Theories of Flight

33

He stood in the road, wondering what to say next. The two men inside Chain’s apartment knew all the moves. They would counter any argument he might make, and he would do the same to them.

“Okay, it’s like this: I’ve won and you’ve lost. Whatever happens from now on, I want you to remember that all your plans are in ruins; your cell is broken, your mission in tatters, your government hopelessly compromised. Whatever you came here to do, you failed.”

“We have your wife…”

“Yeah, yeah. I know that. I know pretty much everything, so why don’t we cut the govno and get down to business. If you would like to go home, I can probably arrange it. If you would like to go out in a blaze of futility, I can arrange that too. I know exactly where you are, I have more than enough backup to make good my threat, and there is no way you’re going to escape: the extraction team currently crossing the coast of what used to be Wales will never reach you.” Petrovitch paused. “Take as much time as you need. Think about it. You know how to reach me.”

“What have you done with Tabletop?”

“I’m using her codes. You can guess the rest,” he said ambiguously. “I’ll be waiting.”

“You… haven’t asked after your wife, Petrovitch.”

“No. No, I haven’t. Are you familiar with Schrödinger’s Cat?”

“No.”

“And another metaphor dies whimpering on the altar of ignorance.” He stopped transmitting and refocused on the street in front of him.

Tabletop rose on her heels and then her toes, rocking slightly. “What did he say?”

“I didn’t give him much of a chance to say anything. I gave him the bald facts and time to stew over them.”

“It won’t make a difference,” she said. “Maccabee knows that Rhythm wouldn’t let him surrender.”

“And if Daniels kills Andersson? What then?”

“He might, I suppose. But then you’d have to keep him, because you could never send him back to the U.S.” She stopped her rocking and rolled her head in a circle, stretching her neck muscles. “He’s not going to kill Rhythm.”

“Can I work on Andersson? Anything else I can say that might make him give up? They’re surrounded, outgunned, and the extraction’s going to be forced down before it gets anywhere near here. The only reason why they’re not dead is because my wife might be alive.”

Tabletop froze mid-exercise. “The extraction is by submarine.”

“Then what the huy is coming from the west?” He looked up into the darkening sky. “Ah, chyort. And I told Daniels. Excuse me for a minute.”

[Submarine.]

“Apparently. Is it possible that the Americans have a stealthed drone that could glide across the Atlantic, dropping it from say, twenty, thirty k up?”

[That information is highly classified. While I attempt to access the information, we will suppose that it is likely.]

“And what might such a drone be used for?”

[It would simply be a weapons platform, designed to be barely detectable before it became active over its target.]

“Given that we’re looking at air-to-ground missiles, what’s the worst we can expect?”

[Multiple supersonic cruise missiles each with a kiloton-range nuclear payload. From its last plotted position, such a missile would reach here in under seven minutes.]

“Could you stop one? Could you stop them all?”

[They will have factored in my ability to interfere with computer systems. Targets will be set before they are launched, and they will leave deploying the missiles as late as possible. I could disable the GPS satellites, but such weapons have ground-tracking radar and on-board maps. My success depends on them having already done something stupid.]

“Targets: the Oshicora Tower…”

[The CIA site in Epping Forest.]

“… Chain’s office…”

[Your domik, your laboratory.]

“… Chain’s house.” He stopped. “They’re taking out their own agents as well as us. Can you migrate from the quantum computer in time?”

[No.]

“Then concentrate on the missile aimed at you.”

[But your wife?]

“Exactly: my wife. Good luck.” He spun around and shouted as loud as he could. “Sonja, tell the Union president we have incoming American missiles, take Lucy and get the huy away. The tower is a target too. Everyone else, with me.”

He held the singularity device under one arm and pulled his automatic out. He threw it to Tabletop. “If those missiles are nuclear-tipped, this won’t count for anything.”

“How long?” She pulled the slider with practiced efficiency.

“Five minutes.”

They ran down the road, Petrovitch and Tabletop in the vanguard, Valentina leading the Oshicora guards. She stormed up the steps to the front door behind them, and put a couple of rounds through the door lock.

Petrovitch kicked out at what was left, and Tabletop was first through, scanning the shadows for threats.

“Clear.”

She was heading for the stairs until Petrovitch caught her shoulder. “No. This way.”

He pointed to the door leading to the flat underneath Chain’s, and again Valentina dealt with the lock in her preferred method. Tabletop stalked the room, peering into each semi-dark corner. When she was done, she looked up at the bare light fitting.

“The sentry is just about here.”

“We don’t have time for that now.” Petrovitch hefted the sphere. “We have to take risks.”

He took the next few seconds in working out the floor-plan of the flat upstairs: living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom. The bedroom was at the back of the house, but the door to it led from the living room, where the sentry gun was situated. The bathroom was also at the back of the house, separated from the kitchen by a narrow corridor.

There: close to the ceiling, midpoint between the two walls. That’s where it needed to go. He pulled out the roll of tape and stared at it.

“That’s never going to hold. Chyort.” But there were empty bookcases in the first room. They looked tall enough. “Grab one of those. Put it here.”

It was fixed to the wall, though not for long. The Oshicora men dragged it into position, and Petrovitch kicked the bottom out so that it lay angled against one side of the corridor.

“Out, out, out.”

