Theories of Flight

31

A squad of Oshicora security guards met them outside the entrance to the university, dressed in full armor and carrying carbines. They had more hardware dangling from their webbing straps. Sonja was in the middle of them, her normally immaculate hair awry.

“I told you I didn’t need them,” said Petrovitch. He climbed out of the car and stalked across the pavement.

“Sam,” said Sonja. She finally saw him as he’d become, not as he had pretended to be on all the video conversations they’d had. “What have you done?”

“Yeah. In Russia, the medical experiments have you.” He spread his arms wide and parted the guards. Valentina followed in his wake, cocking her rifle and sneering disdainfully at the unbloodied poseurs.

He pushed at the doors to the foyer: they were self-opening, and although they still had power, they weren’t opening to anyone. It was a moment’s work to hack them, and they flew aside. He marched across the tiled concourse. At the start of the week, that place had echoed to the ludicrous scrum that had accompanied his scientific discovery. Now, it rang only to tramping boots and the muted rattles of military equipment.

At the foot of the stairs, he turned. “Wait here.”

Sonja put her hands on her hips. “Sam, Sorenson’s going to kill you.”

“She’s going to try,” he corrected. He pulled out the tank major’s side-arm and pulled the slide. “Your crew will wait right here, and they will not interfere. I’m doing this on my own.”

“She’s going with you, isn’t she?” Sonja pointed at Valentina.

“She’s my right arm. Neither of us has a choice whether she comes with me.”

“Well, I’m coming too.”

Petrovitch turned his camera on her, and judged how much damage she could do to his fragile psyche in the time it took to get to his lab.

“Only up to the door, then.” He started up the stairs. “Tell me about the Americans.”

“Publicly, there’s not going to be a change in policy. You, me, everyone involved, is a member of the terrorist organization the New Machine Jihad, which is as stupid as it sounds but their foreign policy doesn’t do nuanced. Privately, the President will not sign any further Executive Orders against us. I think that means we can ignore the saber-rattling for now.”

“That promise is as meaningless as it sounds if we don’t know what Executive Orders he’s signed already.”

“It was the best I could do!”

“Then you have to do better. Yobany stos, Sonja. The art of leadership is delegation: your father understood that. If you don’t think playing hardball with the Yanks is your thing, find someone else who’ll go back for a third time and threaten to cut Mackensie’s yajtza off. I’ve handed you half a city; do not lose it. If you screw up, the AI has nowhere to go. Old man Oshicora’s work, pfft. Gone.”

“What about you? Why don’t you do it?”

Petrovitch stopped abruptly, his foot hovering over a step. He looked at her, leaning in toward her until she didn’t know whether to stare into the blank lens of the camera or at the stained bandages that covered his eyes.

“You don’t want me making decisions for you right now, vrubatsa?”

She nodded mutely.

“Good.” He resumed walking, and told her many other things: how the AI was going to lose its map shortly, how she was to secure the power stations and repair the grid as a priority, how leaving the Outies a means of escape from the Metrozone was really important because she needed victory, not a blood-bath.

“You’re talking like you’re not intending to come back,” she said.

It was true, although he hadn’t meant it that way at all. “Something might go wrong,” he said. He kicked out at the door to the corridor. If he’d been Sorenson, he’d have been lying in wait just there, just beside the hinges, crouched down so no one could see him. He’d count the people through, then sight between his retreating shoulder blades.

She wasn’t that smart. She was going to want to humiliate him first, make him feel fear. She’d lost sight of her objective, whereas Petrovitch was so focused he believed he could almost storyboard out the next few minutes.

He let the door swing back toward him, then he pushed it open to its fullest extent, peering through the wire-strung glass. No, she definitely wasn’t that smart.

“Okay,” he said to Valentina. “The lab where they are has two rows of benches, four each. Heavy wood, good cover. A couple of desks on the right-hand side, also good. Loads of govno against the walls, windows down the left. Far end is a blackboard, facing the door. I’m guessing that’s where they’ll be. You go left, I’ll go right. Keep low, and listen carefully.”

“Da,” said Valentina. She checked her magazine, counting the shiny bullets with her thumbnail, then slammed it home.

The lab had double doors, and they took up positions either side. Sonja hovered. “Sam?”

“You have your work,” he said. “I have mine.”

He dipped his chin, and both he and Valentina rolled around the door frame, heading for the furniture they knew would be there. Again, if Sorenson had been smart, she would have used her time profitably in moving everything to her end of the room, giving her the cover and denying him.

