by Simon Morden
“Except that’s not true, is it?” Petrovitch tried to adjust the surgical gown he was wearing, and found himself frustrated again by his lack of mobility. He’d been awake no more than a minute, and he was already wishing he’d insisted they’d amputated and grafted on a prosthetic.
“I don’t get it,” said Lucy. She looked from face to face. “One of us…”
“Yeah. One of you. Those men knew where I was, knew I was alone, knew how long they had, knew exactly how to disable me, knew there was a bomb there. They were prepared. They were ready. They weren’t armed, but they knew I didn’t have a pushka either: who, outside of this room, knows for certain I don’t carry? That I’ve been ordered not to carry? They put me in a head-lock and unplugged me: only you lot know what that’ll do to me.”
Valentina pursed her lips. “Your wire is no longer secret. Is common knowledge, da? Maybe they get lucky.”
“Lucky?”
She shrugged. “Unlikely. But I would look for reasons other than one of your friends has betrayed you. Start with those who cut Container Zero open.”
“They’ve disappeared,” said Madeleine. She leaned heavily against the wall, nudging the painting behind her out of true. “Vanished off the face of the earth, and I’m not going to be able to go and find them now.”
Petrovitch turned uncomfortably toward her. “Because…”
“Sonja’s sacked me,” said Madeleine through clenched teeth. “Apparently, my judgment is in question.”
“What the hell was I supposed to do?” Sonja’s face contorted into several unlikely expressions before she exploded. “You lost the bomb. You lost it. You had it, and you lost it. You’re head of security and you left one unarmed man alone with a nuclear bomb. It’s not your judgment I’m questioning. It’s your sanity.”
Madeleine levered herself upright, which in itself should have been scary. “Sonja,” she started.
But Sonja wasn’t intimidated. “That’s Madam fucking President to you. They could have killed him! That might not mean anything to a frigid bitch like you, but I actually care about him.”
She’d gone white, all except the tip of her nose, which remained stubbornly pink.
“I’m going now to try and clear up your mess. If I catch you within a hundred meters of me, I’ll make sure someone shoots you. Is that perfectly clear?”
The only thing that was perfectly clear was Madeleine’s desire to straight-arm Sonja through the wall. The effort to hold back was titanic, every muscle straining.
“Yeah, go on then,” said Petrovitch from the bed. “This makes it so much better, doesn’t it? If any of you were listening earlier, I said that you had no idea who took the bomb. Doesn’t mean I don’t. Up to the point where my mitigator was unplugged, I have a recording of what happened, including the six men who took the bomb. And in a couple of seconds I can tell you who they are and where they live. Lived. Three and a half hours ago.”
“They took your rat,” said Lucy. “It wasn’t on you when we found you.”
Petrovitch screwed his face up. “Chyort.”
“I’ll get you a new one,” she offered.
“Go and do it now. Something. Anything that’ll do.” He should have realized when he woke up. The drugs were making him dull. “I need to get out of this yebani place.”
Lucy edged around Sonja and slipped out. She left the door slightly open, and they could all hear her receding, running footsteps. Petrovitch also caught sight of an Oshicora guard through the crack of light.
“I can do better than she can,” said Sonja, though she didn’t take her eyes off Madeleine.
“You’ve got more important things to do. And I’m sorry.”
“Call me when you remember enough that’s useful. Okay?”
“Okay.”
With one last glare up at Madeleine, she flung the door aside and strode out. The guards fell in behind her, and by force of will, they swept the corridor clear ahead of them.
“I’m serious,” he said, trying to attract the others’ attention. “I need to get out of here right now. Someone tell me how long I’m supposed to wear this metalwork?”
“Six months.” Madeleine’s fists were still clenching and unclenching.
“You have got to be kidding.” He stared at his arm. “Call the surgeons. Get them to take it off. Take it all off, up to here.” He sawed with his free hand just below his left shoulder.
“Sam, no.”
