Theories of Flight

by Simon Morden

  He took a chance and took the turn. The colonnades either side were home to the homeless. They stared at him as he ran by, but moments before they had all been looking down toward the small rectangle of daylight at the far end.

  Framed in it, just for a second, was the man. He hesitated as he looked behind him, and Petrovitch fired again. This time he leaned in hard, and though the butt kicked back ferociously, he didn’t screw up.

  The road sparked just in front of his target, who clasped at his shin before running off again, going to the right, heading north.

  Petrovitch kept going. Arms, legs pumping, coat streaming out behind him, heart spinning like it had never spun before. His breath came in rhythmic spurts, in, out, out, in, out, out. Trying to remember everything Madeleine had taught him: stride length, balance, keeping his head up even if he felt like hunching over, even if he felt like sinking to his knees and burying his head in his hands.

  And he was gaining. He’d wounded the man, forced razor-sharp chips of road surface at his leg: even if they hadn’t penetrated, the impact of them slowed him down. Whereas Petrovitch’s cuts, grazes, that stabbing sensation in his face that felt like an electric shock every time his feet hit the tarmac, spurred him on.

  The further they got from the site of the explosion, the more people were on the streets. They were looking up at the black cone of ascending smoke, or sometimes not even that, just out, just happening to be on the route of a man head to toe in black, sprinting by with an uneven step, and a few seconds later of a slight man with white-blond hair and a face streaming with bright red blood. The shotgun was almost incidental.

  Petrovitch saw the man glance behind again, caught a glimpse of a wide mirrored band over his eyes. Hatnav: he was using hatnav, and knew precisely where he was, and where he needed to go. The case for Petrovitch’s own overlays was in his pocket, banging up and down against his thigh, but he couldn’t afford the time to put them on.

  The sirens that had been converging on the yard behind King’s Cross shifted subtly. They were coming up behind him.

  The man he was chasing knew that as well. He had hacked feeds from MEA control center. He barreled right into a vast office building, squat and dirty, windows jagged and doors shattered.

  Petrovitch went in too, blue and red lights flickering at his back. The dim foyer, the hanging ceiling panels where lights and wire had been ripped down, the skeletons of partition walls. It was a stupid place to be, where ambush was easy and hiding easier.

  He brought up the gun and tracked its sights across the expanse of destroyed fittings and bird crap.

  He heard a noise above him. The barrel jerked up and he let rip with another round, blowing a hole in the remains of the suspended ceiling and putting a crater into the concrete slab above.

  MEA militia were right outside. He didn’t have long before they stopped him.

  Up the stairs. The man was heading for the roof. Even as Petrovitch pounded the steps in the stairwell, he realized that it didn’t make any sense. If it’d been him, he’d have stuck to the ground floor. The area was vast, the cover good. By going up, he’d be trapped. MEA would just have to wait for him to come out.

  So there had to be another reason, another plan, unless the man was a balvan. Which he could be.

  There was sound on the stairs. A door popping open, a flash of daylight, then the door swinging back shut: he’d reached the top, and in a few seconds, so would Petrovitch.

  He shouldered the door, and tumbled out onto the great plain of the roof. The black figure was really limping now, but still moving at a speed that put him halfway across the gray-green surface.

  He could shoot and miss. He could force him up against the edge of the roof and make certain. He kept on going.

  The man ahead jumped up onto the parapet and leaped. There was no hesitation, no momentary stall; a fluid up and over. Petrovitch’s waist slammed into the barrier. He looked. A lower roof, and the man still running, still favoring his left leg.

  It was at the limits of what Petrovitch thought he could hit, but he’d do it anyway. He took a deep breath, held it, and looked down the length of the gun. He had no heartbeat to bounce the sights, and he was, all of sudden, brutally calm.

  Squeeze the trigger.

  And the man jinked sideways. The roof where he’d been pocked and insulation fluffed out.

  He had real-time satellite data. That cost money.

