by Adam Roberts
14
We fought all round western London. Some of us came in at the north-west. Simic and I were part of several dozen war-bands that picked a way up south-west. We fought through Esher, and up to Kingston. Mostly we avoided the open spaces - the heaths and parks - because built-up areas gave us better cover. Because we had no desire to hold the territory we did not leave troops behind to guard where we had been, and so we maintained our optimum fighting strength all the way up to the Thames. The postcodes we fought through were pretty empty anyway, and our actions emptied them further, so there wasn’t much to hold.
We crossed the Thames on, and under, the bridge at Hampton; and as we passed along the northern bank the enemy detail guarding the Court opened up on us. That’s never a pleasant experience - the sound of detonations all about, the bone-shocking surprise, swiftly followed by people falling over all around. There wasn’t enough cover on the north bank. I sprinted with my head down through man-high snorts of concrete dust and hailstorms of dislodged tarmac pebbles. The next thing I remember is pressing myself in at the base of a long brick wall, along with a dozen or so colleagues, the barrage continuing, and people in every direction collapsing in mists and splashes and lava-lamp splurges of blood. We had stumbled blindly, and foolishly, upon a large concentration of the enemy at Hampton Court.
This was the severest massacre of my kind in which I have been involved.
The worst of it was that the wiki was overwhelmed, for five minutes or more, with a lot of senseless bellowing and screaming. It took us that long - five minutes, I need hardly tell you, is a very long stretch of time in the middle of a firefight - to lock out all those who were too injured, or too stunned, to be able to step back and let cooler heads discuss the situation. Once we got our communications back in proper order things eased a little. There were several knots of people in the vicinity, and they all pulled in to help. One of these had a nuclear bullet - about the size of a full gym-bag, this device, so calling it a ‘bullet’ is, I suppose, litotes. The group who possessed this weapon happened, by good chance, to be in Sunbury, which is upriver from Hampton; and they strapped the thing about with floats and a model boat motor and fitted a webcam on top. They pushed it into the river and told us to clear out.
The news talks about ‘a nuclear bomb’ being detonated at Hampton Court, but that’s not an accurate way of talking about it. A nuclear bullet is not the same as a bomb. Its destructive capacity is considerably less. We did as much damage as we did only by virtue of the fact that, having steered the little craft down from Sunbury by watching its passage on a little screen, the remote-controller (a woman called Emma Clack) noticed an inlet off the river going in at the site of Hampton Court. Had we just exploded it on the river the banks would have dampened the horizontal spread, and most of the damage would have scorched east and west. But Clack was able to steer the little thing, put-put-put, in at this channel and right into Hampton Court itself. That meant that when the bullet blew it dismantled the house and sent a mass of incandescent masonry up into the air to hail down again. It was not a blast to watch with your naked eyes if you wanted to keep your eyesight. But by the same token, I was huddling against the wall of Hampton Court itself when the bullet was floated, and I had fifteen minutes to get away on foot; which I did, and I suffered no ill effects. I could not have managed that if it had been an actual atomic bomb. In fact not even all the troops stationed at Hampton Court were killed; although the fact that their superiors had positioned so many people in one place made them more of a target than they needed to be. We lost nearly three hundred of our people at Hampton, a figure of which the British can be proud. Then again, we killed many more of them with our bullet.
There was no time to lose. There never is, in war. I was filled with a kind of frustrated fury at the useless, avoidable loss of so many people. This fury was generalized throughout the body of the whole NMA. We went through Kingston in a rattle and a clatter, fighting through a blizzard of smashed and tumbling glass to take easy possession of the shopping centre, and therefore of the roofs, and so of excellent bazooka positions to bombard the four or five most obvious enemy emplacements in the town below. I was lacerated in a number of places, small cuts with some bleeding, and I had to keep wiping my goggles with a chenille shawl I’d grabbed from a department store on the way up. But we coordinated our shooting with a half a dozen other groups, and put an end to the key enemy emplacements. Then we vacated the roof, before the enemy could bring jets to bear upon it.
