Theories of Flight

26

They took Chalk Farm Road toward Primrose Hill. The tanks had long since retreated from the heights back down toward Euston, but Petrovitch hoped to rendezvous with them there, along the porous front line that was developing east of the Westway: there were skirmishes in the narrow streets all around, as far south as Oxford Street. The Outies probed forward, met resistance, and tried to enfold the defenders.

In real time, the conflict between blues and reds looked like two amoebae, fighting to the death. The compact blue shape kept contracting in on itself, losing limbs to the vast red monster that seemed intent on swallowing it whole.

Tower Bridge had gone. MEA militia were parking armored cars on the broken carriageway under the iconic crenellated supports, suddenly brave now that there was no chance of contact. Bishopsgate had fallen. The open area in front of the old Bank of England was filling with Outies.

Petrovitch gnawed at his fist. All the ground he was losing was ground that would have to be retaken, but he couldn’t change his strategy now. Everything depended on allowing the enemy to come forward until his counterattack was ready.

The Outies were moving too quickly, though. They were taking street after street with too few casualties. They were winning.

[London Bridge is falling down.]

“My fair lady,” murmured Petrovitch.

[Cannon Street and Southwark will follow imminently. We will need to hold Blackfriars for longer.]

“No.”

[We are underprepared.]

“Pull everyone not currently in contact to behind the Farringdon Road. Hold the Edgware Road but the Euston Road people need to come down to Oxford Street.” He looked out of the window. Regent’s Park was passing on his right, domiks lying where they’d been spilled during the Long Night.

Then there were figures on the road, marked red on his map. A knot of a dozen, jogging down the white line in a loose pack. A close-up showed two guns, the rest with blades.

“Lie down on the floor if you can, the seats if you can’t,” he called. “Do not look up.”

He glanced around. Lucy was peering around the upholstery, watching the Outies as they heard the coach approach.

The windscreen pocked with a bang. If he’d been driving, he’d have been slumped at the wheel and careering across the narrow pavement into a wall. The bullet puffed out a cloud of white padding as it burrowed into the back of the driver’s seat.

The coach didn’t deviate from its previous line. The first shot hadn’t made Petrovitch flinch, but the subsequent eight did. Massive star-shaped wounds bloomed across the clear glass, cracks spiraling out to craze the whole pane, merging and spreading until only the plastic bonding held it together.

A body slammed against the flat front, and the Outies were now behind them. The rear of the coach was raked with gunfire. More glass patterned white, and suddenly they lurched to the left.

The drift corrected itself, then over-corrected. Right, left, right, and finally back under control.

[Rear tire.]

There was no time to worry about the damage the coach had suffered so far, because they were right in amongst them now.

The Inzone retreat had brought the Outies onto the streets. The carriageway was full of them. Petrovitch reached into his coat pocket and put the gun in his hand. The coach rocked as it was struck and, in striking, was struck again.

He ejected the magazine into his palm and counted the heads of the silver bullets. Six. He pushed them back home and dragged back on the slide.

The windscreen imploded, and a dark shape crashed down into the aisle, scattering a curtain of crystalline granules inside the coach. The shape, rags and dust, started to unfold. Though bloodied and dazed, the man had managed to keep hold of his knife.

Petrovitch raised his gun, and the crosshairs in his vision jerked left and right, up and down with each inconstant lurch of the coach. The Outie’s weather-beaten face screwed up as he spotted the man sitting on the edge of the stairwell, leaning out with metal in his fist.

He came at Petrovitch, crouched low, swinging his blade in an arc before him. And still Petrovitch couldn’t get a clear shot. He could have pulled the trigger anyway: one of the bullets would have hit its mark. The others would have each threatened everyone he’d fought so hard to save, so he held his fire.

The Outie lunged inexpertly forward, stabbing at Petrovitch’s arm. An arc of red drew itself across Petrovitch’s vision, and he pulled back just in time: they were two injured men trying to kill each other.

The knife-hand turned, ready for the return strike. He was close enough now that Petrovitch could bury the pistol’s barrel in the man’s sparse flesh and not miss. Before either of them could take the next move, a blur of black and white flew through the air. It landed on the Outie’s back and caused him to stagger and fall flat amid the shifting mass of broken glass.