  It was a long way down to that second roof. The man had done it, so Petrovitch was going to do it too. He landed in a heap, and he managed to hurt his wrist trying to roll with the blow. He got up, and restarted the same monotonous beat of one foot after another. He needed to keep his quarry on the move and not give him a moment’s rest.

  Ahead was a half-finished building, looking like it had been half-finished for a long time. It wore a shroud of tattered plastic around its open floors and suspended beams.

  If Petrovitch got his prey inside, his spy-in-the-sky would be useless.

  The man seemed to be obliging. He jumped over the railings and onto the scaffolding tied to the side of the construction site. He hung on one of the crossbars, then started to slide downward, going hand over hand, slowing his fall.

  As Petrovitch reached the edge, the man stopped and ducked into the building’s shell, three stories lower, across a three-meter gap.

  Petrovitch slung the shotgun over his back, climbed up and over and braced himself. If he fell now, he’d die. More to the point, the man would get away. He bent his legs and pushed out.

  He flew across the distance, arms outstretched. The first level flashed past his eyes. His momentum carried him onto the platform below, slamming him down on the wooden boards laid across the scaffolding.

  The whole structure shook. Someone had been borrowing pieces of it from the ground floor. But the building itself looked sound enough: no walls, no duct work, as empty as a car park. He picked himself up and shrugged the gun back into his cold grip.

  He ghosted through the hall of pillars to where the stairwell was. No stairs, just a black pit all the way down. He’d come too far to give up: but that was just like him, always going too far when a saner mind would have called a halt.

  He threw the gun down to the next slab of floor, then lowered himself off the edge until his fingers turned white and his feet dangled over the abyss. He swung his legs and let go.

  He landed badly. Again. This time he jarred his back all the way from his coccyx to his shoulder blades. He looked around, saw nothing and repeated the process. Gun thrown. Body suspended and dropped. Spine-crushing impact.

  Still nothing. The man had been on this level, and Petrovitch had arrived too late. He jumped to the next floor: the air was forced out of his lungs and he was left gasping.

  A shadow came straight at him out of the gloom, with that injured skipping run. Petrovitch snatched up the gun, forcing himself to a sitting position.

  The figure sprang clean over him before he could aim, and dropped into the stairwell. Petrovitch twisted awkwardly around, trying to keep his sights on him. The man’s hands slapped down on the lip of the next floor down, and he used that slightest of touches to jack-knife his black-clad body to safety.

  He looked up at Petrovitch, nose and mouth and chin a pale half-moon. Petrovitch looked down, past the knife that was sticking out of his chest, steel blade visible between nylon grip and the growing stain across the front of his T-shirt.

  Maybe the man was waiting for Petrovitch to topple forward, down the stairwell, dead before he hit the bottom, dead for certain afterward. Or perhaps for the gun to slip from nerveless fingers and for him to sag backward, his life leaking away.

  Petrovitch brought the shotgun up to his shoulder and fired his last shell. The solid slug tore a hole through the man’s ribcage and punched out his spine. What remained folded into the center of the poppy-colored pattern blossoming on the concrete behind him.

  The sound of the shot echoed away. Petrovitch was quite prepare
d to reverse the gun and beat out what life was left in his adversary. When it looked like that wasn’t going to be necessary, he put the empty gun down beside him and curled his fingers around the knife handle.

  He gave it a tug, and it felt like he was trying to pull his heart out, so he stopped. He could work it free by moving it from side to side, but that would cut more flesh. The point of the blade had sliced through his muscle, between his ribs, and embedded itself in the kevlar patch that covered his implant.

  He might even consider himself lucky, when he had the luxury of time.

  The chase was over. The adrenaline that had powered his fury was draining away. He hurt now, all over, from the acid pain in his face to the dull, numbing ache of his legs. And more.

  He got to his feet, staggering like a drunkard, stumbling from one pillar to the next, until he got to the scaffolding.

  Most of the MEA militia were still back at the first office building. One or two had heard the last shot, and were tentatively suggesting to their superiors that they should investigate.

