Degrees of Freedom

by Simon Morden

  “Look at them. It’s like a classroom.” Lucy slipped out from under Petrovitch’s arm and failed to notice that he nearly fell. His hand grasped for something solid, and Madeleine caught him.

  “You can’t go on like this,” she said in his ear.

  “I don’t have a choice. Not anymore. I put myself here, and now I have to see it through.”

  “You can barely stand, Sam.”

  “Then hold me up.” He scanned the people lining up in front of him, watching them more or less comply to Lucy’s rearranging of them: those closest were going to have to sit down in the dirt, those behind to kneel, then the third and fourth rows come to some arrangement whereby they looked over each other’s shoulders.

  He couldn’t see Surur or her technician anywhere. He thought it odd, then realized that they’d still be stuck at Park Lane, Michael’s cable tethering them down, scared to move in case they broke his connection with the outside world.

  It wasn’t needed now, hadn’t been needed since the AI had uploaded itself onto another computer, but he’d forgotten to tell Surur that. He hadn’t mentioned the details of Michael’s escape at all, content to let the question hang unanswered in the air.

  He looked for the reporter’s phone, and found it. She didn’t pick up so he tried the one a bare meter away. The cameraman didn’t reply. So he went for the satellite link, riding down the microwave signal which he shared with the increasingly frantic attempts of her studio manager to speak to her, to him, to anyone.

  The camera was still recording, still transferring its footage to the van. It showed a sideways world, lying on the road. The lens was focused on a drift of purple that could, at a squint, be resolved into the body of a woman with glossy hair and flawless skin.

  31

  Michael could multi-task. Petrovitch found it very difficult. He wanted to capture the last half-hour’s output from the Al Jazeera camera, then review it, all the while trying to speak to the assembled press.

  He started off incoherent, then lost track of what he was saying and stopped mid-sentence when something of awful significance happened onscreen.

  Madeleine held up her hand to the crowd, and dragged Petrovitch around to face her. “You’re doing it wrong.”

  “Something terrible is happening,” he said. “There. That’s when it was. Five of them. Same time as the shooter. Coordinated attack. Distracted us. They’re going after Michael.”

  “Sam. You called this press conference. You’re the public face of the Freezone. Either you can do this properly, or I’ll pull the plug.”

  She didn’t know what he knew. She thought he was flaking out.

  “Okay.” He took a deep breath. One thing at a time from now on, he promised himself, and turned to face the world. “This will only take a minute, and my daughter will have to stand in for me for questions if you really want to hang around afterward—but I don’t think you will.”

  Lucy, standing with the press, blinked and her mouth opened to object. Petrovitch pointed at her and then placed his finger against his lips. “No interruptions. I’ve uploaded files to the major newswires, and you can grab them from there. One is Sonja Oshicora’s confession that ten months ago, she was strong-armed into cooperating with the CIA to neutralize me. The events of the last two days have been the outworking of that plot, which has failed with the suicide of Sonja. The second is of footage taken fifteen minutes ago by Al Jazeera’s cameraman, when both he and Yasmina Surur were killed by CIA agents intending to destroy the AI called Michael, and I suspect they’re carrying a nuclear demolition charge.”

  All he could hear was the faint whirr of a motorized focus. Every sudden intake of breath was held, every heart skipped a beat. No one moved, not even to tremble.

  “Michael is no longer in the vault under the Oshicora Tower—I made damn sure of that—and I’m appealing personally to President Mackensie to call off this futile attack before it goes any further. People are going to die and it’ll be for nothing.”

  He paused. The turbine in his chest was spinning fast and his blood ran hot. He could feel the rage surge inside him.

  “How dare they? How dare they come here, to the Metrozone, with a weapon like that. This is my city, my home, and I will not have it fucked up by a bunch of fuck-witted paranoid Reconstructionists acting like they’re in a fucking Western. The old order has failed. The new order is here. Long live the revolution.” He pulled his gun clear and ran as best he could through the middle of the press pack. “Lucy? You’re on. Madeleine? With me.”