He kicked out, and Lucy went flying again, back against a seat. Her hair came loose even as she tried to scramble up again. The Outie turned to face her, and Petrovitch saw the handle of a kitchen knife protruding from under the man’s shoulder blade.

He reached up and drove it home with the flat of his hand. The Outie stopped quite suddenly and Petrovitch reached around his throat and pulled him backward, away from Lucy, toward the gaping hole in the windscreen. He flung him out the way he’d come in.

His legs caught on the lower broken edge for a moment before flicking up and out of sight. The coach rose and fell, the mildest of bumps amongst the storm of shaking.

Petrovitch looked at Lucy. He’d corrupted her and destroyed her innocence, and all he could do was reach in his pocket for the other knife. He slid it down the aisle toward her with a nod of satisfaction, and she picked it up, her chin lifted high, her expression defiant.

[Brace.]

Too late.

They hit something solid. The driver’s airbag blossomed with a white flash of explosive and an expanding halo of powder. Petrovitch, on his feet and with nothing to hold on to, started to move irresistibly toward the front of the coach.

There was nothing to prevent his ejection outside. Sky and ground tumbled together, and he bounced off the roof of a car half-buried in a drift of rubble. The underside of the coach reared into the air, fell. Petrovitch rolled off the car and the coach wheels banged down on it, the interior collapsing, paint and plastic crazing.

The coach settled further, and he could have reached up and touched the hot engine casing.

[Petrovitch?]

He breathed in and it was sweet agony. He was still alive. He was still connected.

“Chyort.”

[I am ordering an advance. One moment.]

The roaring in his ears was no figment of his imagination. There were actual voices raised in a war cry, a long, drawn-out bellow. Petrovitch found himself on the tarmac, lying on the loose fringes of the rubble field. Half-bricks and splinters of wood lay with him. He sat up, certain that he had burst all his stitches and racked up a fresh list of further injuries.

His gun had gone. His glasses had gone. He had blood coming from his hands, his face. He rose to meet his warriors. Gray-clad MEA, olive-green European soldiers, the blue of Oshicora workgroups, all running toward him from the end of the street.

But they were mute, grim in their task, guns and staves and swords held in front of their bodies. So he turned to see where the sound was coming from, and the Outies were charging from behind him, mouths wide for as long as their breath would last.

He drifted out into the middle of the street. In the confusion, perhaps the Outies mistook him for one of their own. He wasn’t wearing a uniform, and he wasn’t an obvious target. They ran by. He looked up at the coach, beached like a whale, sides pocked with holes, dented, scraped. A face pressed against the darkened glass, a pale pink palm either side. Lucy.

The two sides met a little way down the street, forming brief scuffles where bullet or blade swiftly decided the outcome. Once engaged, they were committed. They fought and fell. More Outies streamed by to replace those who had fallen, and Petrovitch, shadowed by the stranded coach, was ignored.

Until one dusty man carrying a long steel pole seemed to leap down in front of him, a boy at his side. He recognized them both: the boy he’d rescued, the man he’d seen kill twice from Lucy’s bedroom window.

The man leaned down to bark orders to the boy, a few words, no more, who was then off, back the way they’d come. He spotted Petrovitch. His head turned toward him even as he ran with his message.

Of course, he knew Petrovitch had had a gun, and of course he was going to shout a warning.

“Fox!”

So it was him. The one whose sole aim was to burn the city. Petrovitch stooped for a ragged brick and so by chance avoided the metal bar thrown like a spear. As he straightened up, he banged against the steel, embedded in the side of the coach behind him. And by the time he’d remembered that the man moved like lightning, he had the red arc of a knife flashing in front of him.

He threw the brick off target. It landed a glancing blow, and there was no real force behind it. Fox shrugged off the impact with a grunt and lunged forward, swinging the tip of his knife in Petrovitch’s face.

His body was sluggish, too drugged and damaged to respond quicker. The point sliced across his eyeline and against the bridge of his nose. The darkness was sudden and profound. Petrovitch felt himself twist and fall, all the sharpness of the debris on the road rising up to meet him.