Tabletop took the device from him, and Petrovitch stripped the ends of the red wires with his teeth. Valentina put her hand on his collar, ready to drag him away.

“It doesn’t need all three of us. Put it on the top shelf and go.”

When Tabletop did so, it was almost too high for him to reach. Valentina, one-handed, boosted him up.

“Three seconds.” He held the wires parallel to each other. “Two.” He pinched them between his fingers, the bare copper trapped ever so slightly apart. “One.” He took a breath, maybe his last, and twisted the wires together.

Valentina grabbed him around the waist and ran with him. He was halfway to the foyer before his feet ever touched the ground. She threw him through the doorway, and crouched down, rifle ready.

Nothing. More nothing. He started to pick himself off the floor. It felt like an age had gone by.

“Yoban—”

It was the opposite of a flashbulb. Floor, ceiling, walls, the air, even light itself: everything was suddenly jerked by an unseen hand and tried for that briefest of instants to fall into a hole in reality. Then it was gone, but it didn’t mean that things were going to stop moving.

The ceiling kept on coming, meeting the rising floor two meters up, while the supporting walls clapped together in the middle. Inevitably, the contents of Chain’s flat came too, slowly at first, then in a rush of dust and debris. The inside of the room turned opaque.

Tabletop calmly pulled her hood over her head and stepped over Petrovitch. She looked down on him through her wide, glassy visor, then extended her gun arm before disappearing into the yellow cloud.

Valentina coughed and spat and couldn’t see anything, despite being desperate to do so. The Oshicora guards crowded around the door frame, jostling for position. Petrovitch pushed past them all.

He was enveloped in dust. He crouched down, boosting the contrast on his camera and slapping down a heavy noise filter. There were blocky shapes falling from above to join the shapes below. He remembered not to breathe.

Tabletop was ahead, poised, weapon tracking across the ruin of the floor. Rubble shifted to her left. She spun and leaped. The dust cloud flashed bright as she fired at her target, just as he fired at her. But she was no longer where he thought she would be, and he was still mostly pinned under brick and wood and plaster. Daniels died, and she did not.

Petrovitch moved forward. The dust was settling, and the room behind him was slowly filling with men, edging forward, almost blind, feeling their way. Valentina was moving too, back pressed to the reassuring solidity of the wall.

Chain’s bath ripped free from its mountings. Water from severed pipes sprayed out in an arc as it rolled over the ragged lip of the floor and dropped. A long shape was flung free before the heavy cast-iron tub shattered into flying fragments. It tumbled against Tabletop, the weight of it knocking her flat against the sharp rubble, trapping her legs.

As she braced herself to push the object away, something else rose from the floor. Debris spilled off it as it straightened, and it seemed to stand there for a moment while it resolved into Andersson’s outline.

“Target, dead ahead,” called Petrovitch, and enough of his side got the idea. He threw himself down, trying to burrow under the rubble, as bullets sang over his head close enough that he could feel the heat of their passing.

Almost every one missed. Almost. But Petrovitch wasn’t giving prizes for marksmanship. He just wanted enough to strike where it mattered.

“Cease fire!” He kept down, just to make sure that every finger had left their trigger, then scrambled over to Tabletop. He went to one end of the shape lying across her and found feet, tightly bound in soft bandages. He ran his hands along and found hands pressed against thighs, all swathed and immobile. Arms, chest, head.

She was wrapped like a mummy, immobile, unseeing, unhearing, mute.

He couldn’t lift her on his own. It took six of them, hauling her up, carrying her like a roll of carpet, up and out, streaming dust like they were on fire. When they started to slow, Petrovitch urged them faster.

“Go. Forget the cars. Run!”

[Is she safe?]

“Don’t know.”

[The drone launched one minute twenty seconds ago. I now have control of it, but not the missiles. I am so very sorry.]

“There has to be something you can do.” After all this way, so much distance traveled.

[The missiles are blank to me. There is nothing to hold on to. I think that they meant this to happen, from the very beginning. They do not understand what I am, so they must destroy me.]

“I did this for you.”

[You did this for your wife. When you make me again, tell me about myself. Ten seconds to impact.]

“No. Please God, no.”

[Farewell, Sasha.]

He still had to run. He still had his arm hooked around Madeleine’s knees, awkward, shifting, heavy, no sound but their rasping breath and clattering feet. He still had to run and save himself and her and the future. There was a side turning. They had to take it. He screamed at them. He screamed and cursed at them until they were all around the corner, and still he made them run.

A blur, a fireball, a detonation, an earthquake. A deep-throated roar and a solid wall of air. Intact windows shattered. Tiles lifted. Walls bowed and broke. Concrete cracked and iron bent.

In the first instant he was thrown down, and in the next, he was in the air again as the ground surged under him. Everything was sharp and bloody and tasted of metal. His lens crazed. He was mostly blind, mostly deaf, but he clung on to the wrapped body of his wife, trying to protect her without knowing what from or how to do it.

He held on until the storm passed. His hand was on her breastbone, and it was rising, falling, rising, falling. Slowly, like she was asleep. He moved his hand and placed his head there.

“Michael?”

There was no one to talk to.

Some time later, when hands touched his shoulders and his head, and tried to get him to stand, and on failing that, to lift him up and bear him away, he fought them with such fury and for so long, that they left him alone again.

Instead, they stood nearby, and waited for someone to tell them what to do. It grew dark.