Theories of Flight

by Simon Morden

  “I take it she shot you.”

  “The first put me on my back. I tried to get up, get my visor out of the way, so she could see who it was. She walked over to me and shot me twice more. There would have been a fourth to the head, but then the rest of my squad turned up, and she ran.”

  “Pizdets.”

  She sighed. “Haven’t told you the best bit yet. I was screaming ‘Mom, it’s me, Maddy’ over and over—and she had to have heard me, she was standing over me with a pistol pointed at my heart—and she still pulled the trigger. So yes, pizdets just about covers it.”

  He squeezed her closer. They sat like that for a while.

  “There’s a poem,” he said. “The one about your parents, how they…”

  “I know it.”

  “It’s true, though. They do.” Petrovitch held out his left hand and examined his ring finger. “Probably a good job we didn’t invite her to the wedding.”

  She snorted. “You’re a bad man.”

  “The very worst. Come on, babochka, let’s get you back to sunny Clapham.”

  Madeleine disentangled herself and gathered up her dripping armor. Petrovitch took the full-face helmet by the chin-strap and let it dangle. She caught him looking at her.

  “I’ll be okay,” she said. “Just, you know.”

  “Yeah.” He opened the door with his foot and held it as she struggled through. “I should be carrying that.”

  “It’d be easier wearing it, except that it’s pretty much unwearable. It’s only going as far as the front gate. MEA can pick it up if they want it, or just bin it.”

  They turned the corner and walked down the long corridor to reception.

  “Do you know a guy called Andersson?” Petrovitch asked as they past the dented door.

  “Jan Andersson? He’s just been transferred in. Tall, Norwegian.”

  “Yeah, that’s him. Is he all right?”

  “He was in here with me. He tripped over something, hurt his knee. They stuck a needle in him and told him to go home.” Madeleine looked askance at him. “That’s not what you mean, is it?”

  “No: he picked a fight with me, right about here.”

  “What? In the hospital?”

  “The self-defense lessons paid off.” He shrugged, and she stopped, which forced him to stop too.

  “Sam? What did you do?”

  “Apparently, I sit at my desk scratching my arse while my woman goes out to fight the barbarians. It seems to offend him. So much so, he tried to push me backward through a wall.”

  She didn’t know what to either say or do, so Petrovitch took up the slack in the conversation.

  “You’ve not mentioned him before, so I was just wondering how he got so concerned about our domestic arrangements.”

  “He. What?” Both words were pronounced separately, indignantly.

  “I kind of guessed as much. I’ll leave him to you, shall I?”

  “How. Dare. He.”

  “Maddy, people are going to figure that now you’re not a nun, they can get in your pants.”

  “But. I’m. Married!”

  “They probably also figure I’m not going to be much competition, either.” Petrovitch shrugged again. “You’re going to have to get used to the attention. I’m going to have to get used to it. We’ll manage.”

  Her face, previously white with pain and fatigue, had colored up. “How can you be so calm? How can you just stand there and be so matter of fact?”

  “Because in the four months we’ve been married, you haven’t got ugly. I know you’re a mass of neuroses and insecurities about your looks, but you turn heads when you walk down the street—and it’s not because people think you’re a freak. I know that when they see me next to you, they’re saying ‘How the huy did a pidaras like him end up with a woman like that?’ And…” He turned away. “I wake up every morning and wonder that myself.”

  Madeleine’s shoulders, tense before, slowly slumped down. “Sam,” she started. Something distracted her, and Petrovitch looked round to see the technician from earlier.

  “What?” he said.

  “Can I,” she said hesitantly, glancing between him and Madeleine, “can I have your autograph?” She brought her hands from behind her back. There was a pen in one, a spiral-bound notebook in the other.

  Petrovitch raised his eyes at the ceiling. “You really picked your moment,” he said. Then he relented, took the biro and scrawled his name at a slant across the page. He tacked on the zero potential Schrödinger, and a smiley face. When he handed it back, she almost curtsied to him before running back up the corridor, notebook clutched like it was first prize.