He couldn’t see.

He wasted time trying to blink away the obstruction: it felt like his eyelids were closing around burning boulders.

[One moment.]

He concentrated on that voice, and the light came flooding back.

He was looking down on a blood-spattered body, more dead than alive. A figure was crouching over it, knife held high. There was a rock under the body’s left hand. He closed the fist over it and told it to lash out.

It connected. The figure staggered back, and he could see that the body on the ground was his. The coat, the remains of the coat, gave it away. His perception shifted, rotated, until he was looking at the scene from inside his own skull, through his own ruined eyes.

There was distortion, blank areas where the satellite couldn’t image, but it was good enough. Good enough to do what he needed to do. He dropped the rock, extended his middle finger on his left hand—the artificial one made of transplant-grade titanium—and locked it rigid. He waited for Fox to come at him again.

He was blind. His adversary knew that and knew there was nothing to stop him throwing himself down with his full weight behind the blade. An easy kill.

So the sightless Petrovitch rolled aside, more marionette than man, leaving Fox floundering. He continued to roll until he was clear, and then he was up. He could stand. He had control. His movements were robotic, precise, fast. As fast as Fox’s, who was swinging low at his calves. Jump, kick to the shoulder, recover. No, he was faster.

The first cast of doubt entered Fox’s face.

He kept on coming, though, still not quite believing that Petrovitch knew what it was he was doing, convinced that he was just lucky, not realizing that the cable snaking from his skull and down his back was the key.

Fox was still an unbeliever when Petrovitch crouched down and threw his arm up under the swinging knife. His punch drove his metal finger deep into Fox’s chest. He could feel his fingertip force through skin and muscle. He could feel the wet slickness spread over his hand and wrist. He jerked his arm hard, once, twice, then thrust Fox away with one last shove.

The man tried to keep his feet. He kept on stepping back to maintain balance, each footfall marked with a bloody stain. The front of his dusty clothing turned dark and glistening. He finally stopped and tried to raise his knife. It made it halfway, but it slowly sank back down. Then he fell, metal clattering by his side, and he didn’t get up again.

Petrovitch was surrounded by uniforms. They’d forced their way forward. The coach was secure, the battle-front now shifting back toward Regent’s Park.

[A medical team is on its way. Lie down on the ground. Elevate your feet. Slow your breathing to one breath every ten seconds and lower your heart rate to half.]

Petrovitch didn’t agree. He was managing to block the pain by disconnecting the feed. If he’d known he could do that, if he’d known he could have done half of what he’d just achieved, he would have plugged in the silver jack so much sooner. He felt such joy. He had transformed himself in the way that he wanted to transform the world. He had so much energy, he felt so vital, that he almost picked up a fallen Outie spear and plunged back into battle.

Lucy ran from the emergency exit on the bus, screaming and weeping. She didn’t want to touch him out of fear, her own and that she would hurt him.

“Ohgodohgodohgod.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s more than okay.”

“How can you say that? Your face…” She held her hand over her mouth, though all Petrovitch could see was the impression of her nose and chin under her pixelated hair.

“Will you do something for me?”

She looked at him, looked away, then forced herself to look back. “I don’t think there’s much I can do. Not now.”

“There’s a computer shop at the far end of this road. If it’s shuttered, find someone who’ll break it open for you. I need a camera, one of the clip-on computer ones. Small as you can find. Bring me a choice.” He wiped his cheek with the back of his hand where the drying blood was tickling him as it dried. “Can you do that?”

He saw her chest heave as she struggled to draw breath. “Yes.”

“Go. I’ll be here.”

[Petrovitch. You must lie down.]

“Just tell me one thing: have we pushed them back?”

[Yes.]

“Then keep pushing. Lay down a series of ambushes on the route. When we’ve gone as far as we can go, pull back and suck them in. Then do it again somewhere else. Keep hitting them until they run.” Fox’s knife had fallen out of his grip, and lay close by Petrovitch’s booted foot. He bent low and picked it up. “This is where we build ourselves a new beginning.”