  Petrovitch wrapped the crook of his elbow around one of the scaffolding poles and leaned out. It wasn’t far, but it was far enough. He clutched his knees to one of the downtubes and shinned down, taking exaggerated care not to knock the knife handle.

  The first MEA soldier raised his pistol at Petrovitch, the second pushed it back down and pointed.

  Petrovitch peeled his glasses free and scrubbed at his eyes. “Yeah. The mudak brought a knife to a gunfight.”

  Overwhelmed by abrupt exhaustion, he slumped to his knees in front of them, and hung his head low over the ground. Tears as well as blood dripped into the dust.

  They’d killed Harry Chain.

  8

  It was the other way round this time, with Petrovitch sitting in the waiting room, bandaged and drugged, dressed in disposable paper pajamas, waiting for a shadow to fall across the glass panel and the door to open.

  He had no rosary beads to click the time away. Instead, he lay back in his seat, eyes closed, realizing that the world had changed so much, so quickly, and that he really wasn’t in control of it anymore.

  The door didn’t so much open as implode. He knew who it was. He could smell her fear and outrage on the gust of air that preceded her.

  “You idiot!” She balanced on the balls of her feet, deciding whether to kiss him or kick him through the wall. She did neither. She was carrying a fresh T-shirt and a new pair of trousers for him, and she threw the bundle at him at full force. “What were you thinking? You could have been killed!”

  He hadn’t been thinking, of course. Nothing but blind revenge, the desire to make someone pay.

  “You’re not to do that ever again, do you understand me? Never again. Leave it to someone else, leave it to someone who has a gram of common sense, someone who’s paid to take the risks, someone who’s actually trained to weigh up those risks and make some sort of rational decision, rather than you because you’re not any of those things. What were you even doing there in the first place?”

  There was a lull in the storm of emotion that was Madeleine.

  He opened his eyes with difficulty. The right side of his face was numb—injectable painkillers for his cracked cheekbone—and the doctor had told him not to smile for at least a month. That was one instruction he was probably going to be able to follow without difficulty.

  She was standing over him, hands on hips, looking righteously angry and utterly magnificent in her gray MEA fatigues. Her skin was even paler than usual, and she was trembling.

  “I cannot protect you if you do stuff like this,” she said. “I cannot save you if I am not there.”

  Petrovitch moved his clothes to one side and wiped some drool away from the corner of his mouth. “Chain called me.”

  “And you had to go.” Her jaw set hard. “I am going to kill him. Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. I imagine they’re still trying to cut the roof off his car so they can get his body out.” He shrugged the best he could. “Someone beat you to it.”

  The fight fell from her like a cut curtain. She sat down next to him, making the chair look child-sized.

  “What?”

  “He called me. Said he had some bits and pieces from a U.S. military robot, but needed them looked over to make sure they were genuine. There was no one his end who’d turn out, so I said yes.” He chewed at his lip, tasted antiseptic, and grimaced. It hurt, in a good way.

  “You could have—should have—said no. He had no business asking you.”

  “When they come for us in the night, to try and take us away to wherever it is they take people like us to torture for what we know, we’ll discover it’s been our business all along. Except it’ll be too late to do anything about it. I need to know who they are, and what they’re planning, because if I do, I can send them home with their tails between their legs.”

  She put her arm around him, her hand resting against the shoulder which had taken the brunt of the shotgun recoil. The paper clothes he was wearing rustled.

  “I didn’t believe him,” he said. “I didn’t trust him. Maybe…”

  “He was just using you, as usual. You didn’t even like him.”

  “Yeah. I know. And now he’s gone, I can’t even tell him what a pizdobol he was.” Petrovitch leaned in against her, resting his head in the angle between her head and chest. “I knew something was wrong. There should have been a guard on the gate. He wanted to go on, I wanted to wait. So he did his thing, and I did mine. He was right in front of me, Maddy.”