Petrovitch caught the briefest of glimpses of her as he spun and rolled for the desk. She was standing, pistol against Lucy’s head, who sat taped to a wheelie chair in front of her.

He put his back against the column of desk drawers and glanced across at Valentina. She sat poised like he was, spine to the woodwork, knees slightly bent and feet planted on the floor. Her rifle, like his gun, pointed up at the ceiling lights that burned with unforgiving fluorescence.

To work: he rewound the last clip of video and examined it frame by frame. Lucy was still alive, because her eyes went from screwed tight shut to wide open as he crashed in. Sorenson looked even more crazy than she had been when she’d half-destroyed Wong’s.

Maybe she thought she was genuinely going to get revenge this time.

“Lucy?”

She had a thick strip of silver tape over her mouth, but she made a noise.

“Sit really still.” Petrovitch slipped his camera out of its cradle and checked he had a long enough lead. He pushed the front end very slightly around the edge of the desk so that he had a clear view. “We’ll get you out of this.”

Sorenson ground the barrel of her gun into Lucy’s scalp. “Come out where I can see you, Petrovitch. Your friend, too.”

“Why would we want to do something so stupid?”

“Because I’ll kill the girl if you don’t.”

“You see, Sorenson, you haven’t thought this through at all.” As he spoke, cross hairs formed on the center of Sorenson’s forehead. He could take her pretty much from any angle now, but he’d only get the one chance. “It’s not Lucy you want. It’s me.”

“And I’m using her to get to you. It’s working pretty swell so far.”

“Swell? Swell? Should have stayed in Nebraska, Charlie.”

“You don’t get to call me Charlie.”

“I can call you what I like, considering you’ve got a gun to a fourteen-year-old kid’s head. Suka, blad, bliatz: there’s three to start with. So, Charlie, let me tell you what’s going to happen next.”

“I get to say what goes down here.”

“Yebat moi lisiy cherep. You’re going to start counting, probably from ten, because you haven’t the wit to think of another number. You’re going to get to about five before you realize that if you kill Lucy, you’ll die yourself in the next nanosecond because there’s two of us, one of you, and you can’t point your gun at both of us at the same time. By the time you reach three, you’ll have figured out that because you’re so desperate to kill me, you’re going to have to ignore Valentina and try and shoot me before she shoots you. Somewhere between two and one, you’ll work out that even if Valentina stands up first, you can’t fire either at her or at Lucy, because the moment you do, I’ll put a round through the govno you use for brains. At zero, you’ll know with the conviction of a true believer that you’ve fucked up so badly, you may as well have died in the car crash that took your legs.” Petrovitch readied himself and held up three fingers where only Valentina could see them. “So start counting, Sorenson.”

He folded his fingers down one by one as Sorenson froze inside the spell he’d woven. He clenched his fist, and Valentina sprang up, her AK aiming straight and true.

Sorenson’s gun snapped around toward her, then inevitably started to drag back. Petrovitch slapped the butt of his automatic on the desktop to steady his shot. He found he had all the time in the world, more than enough time to see that the expression on the American’s face was one of complete and utter despair.

The front of Sorenson’s skull shattered like a dropped snow globe. Her gun hand wavered, directionless, then she fell, sprawling, knocking Lucy’s chair aside until it rolled to a halt. The blood kept pumping for a few seconds, then simply welled out across the floor.

Petrovitch’s finger was still hovering over the trigger.

“Did you…?” he asked.

“No.”

“Neither did I.”

They both dropped behind their respective cover. Petrovitch pulled on the lead to his camera to reel it in.

“Lucy. Just stay there. There’s someone else in here with us.”

Something moved toward the back of the laboratory: a scrape of metal, the rattle of wires. Petrovitch held up the pencil-thin camera and pointed it behind him, over the desk. A figure, all in black, unfolded itself from the wall and walked slowly across the floor. It was advancing toward Lucy, pistol in hand.

“Valentina? One target, coming from the right.” He clipped the camera back onto his head. “Now.”

He rose and aimed. Valentina did the same.

She wore a stealth suit; tight-fitting black fabric, lots of built-in smarts, and covered in little pockets. No mistaking that a woman wore this one, but her face was covered by the suit’s hood and the eyes by a mirrored band.

Her gloved hand came up and tugged the hem of the hood where it fitted across the browline. As it was eased back, blonde hair caught in a ponytail bobbed free.

Just as slowly, she bent down and laid the pistol on the floor.

