by Simon Morden
His hand hovered over the cut-off switch. In the distance, a door slammed shut. Newcomen started, but it was just one of the Inuit workers taking a short cut. He had a bag heavy with tools and a metre-long adjustable wrench slung over one shoulder.
He nodded under his furred hood at Newcomen, and then at Petrovitch, as he passed by.
“Real,” said Petrovitch, when the man had gone through the door at the front of the hangar. He flicked the pump off, then began the laborious task of unscrewing the hoses and coiling them back up, ready for the next user.
Newcomen was in an agony of impatience. “Tell me you don’t have to take that back across the airfield.”
“I ought. But I don’t have to. No one’s going to say anything to my face.” He patted the side of the tank. “I’ll leave it here.”
“So you’ll come now?”
“I’ll get my things.” He trooped back up the steps, gathered his bag from the cabin, and on a whim scooped up the axe he’d bought too. He met Newcomen back in the hangar. “Let’s go and see what we’re up against.”
Once outside, Newcomen pointed to the next hangar but one. It looked locked down, no lights showing, no one hanging around. Petrovitch searched for cameras, telltale signs of digital transmissions: they were there, and there, and there too, and those were just the nearest ones. As they walked, images were sent and commands were received, broadcasting from a building the other side of the runway.
He glanced up as a camera’s housing turned slowly to face him. He wondered if Ben and Jerry were hunkered down over the monitor, maybe a coffee in hand, watching him back, wondering what he was doing.
They weren’t going to have to wonder for long.
“This one?” Petrovitch rattled the door.
“They’re not just going to let us in, are they?” Newcomen looked around nervously.
“You still don’t get it, do you?” He dropped his bag in the snow and rolled the axe off his shoulder. The lock was just below the door handle. “We can do what the huy we want.”
He kicked the lock with the heel of his boot. Not only did the door give, it bent. It shuddered back on its hinges and banged against its stops. The cold, dark space beyond beckoned.
Finally there was some activity behind him. He could hear motors starting up: two, three petrol engines. They weren’t going to get to him before he’d had a good look around. He swung his bag through the opening, and held the axe loosely in his left hand.
He switched to infrared as he stepped over the threshold. There were the softly glowing shapes he was expecting, but what he was really looking for was the light switch.
There, the other side of the main doors: a big board, complete with fuses. “Wait here,” he said to Newcomen, and navigated his way over to the still-warm switches.
He clicked them on, one by one. The lights in the high ceiling flickered on in banks, slowly illuminating the scene. When he’d done, he saw that they’d sent thirty-two fully armed and armoured teletroopers after him.
They sat in neat rows, crouched over and dormant. Their heads rested on their massive chests, and their gun arms pointed at the ground. Their reversed knees were bent slightly. Whip aerials extended over their backs, and cooling fins radiated like coral growths from their spines.
“Ugly bastards, aren’t they?”
He walked up to one and looked into its stereoscopic imaging equipment. It looked disturbingly like huge black eyes.
“What are we going to do?” asked Newcomen.
“I thought we’d spray-paint them pink and give them each a girl’s name.” Petrovitch circled the one he was closest to. “Isn’t that right, Svetlana?”
“There are so many of them. I didn’t know.”
“Yeah, I’ll agree with you there. This is a lot of hardware for just us. Almost as if they’re expecting a much bigger party than the one we might possibly throw.” He reached out and laid his hand on Svetlana’s thigh. Her hip was as high as his head, and the joint — every joint — was carefully recessed and protected with interlocking plates. Not enough room to even wriggle his fingers inside.
They were designed to be tough to kill, to take the bricks and the bottles, the bullets and buckshot, even the smaller anti-tank rounds. They could dish it out, too. Rotary cannon and assault shotgun, grenade launcher. Shoulder-mounted rockets, even.
A man, maybe a thousand k away, would sit in a virtual rig and control it all like it was one big video game. Boom. Head shot. Soldiers under fire would find cover, call in an air strike, scramble back to safety, and only rarely press on to their objective. A teletrooper would shrug off the small-arms fire and just keep going. The rattle of shells and shrapnel against its hull would be muted, less it was distracting.
The cavalry finally arrived. Engines roared outside, doors opened and boots clattered. Petrovitch carried on his circumnavigation of the teletrooper, ignoring the fact that he was being surrounded by men dressed in Arctic camouflage. They all had guns, and they all pointed them at Petrovitch.
He watched them watching him through their full-face masks, each of them printed to resemble the same skull that sat beneath their skin. Except the eye sockets were larger, and the grins more toothy. Ghouls. He was encircled by ghouls.
“Step away from the machine, Dr Petrovitch.”
He looked around for the source of the voice. A figure, dressed in bulky, expensive top-of-the-range civilian kit, but still wearing the skeletal mask, stepped through the ring of soldiers. He had a shotgun held loosely in his hands.
“So which one are you? Ben or Jerry?” Petrovitch looked around for Newcomen. The American was being ignored by his countrymen as someone of no consequence, a mere bit-part player to the main act.
