by Simon Morden
“What are you doing?” asked Miyamoto.
“I’m being awesome. Don’t interrupt.”
Sporadic gunfire rattled the air from some distance ahead, echoing off the walls. The first of the cars had met the first of the Outies. He sent another command to them, and gave them access to his map. The Outies were the red dots, the cars were blue.
Run them down, he said.
How to kill a car? Petrovitch knew—put a bullet in its tiny electronic brain. The Outies had no way of finding it under the bodywork. A lucky shot here and there, but for the most part they’d have to reduce them to piles of scrap metal to stop them. And this being the real world, they were going to run out of ammunition long before then.
He watched the red dots ripple and recoil. The cars worked crudely, without cooperating, crashing into dumb objects and reversing, coming back for another go. More intelligence was needed. They could hunt in packs, with ambushes laid in side streets, traps in alleyways. He wasn’t going to be able to coordinate that at that moment, and the AI had already said it was busy—which for a machine intelligence of unknown capabilities was a startling admission.
It would have to do for now.
Some of the red dots were spilling their way, undisciplined dribbles of color draining off the blocked artery of Highgate Road.
“Company.”
Petrovitch strode on, and suddenly, there were four—no, five—Outies coming down the street at him. They stopped when they saw him, though a couple of them looked around fearfully behind them to check for cars.
Miyamoto drew his sword, and Petrovitch had the opportunity to reflect on what a brilliant sound it made, a clear ringing like a bell.
One of the Outies had a gun, what looked like a shotgun: fat barrels side by side, and a half-empty bandolier of red shells. The others had crude spears, nothing more than pre-Armageddon blades grafted onto long poles. Effective, but hardly worth emptying a city for.
The Outies had been smart, too. They’d made sure their vanguard all had guns. Whenever MEA fought them, it had been bullet for bullet, shell for shell. It had given the illusion of a massive well-equipped army, an illusion they’d all fallen for.
It was kon govno, pure and simple. The speed of the advance, the crushing tidal wave of panic, the complete absence of information from beyond the front line, had served just one purpose.
Petrovitch stared at the man with the shotgun, who was feeding two cartridges into the cracked breach.
Crosshairs formed, and Petrovitch felt his arm come up, lock into place. It was extreme range for both of them, but it was closing every moment as they walked toward each other.
The shotgun snapped shut, and it was raised to a shoulder.
Miyamoto started to look left and right for cover. “You must get down.”
Petrovitch squeezed the trigger, smooth and certain. His aim was adjusted for everything: his motion, his target’s, air pressure, windspeed, bullet trajectory, but still there were variables. Imperfect aerodynamics, uneven powder burn, the barrel of the automatic being out of true by fractions of a millimeter.
He was aiming for his chest, and caught his upper arm instead. The man spun around, the shotgun pointing briefly at the sky before crashing down. One of the barrels boomed and spat smoke, and an Outie was thrown hard against the side of a parked van. He slid down and didn’t move.
Now it was three against two: one older woman, two younger men, all dressed in that uniform of dirty browns and blacks. They looked at each other, uncertain.
Petrovitch spread his arms out wide and kept on walking. “You seem to be in my city.”
The woman found her voice. “City ours,” she called out, even though she was of an age to have received a formal education in what had been England. “City burns.”
It struck him that these Outies were a family group: a tribe, a clan, at the very least a mother and her two sons, and the man dead would have been an uncle or a cousin. The other man on the ground had made it to his knees, and he was shuffling toward the fallen shotgun. There was one cartridge still loaded, and he seemed determined to show he could fire the thing one-handed.
“I always thought it was pillage first, then burn. But whatever,” said Petrovitch, “there’s been a change of plan. Prepare for the New Machine Jihad.”
Behind them, a car rolled around a corner, its red bonnet already badly dented, its windscreen punched through and roof warped. It was leaking radiator fluid, but it would last long enough for what he was going to use it for.
It gunned its engine and raced forward.
23
They walked on in silence as Petrovitch pushed shotgun cartridges out of their loops and into his pocket. Some of the houses either side of them were on fire, burning freely, always centered on one property that was starting to collapse. Bright embers spilled into the air like seeds and rose up on fiery drafts. The heat from them made the air flicker.
“What?” he finally said.
Miyamoto wouldn’t look at him. “That was… distasteful.”
“I’m sorry? Distasteful? What the huy is this?” Petrovitch took the last shell and examined the breach mechanism. He downloaded a video that told him how to load it safely and not shoot his foot off in the process.
“You… we should have given them a chance to surrender. That would have been more,” and Miyamoto pursed his lips, “honorable.”
“You know what? You can take your stupid bushido code and you can za cyun v’shopu. This isn’t feudal Japan. This is yebani Stalingrad: a meat-grinder battle where the first thing that dies is mercy.” He rammed the plastic cartridge home and snapped the gun closed. “The Soviets won Stalingrad by being utterly ruthless about human life. That meant not tying half their men down looking after Nazi prisoners.”
“Seeing who your teachers are, I am not surprised by the lessons you have learned.”