  He stumbled clear, and started issuing his orders. “Tabletop. Were you listening?”

  “We’re already on our way.”

  “Go straight to the tower. I don’t know if they’ve made it that far yet, so we might be able to trap them in the river. Take as many people as are willing to go with you, and please be careful. This is the end game, and they’re choosing to go out with a bang. I’ll send you my maps. Spread out along the line of the culvert, watch the manhole covers but don’t open any of them. Me and Madeleine are going to Park Lane: I’ll take the car.”

  He limped as he went, his arm weighing him down, still festooned with three singularity bombs. He was much slower than Madeleine, who caught him up quickly.

  “You have to get away,” she said.

  “My Freezone, my responsibility.”

  There was Valentina’s car. He reached out and started it up remotely, backing it around in a circle until it was pointing the right way along Euston Road. The wheels screeched, and he jumped in the driver’s seat. Madeleine launched herself in the back.

  He didn’t touch the steering wheel, just plotted in a course and let the automatics take care of it.

  “I can drive, you know,” said Madeleine. She folded the other half of the seat down so she could access the trunk. “I should have impounded her personal armory along with the rest.”

  “Yeah. Tool up. We can’t afford to screw around.”

  “Why can’t we just let them blow themselves up?” Her voice was muffled as she searched for heavy caliber weapons. “If it’s a nuke, it’s a small nuke. They’re setting it off underground.”

  “I’m going to stop them because they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. I don’t need another reason. Bomb, no bomb. It doesn’t matter. They’re wrong. I’m right.” Petrovitch braced himself as the car hurtled around a corner. “Doing nothing is unforgivable.”

  They were almost there, barreling down Park Lane toward the Wellington Arch. He looked in the rearview mirror: Madeleine had found an assault shotgun and enough shells to fill it. She caught his glance.

  “This is it, then.”

  “Yeah. Looks that way. Yebani v’rot.” He banged his hand against the window, the door, his seat, the dashboard. “Why can’t the Yanks be smart like I am? Why can’t they work out that Michael’s gone?”

  She slotted the last plastic shell into place and cranked one into the breach. “Even if one or all of those agents are having second thoughts about a suicide mission, they’re trained to follow orders. All the way to the end.”

  The car screeched to a halt, delivering them next to the broadcast van. The body of Surur was behind the vehicle, a couple of meters shy of the back bumper. She’d been shot repeatedly, and was lying in a lake of congealed blood. The cameraman, still with his rig strapped to his body, was pole-axed near the side door.

  There were holes in the van’s white bodywork—fortunate that they hadn’t hit anything vital in the cramped electronic interior, so that the prone camera had picked up five dark forms sweeping by, one carrying a green canvas bag that was obviously both far too heavy and too cylindrical for regular ordinance.

  And there was the cable, lying on the ground, its plug torn off and disposed of.

  Petrovitch scrambled out of the car and headed for the ramp down to the car park. “Michael? Anything?”

  [If they are underground, the depth is sufficient to block signals. If they are above ground, they
are maintaining radio silence.]

  “Oh, they’re down there all right. And even if Mackensie wanted to order them back, he can’t.”

  [Sasha. Please reconsider. The Americans will die by their own hand, destroying a redundant piece of equipment. Is not the best option simply to let them do this?]

  “Of course it is. But there’s such a thing as justice, and I’m going to deliver it to them like an avenging angel.” The overhang of the concrete roof was above him. “See you on the other side, Michael. The Pope might have doubts about you, but I don’t.” He switched links, briefly. “Tabletop. Collapse the tunnel east of the tower. I have a sort of plan.”

  He ran on, and he felt his feed fail. Madeleine overtook him, and slipped on a pair of night-vision goggles she’d found. “I’m going first.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I can just shove you out of the way and there’s nothing you can do about it.” She jogged ahead of him, scanning the shadows, gun butt pressed hard against her shoulder.

