Degrees of Freedom

28

They had enough people to seal off the streets: down Portland Place and along the Euston Road, covering Tottenham Court Road, and the south side of the square, Mortimer Street and Goodge Street.

It meant that everyone was set back from any immediate confrontation while confining the Oshicora loyalists to a small area. There’d been defections to Petrovitch, but not as many as he would have hoped. He’d have preferred them all to come over, and that would have been that, but no.

And Madeleine wasn’t happy at all.

“There is no good reason for you to do this.”

“There is every good reason for me to do this. She is not going to shoot me.” Petrovitch watched as Madeleine reloaded his gun for him.

“All it takes is one—just one—nervous kid with his finger on the trigger and I’m a widow. I’m not going to let that happen.” She slapped the magazine back home and presented him with the pistol’s butt.

He took it from her and jammed it down the waistband of his trousers.

“I’m calling her and I’m arranging safe passage through the barricades they’ve put up. If we go in mob-handed, it’s going to be carnage.”

She grabbed him by the scaffolding on his arm and pulled him somewhere more private. That meant marching him across to the church that stood on the corner, and under the blackened and dead branches of the trees that flanked it.

“I don’t want to lose you. Not now.”

Petrovitch reached out and slid his finger into one of the holes in her impact armor, scooping out some of the gel and holding it up so she couldn’t help but see it. “You didn’t give me that choice, did you?”

“You’ve got other people.”

“Oh, okay. Which one do you approve of to take your place? Tina? Happy with that? Or Tabletop? Want to imagine me and her together?”

“You know I…”

“Or both together? They could have me on a time-share, and I could hope neither of them got jealous enough to put a blade in the other’s guts.”

“Sam, I don’t mean,” she started, but he interrupted her again.

“What the huy do you mean?” He squared up to her, shaking his arm free and baring his teeth. “You are not a replaceable part. You never were. Yobany stos, I missed you. Every night, every day, no let-up. I have friends, I have a daughter, but you’re my wife.”

“Then listen to me. You’re going to get yourself killed, and I’m going to destroy myself with guilt. I wasn’t there for all that time, and now I face losing you forever. You cannot go out there and expect them not to shoot you. It’s insane.” Her face had gone white, and she was shaking. She was scared, pure and simple. Terrified.

“Sit down,” said Petrovitch. “Come and sit down.”

The steps up to the church porch were close by, and they sat together, side by side, hips pressed against each other even though there was plenty of space.

“Look. I’ve got people queuing up to throw themselves in front of me and take the bullet meant for me. You, Tina, Tabletop, Lucy even in her own cackhanded way, and you’re only just ahead of a couple of thousand Freezone workers who seem determined to follow me, lemming-like, off the precipice. I don’t want that. I don’t want anyone to die because of me.”

“We’re doing it because we love you.”

“You’re doing it because you’re all bat-shit crazy,” he grumbled. “I’ve had enough. I’m taking some decisions for myself, and I don’t have to put them in front of a committee to get them ratified. I’m no one’s shestiorka. If someone’s going down because I’ve screwed up, I want that someone to be me.”

“I don’t. I’d rather it was anyone else but you.”

“Yeah. I’d rather it was like that, too, but I’m going to stick my middle finger up at Fate and tell her to idi v’zhopu.” He shrugged. “What else am I supposed to do?”

“You could stay safe, here with me.”

“And what happens to Sonja? Is there anyone who can do something about her, without people bayoneting each other in the street? Anyone but me?”

Madeleine started to cry soundlessly. Fat tears dropped into her lap. “Don’t do this.”

“There’s no one else. We both know that.” He stood and kissed the top of her head, where her shaved head ended and her mane of plaited hair started.

“At least take my armor.” She pulled at her sleeves until the Velcro fastenings at the back started to part. She was half out of it in seconds, clawing at the straps that held it in place, as if her speed would help protect him.

