Theories of Flight

32

So where are we going?” Petrovitch was in the driver’s seat, Tabletop next to him. Behind were Sonja, Lucy and Valentina—who kept her AK pointing vaguely in the direction of the front passenger seat.

“They’re hiding at Chain’s house, waiting for extraction.”

“Couldn’t make it to Epping Forest?”

“No. Not now. We didn’t expect you to win against the Outies.”

“Ha.” He thought of the location, the town house on the Seven Sisters Road, and the car rumbled into life. He noticed Tabletop watching him intently, trying to work out what he was doing and how. “So who’s got her?”

“Maccabee.” She hesitated. “And Rhythm.”

Petrovitch held up his hand. “No, don’t tell me. Let me guess.” A moment later it was like he’d swallowed something sour. “That pidaras Andersson. Should have hit him harder when I had the chance.”

“He said you only beat him because you took him by surprise.”

“That’s nothing compared to what I’m about to do to him.” Petrovitch peered at himself in the rear-view mirror, trying to find something that would give him a clue as to his current predicament. He pulled a face, and caught sight of Lucy over his shoulder. He twisted around and inspected her. “Tell me again why you’re here?”

Her lips were still bleeding, and her face a map of short scratches and discolored bruises. She held up a carrier bag heavy with promise.

“You told me to get this for you.”

“So I did. Did you find everything?”

She passed the bag forward, and Petrovitch peered inside. It was all in order: wires, batteries, conducting glue, tape, a plastic envelope of tiny cylinders, and the black sphere chased with silver lines.

“You’re getting good at this.”

“Good enough to keep around?”

“I…”

Sonja sniffed. “When I first met you, you were incapable of talking to a woman without insulting her. Now you have a harem.”

Petrovitch abruptly faced front again, adjusting his camera. “And I suppose you haven’t got anything better to do, either.”

“Not since you said you wanted to turn Mackensie into sashimi, no.”

Behind them, the Oshicora security guards were climbing into their own vehicles, slamming doors and turning on lights.

“Last chance to get out,” said Petrovitch.

No one volunteered to move, and he finally pointed forward. The car dropped its wheels off the pavement and started down the road. Three other vans pulled out behind him.

[The last satellite goes below the horizon in seven minutes.]

“Do your best. I take it you heard what McNeil said about the Outies.”

[Her explanation is consistent with the known facts. There are other scenarios which would also fit, but if I apply Occam’s Razor, hers is the most probable.]

“You should be flattered. They tried to destroy a whole city just to get to you.”

[Their actions were a gross over-reaction. Do you intend to ruin President Mackensie’s reputation with his voters?]

“I can’t honestly say I care about his reputation with the Reconstructionistas: they’ll probably love him for it, because, hey, we’re godless heathen foreigners. I would be disappointed, though, if there were more than a half a dozen countries which still had diplomatic relations with them by the time I’ve finished. But enough of the fun to be had. Finsbury Park: secure or not?”

[There are several concentrations of Outies, mainly to the east in the Lea Valley area, but groups are scattered throughout Finsbury Park. They are all moving north, and may decide not to engage with a heavily armed column such as the one you have assembled. However, caution is still advised.]

“Okay. Now tell me if I can trust her.”

[There is insufficient time left in the life of this universe to calculate that solution. Or, if you prefer—no, of course not, and you know that yourself. But you will go with her anyway, because you must.]

“Sucks to be me.”

[I will render assistance where I can. I should be able to deny the airspace to any planned extraction. Would you prefer them captured or killed?]

“I need bargaining chips. Keeping some of them alive would be good.”

[Are you intending to kill the agents who have your wife?]

“I’m intending to worry about that after she’s safe.”

Petrovitch reached into the bag Lucy had given him and retrieved the sphere. She’d sealed it in bubblewrap, and he pinched and tore at it until he could get his finger under a seam.

“Why did you want to bring that along?” asked Sonja.

“Because I thought I might need it.” He passed it to Tabletop. “Hold it like that.”

He glued two wires onto the circular terminals and secured them with tape so they wouldn’t rip free.

“It’s different, isn’t it?” said Lucy. “It’s not the same as the one on the news.”

