Theories of Flight

by Simon Morden

Petrovitch shrugged. “Desperation. He was in a hurry. Couldn’t wait. That’s why he died in the explosion and I didn’t.”

  “So how did you and the major know each other?”

  It was time to start lying. He could do it, as natural as breathing, even to the urbane Captain Daniels.

  “I was a witness, one of his old cases from back when he was plain old Detective Inspector Chain. Nothing ever came of it, but we’d talk every couple of weeks.” Petrovitch pushed his glasses toward the bridge of his nose. “He was checking up on me, I suppose.”

  “You obviously made a big impression on him,” said Daniels.

  Petrovitch gave a momentary frown. “Why d’you say that?”

  “He made you his next of kin.” Daniels lost his composure for the first time, and sounded genuinely surprised. “Didn’t you know?”

  “No. No, I didn’t. Why didn’t the old kozel say anything?” Petrovitch inspected his bandaged palms. “What does that mean, next of kin?”

  “It means he nominated you to receive any outstanding pay, in-service benefits. That sort of thing. Human Resources will tell you more.” Daniels reclaimed his self-control. “There should be enough to pay for a funeral, at least.”

  “Hah,” said Petrovitch mirthlessly. “So that’s what he was after: mourners. You see, Captain, there’s no one else. No one to mark the passing of Harry Chain but me. No friends, no family. That’s what a lifetime of pissing people off leads to.”

  He levered himself to his feet, the sudden surge of blood to his extremities making everything tingle. His face was frozen, his shoulder one big bruise, his hands and knees scrubbed raw and clean with only a layer of vat skin beneath the bandages. There was a hole in his chest that went all the way down to a notch on the surface of his heart, and that meant yet another scar on the road-map that was his ribcage.

  He paced the floor, working the life back into himself.

  “Do you know what it was he wanted you to look at?” asked Daniels.

  “Don’t you lot talk to each other?”

  “Of course. I wanted to know if the major had told you.”

  “Yeah, he told me.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  Petrovitch was flushing out the drugs from his system, feeling sharper by the minute. “No, of course not. I was going along to prove to him all he had were a couple of windscreen wiper motors and a bent aerial. Then some govnosos Outie takes out half the district and Chain goes to his grave thinking he was right.”

  “So you don’t buy the CIA story?”

  “No,” said Petrovitch. “Do you?”

  “I couldn’t possibly say. Classified.” Daniels was nowhere near as good at lying as Petrovitch. “You also need to remember that Major Chain was in breach of protocol when he talked to you.”

  “Yeah. Not a word.”

  “Thank you for your time, Doctor Petrovitch.” Daniels adjusted his cuffs and stood, remembering to pick up the bagged knife as he did so. “I expect I’ll see you again when you come to collect Major Chain’s personal effects. Or we can courier them to you, whichever you prefer.”

  Petrovitch affected a moment’s thought. “I’ll come and get them. The least I can do, I guess.”

  Daniels extended his hand, and Petrovitch shook it gingerly. “Get well soon, Doctor.”

  “Thanks for not arresting me.”

  “These are difficult times for us all. If only everyone was as civic-minded as you.”

  Petrovitch suppressed his snort of derision until he was alone. Daniels didn’t fool him, and he wondered if he fooled anyone. The uniform might work on some people, but not him: he’d had nothing but trouble from men—always men—strutting around as if they were on parade.

  The man he’d killed wasn’t an Outie. No chance whatsoever, even discounting the satellite gear and the stealth suit, or the coincidence that the one building he’d bombed was the one where Chain had stashed the prowler components. It had been his teeth. They’d been even, white, perfect, glowing while bared in a feral snarl in the semi-darkness. No Outie, and precious few Metrozone dwellers, had teeth that good.

  He’d bet good money that Daniels was running a gene assay right now, checking for military-grade bio-hacks, and that he thought the CIA were odds-on favorites for killing Harry Chain.