“There’s a nuclear bomb loose in the Freezone. Someone close to me betrayed me. And I’ve lost my rat. Again. I cannot do anything about any of those things with Arecibo sticking out of my body.”
“Ari?” asked Valentina.
“Arecibo,” murmured Tabletop. “Radio telescope. Puerto Rico.”
“And you’ve been very quiet.” Petrovitch struggled with the sheets, grasping a handful of them and pulling, but the hospital corners proved hard to dislodge. He frowned at her stealth suit that he’d thought locked away for safe keeping. But there she was, wearing it like a second skin again. “Anything you’d like to say?”
“I’m not allowed to talk to anyone but Tina, Lucy and you, and I’m never alone. I know I’ve said nothing that can be used to hurt you. So I’m just waiting for you to tell me what you want me to do.” She tugged at the corner of her dyed hair. “The CIA would have killed you first, then mined the container before they left. It wasn’t them.”
Petrovitch had finally got the better of the bedclothes. “Anyone who doesn’t want to see my bare arse had better get out now.”
No one moved.
“Well, mne pohui.” He swung his legs out and tried to stand. He would have fallen had Valentina not caught him.
She dumped him back on the bed. “Where do you think you need to be?”
“Anywhere. Anywhere but here with this govno hanging off me.”
“You need to think.” She held him by the shoulders and gave him a shake. “You need a plan.”
“I can’t think. I feel like I’ve had half my brain ripped out through the back of my skull.”
“Valentina,” warned Madeleine, “put him down.”
“No. This is important. You do not need computer. You are smart anyway. You live before you get implant. You remember that.” She patted both his cheeks and stepped back.
“Right. You’re right.” Petrovitch glared at his arm. “Where’s the break?”
“Separated fracture of the humerus, midway along,” said Tabletop, still twirling her hair. “I read your notes. You had a chunk of bone three inches long floating free.”
“So the extension on my lower arm is just for show?”
“Stability. You cannot—must not—use that limb for weight-bearing activities. At all.”
“I still reckon I’d be better without it altogether.”
Madeleine growled. “No.”
“Tell me again why I should take your opinion into consideration?” He didn’t turn around, just sat with his back to her. “We’ve been apart longer than we were together.”
The temperature in the room dropped to below freezing.
“One of us has to say it,” he said. “I’ve spent too long hoping you’ll come back to me. Either you will or you won’t. Nothing I do or don’t do will affect that one way or the other. But the situation we’re now in means I’m going to have to make some decisions for myself.”
“We can save the arm.” Tabletop stepped out from the corner. “I’ll get you a wheelchair.”
Valentina picked up her rifle and slung it over her back. It was an automatic reaction; where one went, the other had to go. It was the law.
“Back soon.” She gave a meaningful glance at Madeleine.
“I’ll be fine.” He nodded, feeling the chill on his naked back. “Does this hotel come with a dressing gown?”
“We’ll find you one.” Tabletop held the door for Valentina, and like a pair of ghosts they disappeared.
Petrovitch tried the floor again. His eyes told him it
was flat and still, but as he slowly rose, he felt like he was on a ship at sea. “If losing my arm gives me a chance to get to the bomb before it blows, I’m sawing it off with a rusty blade. Do you understand?”
“Oh, you’ve made it very clear, Sam.”
“So what are you going to do now?”
“Nothing that’ll make you change your mind, I expect.”
He rested his head on his chest. “How about stop acting like a pizda staraya? Sonja was right, and we were wrong: we should have had Container Zero locked down tight. We’re supposed to be responsible adults, not a bunch of yebani kids hiding stuff from our parents and hoping they don’t find out.”
“You mean like you did?”
He slowly turned around, shuffling his feet. His arm refused to hang by his side, the series of rings forcing it away from his body, making him hold his shoulder awkwardly against the downward drag of the metal framework. He reached over and held the lowermost ring in his other hand.
