Theories of Flight

7

He could taste blood, and he was certain it was his. Dust and smoke swirled all around: his lungs were full of it, and the skin on his face was scrubbed wet by the rough road. His ears were ringing.

Petrovitch lay there and blinked, trying to make sense of what had just happened. His glasses were awry, and he dragged a hand out from beneath him to straighten them. There was blood on his palms, too.

He took a breath, coughed hard, and focused on the shotgun lying in front of him. He reached out and dragged it toward him, then used it to push himself upright.

The bombed building had fallen in on itself, extinguishing the fire beneath, but all around were shattered windows and flames twisting from them. A column of black ash rose thick into the air before being blown ragged in the wind. Behind the noise in his head was the clamor of alarms.

Chain’s car was between him and what was left of the fence, its paintwork now scarred by more than age and the occasional knock. The open doors had lost all their glass, the front tires their air.

Petrovitch limped to where the gate lay flattened against the ground.

“Chain!”

No sign of him. Popping supports, snapping walls, cracking rafters, but no Chain.

He slung the gun over his shoulder and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Chain!”

He could feel the heat from where he stood. Steam was rising from beneath his feet. He whirled around, seeing for the first time a straggling crowd forming back at the roundabout.

“Chain!”

He saw him. He saw his feet, his legs as far as his knees, laid out on the bonnet of his own car. The rest of him had been forced through the concave windscreen.

Petrovitch walked slowly toward him, aware that Chain wasn’t moving his worn shoes, not even an involuntary twitch.

“Chain?”

He knew he had to check. He knew he didn’t want to. He gripped the top of the door, steeling himself, then ducked down.

For a moment, he couldn’t work out what he was looking at. Chain’s head appeared to be missing, and then he saw it, bent back under his still and shattered body, caught between the two front seats.

Petrovitch straighted up, breathing hard. Everything seemed to be spinning, the sky, the smoke, the street. People were running toward him, running away from him, shouting incomprehensible things at him. He didn’t understand.

And someone caught his eye.

A figure, all in black, was walking away up the Pancras Road. Walking. Reaching a line of bystanders and pushing through them, leaving them to turn and gesture angrily.

“Hey.” Petrovitch slid the shotgun off his shoulder and into his hands. “Hey. You.”

He chambered the first shell and started after him. Within a few steps, he was jogging, and so was the man. At least it looked like a man: tall, athletic, dressed like an athlete even, an all-in-one body suit with nothing flapping. A courier would have had a courier bag. This man had nothing.

Petrovitch speeded up, gauging a loping gait that would close the distance between them. The man responded in kind, and it quickly turned into a chase.

They were both running as fast as they could. Petrovitch reached the line of people and they scattered before him, taking in the state of his face, the big gun held across his body, the aura of utter blind rage seeping from every pore of his filthy, smoke-scarred skin.

Suddenly, he had a clear shot. He snapped the stock to his shoulder and his finger spasmed on the trigger. The recoil nearly tore his arm off. He spun and fell, the fresh pain serving only to stoke the fire inside.

He got up with a growl and started over again. The man was further ahead now, moving in fast, clean strides. Then he just seemed to disappear.

Petrovitch raced to the place where he’d last seen him. A road to his left went under the railway station—a deep long tunnel made wide by the pillared supports for the structures above.

He took a chance and took the turn. The colonnades either side were home to the homeless. They stared at him as he ran by, but moments before they had all been looking down toward the small rectangle of daylight at the far end.

Framed in it, just for a second, was the man. He hesitated as he looked behind him, and Petrovitch fired again. This time he leaned in hard, and though the butt kicked back ferociously, he didn’t screw up.

The road sparked just in front of his target, who clasped at his shin before running off again, going to the right, heading north.

Petrovitch kept going. Arms, legs pumping, coat streaming out behind him, heart spinning like it had never spun before. His breath came in rhythmic spurts, in, out, out, in, out, out. Trying to remember everything Madeleine had taught him: stride length, balance, keeping his head up even if he felt like hunching over, even if he felt like sinking to his knees and burying his head in his hands.