  The plastic sheeting in front of the tunnel entrance flapped, and sent the pair of them sliding apart, left and right, slowly converging on the scaffolding it covered. Madeleine eased a piece aside with the barrel of the shotgun.

  “Clear,” she said, and climbed inside. Petrovitch followed in a poor second place: she was already lying down in the tunnel, moving forward on her elbows. He watched her feet recede, then scooted down the shallow slope on his backside. And when he arrived, his feet splashing into the river, she was ahead, stalking forward.

  He wasn’t going to be left behind, even though he was reeling from one side of the tunnel to the other. He was going to keep up even if it killed him.

  As they advanced down the coal-black tunnel, made barely visible by their hardware, a distant booming noise rattled the brickwork, and a pop of air brushed by them.

  Madeleine looked behind her at Petrovitch. He gave her the thumbs-up and pointed ahead. She trod silently on, her long legs allowing her to step on either side of the river.

  Then she stopped, keeping perfectly still. Petrovitch slowly lowered himself to a crouch. There was a slight bend in the river, and around it were the first glimmerings of a heat glow.

  Her shotgun already had a chambered shell. She already had it up at her shoulder and aimed. All she had to do was lean into the recoil and twitch the trigger.

  The sound of the shot was brutally loud in such a confined space, and the figure ahead was just turning away from the sound of Valentina’s tunnel demolition when the solid slug tore through the layer of ballistic mesh and into the flesh and bone beneath.

  As the thunder rolled away, the body fell back with a splash. Madeleine listened carefully, and shuffled forward, balancing on the balls of her feet. When she reached the agent, she leaned down and felt for signs of life. There were none, and Petrovitch crept up beside her.

  He knew there was some sort of secret Vatican sign language for times like this, but he didn’t know any of it. Instead, he held up a finger, four fingers, made a zero with his index finger and thumb, then pointed down the tunnel. He meant one hundred and forty meters to the vault. She nodded to show she understood, but he had no idea if he’d actually given the correct message.

  The tunnel was relatively straight, but there was no sign of another heat source. Valentina could have fortuitously dropped the tunnel roof on someone, or isolated them on the other side of the rock fall. The niche in the wall that held the ladder up to the surface seemed blank.

  Assuming five agents to start with, they’d killed one, and neutralized another. One would be left in the short tunnel to the under-tower shaft—to help lower that heavy bomb down—and two to enter the vault and set the bomb.

  He wondered what they were waiting for. They had to have the bomb in place by now, and every second that passed was a second less on the countdown. He’d had enough of creeping along: he stood up straight, and started shambling toward the gaping cold hole in the brick, making no pretense at stealth.

  He pressed his back against the crumbling wall and patted his pockets. Nothing there. He’d used the stun grenades already, and he didn’t think Madeleine had any left either. He’d have to improvise.

  “Hey, Yankee,” he called, and flinched as a hail of bullets hammered the far side of the tunnel. The soft brick absorbed the impacts, cracking and spalling. The air filled with dust, but save for a few larger fragments of baked clay, he wasn’t struck. The firing stopped, the muzzle flashes flickering away like lightning.

  Madeleine came up next to him. He couldn’t see her eyes, hidden behind the green lenses of her night sights, but he could tell she was appalled at his recklessness. He grinned in the dark.

  “Hey,” he started, and held up his good hand to his face to protect it from yet more shrapnel. “Yobany stos, will you stop that?” He waited for a pause, and tucked his gun in his waistband again.

  “What are you doing?” Madeleine hissed.

  “Making it up as I go along.” He unhooked a sphere from his arm, and primed it. The little green light winked on. “You seen what my singularity bombs do yet? I have. I’ve seen what they can do to a car. I’m just wondering how much of you there’s going to be left to ship back home. I’ve some airmail envelopes around somewhere. Should be big enough.”

