Degrees of Freedom

20

Away from the small circle of light, the darkness was like a wall. Petrovitch switched to infrared, and watched while Madeleine descended.

“Still not that sweet,” she said, and raised her arms to guide Lucy’s feet onto the corroded metal rungs for the last few steps. “You’re there.”

“What is this place?”

Petrovitch was about to answer, when Madeleine cut in, sounding casual: “It’s a river. An underground river running through the heart of London.”

“Then why can I smell, you know…” Lucy looked around her, then at her feet.

“Because it doubles as a sewer.”

“Eww.”

Valentina swung herself over the hole in the road and held out her AK. Madeleine took it and passed it to Petrovitch, who could actually see where he was pointing it.

“Case. You catch.” She dropped a steel briefcase and Madeleine caught it cleanly. “Do not get wet.”

“You might want to warn me before you start throwing explosives around.”

“Hmm,” said Valentina, and trip-trapped down the ladder, “and you might warn us before telling lying priest everything.”

“Knock it off.” Petrovitch stepped out of the alcove and into the tunnel proper.

“In Soviet Union, priests were shot.”

“Tina. Really.”

“Against wall. With blindfold.”

“Yobany stos, past’ zabej!” He thought about leaving the two of them to get on with it, but Lucy was also present, and there wasn’t much room for hand-to-hand combat without hurting the bystanders. “Just leave it upstairs, okay? Down here it’s cold, it’s dark, it’s got water and slime, and shortly we’ll be setting off some shaped charges. We all have to work together, whether some of you like it or not.”

Petrovitch retrieved Lucy and put her mid-stream, then dragged Madeleine up behind him.

“Tina, go behind Lucy, hold her hand. Maddy, get Lucy’s other hand and grab hold of me. And no pulling or shoving. Or I’ll tell teacher.”

He led the way upstream, to find that Tabletop had already discovered the breach in the culvert’s wall. She’d turned the lights on, and was exploring the gently sloping tunnel.

Lucy climbed in first, then Valentina, and Madeleine boosted Petrovitch through the hole before stepping up herself.

“Right,” said Petrovitch, “let’s get all the ‘how did you know this was here?’, ‘when did you do this?’ and ‘frankly this looks ludicrously unstable, what were you thinking?’ questions out of the way before we start. I’ve been at this for eleven months, and I would have got away with it but for recent events. Needs must, however. At the far end is the outside of a concrete tube that should lead straight to the quantum computer beneath the Oshicora Tower. There’s about half a meter’s worth of ferroconcrete between us and it, and it would be brilliant if we can cut through it without collapsing this tunnel.” He looked at Valentina’s pale, pinched face in the glimmering light. “Can you get us through?”

“Concrete, yes. Rebar is problem. I will need to take two, three separate blasts to cut metal rods.” She lifted her case onto her outstretched legs and popped the catches.

Tabletop pressed her hand against the curved wall she was crouching next to. “When were you going to tell us? I mean, I suppose you could have chosen never to do so.”

“I always thought,” said Petrovitch, “that I’d be able to do this on my own. That I wouldn’t have to involve any of you in this, well, highly illegal enterprise. Freezone signed up to both the UN resolutions and imposed their own penalties.”

“Ten years,” murmured Madeleine, “or an unlimited fine. Or both.”

“Bearing in mind I can record this, and we’re in charge now: all those in favor of revoking that particular law?” Petrovitch raised his right arm and glanced up at it.

Madeleine put her hand on the tunnel roof, Lucy’s pale fingers wiggled in the half-light, and Valentina looked up from her makings long enough to register her approval.

“Tabletop?”

“I’m not a citizen,” she said. “I’m not really anyone.”

“Executive order. You are now.”

“Do you think my—the Americans: they’re going to want to stop you.”

“Yeah. And we already know there’s another CIA team of who knows how many agents. Or they could just drop a missile on our heads, and this time it might not be a thermobaric warhead.”

