Theories of Flight

16

They eyed the stream of refugees from the other side of the plate glass in the university foyer.

“This will complicate matters,” said Miyamoto.

“No shit, Sherlock.” Petrovitch tracked the movement of a woman pushing a huge chrome-ornamented pram piled high with plump plastic bin-bags. There was no evidence of a baby.

“They are all going one way. Not the direction we wish to go, either.”

“Yeah. You stating the yebani obvious is going to get really old, really quick.” Petrovitch held the door open to let one of the engineering lecturers out, wheeling a trolley stacked with taped-closed boxes. The noise poured in, the babble, the roar of people on the move. It reminded him of the old days, before the Long Night, when he was anonymous and the city sheltered him. “Let’s go.”

The only way they could make progress on the pavement was to press themselves against the walls, and even then, they had to stop for bulkier loads to pass by, or be swept backward and lose precious ground.

Petrovitch pulled Miyamoto into a doorway toward the top end of Exhibition Road.

“This is stupid.”

Miyamoto crowded in next to him and still managed to take up half the space Petrovitch did despite being of similar height and build. “You wish to abandon your plan?”

“No. Just change it.” He craned his neck over the moving crowd and eyed the traffic stop-starting down both sides of the white line. “Let’s see how good you are at keeping up.”

Petrovitch stepped out and let the press of bodies carry him away. But even as he shuffled back the way he’d come, he edged leftward toward the road. His foot fell off the curb, and he was with those traveling light, bags and backpacks only, squeezing in with the cars and vans, all heading south.

Then he sat on the bonnet of a car, and swung his legs up. Ignoring the furious driver hammering ineffectually on his horn, he walked up the windscreen to the roof and looked up the street toward Hyde Park.

The bigger vehicles were a problem. He couldn’t mount a big van or a lorry, but there was a path through that relied on switching lanes and no small dose of luck.

The car beneath him jerked forward to close with the bumper of the one in front, and Petrovitch crouched like a surfer to keep his balance.

Miyamoto appeared at his side, and thought Petrovitch needed steadying.

“Why don’t you look out for yourself?” Petrovitch rose up and, with a grimace of unexpected pain, started running.

The bodywork sounded hollow under his feet as he skipped down to the boot end and over the gap to the next car. There was a mattress tied on top—people thought they might need the strangest things—and he bounced across it, using it as a springboard to the next car in the queue.

He didn’t check behind him. Of course Miyamoto was there. The kid thought he was better than Petrovitch, more worthy than Petrovitch, and no part of him was going to let a gaijin show him up.

Petrovitch landed lightly, bracing himself with his extended fingertips. The woman behind the wheel stared at him. Every bit of space within the interior was overtaken with soft toys: it looked like she was being eaten alive by pastel-colored fur. It made the couple with the mattress look sane.

No time to wonder, though. He was up and over and confronted with his first flat-faced van. The street was supposed to be two-way traffic, but only an idiot would be going north at a time like this: both sides of the white line were stacked with a long queue of traffic, and the spaces between filled with people.

He judged the distance to the roof of the nearest car. Too far from a standing start, but neither did he want to climb down.

Miyamoto bounded by on the other side, not condescending to look back. He moved like a cat, all loose-limbed grace and confidence, as if he’d trained for this very moment.

Petrovitch growled under his breath and leaped, just as a shopping trolley rolled underneath. He used the handle as a stepping stone, planting his leading foot between the hands that steered it.

By the time he’d straightened up on the orange roof, Miyamoto was two vehicles ahead. Petrovitch set off in pursuit. Even when presented with another obstruction, in the shape of a lorry cab, he managed not to lose momentum. He pushed himself between the lines of cars, using the last of the bodywork to gain the first part of the next.

The lights at the junction cycled uselessly through the colors. Miyamoto got to them first, but only by the length of time it took Petrovitch to scramble over the last car and slide his feet to the tarmac.

“That was fun,” he said. “Let’s do it again.”