‘[The bullet has startled them, some.]’ This was McKibin. I had met her once upon a time - oddly, though, before joining the NMA, at a party; since being in the same corpus militis as her I hadn’t seen her. [‘They’re sending along cars, but only from the east.]’
‘[I can see them, half a dozen.]’ said somebody else, name of Leggatt. I had never met this individual, although from his name, and doubtless irrationally, I believed him to be a tall and lanky fellow.
‘[We’re at Sunbury,]’ came somebody else. ‘[There’s a lot of noise up here.]’
‘[Its set the cat down amongst,]’ said Barnard. I knew Barnard well. ‘[They’re all hurrying along, It’s drawn them, like shit draws flies.]’
‘[We’re up on a hill,]’ said somebody new: Myerson. ‘[Looking down on Twickenham, Teddington, google seems a bit uncertain as to where - so I guess the borderline between the two? I can see that crater you guys made, and no mistake.]’
I pitched in, here: ‘[Get off the ping, Myerson, if you’re just rubbernecking. Some of us are fighting here.]’
‘[I have priority news,]’ Myerson insisted, in a hurt tone of voice. ‘[I can see a long way south-west, and there are a dozen helicopters. More than that.]’
‘[Here come the choppers,]’ tooted a man whose moniker, Snow, may have been either name or nickname. [‘To chop off our heads.]’
‘[At least a dozen, I’ll confirm that.]’
‘I can hear them,’ said Simic.
‘[Do they think this is, like, half-time?]’ said Leggatt.
[‘Pinging that we’re carrying a good set of chopper-choppers,] ’ said a man called Asherton.
‘[Where are you?]’
The map was updated.
‘[We’re carrying too - this is Wilton, and we’re a dozen ladies and germs, and we’re setting up on the hill, north-west of the crater.]’
‘[Take them down - sorry, this is a formal prop.]’ The lights lit up on my arm. ‘[This is a strategic needful. Take them down and pull north up towards Hammersmith. It’s built up, heavily housed up there.]’
‘[Counter proposal,]’ said somebody, also lighting up the priority. I couldn’t, for a moment, see what a counter proposal could even be: going north was the only sensible tactical call. I checked the tag: a woman called Lee (again: surname, first-name, nickname, I don’t know). What was she going to suggest? Pulling east? Going west past the crater?
‘[I counterprop we let the choppers alone, pull south out of the fighting and let the world know we’re a fucking merciful warrior-giant.]’
I swallowed air in astonishment. Simic, Ridgway, Levy and I were jinking our way quickly but cautiously through Kingston in the general direction of the river, so as to be ready when the prop was passed and we had to pull north.
Straight away a dozen debating pings queued. ‘[Mercy?]’
‘[I call it weakness.]’
‘[If this is a serious prop, then it’s tantamount to ceasefire.]’
‘[I say no.]’
And one: ‘[Smart - they know their choppers are vulnerable, the fact that they’re sending them at all suggests they’re undertaking this manoeuvre more as a humanitarian gesture, perhaps to evacuate the—]’ He ran out of time to make his point.
This led to another dozen. ‘[Too soon to ease back on the fighting.]’
‘[Agree. Way agree.]’
‘[One week minimum, two weeks likely, then negotiations.]’
‘[We’ve shot a nuclear bullet.
Showing mercy to helicopters isn’t going to be noticed as mercy after that.]’
‘[The nuclear bullet was our Paul Atreides play. Our genius play!]’ said somebody, very eagerly. He was yelled at: ‘[What does that even mean?]’ ‘[I move we lock this idiot out of debate]’ and so on.
And in fact a surprising number of people were behind the counterprop. ‘[Atomic bullets are serious. They have serious consequences. We need to rein it in.]’
‘[One atomic explosion is enough shock and awe for one day.]’
