Degrees of Freedom

5

She stood there at one end of the long canteen table, Petrovitch sat at the other with Lucy. Silence flowed from her like a cold, heavy stream until the whole room was flooded with it.

Petrovitch pushed his plate away and leaned back in his chair. Lucy looked first at Madeleine, then at Petrovitch, trying to judge the mood. She sensed that something had changed, and she put down her fork to gently lay her hand on her ersatz-father’s forearm.

Petrovitch glanced at her from the corner of his eye, and she shook her head slightly. So, no argument today. Perhaps.

It had started with one thing, and had snowballed from there: he hadn’t told her about Michael. He’d kept it a secret for all kinds of reasons, and all of them, he thought, good. He hadn’t cheated on her. He hadn’t neglected her. He’d even fought his way through a city in flames to save her. If there was any way left for him to demonstrate his love for her, he was open to suggestions. She was Mother to everyone, but wife to none.

She didn’t live with him. She didn’t live anywhere, except on her bike. She traveled around the Freezone, appearing un-announced at work camps and building sites, intent on keeping everyone honest.

Petrovitch saw her every other day or so. It might have been her way of checking up on him, keeping him honest too. She never announced her visits to him, either. But in eleven months, she’d never found him compromised, while showing no sign of coming back to him.

And now she wasn’t saying anything, the silence stretching to breaking point. Someone was going to giggle, or fart, and from the expression on her face, she wasn’t in the mood for levity.

“You can just call me. I’ll come. And you know that.”

“Yes. I know,” she said. “Can we step outside for a moment?”

“Just me?”

“Just you, Sam.” Her motorbike leathers creaked as she adjusted her stance. “Is that all right?”

He couldn’t read her. He turned slightly to Lucy. “You going to be okay on your own for a bit?”

“I’m hardly on my own. I’ll be fine. Go, go.”

He pushed back his chair with a scrape. “Thank you for your company, ladies and gentlemen.”

They watched him follow Madeleine out of the canteen, and only as the door started to swing shut did the murmur of conversation start up again.

She didn’t stop, though. Her bike was on the far side of the site, up by Lancaster Gate. She strode, and Petrovitch had to jog to keep up with her long-legged strides.

“Where’s the fire?”

“Who said anything about a fire?” she said. She was breathless, and something was wrong.

“Yeah. You going to tell me now, or do I have to work it out?”

“Neither. I’ll show you.”

“So there is a fire.”

“Will you…” She almost broke step, as did her voice. “Just hurry.”

They arrived at the gate. Petrovitch was going to wait for the guard to open the barrier: Madeleine vaulted it and went over to her bike, hastily abandoned in the middle of the road. She beckoned urgently to him.

“Sorry,” he said to the bemused security man and ducked under the rising metal pole. Madeleine threw a helmet at him, which he caught unerringly even in the glare and shadows of the site’s floodlights. The speed at which it came knocked him onto his back foot.

She hadn’t noticed. As soon as the helmet left her hand, she was astride the bike, kicking up the stand, starting the engine with a press of her thumb.

“Aren’t you putting one on too?”

“That is mine. Get on.” She throttled the engine and made the turbine whine. “And hold tight.”

He dropped the helmet on his head, where it slopped around loosely, and tried to work out how—and where—to sit.

“Just, just get on, Sam. Please.”

He hopped his leg over and eased himself down behind her. There was a grab rail behind him, but if she was going to ride as recklessly as he thought she would, that wasn’t going to be much use. Tentatively, he put his arms around Madeleine’s waist and caught his fingers together.

She momentarily stiffened, then shivered. Then she hauled on the accelerator like the very gates of Hell were opening somewhere and she had to go and stand in the breach.

Petrovitch almost lost his grip. He clung on for his life, and held her closer than he’d done in almost a year.