Miyamoto raised an eyebrow above his dark glasses. “Are you planning to travel like this all the way to… where?”

“West Ham. Ten k, that way.” He pointed down to Hyde Park Corner. “But there are around five million people trying to cross the Thames all at once. We have to go north to go east.”

“Across the park, then.” Miyamoto touched the hilt of his sword, protruding over his left shoulder. But he cast a glance toward the Oshicora Tower, visible in the middle distance.

“We’ll see what the Marylebone Road’s like.” With that, Petrovitch shouldered his way into the crossways traffic toward Hyde Park. Miyamoto followed, eyes fixed on Petrovitch’s flapping coat.

The park was fenced off—boarded in like a construction site with painted wooden panels twice his height. In amongst the warning signs nailed to the outside were biohazard symbols in stark black and white. The gates themselves were chained and locked as well as covered in plastic sheeting.

Miyamoto drew his sword and slipped the blade between the gate and plastic. Then he drew his arm up. The black iron showed through as the plastic parted. The ornate curls and leaves had been designed for show, not security. Petrovitch jumped up, dug his boot in a gap and clambered up until he reached the top, using one of the gateposts as a handhold.

He turned and slid down the other side, to find Miyamoto staring at him through the bars.

“What?”

The corner of Miyamoto’s mouth twisted. “You are better at this than I thought you would be.”

“I can piss higher up the wall than you can, too. Get your zhopu over here.”

Miyamoto resheathed his katana and scaled the gate, hand-over-hand, dropping lightly to the ground next to Petrovitch. He looked across the gray wasteland over the top of his shades.

Yellow diggers huddled together on the north side, and the first attempts at bulldozing the shanty-town had radiated from there, no more now than a sea of compacted mud. The Serpentine had been drained and dredged by a bucket-line, a crane parked over at the east end of the lake.

Apart from that, and the absence of the dying, it was as Petrovitch remembered it: low, ramshackle shelters, mostly collapsed, made from old, wind-torn bags, pieces of crates and metal spars, and the paths twisting between them in a drunkard’s walk.

“Yeah. Follow the road straight across, and try not to contract cholera.”

Petrovitch set off at a jog, giving the rats time to skitter out of his way. Some of the shacks had been constructed on the road through the park, but the route was more or less direct.

The bridge across the black stink of the empty Serpentine was grim enough. The graded and flattened ground leading up to Lancaster Gate, with its caterpillar treadmarks and drifts of crushed white bones poking up out of the brown soil was worse.

The anonymous desperate had come to Hyde Park to lie down and die, and this was their legacy. It had enraged him while it had stood, and it retained its capacity to do so after its closure. Petrovitch considered it a selfish, stupid waste: pointless, pathetic, infantile.

It lent him more than enough energy to climb the gates on the other side of the park, vaulting the spear-shaped spikes decorating the top to land, knees bent, beside the Bayswater Road.

Miyamoto jumped down after him, and surveyed the scene. “This looks little better, Petrovitch-san.”

People were still streaming south, a formidable, moving obstacle to overcome. Outies had been reported as close as Hampstead Heath: those who were on the west side had options on where to go, but those on the east could only go one way. Tower Bridge was the lowest downstream crossing point, right in the heart of the city.

“If I was running this show, well, we wouldn’t have got to this point. But even now, someone should be in charge of traffic management.” Petrovitch pushed his glasses against his nose. “I suppose we should be grateful it hasn’t turned into a stampede.”

“Yet,” said Miyamoto. “There are reports of contact in Stratford.”

“Chyort.” Petrovitch dug in his pocket for the case that held his clip-ons. He fitted them over his glass lenses and fired up the rat.

[Moshi moshi.]

“Yeah. Need a route. There’s a barracks in West Ham Madeleine’s working out of. If you can monitor the MEA radio net, too—without letting them know you’re listening—and see if you can hear her, that’d be even better.”

“Who are you talking to?” asked Miyamoto.