I flicked through, but my mind was already made up. Time to vote. The sound of the approaching choppers was swelling in the afternoon air: ‘Move,’ I pinged.
I was one of thirty or forty who were pressing the vote in this manner.
‘[Move!]’ ‘[Move!]’ ‘[Move now!]’
We voted. The four of us slunk through an underpass, came out round a corner and saw Kingston Bridge spanning the river in front of us. The vote was closer than I might have thought, although the majority was clear: we would waste all the helicopters, and pull north. ‘[OK,]’ said Lee. This was sort of traditional: that the defeated proposer be the first to press the majority decision: ‘[Let’s take them down and go north.]’
‘The bridge looks clear,’ I said; and a fraction later somebody confirmed. ‘[Also at Kingston Bridge, and it’s clear.]’
The choppers were twanging the sky noisily now with their trippy, dance-club reverb; that How Soon Is Now shudder, multitracked a dozen times. Something else was folded into the noise. Words. We rushed the bridge, keeping close to the stone balustrade, peeking over the side to check the river below, flowing strenuously, silently, dark and thick as stout. I was nearly across when they were close enough for me to be able to make it out: loudspeakers on the choppers broadcasting an urgent, booming voice: RADIATION HAZARD, RADIATION HAZARD.
We four jogged over the bridge and on to a roundabout on the far side, completely traffic free. Beyond it was a fuel station; and there, behind the twin banks of recharge plugs, was a row of petrol dispensers; and behind those - amazingly enough - was a delivery tanker, parked up. ‘Sometimes,’ said Levy, ‘they make it too easy for us.’
I pinged through to the rest of them that we wanted to explode a petrol tanker, fortuitously abandoned in the midst of the fighting, on the northern side of the bridge. It was a nobrainer, really; but given how sizeable the minority had been of people who wanted to spare the choppers I thought perhaps we should run it past a vote. It came straight back, unopposed, maybe a third of people even bothering to click their voting buttons.
The choppers chuntered closer. Levy broke open the cab and used his clever phone to jump-start the truck. Simic got up there too, and propped his rifle on the hinge of the open door to give him cover. I took up a position on the roundabout, watching our people come driving or running over the bridge, checking their pings and counting them off. Away to the west was a stretch of parkland; and smoke was sifting upwards from this like chaff in the wind - myriad flakes of soot, like Goth snowflakes, dropping and blowing all about me. The weather was damp. We had set fire to a lot of vegetation.
Then, several groups, working in unison, pulled the enemy choppers out of the sky. Light, abruptly, flared; the sky roared as if in pain. Missiles seared out from four separate positions, and four enemy helicopters became four fantastically expensive firework displays. The two remaining choppers started to bank, turn, the chuggety of their rotors increasing in pitch as their engines strained.
Levy was backing the petrol tanker out of the fuel-station, and it was making that sleekit cowering ‘eek! eek!’ noise huge trucks make when they back up.
‘[General ping, Kingston area,]’ I said. ‘[We’re going to snap the Kingston Bridge in two minutes; so if you’re south of the river you’ll need to go round.]’ I was coughing with all the smoke.
‘[I’m right here,]’ came a ping back: man called Coates. I could see him waving, on the other side of the bridge.
‘[Coates, hurry. Everybody else, find another route.]’
The remaining helicopters had turned, and were on their way back south. A squad in Esher put out a general ping that they had them. Away to the west the sounds of more than one localized firefight were sporadically audible. Behind me the tanker’s engine made its hungry-belly growl, and Levy drove it out of the fuel-station and on to the bridge. Sheets of smoke folded like theatre drapery through the sky. The moon, visible westward through the gaps in the smoke cover, was almost full. I was struck by it. There wasn’t anything in the least cratered about it. It looked, indeed, like a smooth silver shield, that a giant might carry, if only he could find a sword massive enough to match it.