“The two situations are completely different. People already knew about the bomb. It wasn’t a secret, and we should have realized what that meant.”
She gave a pained expression. “They were so quick.”
“Yeah. They knew before we did. They knew, I guess, long before Container Zero was opened. You don’t get to make yourself a nuclear power just because you haven’t got anything better to do that evening.” He tried to shrug, and found that impossible, too. “We were set up. By someone who knows both you and me very well.”
“Bet Harry would know who.”
“Maybe. He wouldn’t have done anything about it, though. Not until it was too late.”
“I do care,” she blurted. “It’s not true what Sonja said. I care so much about you.”
He thought she might cry. He thought he might cry. He took a deep breath. “Shame it doesn’t seem to be enough anymore.”
The door banged back to its fullest extent. Tabletop wheeled in a chair, cornering hard and scraping paint off the doorframe.
“Hop in.” She stopped suddenly, and Valentina ran into the back of her. “Did I interrupt something?”
“Yeah. No. Whatever. Dressing gown?”
“Got a blanket. Best we could do.” She brought the wheelchair closer and stamped on the brakes with the side of her foot. “I had to throw someone out of this thing.”
“Is true,” said Valentina. “Seat is still warm for your naked arse.”
“As if this couldn’t get any worse.” Petrovitch attempted to lower himself down one-handed into the chair, and dropped most of the way. “Chyort. That hurts.”
While Valentina artfully draped the blanket over his knees, Tabletop kicked the brakes off. “Okay. Next stop, physiotherapy.” She popped a wheelie to turn him around, and started at speed toward the door.
“And you could stop being so cheerful. I’m not used to it.”
She leaned in from behind him, so that her hair curtained his face. “I’m useful. At last. You don’t know how good this feels.”
Out in the corridor, he glanced behind him. Valentina was following at a jog. There was no sign of Madeleine.
8
The overhead lights flickered on as they entered the room. Each successive click and buzz revealed more of the modern torture chamber until it was laid bare in its full antiseptic glory.
Petrovitch shivered. The sign on the door had said physiotherapy, but now he wasn’t so sure. “Are these things supposed to help people?”
Tabletop stood on the back of the wheelchair and sized up the equipment. “I don’t know how I know what each one of these does, but I do. Sometimes I find myself thinking about something, and I suddenly find I’m an expert in it. And I never realize until I’m confronted by it.”
“If they can wipe your memory, maybe they have a way of putting new ones in.”
“So it seems. That device on your arm is called a Taylor-Hobashi bone fixator. One of these machines is designed to work with it.”
She put his brake on and wandered between the benches, chairs and tables, running her hands over the metal and plastic, remembering thoughts that were not her own. Valentina squatted down next to him.
“Hmm,” she said. It was her holding sound, what she did when she was trying to find the right words. “You are okay?”
“That’s loaded with subtext, even for you.”
“You have many problems. Too many.”
“Are you suggesting you remove one or more of those problems, permanently?”
“If you were, hmm…”—her expression became flinty—“in charge. Then perhaps you would be able to act more freely.”
“You want me to start a revolution against the Freezone.”
“Against Oshicora. Freezone is good idea run by wrong people.”
Petrovitch flexed the fingers of his left hand. He watched them curl and uncurl like thin white tube worms extending from their nest. “Yeah, well. Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. It would, I guess, be quite easy for me. Rally the troops, depose the leader, seize power. Shame it’s not going to happen.”
“Nyet?”
“Definitely nyet. And of course the Freezone is a good idea. It was my idea. That’s why I’ve been a loyal servant of it, and why I’ll stay one for the next week and a bit.”
“What of future? Your future?” She looked pensive for the briefest of moments. “Mine?”
“Leave it with me. I don’t intend to disappoint either my friends or my enemies.”
She pursed her lips and nodded. “That is good.”
And that was it; the matter was concluded to her satisfaction. He’d deflected an attempted coup simply by saying no. He hoped that if Sonja ever found out, she’d be appropriately grateful.
