructed. “Table?” She tilted her head. “Music stand?”

“Too… big.”

Grigori was growing impatient. “If you won’t open the door, I will.”

“You had chance,” said Valentina. “You did not take it. So let me do my job.” She switched to infrared, and the screen changed to reflect the new data. The floor and wall were blue, cold. But the object in the middle of the room was colder still, a skeletal pyramid glowing in intense purple except for the white-hot spot at its chest-height apex.

“It’s a tripod. A camera?” Petrovitch dabbed a greasy finger on the plastic surface of the screen. “That’s strange, though. Some sort of heat source.”

“It is infrared light.” She froze the image and slid the cable out from under the door. “It could be part of Chain’s alarm system. Did you ever come here before?”

“No. I just assumed he lived in his office.” Petrovitch squinted. “What is that thing?”

Grigori sighed and rubbed his open hand with his fingers. “He’s dead, he has no neighbors left, and you’re worried about an alarm that no one will hear. Give me the key.”

Petrovitch looked at Valentina.

“If it was up to me,” she said, “I would say no. But we seem to find ourselves in democracy.”

“So give me the key,” said Grigori.

“You don’t have to prove how big your peesa is.” Petrovitch brought the keys out again, and Grigori snatched at them. “You want to open the door, not knowing what’s behind it?”

“You’re going soft on me, Petrovitch. It’ll be that wife of yours.” He held the key to the sensor, and the lock made a solid clunking noise. “Pizda.”

Valentina strode two quick paces toward Petrovitch, put her thin arms around him and kept moving, pushing him away and against the dividing wall. Grigori pushed the door open to be greeted by the high-pitched whine of servos.

There was a series of lightning flashes from inside, accompanied by the fast-repeated roar of gunfire. Grigori danced like he was standing on a scalding hot plate, and the plasterwork behind him was patterned with holes.

Then he fell backward, strings cut, body ruined.

Valentina kept Petrovitch’s back pressed against the wall. “Do not move. Do not go to him. There is nothing you can do.”

The firing stopped, and a wisp of smoke curled around the door frame.

“Chyort.” Petrovitch didn’t quite know where to put his hands. He flapped for a moment, then gripped Valentina around the waist to ease their two bodies apart.

He didn’t step into the open doorway, but got down on his belly and crawled. The opposite wall was cratered, punched through in places to the room beyond. The gun inside was clearly more than capable of hitting him through the brickwork, if only it could see him.

There was no doubt that Grigori was dead. His thumb had caught the loop of the keyring, but his arm was thrown up behind his head, and still in full view of whatever lay in wait. As were the top of the stairs, too.

More propellant fumes drifted out, sharp and hot.

Valentina stood behind Petrovitch, adjusting her jacket.

“Idiot,” she said. “It is not like he had spare life that he could afford to throw this one away.”

Petrovitch backed away and sat up. “Sentry gun? What the huy was Chain doing with one of those?”

“Protecting his information? He would have had a way of deactivating it, though. Did MEA give you anything else besides keys?”

“No. Just them.” He’d broken out into a cold sweat. It could have been him. If Valentina hadn’t stopped him the first time, if he’d accepted Grigori’s dare, he would have walked straight into the line of fire. “First chance I get, I’m going to kick Chain’s corpse in the yajtza.”

“Do I have to point out that we have more immediate problem?”

“No.” Petrovitch pushed his glasses up his face, and eyed the distant stairs. “What’s the reaction time on that thing? Can we move faster than it can track us?”

She threw Petrovitch a box of matches. “Try for yourself.”

He picked up the cardboard box off his lap and extracted one of the red-headed sticks. His fingers were trembling as he rasped the head against the rough strip.

The match flared into life. Petrovitch held it for a second to make sure the flame had caught, then flicked it into the air. The match arced away, and simply vanished as a bullet tore through it, turning the wood to dust.

“Okay,” he said. “Plan B.”

“Which is?”

“Give me a moment.” He looked around for some assets. The floor was bare boards, the windows were on the half-landings, up and down, even the door to the other flat was in plain view of the automatic weapon in Chain’s apartment.