  Petrovitch got his clothes on, and rescued his boots and coat. His rat was still in his pocket, along with the other bits and pieces he kept there. Not like last time. His fingers wouldn’t lace his boots, and he ended up tucking the loose ends inside.

  Madeleine was sitting in the reception area, counting her beads while having one eye on the television screen. She stopped clicking and tucked them away as he slopped closer.

  “I would pull you up,” he said, “except I’m more likely to rip both my arms out of their sockets.”

  She chewed at her lip. “I don’t want to lose you, just when I’ve found you.”

  “Yeah. It was crazy. I should never have done it. That I got away with it doesn’t excuse anything. Sorry.”

  “And it won’t happen again?” She fixed him with a needle-like stare.

  He blew out his breath in a thin stream. “Slight problem with that.” He looked around: there were other people present, and what he wanted to say wasn’t for public consumption. He did notice that he’d fallen further down the news cycle: the morning’s bombing had knocked him lower. “Can we go and find something to eat? I need to tell you everything.”

  9

  Petrovitch was shown into an office—which was in a different building to when Chain was a policeman, with a different view from the windows—and still recognized the hallmarks of the man.

  There was a coffee maker in one corner, surrounded by the paraphernalia of making: dirty mugs, dirty spoons, two empty foil packets of filter coffee and one closed with a red clip. Filters were scattered like autumn leaves on the floor, spilling from the box on the shelf above.

  Flimsy pieces of paper sat in randomly allocated piles on every flat surface, daring the erstwhile occupant to open the window and lose all order. Filing cabinets bulged with files. His desk was crammed, too, along with what brief ephemera he considered important.

  There wasn’t much room between the furniture and the walls: being a major in a bankrupt militia held even less prestige than a detective inspector.

  “Yeah. Okay,” said Petrovitch, “what am I supposed to do?”

  Daniels presented him with a build-it-yourself document box. “Take what effects he left. The next person in will throw away what you leave, so better get them all.”

  Petrovitch folded the box together, pushing tab A into slot B until it became rigid. There was a lid, too, and that was constructed in the same fashion before being laid to one side. Daniels leaned against the door frame as Petrovitch edged his way toward the window and Chain’s chair.

  “I should watch you while you do this, but I can trust you, right?”

  “Of course,” said Petrovitch. “I’d appreciate some time alone.”

  “I’ll come back in twenty minutes or so, see how you’re doing.” With one last look, he strode away, almost marching, leaving the door to the corridor open.

  Petrovitch looked over the top of his glasses, and picked up a photograph frame, toying with it until Daniels’ heels disappeared.

  He was about to put the photo down when he realized what it was, what it showed. Him and Madeleine: him uncomfortable in a jacket, no tie. Her—she’d wanted white, but post-Long-Night Metrozone didn’t do wedding dresses for two-meter-tall brides in a hurry. She wore gray silk instead, looking like gossamer, wound around her straight from the bolt and held together by artfully placed pins and a silver brooch.

  Chain had taken the picture himself on the steps of the church, then he’d taken the time and trouble to print it out and mount it, and sent the happy couple a copy. It appeared he’d made one for himself, too.

  Petrovitch put it in the box. The corridor was clear, but that didn’t mean he wasn’
t being watched. He took out a slim black wand and twisted it on. A line of lights rose up the side of the casing, then dropped back down until just one was illuminated.

  He ran the wand over the desk, then spread out, holding it up and around until he’d scanned the whole room. Near the door, the lights tripped all the way into the red, and he peered out. There was a camera positioned just above, on the ceiling, a small black dome of surveillance.

  He stepped back in and knocked the door half-closed with his foot.

  He went straight to the desk and leafed through each file, scanning its contents with a quick, practiced eye. Nothing seemed immediately relevant in the first few, and he guessed they’d been placed there by a subordinate. Further down the pile was the report on the discovery of the prowler. That went into the box, too, as did the one beneath, which was slim, containing only a couple of sheets of typescript, but was labeled CIA suspects.

  He looked at the size of the files, then retrieved two more, roughly the same thickness, from random places in the drawers. While he was there, he poked around in the far recesses of the cabinets, seeing what lay hidden.