The question confused the man. His hidden face flexed the surface of the mask. “I said, step away from the machine.”
“Or what? You’ll shoot me?” Petrovitch’s bag was by the door, but he was still carrying the axe. “I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
“For the third and last time, step away from the machine.” Even his voice was disguised, subtly filtered and modulated.
“Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.” Petrovitch switched the axe into a two-handed grip. “Where’s my girl?”
The man, Ben or Jerry, raised his shotgun and fired it without warning. The taser round caught Petrovitch in the fleshy part of his outstretched palm. The impact rocked him backwards. He kept his feet, but he couldn’t prevent the discharge that followed.
No matter that he could block the pain: he had no control.
He swung the axe, but couldn’t see where it hit. His arm thrashed, and the weight of it threw him to the floor.
Someone had modified the taser. The shock went on for far longer than it should. If he’d taken it to the chest, it would have stopped his heart.
It ended, eventually. Petrovitch looked up at the circle of gun barrels and fixed-grin faces. He gripped the plastic body of the shell and pulled the barbs out of his hand. Blood oozed out.
“Step away from the machine, Dr Petrovitch.” The man in the skeleton mask chambered a fresh shell, indicating that he was more than prepared to keep shocking him until he complied. The used cartridge clattered on to the concrete.
The axe had embedded itself in Svetlana’s leg. The blade was wedged in the shin, enabling Petrovitch to use the haft to lever himself up. “I want to know where Lucy is.”
With a sound like a sigh, the man raised the butt of his shotgun to his shoulder.
“I can keep this up all night if I have to.”
Petrovitch gripped the axe, tore it free. “It’s the only thing you can keep up all night, dickless.”
This time, the taser hit his side. He was just too slow, too disorientated, too full of interference and conflicting signals to parry it. The electrodes had to punch their way through his dense jacket, though, and only just grazed his skin. He was thrown to the floor again, but as he fell, the device shifted and lost contact.
It gave him a moment to recover. The man, with a hiss of annoyance, worked the pump for another shell.
“That’s enough.”
Petrovitch thought at first it might be his own voice. He blinked away the stars to see Newcomen, armed with his own FBI-issue pistol, aiming at his tormentor’s back.
“Agent Newcomen,” said the man. “What in God’s merciful name are you doing?”
“I’m stopping you. This, this isn’t right.” Newcomen’s voice was wavering, but his gun was steady.
“I think you’re forgetting which side you’re on.”
“No,” said Newcomen. “I know which side I’m on. I’m on the side of the law.”
“Sometimes, Agent-” said the man, but Newcomen interrupted, his voice a roar.
“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. That’s the fourteenth amendment to the constitution of the United States of America, you bastard, and you will obey it.” He was gasping for breath by the time he’d finished. He also looked ready to pull the trigger.
Petrovitch hauled himself up again. He was sore, deep inside. He used the axe as a crutch and walked forward until the barrel of the shotgun taser was against his chest. “If it was me, I’d have killed you by now. I’d have put a bullet in your head, because, hey, it’s what I do. And you’d deserve it. Newcomen here? You should be on your knees thanking him that he still plays by the rules. He’s an idiot, because he thinks the rules haven’t changed, but I’ll take an honest idiot any day over a niegadzai sooksin like you.”
Beneath the mask, muscles twitched and a decision was made. “Okay. Let’s move out.”
The soldiers snapped their guns upright and jogged to the door. The man in charge was in their midst, surrounded, safe. Then they were gone. Engine sounds faded away, and they were left with the creak of the hangar and the sympathetic swing of the lights.
Newcomen was locked rigid in his shooter’s stance. Petrovitch hobbled over and rested a hand on the agent’s wrist.
“We’re done here.”
Newcomen’s expression turned from concentrated determination to startled bewilderment. “What just happened?”
“You rediscovered your spine.” Petrovitch pushed the gun down until it was pointing at the floor. “And I’m grateful.”
30
Dinner had been unsatisfying. Not because the food hadn’t been good, or plentiful, but it had been like eating in an experiment, closely observed by the researchers. Newcomen had been in turn sullen and nervy, and Petrovitch’s own emotional state had even now barely dropped below incandescent.
That they’d been served by Reception Guy, a known secret service plant, just added insult to injury. Petrovitch had gone to sleep with his gun in his hand.
[Do not move, Sasha, or show any sign you are awake.]
He lay perfectly still. Even the finger curled around the trigger guard didn’t twitch.
“Problem?”
[Several men have entered Joseph Newcomen’s room.]
“Are they going to kill him? I sort of promised him I’d try and stop them from doing that.”
[If they were intent on an extra-judicial assassination, they would have done so already. His door was opened with a master key card: Newcomen had placed a chair against the door jamb, as per your instructions.]
“So he’s awake. What’s he doing?”
[I have built up a soundscape of his movements. Without visual confirmation, I am only ninety-eight per cent certain he is pointing a gun at the intruders.]
“Tell me he’s wearing pyjamas this time.”
[I am eighty-five per cent certain of that.]
Acutely aware that he should be hearing raised voices, and possibly a bit of gunplay, from the next room, Petrovitch flexed his ear.