“About one in a million people would have spotted that.” He opened the packet of electronic components and shook them out into his hand. His camera wouldn’t focus on the tiny writing on the sides of each piece, and he passed them back. “I need something in the microfarad range, and the biggest resistor you can find.”

Only Valentina could interpret the color coding. She explained the system to Lucy while sneering at Sonja for not knowing.

“What is your trigger voltage?”

“That’s a good question. About nine and a half volts.”

“About? If you are wrong, will anyone die?”

Petrovitch grimaced. “Probably.”

Sonja leaned forward. “Do you actually know what’s going to happen?”

“Theoretically, yes.”

She sat back again. “So you have no idea at all.”

He held his hand out and Valentina passed him the resistor and capacitor. She’d already twisted two of their leads together to form a chain.

“There’s a sentry gun,” he said. “We have to disable it somehow. We’re out of explosives, and experimental physics is all we have.”

“Take it over,” snorted Sonja. “Take it over like you do a car.”

Tabletop peered over the top of the sphere she held while the glue dried. “We already thought of that. It comes with a manual override.”

“Which means it won’t be as smart, but it’ll be faster.” Petrovitch held the tube of glue up to the side of his head and fashioned a circuit from wire and the components he already had. “If it’d been programmed to fire through walls, this car would be a lot emptier.”

He glanced up as the car bumped and jogged his hand. There were bodies all over the road—in places, thick enough to resemble a carpet of torn cloth and broken flesh.

Outies, Oshicora conscripts, civilians, MEA militia: all mixed up. Vehicles embedded in shop fronts and sideways in doorways. Lamp-posts felled by collisions and burned-out wrecks.

They slowed to a crawl, and the thick rubber tires fought for grip on the uncertain surface. Petrovitch glanced behind him, and discovered that Valentina had already clamped her hand over Lucy’s eyes.

“She is too young.” A muscle in her face twitched. “And I am too old.”

Tabletop stared open-mouthed through the windscreen. When it looked like she was going to drop the sphere, Petrovitch reached across and put his hand under it, holding his work in the other and the tube of glue in his mouth.

It got worse the closer to Euston Station they got.

Eventually, Petrovitch was able to place the finished circuit on the dashboard and remove the glue from between his teeth.

“Angry yet?”

“What have we done?” murmured Tabletop.

“When the sun came up this morning, all these people were alive. Most of them would still have been alive by tonight if I hadn’t taken it on myself to fight back. So I take my part of the responsibility. Your masters can take the rest. I’ll make sure of that.”

“When this is over, what are you going to do with me? I thought I could help you build the future, but this, this…” Her voice trailed away and she scrubbed quickly at her cheek. “You’re going to put me against a wall with the others and shoot me.”

“Surprisingly enough, I’m not in charge. I don’t know how much say I get in this.”

Tabletop looked back at Sonja, who met her gaze with such unflinching hostility that she decided she’d rather look at the dead people they were about to run over.

“I would say, though, that if we get Maddy back now, and Pif later, there might be grounds for clemency.” Petrovitch handed her the sphere back. “Now hold this still.”

He concentrated on his work for the next few minutes, gluing and taping joints and wires, fixing the batteries together in a bundle, then chasing conducting glue across their terminals.

Slowly, the road became clearer, and the car’s wheels managed to steer around the obstacles. By the time they got out to the Caledonian Road, Valentina felt it safe to remove her hand.

Lucy blinked in the light. “I wouldn’t have looked,” she said.

“You cannot unsee what you have seen, little one,” said Valentina.

“Not true: I can’t remember what my parents look like,” said Tabletop. “Neither can I remember how the CIA made me forget; I just have to accept that they did, and that I agreed to it.”

In the wing mirror, one of the following cars pulled over against the curb, jerking to a halt. The driver fell from the door and was copiously sick on the road.

“Maybe,” said Petrovitch, “we should find out the answers to both those questions.” He carefully fitted the two black wires together, leaving the two red ones free. He deliberately taped over the bare ends to prevent their accidental contact.

“Is it done?” asked Lucy.

“I can’t test the continuity or how much juice is in the battery pack. But it’ll either work or it won’t.” He tucked the rest of the roll of tape inside his overalls.

“And what will it do?”