  “Sam?”

  He held her helmet to his chest and flexed his fingers against its cold ceramic surface. “It’s not important.”

  “What’s not important?”

  He started for the exit again, and this time forced her to follow. She repeated her question to the back of his head.

  “I didn’t want to mention it. You know: yeah, so what if your long-lost mother just tried to kill you? I don’t care how upset you are because I made gravity today.” He slid his glasses up his nose and tightened his lips. “I’m not like that. Not anymore.”

  The news was still playing on the wall in the foyer. He’d overtaken both Florida and Paris, and coverage was pretty much universal. One side of the screen was the loop from the camera phone. The other was a scientist he vaguely recognized talking animatedly about how the future had changed irrevocably.

  Madeleine trailed after him, and she stumbled as she saw her husband declare to the world just what he thought of Stanford University.

  “That’s you.”

  He went back for her, took her arm and guided her outside. “You get to see me all the time.”

  She tried to re-enter the foyer. “You were on the news.”

  “Yes. And in twelve hours, they’ll have forgotten all about me.”

  “But shouldn’t you be, I don’t know, somewhere else?” She looked over her shoulder to catch a glimpse of the rapidly shifting images. “You did it. You made it work.”

  “You called me. I came.” Petrovitch clenched his jaw, then forcibly relaxed it. “I thought that was the deal. No matter what we were doing, if one of us wanted the other, they’d come. No questions, no ‘I’m a little bit busy right now.’ That was what we promised each other. Or have I got it completely wrong? Probably better I know now than find out later.”

  She dropped the armor and enfolded him in her arms, pressing him against her and not letting him go, even though it had to be hurting her.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Petrovitch could hear the beat of her heart, strong and steady. “That’s okay,” he mumbled.

  4

  She was sleeping in the bed, and Petrovitch was sitting at his screen, wearing a glove to gesture to the images on it. The crest of the news wave had reached east Asia, where Chinese technocrats in their glass towers and Mongolian yak-herders living in yurts were having breakfast to his sweary cry of triumph.

  His phone rattled against his thigh again—and it couldn’t be Maddy this time either. He slipped it from his pocket and wearily thumbed the button.

  “Doesn’t anybody use email these days?”

  “Congratulations, Petrovitch.” There was a pause. “I can’t hear the champagne corks popping.”

  “If you thought you could use me to get into a party, you don’t really know me at all.”

  Harry Chain cleared his throat noisily. “So you’re bunkered down in Clapham A, waiting for the storm to die down. Perhaps you should have chosen a quieter career.”

  “Quieter?” Petrovitch swung his bare feet up on the desk. “Quieter than high-energy physics? Yeah, we’re all yebani celebrities these days. Why did you call?”

  “Apart from to say well done? How’s Madeleine?”

  He looked at her reflection in the screen, the long curve of her spine and the shadows formed by her waist. “She’s fine. A b
it shook up.” He didn’t tell him about her mother.

  “Look, Petrovitch; we need to talk. Not over the phone, either.”

  “About…?”

  “Really not over the phone. I can come to you. Half an hour, forty minutes.”

  “I don’t want to leave her, but I don’t want you coming to the domik either. You know where Wong’s is?”

  Petrovitch heard the tap of a stylus against a screen.

  “I do now,” said Chain. “Half an hour? Please?”

  “You’re buying.”

  “I always do.” The connection clicked off.

  Petrovitch slid the phone back into his pocket and turned in his chair. Madeleine was still but for the slight rise and fall of her rib cage. Her hair was coiled on the pillow. Her hips were shrouded by a sheet. The expanse of pale skin between was perfect, unmarked by scar or blemish.

  She was a thing of wonder, and she was in his bed. He shivered, even though he wasn’t cold.

  His boots were by the door, his coat on a stick-on hanger next to it. He got ready as quietly as he could, but then came the point that he had to wake her. He kissed her shoulder, and waited for her to stir.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey yourself. What’s time?”