And he was gaining. He’d wounded the man, forced razor-sharp chips of road surface at his leg: even if they hadn’t penetrated, the impact of them slowed him down. Whereas Petrovitch’s cuts, grazes, that stabbing sensation in his face that felt like an electric shock every time his feet hit the tarmac, spurred him on.

The further they got from the site of the explosion, the more people were on the streets. They were looking up at the black cone of ascending smoke, or sometimes not even that, just out, just happening to be on the route of a man head to toe in black, sprinting by with an uneven step, and a few seconds later of a slight man with white-blond hair and a face streaming with bright red blood. The shotgun was almost incidental.

Petrovitch saw the man glance behind again, caught a glimpse of a wide mirrored band over his eyes. Hatnav: he was using hatnav, and knew precisely where he was, and where he needed to go. The case for Petrovitch’s own overlays was in his pocket, banging up and down against his thigh, but he couldn’t afford the time to put them on.

The sirens that had been converging on the yard behind King’s Cross shifted subtly. They were coming up behind him.

The man he was chasing knew that as well. He had hacked feeds from MEA control center. He barreled right into a vast office building, squat and dirty, windows jagged and doors shattered.

Petrovitch went in too, blue and red lights flickering at his back. The dim foyer, the hanging ceiling panels where lights and wire had been ripped down, the skeletons of partition walls. It was a stupid place to be, where ambush was easy and hiding easier.

He brought up the gun and tracked its sights across the expanse of destroyed fittings and bird crap.

He heard a noise above him. The barrel jerked up and he let rip with another round, blowing a hole in the remains of the suspended ceiling and putting a crater into the concrete slab above.

MEA militia were right outside. He didn’t have long before they stopped him.

Up the stairs. The man was heading for the roof. Even as Petrovitch pounded the steps in the stairwell, he realized that it didn’t make any sense. If it’d been him, he’d have stuck to the ground floor. The area was vast, the cover good. By going up, he’d be trapped. MEA would just have to wait for him to come out.

So there had to be another reason, another plan, unless the man was a balvan. Which he could be.

There was sound on the stairs. A door popping open, a flash of daylight, then the door swinging back shut: he’d reached the top, and in a few seconds, so would Petrovitch.

He shouldered the door, and tumbled out onto the great plain of the roof. The black figure was really limping now, but still moving at a speed that put him halfway across the gray-green surface.

He could shoot and miss. He could force him up against the edge of the roof and make certain. He kept on going.

The man ahead jumped up onto the parapet and leaped. There was no hesitation, no momentary stall; a fluid up and over. Petrovitch’s waist slammed into the barrier. He looked. A lower roof, and the man still running, still favoring his left leg.

It was at the limits of what Petrovitch thought he could hit, but he’d do it anyway. He took a deep breath, held it, and looked down the length of the gun. He had no heartbeat to bounce the sights, and he was, all of sudden, brutally calm.

Squeeze the trigger.

And the man jinked sideways. The roof where he’d been pocked and insulation fluffed out.

He had real-time satellite data. That cost money.

It was a long way down to that second roof. The man had done it, so Petrovitch was going to do it too. He landed in a heap, and he managed to hurt his wrist trying to roll with the blow. He got up, and restarted the same monotonous beat of one foot after another. He needed to keep his quarry on the move and not give him a moment’s rest.

Ahead was a half-finished building, looking like it had been half-finished for a long time. It wore a shroud of tattered plastic around its open floors and suspended beams.

If Petrovitch got his prey inside, his spy-in-the-sky would be useless.

The man seemed to be obliging. He jumped over the railings and onto the scaffolding tied to the side of the construction site. He hung on one of the crossbars, then started to slide downward, going hand over hand, slowing his fall.