“Voice-activated hatnav. With some additional, non-standard, plug-ins.”

Text started to roll out in front of his eyes: [I need some criteria: shortest, safest, fastest, or some defined mixture of those three parameters.]

“Make it the fastest.”

The AI materialized in front of the unseeing Miyamoto. [Any route, any method?]

“Yeah.”

[How are you at running along railway lines?]

“Oh, you’re joking.”

[No trains. No people. I am aware you have been promised that before: this time will be different.] The avatar, looking through the cameras on the building opposite, sized up Miyamoto. [Who is this?]

Aware that a regular hatnav couldn’t hold a conversation, let alone instigate one, Petrovitch tapped out his reply on the rat’s screen: Miyamoto—one of Sonja’s corporate samurai.

The AI’s avatar circled Miyamoto, and said approvingly: [He looks competent.]

You wish, Petrovitch typed. Now get on with it. We haven’t got time for this.

[I am—surprised is not the right word—bemused by humans’ ability to believe two contradictory views at the same time. I will have to learn how this is possible.]

He knew he’d regret it, but he asked anyway, “What the chyort are you on about?”

[You refuse to say that you love your wife. Yet every action you take shows that you do.]

Miyamoto was becoming too interested in what Petrovitch was doing. He started to crane his neck to see what was being written, and Petrovitch snapped the rat shut before he could make out a single word.

The avatar smiled; Petrovitch hated that expression, because he knew the vast intellect behind the stupid floppy hair and studied innocence had just got one over on him, and it was perversely happy about it.

“Were you doing anything I need to know about?” Miyamoto leaned closer so that Petrovitch could make out his own reflection in the dark glasses.

“No.”

The avatar strode into the crowd, turned and waved Petrovitch on. It made it look so that bodies that passed between them obscured his form: just a trick and a waste of processing time, but it was showing off.

Petrovitch put the rat back in his pocket. “We’re off again.”

“You have a way through this madness?”

“Yeah.”

Following the avatar, Petrovitch elbowed his way across the road and into the warren of sidestreets. Most traffic was sticking to the main roads, guided by herd instinct and maps which were in meltdown themselves. The maze created by the tall town houses and short straight streets must have looked baffling and frightening to the average refugee, whose only concern was to get to a bridge before it was cut.

So for Petrovitch and Miyamoto, it was easier going as they worked their way, dancing and dodging, toward Paddington. They had to cross Sussex Gardens, a rat-run from the Edgware Road that had turned into a solid mass of stalled cars and nervous people, but then they were back in the little streets in front of the station.

The avatar ran ahead, waited for them, then bounded away again, urging them on.

Praed Street was as bad as anything they’d found before. Two roads converged at the far end. It was a riot waiting to happen, and tempers were already rising as Petrovitch jumped up to a car roof and leaped across to the next.

A shout alerted him. He turned to see Miyamoto balanced on the car he’d just left. He’d drawn his sword and in one uninterrupted movement, he brought the singing edge of the blade to a halt a hair’s width from a ruddy man’s upturned snarling face, perfectly exposed beneath him.

“Gun,” called Petrovitch.

Miyamoto reached to his waist and tossed the gun over the heads of the crowd. Petrovitch caught it, and trusting that eyes were turning toward him already, fired three shots into the air.

The crack of gunfire, amplified and echoed by the glass and brickwork, achieved a collective cringe. For a moment, everyone stopped, ducked, looked for cover.

In that moment, Petrovitch was gone again: car, car, big last jump that barreled into a wheeled suitcase and the person pulling it, tumble, roll, and run down the dark service road that ran beside the concourse.

Miyamoto took his chance, too. Naked sword in front of him, he followed. One, two, three, and off into the space created by the fallen man, before chasing away after Petrovitch’s flapping coat-tails.

Behind them, the roar of shouts and screams built and spread, along with the panic and fear: Outies, in the central Metrozone. What order there had been evaporated. They left chaos in their wake.