The lights of the Freezone whipped by in a sodium-orange blur, but he knew where he was. He hat-navved them taking a sharp left—so sharp his knee almost scraped the tarmac—up the Edgware Road, and another right at Marylebone. Her old church had been on the corner there, reduced to burned timbers and scorched brick and then cleared to be yet another building site.

He’d first met her there; he’d been dying, she’d brought him back to life. He wondered if her choice of route was deliberate, as if to point out that it wasn’t just him who’d been doing the saving. Or it could just have been faster this way. He knew where they were going now.

Petrovitch had had a domik at Regent’s Park, a bolt-hole for when disaster struck. He’d lost it in the Long Night, along with his case of memories, courtesy of the New Machine Jihad. He’d not gone back, not looked for it amongst the tumbled chaos of containers.

The Freezone had been clearing it, crews with gas axes working day and night. They’d got almost to the lowest level. And now, as they turned another corner with the back wheel almost sliding out, there was no activity at all. No blue-white cutting flames, no noise of grinding metal or the grumble of heavy cranes.

She drove toward where the Inner Circle had been, and braked sharply. Petrovitch turned his head sideways to Madeleine’s back and pressed his cheek against her, frustrated only by the plastic and kevlar of the helmet.

The engine died, and it was silent. Despite the ferocity of the ride, they both sat there, perfectly still, him against her, she leaning slightly back to increase the contact.

“I know why we’re here,” he mumbled through the foam interior of the helmet.

“You do?” Her words were equally indistinct, numbed by the cold.

“Container Zero.”

“How do you do it? How do you make these wild guesses and come up with the right answer?” She flexed her shoulders, and he felt her muscles move, dense and fluid.

“Because there’s no other reason for us to be here. No other reason for me to be here. Everything else you can handle, but not the Last Armageddonist.”

“I never believed it was true. But it is.” She shrugged again, this time with purpose. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

Petrovitch found the ground and hopped off. She rolled the bike onto its stand and stepped over the seat. She knew the way—despite the anonymous jumble of containers, she turned unerringly right, left, right, following the line of compacted earth to her destination.

Petrovitch knew the way, too. Moreover, he could see. He blinked, and his vision changed to a slightly stuttering but bright zoetrope of images. He blinked again, and the scene was transformed into a wash of reds and blues, depending on their heat.

Madeleine’s head and hands were white, incandescent almost. That was the effect of fear, and he’d not known her to be so scared, ever. Which was saying something.

The path finished. A container blocked their way. Container Zero. The first domik to be planted on Regent’s Park. The door had been partially cut with a letterbox-sized window, burned through the metal at head height.

“Standard procedure. Cut a hole, check the contents, mark for disposal, opening or decontamination. When the wrecking crew cut this one…”

“How many people know?”

“Four—five now. I’ve told them not to talk.”

“Yeah, like that’s going to work. You’ve laid off the whole site. If it’s not round the Freezone by dinner time that something’s going on, I’ll be a shluha vokzal’naja. You’ve got a couple of hours before this goes global. If that.” He stretched himself up and looked through the slot. “Has anyone been in?”

“No.”

“Thank huy for that.” He looked up and around him. “Does the door mechanism work?”

“They’re welded shut. From the inside. We’re going to have to make that hole bigger.” The work crew’s cutting equipment was abandoned nearby. “Know how to use that?”

He didn’t. Then he did. “In theory.”

Petrovitch hefted the trolley holding the gas cylinders and wheeled it closer, then opened the valve on the acetylene. It burned with a smoky orange flame, flickering and bright in the dusk. Then he turned on the oxygen and the flame turned into a blue spearpoint.

He dialed back the gain on his eyes until he could just about see what he was doing, and no more. The tip of the fire touched the outside of the container, which started to dribble orange drops of molten steel.

“This could take a while.” He could feel the heat on his face, a dry, furnace heat. “Tell me what he’s doing in there.”

Madeleine tried to look past the burning metal. “Just… just sitting. Facing the door. There’s something on his left-hand side. I think it’s a bomb.”