“Fuck them.” She showed her hand.

“Unanimous. Tina, do your worst. Everyone else out.”

Tabletop stayed behind to help Valentina, while Madeleine helped Petrovitch get back out into the main tunnel. The blue-white glow from inside the hole glittered against the drops of moisture on the brickwork.

“Seriously,” asked Lucy, standing as close as she could to Petrovitch and shivering. “Were you ever going to tell us?”

“I didn’t want to give them any reason for thinking you had anything to do with this.”

“Them. But Madeleine would have had to arrest you. She wouldn’t… would she?”

“Just another reason not to tell anyone. She’d sworn to uphold the Freezone law. Giving her a dilemma like that?” He puffed out his breath and watched it condense in the cold, still air. “Yeah, I would have told you. Long after the event, long after we’d…”

“We’d what?” She pushed in against him and leaned her head against his shoulder.

“We’re getting out of here. All of us. Including Michael. This,” and he pointed up and down the tunnel with his right hand, draped over Lucy’s shoulder, “this isn’t how I’d planned it. We were supposed to show a clean pair of heels, just slip away in the night in a ‘my work here is done’ sort of way. Now, we’re going to be born in blood and fire whether we like it or not.”

“Doesn’t sound good.”

“Meh. We’ll be fine. It’s everyone else I’m worried about, especially the ones who get worked up about AIs: they get all unpredictable and dangerous, and I don’t like that.”

“Just one other thing. You know you had me make one of those singularity bombs every day, off the renderer?”

“Yeah. I used them every night down here.”

“I know that now, but I thought you were hoarding them. I,” and she coughed, “might have made some spares.”

“What the chyort did you think I was going to do with three hundred bombs? Start a war?”

“It’s not like you haven’t done that before,” she mumbled. “I thought I was helping.”

“How many?” asked Petrovitch, dreading the answer.

“There’s about a cupboard full. The one next to the sink. In the lab.” She shrank away from him. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine. As it turns out, if we didn’t have a shed-load of cee-four from the fake bomb, we’d be using them right about now. But,” he said, trying to be serious when he was actually pleased, “no more making black holes without telling me first, okay?”

She looked up as Madeleine climbed out to join them. “Okay.”

Madeleine was followed by Tabletop and finally Valentina, trailing a thin two-core cable behind her. She passed the end out to Petrovitch, then reached back in for her case.

“So: first charge to crack concrete. Have added copper core to slice rebar, but maybe one more after.” She handed the case to Tabletop, who held it up to the light while she retrieved the hand-cranked dynamo.

“Should we move?” asked Lucy.

“Is small explosion, little one. Loud, but small.”

“She knows what she’s doing,” assured Petrovitch. He passed Valentina the bare wires, and she attached them to the terminals with an easy dexterity born of familiarity.

“Against wall, please. Will be loose debris, and dust.”

When she was ready, and she’d checked everyone was staying where she’d put them, she reached into her jacket pocket for earplugs. She pushed them home with a grunt, then vigorously wound the handle on the cylinder in her hand.

She followed her own advice and stepped back against the damp brickwork. “Tri, dva, adin.” Her thumb closed on the button.

A circle of light like a flashbulb imprinted itself against the tunnel wall, and the sound of a thousand hands clapping slammed into the air, making it hard and unyielding. A cloud of brown dust blew outward as if fired from a cannon, and the lights flickered: blinked on, off, then on again, illuminating the inside of the haze and making it glow.

Petrovitch listened for the inevitable rumble and slide of a roof collapse. He waited and waited, and realized he was holding his breath. A year’s secret work, and it came down to whether he’d secured the tunnel supports properly. He felt his heart surge, and he let it run.

There was benefit in being able to control parts of his physiology. There was also something to be said for letting him feel human, just once in a while. Terror, anticipation, euphoria even. Being alive was a drug, and he was addicted.

The noises he feared the most never materialized. He heard the sounds of coughing and complaining instead.