  “He could have waited, just like you.”

  “I should have made him.”

  “When did he ever listen to you? He always did what he wanted.” She pulled him close. “Stupid man.”

  “Ow,” mumbled Petrovitch.

  “Sorry,” she said. She didn’t let go.

  They sat like that for a while, listening to the little sounds each other made. The door opened again, and there was a man in uniform: jacket; crisp, white shirt; tie knot snug against his throat; trousers that could hold a crease in a hurricane. He was carrying a sidearm at his waist and a clear plastic bag in his hand.

  “Apologies for the intrusion. Sergeant Petrovitch, Doctor Petrovitch?”

  They looked up.

  “Captain Daniels. Intelligence Division. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Loss?” said Petrovitch, sitting up. “Yeah. That. So am I.”

  Daniels held up the bag he was holding. “We need to keep this as evidence, but we can release it to you later, if you want.”

  Madeleine took the bag and examined the knife inside. “Where did you get this?”

  “The surgeon took it out of your husband’s chest, Sergeant.”

  She scowled at Petrovitch, and handed the bagged knife back. “It’s a Ka-bar. American.”

  “They make them in Taiwan,” said Petrovitch, putting his hand on the dressing over his heart. “Could have come from anywhere.”

  “No, it couldn’t,” she said. “It could only have come from my fool of a husband, who in ten years’ time will have to have had everything important replaced with plastic and metal.”

  She stood up, forcing the captain back, and resumed her hands-on-hips accusation of Petrovitch.

  “Anything else you need to tell me? Lost an eye, a leg? Been fitted with a robotic spleen? Because they’ve already replaced your brain with a fifty-cent pocket calculator.”

  “Depends,” said Petrovitch.

  “On what?”

  “On how much they told you.” He looked over the top of his glasses. “Do we have to do this now?”

  “Then when? I don’t see you doing anything else important right now—unless you’ve arranged another press conference to hurl abuse at.”

  “Perhaps I should come back later,” ventured Daniels.

  “No, we’re done here. You’re supposed to tell me everything, Sam. Everything.”

  She stormed out, leaving Petrovitch with his
head in his hands.

  “That went well,” he said. “What can I do for you, Captain?”

  “I need to ask you some questions. Are you sure this is a good time?”

  “Yeah. She’s right: I’m not doing anything else, so questions are fine. I’ll do what I can. Can I just ask you one first?”

  Daniels pointed to the seat vacated by Madeleine, and Petrovitch nodded his assent. The captain sat down smartly, back ramrod straight.

  “How much trouble am I in? If the guy I killed was just a regular citizen who liked dressing up as a ninja, I’m screwed.”

  “If that was the case,” said Daniels, “you’d be under arrest by now.”

  “I’m supposed to be smart. Everyone tells me so. I could’ve thrown it all away.” Petrovitch scrubbed at his scalp with his fingernails. “I think I have some apologies to make.”

  Daniels’ face twitched. “He doesn’t appear on the Metrozone database. Most likely an Outie, judging from his appearance.”

  “Good job I didn’t shoot him in the head, then.”

  “Quite. You were suspicious?”

  “I’m a street kid. I know how people behave when they’re scared, surprised, shocked. This man was too calm, like he knew what had happened, like he’d made it happen. It was just wrong.”

  “You chased him.”

  “And he ran. I looked like govno and I was carrying a pushka. I would’ve run from me, too, though I like to think I would have got away.” Petrovitch shifted in his chair. The pain was starting to seep through the haze of morphine.

  “You didn’t think that someone who leaped from tall buildings was someone you should stay away from?”

  “Yeah. Well. It was a little late for that. I was committed.”

  Daniels kept his hands on his knees. He didn’t record any of Petrovitch’s answers, merely soaked them up like a sponge.

  “You were with Major Chain at his request, yes?”

  “Yeah. He called me. Said there were no tech guys around.”

  “Is it something he did often?”

  “No. No, he didn’t.”

  “So why this time?”