  He didn’t know what to expect. Bottles, perhaps, but he’d never seen Chain so much as sniff at a wine cork. Porn, but the man seemed almost completely disinterested in women. Or men. And he clearly liked his pies, but his roundness was due to poor diet and lack of exercise, rather than bingeing on packets of biscuits.

  Nothing but a few empty boxes of nicotine slap-patches. Chain had missed his vocation. He should have become a monk, instead. He might still be alive if he had.

  Back to the desk then, and the tier of three drawers. Petrovitch pushed the empty biros and dried-out fibre-tip pens aside to get at the three cash cards at the bottom. He’d pass them through a reader later and find how much was banked on each.

  The next drawer down was stuffed with storage media, all the way from ancient three-and-a-half-inch black squares, through silvered discs and plastic sticks, to the modern solid-state cards overprinted with a variety of designs.

  They all went into the box. Even if they all ended up in a bulk eraser, it was worth sifting through them for the chance of one nugget of gold.

  He opened the bottom drawer and found Chain’s bugging equipment, devices he’d been the wrong end of on several occasions. There were manuals, software, and the bugs themselves, various sizes and shapes, including the sticky ones Chain liked so much. His detector wand, too.

  Petrovitch didn’t know if MEA would allow him to take that sort of property home. It was worth a try.

  Now for the hard part. He opened the case that held his overlays and slipped them on his glasses, then from another pocket, clicked open the rat. The environment wasn’t info-rich. Not yet, anyway.

  He started patting the underside of the desktop, then the drawers, then got down on his hands and knees when he couldn’t feel any pieces of paper. His face twitched. Chain hadn’t pasted his logon details anywhere obvious.

  There was nothing on the desk either: used mugs held only dregs, and the hardwired phone only its own number.

  Then he cursed himself, and dived back into the half-full box, sliding out his wedding photo and using his thumbnail to open the back of it. Not there, either.

  No matter. The job went from hard to really, very hard, but he was prepared. Using the rat, he navigated his way to the MEA computer—not the public face of the authority, but the bare code that covered the access nodes, and simultaneously fired up his secret weapon.

  The script on his screen read: moshi moshi.

  It was smart enough to know what he wanted. Of course it was. All he had to do was point at the node he wanted hacked, and it ground out the solution with blind repetition. Finesse wasn’t required, but speed was. Two seconds and he was in.

  His overlays came alive, a flurry of identity tags blossoming out from the cabinets, unique strings of numbers that were attached to every paper file. The two he’d salted away in the box gave up their names, and rather than delete the records completely, he swapped the tags with the two replacements. It was those he wiped out, and sent his agent through the MEA computer, scrambling any mention of the new numbers.

  It wasn’t perfect, but it’d take six months of solid work to find out what had really happened. That was it: retreat back out through the hacked node, making the user session disappear from the memory before closing the door behind him.

  All he had to do now was get the physical files out of the building. The radio tags built into the cardboard covers were easy enough to dispose of. He just had to tear them off and soak the squares in a cold cup of black coffee to soften them enough that he could peel them apart and disassemble the tiny printed circuit. As for the rice-grain-sized tags themselves—he placed them on the window sill and crushed them to dust with a glass paperweight.

  Chain had a pair of scissors. Petrovitch turned one of his coat pockets inside out and sliced through the seam at the bottom, then pushed the pocket back through. Each file was rolled into a tube and slid inside, then artfully arranged to lie flat within the coat’s lining, against the hem.

  He took his overlays off and tucked them into their case, shut the rat, and put both into his other pocket. He put the lid on the box, and sealed it with tape from Chain’s stash of stationery. The solitary and sad pot plant—some sort of yucca forced into dwarfism by the size of the container—went on top, shedding brown leaves.

  He’d done what he came to do, and the time he had left was extra. So he put on one last pot of coffee, and cleaned out two mugs the best he could. There was no milk, no sugar, just hot, strong, oil-black brew. The maker coughed and spat until it had done, then Petrovitch poured himself a cup and sat back in Chain’s chair with his feet up on the desk.