“How big? Size, not megatonnage.”

“It’s about,” she started, and he interrupted.

“I can’t see how far your hands are apart because I’m holding a two-thousand-degree torch and I don’t want to go blind or accidentally set myself on fire. Again.”

“About a meter long. A tube in a cradle, maybe half a meter across.”

“Panel? Wires?”

“There were wires.”

“Any idea where the wires were coming from?”

“Couldn’t see. From him. From under the chair he’s in, perhaps.”

Petrovitch clenched his fists around the gas axe. “This doesn’t fill me with confidence.”

“You think it’s rigged?”

“I know it is. It just depends on how.” He turned the corner with the flame. “Still, if opening the container was going to trip it, it would have tripped already. Dodged that bullet, at least.”

“Sam…”

“Yeah?” It would be good if he could concentrate, but she was standing very close to him. He could feel her breath on the back of his head.

“I wish you’d told me about Michael.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “Do you really want to do this now? Considering the only imminent intimate mingling I might enjoy with you will be our atoms forming part of the same rapidly expanding fireball?”

She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

“Yeah. Sue me,” he muttered. “You know I want you back. But I need you to shut up for one minute.”

She walked away from him, and he slowly drew the gas torch back up toward the previously cut hole. When it was nearly complete, he stopped and turned the oxygen back off.

Madeleine reached forward to bend the metal aside. Petrovitch caught her wrist.

“Hot. Still hot. Will remain hot for a while yet.” He spun the valve on the acetylene, and the orange flame flickered and died. “If you weren’t in such a hurry to get rid of me, you’d have worked that out.”

“I’m not trying…” She looked at her wrist, and Petrovitch let go.

“You can’t keep away. You find excuses to pass by, but you always find excuses to go again before anything meaningful can happen.”

“You lied to me.” Madeleine leaned back against Container Zero, sliding down its pitted side until she was crouched on her haunches.

“I lied to the whole world. It seemed to me like it was the only option.” He copied her position, on the other side of the unopened cut. “It was the only option at the time.”

“No. You didn’t trust me. You wanted a pet AI to keep for yourself. All the business with the CIA: we could have skipped all that if you’d come clean.”

“That, I doubt. We would have ended up with gods-knows-what raining down on us from the sky, and still have had the Outies to deal with just on our own. I would have died at Waterloo Bridge, and you’d have been overrun on your overpass.” Petrovitch checked the clock in the corner of his vision. The metal should be cold enough to touch, but fighting with Madeleine was better than missing her. “We’d be dead, the Outies would have half the city, and Michael would have been hunted to extinction.”

“So what we have now makes everything you did okay?”

“If it’s a choice between a smoking ruin containing a million or so charred corpses ruled over by someone like Fox, and a Freezone ready to take fifteen million citizens grateful for the facts of running water and electricity? Yeah. Let me think about that for a nanosecond.”

“I’m glad you think it was worth losing me.”

His heart was incapable of skipping a beat. It never beat at all, just spun and spun and never stopped. Maybe it slowed briefly, just enough to cause him a transient but real pain.

“I would have lost you whichever choice I made. At least this way, I get to see you live.” Petrovitch levered himself up and put his shoulder to the metalwork.

It bent with a creak, leaving a gap only just large enough for him to squeeze through. Certainly not her.

“You made it that size deliberately, didn’t you?” she said.

“Can’t prove it.” He shrugged off his greatcoat and let it fall to the ground. “Yobany stos, it’s colder than Siberia.”

He started to ease himself into the hole, one foot inside first, then feeling the sharp edges pressing into his chest and back. Slowly, he worked his way in, until he was able to wriggle free and bring his other leg after him.

The interior of Container Zero boomed with his footsteps.

“Be careful,” she said, and threaded his coat through to him.

He took it and pulled it around him, then turned to face the Last Armageddonist.