As Petrovitch reached the edge, the man stopped and ducked into the building’s shell, three stories lower, across a three-meter gap.

Petrovitch slung the shotgun over his back, climbed up and over and braced himself. If he fell now, he’d die. More to the point, the man would get away. He bent his legs and pushed out.

He flew across the distance, arms outstretched. The first level flashed past his eyes. His momentum carried him onto the platform below, slamming him down on the wooden boards laid across the scaffolding.

The whole structure shook. Someone had been borrowing pieces of it from the ground floor. But the building itself looked sound enough: no walls, no duct work, as empty as a car park. He picked himself up and shrugged the gun back into his cold grip.

He ghosted through the hall of pillars to where the stairwell was. No stairs, just a black pit all the way down. He’d come too far to give up: but that was just like him, always going too far when a saner mind would have called a halt.

He threw the gun down to the next slab of floor, then lowered himself off the edge until his fingers turned white and his feet dangled over the abyss. He swung his legs and let go.

He landed badly. Again. This time he jarred his back all the way from his coccyx to his shoulder blades. He looked around, saw nothing and repeated the process. Gun thrown. Body suspended and dropped. Spine-crushing impact.

Still nothing. The man had been on this level, and Petrovitch had arrived too late. He jumped to the next floor: the air was forced out of his lungs and he was left gasping.

A shadow came straight at him out of the gloom, with that injured skipping run. Petrovitch snatched up the gun, forcing himself to a sitting position.

The figure sprang clean over him before he could aim, and dropped into the stairwell. Petrovitch twisted awkwardly around, trying to keep his sights on him. The man’s hands slapped down on the lip of the next floor down, and he used that slightest of touches to jack-knife his black-clad body to safety.

He looked up at Petrovitch, nose and mouth and chin a pale half-moon. Petrovitch looked down, past the knife that was sticking out of his chest, steel blade visible between nylon grip and the growing stain across the front of his T-shirt.

Maybe the man was waiting for Petrovitch to topple forward, down the stairwell, dead before he hit the bottom, dead for certain afterward. Or perhaps for the gun to slip from nerveless fingers and for him to sag backward, his life leaking away.

Petrovitch brought the shotgun up to his shoulder and fired his last shell. The solid slug tore a hole through the man’s ribcage and punched out his spine. What remained folded into the center of the poppy-colored pattern blossoming on the concrete behind him.

The sound of the shot echoed away. Petrovitch was quite prepared to reverse the gun and beat out what life was left in his adversary. When it looked like that wasn’t going to be necessary, he put the empty gun down beside him and curled his fingers around the knife handle.

He gave it a tug, and it felt like he was trying to pull his heart out, so he stopped. He could work it free by moving it from side to side, but that would cut more flesh. The point of the blade had sliced through his muscle, between his ribs, and embedded itself in the kevlar patch that covered his implant.

He might even consider himself lucky, when he had the luxury of time.

The chase was over. The adrenaline that had powered his fury was draining away. He hurt now, all over, from the acid pain in his face to the dull, numbing ache of his legs. And more.

He got to his feet, staggering like a drunkard, stumbling from one pillar to the next, until he got to the scaffolding.

Most of the MEA militia were still back at the first office building. One or two had heard the last shot, and were tentatively suggesting to their superiors that they should investigate.

Petrovitch wrapped the crook of his elbow around one of the scaffolding poles and leaned out. It wasn’t far, but it was far enough. He clutched his knees to one of the downtubes and shinned down, taking exaggerated care not to knock the knife handle.

The first MEA soldier raised his pistol at Petrovitch, the second pushed it back down and pointed.

Petrovitch peeled his glasses free and scrubbed at his eyes. “Yeah. The mudak brought a knife to a gunfight.”

Overwhelmed by abrupt exhaustion, he slumped to his knees in front of them, and hung his head low over the ground. Tears as well as blood dripped into the dust.

They’d killed Harry Chain.