  “Eight thirty. In the evening.”

  Her eyes, large and unfocused, narrowed. “You’re going out?”

  “I’m going to Wong’s. Harry Chain called. Said it was…” he shrugged, “he didn’t say what it was, but that in itself is worrying.”

  “Okay.” Her eyelids fluttered shut, and she was instantly asleep again.

  He took a moment to inspect the bruising that was seeping in a yellow and purple tide across her front; even her breasts, which were still as magnificent as he remembered them from that morning.

  She’d need stronger painkillers than the pitiful bottle dispensed to her by the hospital.

  He reluctantly turned away and zipped open a holdall on the floor. In Madeleine’s methodical way, each item inside had its own ziploc bag. He rummaged through the CS spray, the sheathed knives, the taser and assorted coshes for the Ceska. He slipped the pistol into his hand and went back in for the almost toy-sized bullets. He tidied away when he was done.

  He threw on his coat, dropped the gun into his pocket, and looked back as he started to unlock the door. She’d still be there when he got back, which was in itself a reason not to be too long.

  Wong scowled at him as Petrovitch kicked the door open.

  “Hey. Why you no use handle like everyone else?” he complained, but he was already pouring coffee in a scalding black stream.

  Petrovitch pushed the door back with his heel, shutting out the mist and the dark. “Because I’m not like everyone else. Where I come from the door opens you.”

  “That still make no sense. You say that like it mean something, when it all nonsense.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and felt the weight of the pistol as he sized up the rest of the café’s clientele. “Quiet?”

  “No one come in and shoot us up. Not today.” Wong slid the coffee over the counter. “On house.”

  Petrovitch had come out without a credit chip, or even a few coins, so he had no choice but to accept. “Thanks. Why?”

  “You great man now. Shows fortune cookie right again.” His face cracked into an unpleasant grin. “I have sex with the Stanford faculty’s mothers!”

  Petrovitch looked over the top of his glasses. “Is that how they translated it? I prefer my version.” Still shaking his head, he retreated to the very back of the shop and nursed his scalding black coffee until Chain barged his way in.

  “Hey,” started Wong.

  “He’s with me,” Petrovitch called.

  Chain squinted into the distance and finally located the source of the voice. He patted his jacket down for his wallet, and let Wong charge him twice for the same drink without him noticing. He brought his coffee to Petrovitch’s table and slopped it down before collapsing in the chair opposite.

  “You all right?” asked Petrovitch.

  “A bit, you know. Strange days.” He pressed his squashed nose into his mug, inhaling the bitter fumes. “Everything is wrong.”

  “That, coming from a policeman, doesn’t fill me with happy thoughts.”

  Chain’s face twitched. “I’ve been seconded. Metrozone Emergency Authority militia. Intelligence.”

  Petrovitch just about managed to swallow. He coughed hard to clear his throat. “Ha!”

  “Don’t start. Not now. Besides,” he said, reaching inside his jacket, “I’ve got something for you.”

  He slid a slim metal case the size of a cheap paperback across the table. Petrovitch stared at it for a moment before looking up into Chain’s rheumy eyes.

  “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Since I dropped the last one in a swamp, I supposed I owed you.” Chain nudged it closer. “Consider it a late wedding present.”

  “I thought my present was your convenient forgetting of all the illegal things I’d done.” Petrovitch picked up the case and turned it in his hands, watching the play of light and shadow across the brushed steel surface. He touched the recessed button and the case split apart. “If you’ve loaded this up with spyware… What am I saying, if? The first thing I’m going to do is bleach the insides.”

  “For what it’s worth, I haven’t touched it. Factory fresh. Except,” and Chain stopped, and his shoulders hunched higher.

  Petrovitch dabbed at the rat, checking the software and the connectivity. “Except what?”

  “I did put a file on it. You might want to take a look.”