“Maddy, stop.” He put his hand on one side of the stiff collar, and moved it to cover her shoulder again. Under the armor, she wore a pale skinsuit, and it was hellishly distracting. “Just stop. I can barely stand up as it is, and I’m not going to fight. I’m going to talk. Impact armor isn’t going to help.”

“I have to do something.”

“Be here when I get back? That would be good.” He kissed her again, and made the long walk back across the road.

Valentina’s eyes narrowed as he approached. “Problem?”

“Yeah. We’re doing it anyway. Load me up.”

She had the box of singularity bombs out next to her, and she hooked four onto the exposed metalwork of his arm. Individually, they didn’t weigh that much: together, with their batteries and timers, they dragged all the harder.

“Here,” said Lucy, pressing a bottle of water on him. She’d already cracked the seal on the top. “Anything else you need?”

“Vodka?”

“I don’t know.” She was suddenly flustered. “We can get some.”

“Joke,” he said. “I’m not serious. Well, not that serious. I shouldn’t really be drunk in charge of implosives, but a quick slug of the hard stuff would’ve gone down well. No matter.”

He patted his pockets in case he’d forgotten something, but he didn’t have anything in them anyway. His passport was in his courier bag, in Valentina’s car. Madeleine’s was there too. He hadn’t told her. If things went badly, he never would.

Too late now.

“Okay.” He started out down the street toward the tower, past the two groups of armed men and women clustered at each corner behind their hastily erected barricades. He stopped when he crossed the road markings and looked back. Tabletop, Valentina and Lucy seemed uncertain as to what to do next: one or other of them was with him almost all the time.

“What?” called Tabletop.

“Aren’t you supposed to wish me luck?”

“You don’t believe in luck. You don’t leave anything to chance.”

“Yeah, well.” He turned again. He could see the tower, its strange top-heavy shape and thin waist surrounded by microwave dishes. “First time for everything.”

The street was narrow, with three- and four-story houses. The ground floors had mostly been turned into shops, and steel shutters covered their windows. The Jihad had passed through one way, and the Outies the other, but the damage had been repaired. It was mostly as it had been, except for the line of cars parked across the street further down.

He undid the bottle with his teeth and spat the cap out. He drank half the water. It was a poor substitute for coffee. He unlocked Sonja’s phone and called her up.

“Hey. I’m walking down Cleveland Street toward your lines. No one’s going to take a pot-shot at me, are they?”

“Sam? What’s going on?” She sounded lost.

“Well now. At the risk of sounding like a pre-Armageddon cop show, you’re surrounded. I’ve a few thousand armed ex-soldiers and police blocking off every road away from the tower, and they know what to do if I don’t come back. One way or another, this ends today. How it ends is up to you, but I thought it worthwhile to try and talk our way to a solution rather than start another war.”

“I… I can see you.”

Petrovitch’s eyes tried to zoom in all the way to the top of the structure, but the reflections of sky off the slabs of glass defeated him. He raised the bottle of water anyway, and kept walking.

“So what’s it going to be? Can we talk?”

“We could always talk, but you never needed to be actually there, did you?”

“No. This time, though, it’s important to do it face to face. We need to see the windows of each other’s soul. No lies. Just the truth, and I don’t care how uncomfortable that is for either of us.”

The barricade of cars was just ahead, and he found he’d collected several glowing red laser dots that buzzed around his chest. It looked like most of the shooters wouldn’t be able to hit a double-decker at ten paces, but as Madeleine had pointed out, it’d only take one bullet.

He stopped and looked at the figures crouching behind the trunks and hoods, fixing each one of them with a hard stare. He saw them nervous, panicky even. Not a good combination with firearms.

“They’re not going to shoot me, are they?” he asked Sonja.

“They know not to. Whatever happens.”

“I suppose I’ve bet my life on longer odds,” he said. He shrugged and kept on going until he was on one side of a red family-sized car, and the Oshicora guards on the other. One man lowered his rifle, and with a little shake of his head, told his colleagues to do the same.

“Petrovitch-san. We cannot let you pass.”