“Hello, Doctor Petrovitch.” She scooped off her info shades and held them lightly, swinging them between thumb and forefinger as she straightened.

He kept her in his sights. “Aren’t you supposed to be on your way back to the Glasgow-Edinburgh Axis?”

“I don’t really have any family there,” she said. Taking exaggerated care, she leaned to one side and unsheathed the dagger strapped to her thigh. “A cover story. But if you’d checked, there would have been real people at the end of the phone.”

She dropped the knife point-first into the floor covering. It stuck and quivered.

“Petrovitch. Who is this woman?” Valentina stepped around the table, rifle to her shoulder. When she got to Lucy, she used her foot to draw her back toward the doors. The chair left wheel marks in blood on the vinyl.

“I’m guessing she’s not called Fiona McNeil, she’s not from the Axis, and she’s not one of my grad students. She’s a CIA agent, codename Argent?”

“Not Argent. You killed him. Tabletop.”

“What about Daniels? Which one is he?”

“Maccabee.” She smiled sadly. “It seems none of us have been very careful.”

“Yeah. If it hadn’t been for the Outies, I would have cleaned up every last one of you.”

“There are,” she said, “no coincidences.” She looked across at Petrovitch, then at Valentina, perhaps wondering which of them would shoot her first. She certainly sighed when she felt the moment had passed.

“You realize there will be hell to pay for this outrage?” Petrovitch surprised himself at just how calm he was. “Setting an army of fanatics on a defenseless civilian population?”

“Yes,” she said. “I know. Except they’re not quite as defenseless as we thought. Are they, Sam?”

He said nothing, but he did want to put some distance between her and her weapons. Since her whole body was a weapon, he considered doing to her what she’d done to Sorenson. Which then begged a whole different series of questions.

“Are you trying to defect?”

“I can’t help myself. I want to live in a world like the one you made me imagine. I want to be with… with people like you. I don’t know if that’s possible, but I know I don’t want to be who I am anymore. She’s not a good person. She watches as one of her fellow citizens ties up and beats a girl, and she does nothing because she feels nothing.” She looked at her feet. “Whereas you—you’re good. You came when she needed you, despite everything else that was going on.”

Petrovitch kept on expecting her accent to slip. It remained a flawless soft Scottish brogue.

“She’s my responsibility. What else could I do?”

“Abandon her. Got someone else to do the dirty work for you. Except neither of those crossed your mind for a moment, did they? You really need to cut her free, though.”

“That would mean one of us putting down our guns. I think we need to wait while I call for backup.” He cleared his throat. “Sonja?”

She opened the door a crack. “What took you so long? I heard the shot, then…”

“There are complications, some of which are still not fully resolved. There is a knife on the floor over there. Get that, and the gun, and take Lucy outside.”

Sonja edged further in. “Who is that?”

“CIA. Have you talked to Mackensie again?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Don’t. I want to bring that sooksin down and I’m not going to give him any advance warning. Go on, get the knife.”

Sonja skirted Sorenson’s ruined body and the lake of blood, and scooped up the weapons. She took the opportunity to size up the opposition. “I know you. You’re a student. One of Sam’s.”

“Yes. And you’re Sonja Oshicora.” She chewed at her lip. “One of your secretaries is Miyuki Yoshihara. Be very careful.”

Sonja acknowledged the information with a barely perceptible nod. Then she retraced her steps and wheeled Lucy out of the door. It flapped closed behind them.

“So what do I do with you?” asked Petrovitch. He lowered his gun, even though Valentina declined to follow his lead. “What do I even call you?”

“Tabletop. I can’t remember what my real name is.”

Petrovitch had his own reasons for forgetting his name, but it wasn’t because he didn’t know it. “Can’t?”

“They take it from you, along with your friends, your family, all your memories, your past and your future. I let them. For the sake of the nation.” The woman called Tabletop pressed her palms together and clenched her jaw. “If she wasn’t already dead, I’d kill the stupid bitch.”

When she lowered her hands, she apologetically showed them the insides of her wrists. Two small blades had emerged from the cloth.

“I say we shoot her,” said Valentina. “She is dangerous.”

“Yeah. She is.” Petrovitch scratched at his chin. “But it’s not us she’s dangerous to. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” she said. “I will betray them all and tell you everything.”

He took a moment to consider his next move. “Do you,” he started, and then deliberately put down his automatic on the desk. He took a step back so it was out of reach. “Do you know what happened to my wife?”

“I can do better than that,” said Tabletop. “I can take you to her.”