Meanwhile, Tabletop was circling one machine that looked like a skeletal robot cut off at the waist. Her fingers were manipulating the two outriggers, bending them and twisting them, and feeling the way the joints moved in relationship with one another.
“This is it.” She beckoned Petrovitch over, and he allowed himself to be wheeled into position.
When he looked up, the thing towered over him. He had a flashback to the New Machine Jihad, of a construct of steel and hydraulics bending down to inspect him minutely.
“Nothing to be nervous of,” said Tabletop.
“You’re not sitting where I am.” He took a deep breath. “What do I have to do?”
“Just hold your arm out. I’ll do the rest.”
He raised his arm awkwardly, and she moved quickly and carefully, with unearned ease. She lowered the machine over him and clamped Petrovitch’s titanium rings to the metal skeleton until it provided all the support and he could just hang off it.
“Comfortable?”
It wasn’t, but he’d expected nothing else. “It’s fine.”
There was more: a harness that clicked into place around his shoulders and down his back. It was more than just like an exoskeleton: it was an exoskeleton, and he got the point of what she was trying to do.
“We’ll need to lose the right arm—not mine, the machine’s. And doesn’t this work off the mains?”
“The servos are twelve volts. You should be able to rig something up.” Tabletop opened several drawers in a nearby desk, searching for something. “Hex wrench. Five mil.”
“Madeleine should have mine.”
“I’ll keep looking,” she said, and spread her net wider.
“She doesn’t hate you, you know.”
“Uh huh.” Her voice was muffled by the cupboard she was in. “Did she tell you that?”
Petrovitch scratched his nose with his free hand. “Good point, well made.”
She looked over the top of the steel bench. “Her last act as head of security was to release this suit to me. She took the opportunity to make her opinion of me crystal clear.” Tabletop ducked back down again, eventually emerging with a flat plastic case. “Let’s get this done.”
With Valentina taking the weight of the spare machine
arm, Tabletop unwound the bolts that held it in place, then disconnected the cables from the motors at the shoulders, elbow and wrist.
The door banged open. A man in a white coat stood framed in the doorway.
“What… are you doing?”
After months of being used to scanning a face, running it through his software, coming up with an identity, Petrovitch was lost. The personal touch, the calling someone by their own name, was his signature move. It was his only move. And no matter how hard he tried, nothing would come.
So he gave up. “Ah, chyort voz’mi. We’re taking hospital property apart and modifying it so I can regain some basic function in my shattered left arm, which should allow me to at least attempt to drag ourselves out of the pizdets we’re in before we all die horribly. If I can find the podonok who did this to me on the way, it’ll be a bonus.” He smiled unpleasantly. “Any questions?”
“Doctor Petrovitch?” asked the man.
“If that was your question, may whichever god you believe in help us all. Who the huy did you think I was?”
He could see the mental calculations whirr behind his eyes. If that was Petrovitch, that must mean the one in the black form-fitting all-in-one was the CIA assassin, and the other one in the brown jacket cinched in at the waist and with the Kalashnikov across her back was the Russian gangster, hero of Waterloo Bridge.
“I’ll be going,” he said.
“Good choice,” said Petrovitch, and waited for the door to close. “Mudak.”
“Right.” Tabletop tightened the straps and checked the retaining bolts. “Can you stand?”
“With help, probably.”
Valentina stopped playing with the spare mechanical arm long enough to grip the spine rod and neck harness. The women heaved him up. Petrovitch leaned to the left, overcorrected, and eventually found upright.
“Heavy. Unbalanced.” The straps bit into his pale skin.
“You’ll feel the difference when I turn it on.”
Tabletop took up the little hand controller and powered it up. Immediately, the servos whirred and strained, taking the effort out of holding his arm up. He moved his shoulder slowly, and the sensors felt his tentative efforts, translating it into a smooth, steady arc.