Petrovitch snorted. “In Russia, lessons learn you. But let’s go with this for a moment: they didn’t look like they wanted to surrender. Quite the opposite.”
“You drove over them.”
“Yeah. No cries of ‘we surrender’ at that point.”
“And then you reversed back.”
“Even then one of them was still trying to get up, and you made me waste a bullet on him. Swords don’t need reloading.” The road they turned into to head up the hill toward Highgate was littered with bodies like spilled grains of cooked rice. Some of them were still just about alive. Others lay in pools of wet blood and were patently dead.
Petrovitch scanned the ground for guns, or other ranged weapons, but couldn’t see any. Just blades and clubs and spikes. At the top of the road, there were tail-lights and sounds of mayhem.
“So, let’s say that they’d surrendered, the four of them. We’d have three Outies, plus the one I’d shot. What were we going to do with them? Disarm them? They’d just walk into the nearest house and tool up. Tie them up? The next Outies through would let them go. Take them back to the relevant authorities? The two of us are the authorities.”
Miyamoto stepped over a twisted corpse, spine broken, arm bent unnaturally. “You labor the point. We still should have offered.”
“And that’s precisely why they’re five k from the Thames and have turfed twelve million people out of their homes.” Petrovitch studied his map. The cars were a stop-gap, enough to clear a path for him to the coach depot and little more. The Outies would be back. “We’re too yebani civilized. We’ve forgotten that there’s something to fight for.”
“But do we have to fight like this?”
“Yeah. We do.”
“You mean you do.” Miyamoto almost sneered, and Petrovitch was tempted to hit him very hard somewhere painful.
Instead he stopped, stood in front of him and waited until they were toe to toe, then screamed in his face.
“Wake up! What the huy is wrong with you, man? Two hundred thousand Outies are busy slaughtering their way to victory, and you want to play nice? Nice is what put us in this p
izdets in the first place. Look around you: where are the people who normally live here? The ones that didn’t run are waiting, cowering behind locked doors before they’re cut up into little bits like those two kids outside Lucy’s.” He took a breath. “Or they’ve already been cut up. So, yeah. I’m going to kill and kill and kill until the Outies finally get the message that they’re not wanted here. And I will carry on killing them all the way back to the M25. And then I’m going to bomb the survivors and send an army out to sweep the rest away. Then, and only then, will I think about nice. Got that?”
Miyamoto wiped the spittle from his cheeks. “I understand.” He sounded more subdued.
“I want you to go.”
“I have to stay.”
“I don’t have to justify myself to you.”
“Then stop.”
Petrovitch ground his teeth together. “Come on. We’ve got a bus to catch.”
He turned on his heel and stamped his way up the hill. Smoke was drifting across the road, obscuring it from his eyes and the satellites. Infrared was a mess, bright blooms of incandescence blotting out other smaller heat sources.
His assault on the summit of Highgate was petering out. The Outies were in the cemetery, while the cars growled outside the iron gates and brick walls.
He summoned the AI. “Fifty-one, thirty-three, fifty-six north: zero, eight, forty west. Get the tanks at Primrose Hill to smash it.”
The avatar walked by his side for a few steps. [You know you’re about to destroy the tomb of Karl Marx.]
“Yeah. What did he ever do for me?” Petrovitch involuntarily raised the shotgun to his shoulder, aiming down a side street. “Engels did most of the hard work, anyway.”
He remembered to pull the butt in hard before he squeezed the trigger, the only two conscious decisions he had to make. The gun kicked back and a man—he thought it was a man, but in reality it was only a half-seen blur behind a line of low concrete bollards—fell backward.
The inexorable advance was pressing down on him once more. He summoned more cars, raising them from sleep and sending them out to battle. The Outies were fluid, trying to flow around his forces like a flood, but the garage the coach hire operated from was just around the corner. He only had to hold back the tide for a few more moments.
The storm broke around him. Even as cars pulled out from curbsides and threw themselves at the gray figures, gunfire popped and glass shattered in curtains of shining crystal.
The avatar raised his hand and vanished, and Petrovitch got on with the task of surviving the next minute. He crouched down and took a look at the pitiful cover he’d given himself: halfway across the road, with Outies to his left and more in front. They might not even have noticed him yet, but a stray shot was going to hurt just as much as an aimed one.
Miyamoto was faring no better, a few meters behind him. Two cars were coming up the street, side by side. Not fast, not yet, but if he ran it would be into the path of one or the other of them.
Petrovitch had an idea. He took those two cars and slowed them down, taking them out of hunter-killer mode and telling them to do something different. He ran back to Miyamoto and forced his head low.
The cars flanked them, and rumbled on at jogging speed. Other cars overtook them, wheels up on the pavement, swerving with screeching tires to avoid the lamp-posts and signs, then hurtled away straight at the Outies.
The first artillery shells howled overhead, and there was an almost simultaneous flash of fire. The windows all around disintegrated as the shockwave hammered into the buildings around them. Petrovitch ducked.
Speech was rendered impossible by the simple fact he thought he was deaf. A burning vehicle, everything ablaze, even the wheels, rolled back out of the side street.