“So. Spooks in Newcomen’s room. What do they want?”
[There have been no spoken words as yet. It could be that they wish to take revenge for his act of defiance this evening.]
“Or?”
[They want to parley.]
“Maybe I should intervene.”
[Perhaps I should make him aware that we know of his situation. If he was a member of the Freezone collective, it would be my duty to ask whether he needed assistance.]
But Petrovitch didn’t stir, and Michael didn’t speak.
“What’s he doing now?”
[There is no change in the situation. His breathing and heart rate, initially elevated, are now slowing again. His arm will begin to tremble in another minute or so, and eventually he will lower his weapon. The men facing him are most likely unarmed.]
“He won’t shoot.”
[No. Despite all you have told him. Perhaps even because of it. He still possesses huge psychological barriers to killing.]
“Unlike me.”
[Now is not the time to discuss this.]
“I want to get up and find out what’s happening.”
[We have a better chance of finding out if you do not.]
“They wouldn’t be so stupid to try and cut Newcomen a deal while we’re listening. They do know we’re listening, right?]
[It seems likely that they do, since they have not uttered a word. The link earpiece is still visible when inserted, and there would have been ample opportunity to discover that Newcomen was linked while he was being observed in the restaurant.
“You want to find out whether Newcomen is going to betray me or not.”
[We have told him we can punch a hole in his heart at a moment’s notice. You held a gun to his head this morning. You nearly flew him into a mountain range earlier. He owes us no loyalty.]
“And yet he pulled his gun on the spooks in the teletrooper hangar.”
[A perfectly sound psychological response to seeing a vulnerable person repeatedly hurt by larger, more aggressive people. Even you have that reaction, Sasha. When you are caught off guard.]
The shade of Sonja Oshicora drifted through the hotel room. It felt colder, and Petrovitch risked turning over and wrapping himself more tightly in the duvet.
“Yeah, okay. He doesn’t owe them any loyalty either, though. They’ve pretty much taken everything he thought important away from him.”
[And still he persists in entertaining the fantasy that there might be a way back.]
“It is just that, though. A fantasy. They’re not interested in him at all.”
[Yet it is his room they have entered. We must assume therefore that your analysis is flawed in some way.]
Petrovitch, face down in his pillow, worried at his lip. There was no sound at all.
“Give me the live feed.”
He could hear Newcomen, his laboured breathing, the faint rustle of his clothes, the odd pop as he swallowed and forced air up his Eustachian tubes. Behind that, the hum of the hot-air ventilation system, and after a quick analysis of the waveforms, three other people.
There was a rustle and a sigh. Newcomen lowered his arm. The light switch clicked on, then came another noise that Petrovitch couldn’t quite make out.
[Notebook.]
A pen rasped across the rough cellulose surface of a fresh white sheet of paper.
“I don’t suppose you can…”
[My powers are limited to the possible, Sasha. Guessing the shape of words from the sounds they make when written?]
“They have cameras in every room.”
[They are watching for any hint of intrusion. Naturally, when the time comes, I can hijack their entire system, but then they will know that I have. Theirs is not an insecure public network: it has been constructed with care as well as haste. They might not be able to keep me out — something they hope they can do but fortunately cannot — but they will know I am there.]
“Then we should have bugged Newcomen better.”
[The threat of immediate death not being enough to keep him in line?]
“Funny how things turn out. We’ve turned a craven, incompetent Reconstructionista into a decent human being, and he doesn’t do what we want.”
[I have several pertinent literary allusions ready to deploy at a moment’s notice.]
The piece of paper used to write the note was scrumpled up, and — it sounded like — eaten. Then another page was turned, and another message made.
Newcomen’s breathing and heart rate rose again.
[He is subvocalising. One moment.]
Petrovitch waited in the dark, aware of every point of contact between his bedclothes and his body.
[Incomplete. One word is most likely ‘deal’.]
“We should stop this. Newcomen’s zhopu is mine.”
[Are you not interested in what he will do?]
“Will my knowing help me find Lucy?”
[I cannot say. Wondering whether he will betray you as opposed to knowing he already has? I suggest it is important to know what lies in his heart.]
“But they’re shafting him all over again. They sold him up the river, and now they’re promising him passage back. He has to realise that.”
[And as you have already said: he will fall for it. They will tell him he is the most important part of their mission. That it will fail without him. That he will be a hero. That he can make contact with Christine again. That he will get a medal from the President. Newcomen will forgive them for what they have done because he is just waiting for someone to tell him all these things and make it better.]
“At least when I blackmail someone, my terms are clear and transparent. I’m honest about what I want.”
[Yes, Sasha. But what if they are telling him the truth?]
Petrovitch almost sat up. His muscles tensed, and he caught his breath.
“Say that again?”
[It seems obvious now. We have been operating under the impression that Newcomen is entirely the wrong agent for the task. What if he is not? What if he is, in fact, exactly the person they required? Someone who, for example, they could abuse and treat appallingly, and who would still come back to them when they judged the time was right.]