“He won’t tell you,” said Tabletop. “He didn’t tell me the first time.”

“Yeah, well. There is such a thing as being too full of your own govno.” He adjusted his camera so it faced backward. “It should tear a little hole in the fabric of space-time, just for a fraction of a second. Less than that, really: it should be instantaneous. The effect should be similar to a small explosion, except in reverse. Implosion. Gravity waves. Like I’ve created an infinitely heavy mass then made it vanish in the same moment.”

The women looked at each other. Tabletop looked at the mass of electrical tape in Petrovitch’s lap. “You want to make a singularity. With that.”

He equivocated for a second or two. “Pretty much.”

“How do you know you’re not going to level the entire Metrozone?”

“Because the instant it appears, the machine that made it is destroyed. I can show you my workings.” Petrovitch frowned and turned his camera back around. “Are you actually a physicist, because you always sounded like you knew what you were talking about?”

It was her turn to take a moment to think. “I must have been. The knowledge has to come from somewhere.”

“If I’ve got it wrong, I apologize in advance.” He glanced out the window. “Almost there.”

Valentina checked the magazine on her AK. It was as full of bullets as it was the last time she’d looked. “What is plan?”

“I’m going to try and get them to surrender.” Petrovitch scratched his hair. Scabs came away and caught under his fingernails. “Explain that their position is a whole world of pizdets, and they may as well give up.”

“Can I tell you it won’t work?” offered Tabletop. “Maccabee might have considered your offer, but Rhythm will refuse it out of hand. Just be glad it wasn’t Retread…”

Sonja said from the back seat. “We tasered her, then put her in a coma.”

“… because she would have shot your wife, the rest of her team, then herself, but not before setting the building on fire.”

“The other one. Slipper. Where is he? Epping Forest?”

“Yes. But he’s too far away to intervene.”

Petrovitch tutted. “I had attack helicopters not so long ago, but the EDF wanted them back. Shame.”

They were on the Seven Sisters Road, and the car glided to a halt. The three vehicles behind stopped too, blocking the street. Black-suited men with rifles started to emerge.

Petrovitch stepped out, device under his arm. He could see Chain’s front door in the distance. “Fiona, Tabletop, whatever I’m supposed to call you. I need to borrow you.”

She obediently joined him, and they walked a little way from the others.

“I’ll go in there and kill them for you. They won’t suspect anything, and they won’t have time to hurt your wife.”

“Tempting,” said Petrovitch. “But it’s been pointed out to me that I can’t really trust you.”

“You want me to contact them?”

“No. There are code-words you could use that I’d have no idea about that could mean anything. I just want the frequencies, encryption method, stuff like that. I’ll take it from there.” He sighed. “If I let you do something that means Maddy dies, I’ll want to lay waste to your entire country. So, it’s probably better if I screw up on my own.”

Her bodysuit had a series of switches along the inside of her left wrist, and she powered up for him. He supposed that if she was going to kill him, now would be as good a time as any. She was so close to her colleagues she could shout for them.

But then again, with every concealed button pressed, he saw more and more of her suit come alive. She had an enhanced musculature; a medical kit that would numb pain, boost adrenaline, clot her blood; he knew about the hatnav, but not the night vision or the multiplicity of concealed weapons. It would keep her warm or cool, it would turn a blade, it would deliver fifty thousand volts through her fingertips.

He infiltrated her suit’s computer, hacking it through the diagnostics routine. He was now closer to her than her own skin, and he took what he needed. The aerial was up her spine, and the short-wave burst transmitter an insignificant patch over one kidney.

“Ready?”

“For what?”

“Sorry,” said Petrovitch, “I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”

[There are hints of something coming across the Irish Sea. It is in unpowered mode, but every so often there is a course correction. I will attack as soon as it becomes possible.]

“Thank you. Let’s see what Daniels has to say for himself.”

Because he was using Tabletop’s callsign, the agent assumed it was her.

“What’s your mission status?” His voice was unrecognizable: digitized, spoken in a plain robotic monotone.

“Dobre vyecher, Captain Daniels. Kak pazhivayesh?”

The airwaves hissed for long enough to start making him nervous.

Then they cleared for a single word. “You.”

“Come,” said Petrovitch, “let us reason together.”