  Petrovitch found the file and clicked it. A video started to run: grainy, too-bright colors, ghosting. It was almost unwatchable, but then it settled down. People were passing through a screen, the camera pointing down and toward them, recording their faces as they walked out from under the arch.

  “Airport?”

  “Heathrow, this morning. Watch for the blonde.”

  “That’s every second person.”

  “You’ll recognize her.”

  He watched as figures paraded by. There was a pause, then a woman with a curiously mechanical gait stepped up to the screen. Lights and alarms sounded, causing a flurry of activity from the paycops. The woman looked first to her left, then her right, her ponytail flicking her shoulders. A guard was arguing with her, his hand on his holster, but she seemed supremely unconcerned. It was almost as if this happened all the time to her.

  She was alone again, everyone else retreating outside the square of the camera’s capture. The screen rang its alarms for a second time, but she strode through untouched. She looked up at the camera, her gaze unwavering. Then she was gone.

  “Don’t know her,” said Petrovitch.

  “No family resemblance, then?”

  “Not mine.” Petrovitch wound the video back and froze it. He stared at the image, even as she stared back. “Chyort.”

  “May I introduce Charlotte Sorenson, recently arrived from the U.S. of A?” Chain swigged at his coffee and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “She has cybernetic legs, hence all the kerfuffle.”

  “No prizes for guessing why she’s here.” Petrovitch snapped the rat shut and tapped it on the tabletop. “What does she know?”

  “She knows where her brother stayed, who he was working for. She may even know he was being blackmailed.”

  “By Oshicora and by you,” said Petrovitch pointedly.

  “I would apologize, but he’s dead.” Chain shifted uncomfortably in his seat and leaned closer. “We all did things we’re not proud of.”

  “Like shooting my wife in the back? At least the Outies have the decency to try and kill her face to face.”

  Chain almost got up and left. His hands were on the tabletop, poised, ready to push himself away. He went as far as tensing his arm muscles. Then he slumped back down. “Okay. Probably deserved that.”

  “Probably?”
<
br />   “I’m trying to help you. There’s more than just Miss Sorenson to worry about.”

  Petrovitch pocketed the rat and signaled to Wong for more coffee. “Go on.”

  “I get to see things in my new job I wouldn’t normally see. A briefing here, a transcript there. Things start to add up.”

  “Chain, stop sounding like the yebani Oracle and get to the point.”

  “I think the CIA are after us.”

  Petrovitch became stock still. Even when Wong banged down two more mugs and swept away the empties, he didn’t react.

  Chain leaned back, making his seat creak in protest. “Did you hear what I said?”

  “Yeah. I heard. What makes you think that?”

  “This is not the best place to discuss the evidence.” Chain regarded his fellow diners, who appeared to be entirely disinterested in anything he might say. Or do.

  “I’m not taking this on trust,” said Petrovitch. “You’re a pizdobol at the best of times.”

  “I’m limited to what I can show you, but come in tomorrow.”

  Petrovitch smirked. “Don’t you think I’m going to be busy tomorrow?”

  “Enjoy your fifteen minutes of fame. It’ll be something to remember fondly while you pace your cell and tear at your orange jumpsuit.” Chain picked up his coffee and gulped at it.

  “You’re actually serious.”

  Chain leaned forward again, his chest almost across the tabletop. “They’re desperate to know what happened during the Long Night, and there are only three people who know the whole story. Four, if you count your Doctor Ekanobi. I hear rumors: some of them are even true, though it would take anyone else years of sorting to get the full picture. But that’s why the CIA are here. They suppose if it can happen to the Metrozone, it can happen to one of their cities. This has their highest threat level, and their top priority.”

  “Why don’t we do something radical?” Petrovitch stretched his neck out toward Chain and whispered: “Why don’t we just tell them what happened?”

  “You shot an American citizen.”

  “He was tovo. He’d killed, what, two dozen cops by blowing them up? You said yourself he had form for that, and yobany stos, he had his own father murdered.” Petrovitch pushed his glasses back up his face. “The Director’ll probably give me a medal for services rendered.”