There was Valentina’s open case, just the other side of the doorway.

“Yeah. We can do this.” He hunched his legs up and started to unlace his boots, slipping his fingers between the eyelets and dragging out longer and longer loops of lace until they were both free.

Valentina watched him tie the laces together to make a single length. “What else do you need?”

“A piece of bent metal, to make a hook.” He had all-sorts in his pockets, but nothing that would do.

She had a heavy combat knife, which he thought might do. He tied the lace to the center of the knife, just handle-side of the hilt, and judged his throw.

The knife fell into the case, but as he slowly tensioned the attaching cord, it turned and rolled out.

The servos aiming the gun squeaked, and Petrovitch gritted his teeth for the inevitable bang.

It didn’t come, and he pulled the knife back in.

He tried again, making absolutely sure that at no point did his hand go further than the wall. His aim was good, but there was nothing for the knife to catch on to.

“This isn’t going to work,” he said, readying himself for a third attempt.

“This might.”

She was holding her blouse shut with one hand, presenting him with her bra with the other.

“I… I don’t see.”

“Underwiring.”

He blinked, and took the white satin underwear from her. Its warmth made his face flush. She turned away to button up, and he used her knife to slice open the reinforced seam.

Petrovitch fashioned a hook from one end of the curved metal strip, and an eye from the other, using the back of the knife blade as an anvil. When he looked up again, she was dressed.

“Thanks,” he said.

“I assume you are helping me,” she said. When he offered her the remnants of her bra, she waved them away. “I will survive. Even if I must run.”

The backward-facing tine of the hook bit into the soft foam interior of the case on the first go. With a little gentle pressure, it cut through until it wedged against the metal outside.

Petrovitch pulled, very slowly.

“How much of your stuff is going to go boom if it ends up with a round or two through it?”

“Enough that you will not have to worry about your terrible injuries.”

“Yeah. Figures. Are you going to stand back?”

“It would not make difference,” she said. “Here is as good as anywhere.”

It took him five minutes to ease the case across the doorway. When he went too quickly, he knew, because the electric whine of motors told him so.

“Yobany stos.” He flexed his fingers, making them all crack except the replacement.

Valentina extracted the hook from her case and undid the knot in Petrovitch’s laces. She passed them back to him, and he started the laborious task of threading them back through the dozen eyelets in each boot.

“You want me to blow sentry up?” She started by selecting a small block of plastique.

“Are we talking about throwing a bomb in the room and just hoping? Can you take out the gun without setting the building on fire, bearing in mind that room’s full of paper?”

“No.”

“Then,” he said, pointing at the floor, “why don’t we go down? We can come back with the right hardware and not ruin Chain’s filing system.”

She stamped her heel against the wooden boards. “Is not a good material to work with. Splinters unpredictably.”

“Can you get most of the blast downward?”

She walked the floor, testing sites by doing little jumps. “Here,” she said, standing in the far corner. “Much more rigid, more likely to snap, not flex.” She came back for the plastique; which she rolled into a long thin worm.

It looked like marzipan. It smelled of oil.

“Will not be pretty.” She pressed the explosive into a gap in the floorboards, and a detonator into the protruding end. She trailed wires back to where Petrovitch was finishing tying the final bow of his laces. “I should have something to contain explosion, aim it where I need it to go. We are also very close.”

“As long as it gets us out of this mess.” He looked at Grigori’s ruined form. “You balvan! You mudak, you pidaras. You got yourself killed for nothing!”

“He was showing off. To me. Perhaps he thought I would be impressed.” She retrieved a battery pack, then shut the case. “Do I look impressed?”

“No. You look pissed.” Petrovitch shrugged his trenchcoat off, and they both crouched down as small as they could make themselves, covering their backs with the tent of the coat.

“Put your hands over your ears,” she said in the darkness. She had earplugs. He did not. Under the coat, it was hot, her breath was hot, and everything was about to get even hotter.

Valentina touched the wires to the battery terminals.