Levy dashed back to the roundabout with Coates and his half-dozen others. Just at that moment we came under small-arms fire: snap, snap, snap, like sticks in the fire. At first it wasn’t clear from where. I pulled my head down, put out a help!-ping and checked the wiki for updates.
Then one of the people with Coates, a chap called Durcan, did the most extraordinary thing: he suddenly performed a perfect backwards somersault, like an inadvertent circus acrobat. What happened is that he took two rounds, simultaneously, in the armour of his chest; and the double impact absolutely flung him backwards with such vehemence that he went down and his legs came up. He stood on his head, for an instant, his boots waggling. Then he went down right over, and lay on the ground on his front. Coates and somebody else had him, hauling him by his armpits and he was coughing and coughing like an eighty-a-day man. He was fine - alive, although more than one rib was broken and his phlegm was coming up bloody. But the bullets had not got underneath his skin.
We had moved the tanker to the middle of the bridge. Levy dropped two lob-rounds. One, deliberately, missed the tanker and cracked the stone of the carriageway so that the big truck sagged into a new declivity. The second hit the tanker squarely and the whole thing went up exactly like a Hollywood explosion - a rare sight, rarer than civilians might think. But we were already hauling ourselves north, taking turns to drag Durcan with us.
15
You asked me, Colonel, what I’m reading, in between our conversational sessions together. I’m reading a book called Seeding Neural Networks. Popular science, pretty interesting. I am reading it because I want to come to terms with the logic behind this new awareness. It is not very forthcoming on that subject.
By dusk Kingston was far behind us, and we had made our way more-or-less unopposed northward into the dingier streets of Hammersmith.
A couple of dozen of us found a good-looking building to hunker down in for the night, and scattered ourselves about the place in threes and fours: settled ourselves in with good lines-of-sight and supplies to wait the night out. We did debate pushing on, though the dark; but the heart of the group wasn’t in it. I think the bullet had thrown a fair few people, on both sides of the fight. It was, I concede, a lot to take in. We were tired. So we bedded down.
There were sporadic sounds of gunfire, and the occasional more distant detonation - for there was some nightfighting on the other side of the river at Barnes. We ate and chatted and dozed.
At midnight, or thereabouts, it started raining. Simic was of the opinion that this would wash radioactivity down upon us, and became indeed fairly peevish about it. I thought it an ill-informed opinion and told him so. But, you see, people are irrational when it comes to radioactivity. It is all around us all the time. Sometimes (as when the dentist scans our jaw, or when we make camp a couple of miles away from a recent nuclear bullet detonation) it’s more intense. Other times less. It balances out, overall. A bullet is not a bomb.
Simic and I bickered over this subject, but pleasantly, and with laughter, as friends do. He was straight. I couldn’t help that. Better, I suppose, that he was the way he was and I got to spend time with him, than that he was queer too and with somebody other than me. Best of all that he could be both queer and near, but life doesn’t shake itself down like that.
So, o
n the subject of love. I will say this, honestly not intending to evade the responsibilities of truth: love is a difficult thing to write about. This is not because it manifests itself in the world in impossible ways (I mean, impossible to apprehend, impossible to talk about) but rather because love by its nature inflects so large a quantity of desire that its representation gets pulled out of shape. The desire in question is complex, not simple; it is laminated on several layers. Love in fiction, for instance, becomes the written form of how we desire love to be. As a result we are of course continually getting it wrong. Love is not a representation of love, you see. I’m talking about more than the simple form, the familiar erotic-romantic fantasies where you get the guy, and he’s a splendid fellow; or you get the girl and she’s a doll (though that’s clearly one way of getting it wrong). I’m talking about more complex forms too. More nuanced understandings of love still don’t escape the black-hole-tugging ellipses of desire, the way those forces distort the otherwise flat map of lived-experience. All those films and books about the woe that is in marriage, about desperate affairs or exploitative relations: they tend to represent sex as mind-blowing, love as life consuming. But this is only the shape of our desire for desire. It’s not the thing itself.