  Madeleine had ducked down and hidden beneath the lip of the hole, swapping the shotgun for her Vatican special. Petrovitch threw the singularity device through the hole, against the side of the tunnel wall. It bounced out of sight, and started to roll downhill.

  There was another storm of noise and light, but this time the bullets weren’t directed out at them. They were aimed at the trundling sphere, picking up speed as it rattled and clattered toward the shaft, a spinning green light marking its passage.

  Madeleine pushed the pistol above her head and emptied the entire magazine blind, pointing it at all angles into the space beyond.

  The air tasted of spent powder and dirt as the final shell case fell with a clink.

  “Yes or no?” asked Petrovitch.

  Madeleine swapped her empty magazine for a full one. “I’ll find out.” She dislodged a loose brick from the top of the ragged wall and let it fall at her feet. She retrieved it, and lobbed it inside. No returning fire.

  “Yeah, we haven’t got time for this.” He pulled his automatic and backed up to the far side of the river culvert, edging up the curve of the wall until he could see down the length of the tunnel all the way to the shaft.

  There was a splash of color at the far end, all hot whites and yellows. It showed what looked like a leg, maybe a hand reaching out for the bright-painted stick that could only be a rifle. Petrovitch drew crosshairs on the main mass and fired three times.

  Madeleine leaped up and over the wall. The mortally injured man was bundled out, suspended for a moment across the top of the brickwork before toppling into the river.

  Petrovitch splashed toward him, then along and over him, using his shoulders and head for purchase to gain enough height. Madeleine reached over and pulled him in.

  “You know this is just madness, don’t you?” she told him as he crashed to the floor.

  “We’re trying to prevent a bunch of fanatics armed with an atomic bomb from putting a glowing crater in the Freezone. Compared with what we’ve already been through, this counts as sane.” He held his good hand up. “Shall we do it, then? Take revenge for all the ones the Armageddonists got through?”

  Her fingers tightened around his wrist and he was dragged upright. “That’s what everyone wants, isn’t it? In their nuclear dreams, they get to stop them, just once.”

  She pushed her night-vision goggles up her forehead long enough to kiss him hard on the lips. Then she pushed him behind her, and knelt down to crawl toward the sharp-edged void of the shaft.

  32

  The singularity bomb was shattered: the resin that had held the warp and weft of the wire had been reduced to a few large fragments with the rest of it turned to p
ea-sized grit. That meant he had two left, then. Petrovitch and Madeleine sat on opposite sides of the end of the tunnel and looked out over the shaft.

  Madeleine checked the rope, which had been tied around the base of the last tunnel support.

  “I still don’t get what’s keeping them.” Petrovitch curled his fingers around the haft of a shovel and felt its reassuring, primitive weight. “If it had been me, I’d have blown it by now. There has to be a good reason.”

  “And you want to exploit it.”

  “We’re not dead yet.” He peered over the edge; no mines or tripwires that he could see. He glanced upward again, at the great mass of debris hanging high above their heads.

  “If I lower you down, both of us are vulnerable at that point. If they’re watching the shaft…” Madeleine studied the vault doors. The stone that had kept them ajar had been kicked aside, and it rested almost shut on the thickness of a fiber-optic cable.

  “I need to get down there,” he insisted.

  “You really think you’re going to talk them out of this?”

  “I think I should try. It’s not over till the Fat Boy sings.”

  “Sam, I want you to listen to me.” She dragged his face around. “They’re not going to be dissuaded. They’re not just soldiers, they’re martyrs. I understand this sort of thing. They’re not going to recant; they believe in what they’re doing.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You can’t stop them. We can’t storm the vault, and they won’t come out. They’re in there and, whatever it is they’re waiting for, anything you say is more likely to make them detonate early, not less.” She took the shovel from him and put it to one side. She clasped his now-empty hand in both of her own. “I want a future with you. I don’t know where it’s going to be or what it is we’re going to be doing, but I want it with you. That’s never going to happen if we stay here.”