“Yeah, about that. I’m coming through whether you like it or not. So either you shift these cars, or I’ll shift them for you.”

The man in charge—at least, the man who had assumed leadership in the absence of anyone else—regarded Petrovitch’s broken form. “That would seem unlikely.”

Petrovitch set his bottle of water down on the road and unhooked one of the spheres hanging from his arm. “Unlikely? Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I could move the world.” He put the hook through the door handle and fiddled with a switch.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m priming this singularity generator. I’ve never used one of these things in the open before, so I have no idea what’s going to happen.” He made a face. “That’s not strictly true: I know that for a length of time too small to measure, a black hole is going to appear at the very center of this ball, and everything around it is going to want to fall inside it, even light itself. I’ve used them for tunneling, and once, I destroyed the inside of a house using just one of these.”

“Is it a bomb?”

“No. Bombs explode.” He gazed over the top of the car. “This sucks big time, and I really wouldn’t recommend being anywhere near it when it turns on.”

He leaned forward and pressed the button next to the switch. A light flicked from green to red. He scooped up his water and started to back up. The men on the far side of the barricade began to move away, too.

“The thing is,” called Petrovitch, “the timer was made by a fifteen-year-old girl. She’s normally pretty good at stuff like this, but you know how difficult it is to read the right value off a resistor when it’s late and your eyes hurt.”

He’d put five meters between him and the device and he was sweating. It wasn’t far enough, and he hadn’t been joking about the timer. He kept on walking backward, as fast as he could manage.

Yet perversely, he didn’t want to miss a single moment.

And right on cue, the bomb vanished like a darkly shining flashbulb. The car it was attached to spasmed and warped. In a blink, it was tiny, inside out, glowing with blue fire. The road pocked, bloomed, tarmac ripped free, the cobblestones underneath shattering into dust. The vehicles on either side jerked like they’d been struck by a runaway truck, twisting around, dragging their tires, bending, breaking, glass flying.

He could feel the momentary pull himself, a vast hand reaching out to haul him irresistibly inward. He stamped down hard, leaning back, and lost his footing anyway. His backside connected with the road surface at an angle, and slid a heart-stopping but insignificant distance toward the mangling wreckage and opening crater.

The air was full of fumes. There was a pop, and a pool of gasoline ignited, burning with a sooty red flame. Within a second, everything had stopped moving, and Petrovitch could get up again.

The flanking cars were both half in the hole in the road, their paintwork cracking and flaking in the heat, their panels hanging off and their chassis bent like toffee. Of the third car, there was nothing to be seen. Yet the windows in the surrounding buildings were untouched.

He still had three of those bad boys hanging from his arm, and he felt invincible. He skirted the tipped-up rear of one car and ignored the guards sprawled in the road, mere mortals all.

“Hi, Sonja.”

“Oh my God.” She would have seen it all. She would have had a better viewpoint than Petrovitch. “That’s what it does.”

“Tell whoever’s on the front desk not to get in my way. I know you can’t call them, but the ground floor is only thirty seconds away. You can’t bar the doors against me, and if you block the lifts, I’ll just walk up. It’ll take longer, and I’ll be pissed off when I get there, but it’s inevitable all the same.”

He heard her issue a hurried instruction, then come back breathless. “Sam. I can’t… I’m scared.”

“I’m not. Not anymore.” The low building that sat at the base of the tower was just beyond the next junction. He was being watched, but not by millions across the globe: just by a few hundred. Some were pressed, like their employer, against their office windows as he strode up to the street-level canopy that hung over the doorway. Others, armed guards forming a secondary line of defense, huddled in doorways and behind pieces of street furniture. They let him pass, and he didn’t expect anything less.

He had schematics, architects’ plans, photographs. He could navigate his own way to the elevator shaft, and he’d ride in one all the way to the top, despite his dislike of that mode of transport. It was true: he wasn’t frightened at all, by anything.

Petrovitch barged through the doors and marched through the foyer.

“Get the kettle on. I’m coming up.”