  He closed his eyes and dreamed: there was the sea, white waves rolling up a narrow beach of dirty yellow sand, the strandline marked with tails of brown seaweed and bleached fragments of wood. There was green grass and pink flowers dancing in the wind, and inland, deep green trees grew. Between sea and forest was a dome of clear crystal that reflected the clouds in the baby blue sky. Inside the dome were structures, buildings within a building, and overhead, a wingless aircraft wheeled and spun with the gulls.

  He was there. He was old.

  “Doctor Petrovitch?”

  He sat up with a sudden intake of breath. The coffee he was holding slopped over the rim of the mug and onto his legs.

  “Yobany stos!” he yelled, and just about managed to get the mug down before he danced around the room, batting at his thighs. His actions set off all the aches and pains from the previous day. He screwed up his face in pain, and hobbled back to Chain’s seat.

  “Sorry,” said Daniels. He was trying not to grin. “Have you taken everything you wanted?”

  Petrovitch took a moment before replying. “Yeah. I made coffee.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Want one? At least it’s hot.”

  “I can see that, too. Go on, then.”

  Daniels perched himself on the edge of the desk while Petrovitch poured a dark steaming stream into another chipped mug.

  “He didn’t have much,” said Petrovitch. “Nothing to remember him by. No photographs of him, his family, anywhere he’d been, nothing he’d made, nothing of sentimental value. A few bits and pieces, and that’s that.”

  “Except for your wedding picture.” Daniels took his coffee from Petrovitch. “Perhaps you’ll find something different at his flat.”

  “His… flat.” Petrovitch sat down again, and sipped at what was left of his drink, after he’d poured it over himself. The thought that Chain might have lived somewhere—that he left the office at all—was strange and unsettling. “I didn’t find any keys.”

  Daniels dipped into his pocket and produced an evidence bag. Inside were two keys joined by a simple steel ring. As he slid them across the desktop, he asked: “Do you need the address?”

  “Yeah.” He took the proffered slip of paper and
stared at the bag. There was a brass lever key, old school and secure, and a plain bar of metal for a magnetic lock. He dragged them into his hand, closing his fist around them so that the sharp edges dug into his freshly skinned palm.

  “Doctor Petrovitch, can I ask you something entirely unrelated?”

  “Sure.”

  “This research of yours: where will it take us?”

  Petrovitch put the keys in his lap, and picked up his coffee again. “You realize you’re the first person to ask me that?”

  “Didn’t you have a press conference yesterday?”

  “Depressing, isn’t it? No one wants to know anymore. I could have invented something that could unravel the fabric of space-time itself, and some mudak would call it boring.”

  Daniels looked over the top of his mug. “And have you?”

  Petrovitch pushed his glasses up his nose. “Difficult to say. I’m… look: the Ekanobi-Petrovitch equations try to describe how the universe works. That I’ve shown we can change the local gravity field for one object is a signpost on the way, but all we have is a single answer to a very complex function that should have—will have—multiple solutions.”

  “But you’re working on the others.”

  “I would be, but I’ve done no work since Monday morning. I’ll get back to it when everything isn’t so pizdets. I haven’t answered your question, though. When you work with this… thing—Pif describes it as being like a sculpture—you get a sense of what might be there when you chip away all the rock you don’t need. I’m pretty certain I can get a working spaceship drive out of it, not just enough to take us to the other planets, but to other stars. And then there’s energy, fantastic amounts of it, trapped inside every atom. We can only get at it by going nuclear, and that’s not exactly flavor of the century after Armageddon.” He looked up and shrugged. “Give me ten years and no one trying to kill me, and I’ll do it.”

  Daniels said nothing. He blinked, drank his coffee, and tried to digest the new knowledge along with his beverage.

  Petrovitch put his mug down and hefted the cardboard box. The pot plant on top wobbled, and threw another long, crisp leaf to the floor. “I’ve wasted enough of your time. You’d better show me out.”