Lucy peeled her hands from her ears. “I was expecting, I don’t know. More flames.”

“I made that mistake once. Tina’s an expert: you could learn a lot from her.” Petrovitch splashed his way to the gap in the brickwork and peered in.

The dust was settling in a fine hissing rain, making shifting shapes and sheets in the light. Valentina appeared next to him and she cast a critical eye over the scene.

“Hmm. Is okay.” She passed the dynamo back to Tabletop and boosted herself up. Her legs wriggled, and she found a handhold to drag herself over the top.

Once she’d gone to inspect the damage she’d caused, Madeleine thought it safe to speak.

“You never did say what you were going to do with Michael once you’d got him out.”

“Didn’t I? We’re back on plan B anyway. Shame, really. Plan A was brilliant, even if I say so myself.” Fine dust was settling on his eyes, and he cried it away. “If Michael’s not in a fit state, I don’t know what I’m going to do instead. It’s taken the NSA months to purge Anarchy from its network; clearly, I’m better than they are, but it’ll still take time.”

“Sam.” She was standing right behind him, pressing into his back. “What were you going to do with Michael?”

Valentina came scrabbling back, a shadow that slowly solidified. “Petrovitch. Come. See.”

“Sorry,” he said to Madeleine, “it’ll have to wait. Shove me up.”

She did so with a little more force than was strictly necessary, and he landed in a heap at Valentina’s feet.

“Yobany stos,” he muttered. “I’m already broken enough.”

Valentina crouched low and led the way back to the tunnel face. Where there had been a slick gray wall was now a gaping black maw. When she settled against the last roof prop, she looked uncommonly pleased with herself.

Petrovitch crawled over her legs and moved his left arm so that it supported itself on the lip of the hole.

The cut was sharp on its outer edge, and grew ragged as it worked its way in. Loose rubble clung to the sides and cracks radiated out. The steel mesh that reinforced the concrete had been severed as neatly as if it had been sawn through. The exposed ends of each bar looked like they’d been melted.

“I thought you said you’d need at least two goes at it.”

“I am better than I thought.”

Petrovitch grinned. The explosion had created a hole that was perfect. “Yeah. Orders of Lenin all round.”

“At least, am good for something.”

“You’re good for lots of things, Tina.” He took a fragment of concrete and dropped it over the edge. Being able to time the fall accurately, he calculated that the bottom of the shaft was only three and a half meters down. “Most of all, you’re a good friend.”

She narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips. “I must say this now.”

He was busy peering through the hole, checking to see if there was debris clogging the shaft, and how much they might have to shift before getting to Michael. The air inside was cool blue, uniform but for a faint glimmer of brighter notes in a rectangle set into the wall down at the level of the concrete floor. He brought his head back through.

“Sorry?”

“Does not matter.” She started back up the tunnel, but he caught her sleeve.

“Seriously. I use you like a Swiss Army knife and you ask for nothing except the assurance that it’s going to be all right in the end. And even when it looks like it’s one big pile of pizdets, you still believe in me. So you’ve earned the right to say whatever you want, and I’m just going to have to shut up and listen.”

Valentina turned herself back around as Madeleine shouted down to them: “Everything okay?”

“Fine. It’s all fine,” replied Petrovitch, and brought his head close to Valentina’s. “Talk to me, Tina.”

“I would never betray you. You must know this.”

“Yobany stos, of course I know this.”

“I would never do anything that would harm you or Madeleine.”

“I know that too.”

“I have been tempted. I am still tempted. I will still be tempted: by fantasy of you and me making lots of good little communists together. But know this also—Sonja Oshicora will never live to make you her slave: I will kill her first.” She tossed her head back and stared Petrovitch square in the face. “She does not know what love is. We do. Because of this, we will prevail.”

He grabbed her, pulled her close, pressed his dusty lips against her ear. “We can all win. We can all still win. I promise.”