Straight toward them.
Petrovitch grabbed Miyamoto’s arm and threw him forward, slaving their moving shields to his position. It wasn’t quite fast enough. The car on their left shuddered as it was struck. By the time it managed to tear free, it was on fire itself.
They were across the junction. The coach depot was next left. Miyamoto was scrabbling to get upright again, and Petrovitch’s face was growing warm from the flames. They’d have to get the rest of the way on their own.
An explosion behind him sent him sprawling again. Shrapnel—plastic, metal, glass—sang through the air and zipped off the tarmac. Petrovitch was alive with pain. He tried to rise, to run, and instead stumbled as the splinters embedded in the backs of his legs tore into his flesh.
He fell, spilling shotgun cartridges onto the tarmac. The cars kept rolling onward as Miyamoto did a crouching shuffle between them. The man’s black clothing was white with dust.
He tried to summon one last effort, but the deep breath he took caught like acid in his throat and made him cough uncontrollably. Every spasm was accompanied by white flashes that blinded him and robbed him of what little control he had.
When he could see again, the ground in front of his face was flecked with red.
“Pizdets.” He sipped air, and found that he could move. With artillery shells thundering overhead and the crackle of hungry flames around him, he got to his hands and knees. That was all he could manage. Even that small movement made him gag. A glance behind showed him that his trousers were wet with blood.
“Miyamoto!”
He was a little way off, escort cars idling away to either side, regarding Petrovitch with his dark eyes.
“Miyamoto!” he shouted. Ragged clouds of smoke crossed between them. “What the huy are you doing?”
“I am watching you die.”
“I’m not dead yet. Get me up.” He tried to get one foot under him, and everything went momentarily gray. He swallowed, and it tasted of hot iron.
“If I do that,” said Miyamoto, “Miss Sonja will continue to fight rather than retreat, believing that you can offer her victory.”
“But we can win. We will win.”
“You will destroy her if you live,” he said. “Not now. She will survive this, while you will not.”
He started to walk away, up toward the crest of the hill, toward the Outies.
“Where are you going?” Petrovitch reached out for the shotgun that lay ahead of him on the ground, and dragged it back.
Miyamoto flicked his fingers behind his head at Petrovitch, discarding him as finally as a piece of litter.
“They’ll kill you too,” he called, and belatedly realized that was just what the other man had planned. Of course he could never go back, not with Petrovitch dead: it would be a failure, a disgrace, shameful.
The cars were still slaved to Miyamoto, even the one that was now thoroughly alight. They rolled slowly after him, beyond shouting distance.
Petrovitch could still call him, though. Of course he could. He had his number stored from earlier.
And Miyamoto answered. “What?”
“You don’t have to do this.”
“I will not act against you myself because of my promise to Miss Sonja. I can only stop you by leaving you out here, alone, dying, surrounded. When we are both gone, she will be able to make her decisions without your influence.”
Petrovitch tried to find the man on his map, and found that the nearest red dot to him was mere meters away. He was in amongst them.
Miyamoto grunted, swinging his sword. “This madness will soon be over.” He grunted again. Metal rang against metal, followed by a gargling cry. “Your revolution will have failed. Your futile war will have been lost. But she will be saved.”
Petrovitch screwed up his face. “Do you hate me that much?”
“Almost as much as I am devoted to her,” and he never got any further than that. He was in his last battle, cutting and dodging and piercing.
Then the connection went quiet. Miyamoto’s sword clattered to the ground, and Petrovitch heard voices over breathy panting. The one blue dot was almost obliterated by red.
“Miyamoto?”
The sword rang one last time. The point of it
dragged across the ground, skittering and chiming.
The connection stayed live. He could hear the echo of explosions and squeal of cars, but nothing more from Miyamoto. The voices drifted away, and he knew they were coming down the road, straight for him.
If he didn’t move now, they’d find him sprawled there.
He used the shotgun as a lever to get himself upright. He was so close to the yard where the coaches were stored. He could see the wall, and the shattered acrylic sign of the firm in red and white.
He dared not bend his legs. He could not turn or twist his torso. Every time he tried, he was overwhelmed. So he dragged each foot in turn across the road, leaning on the butt of the shotgun as a crutch. He had to hurry, but could not. He had hurt himself before, but even when he’d been shot in the head and had his middle finger ripped off, it hadn’t been this bad.
He hadn’t been on his own. Madeleine had been there, and so had battlefield-strength painkillers.
Another salvo of tank shells screamed in. He covered his head as best he could, and when the air was still again, he staggered on. The Outies were coming. They were coming for him.
There was a small door in the wall: it led directly into the yard where they kept the coaches. It was locked: of course it was. Nothing was going to be easy.
Petrovitch raised the shotgun and held it unsteadily. The crosshairs in his vision wandered across the face of the peeling paint until he dragged them back by concentrating his whole being on the gap of wood between the lock and the frame.
It was at point-blank range, and the recoil threw him backward. When he landed, it felt like teeth tearing at his thighs and that the skin on his torso was being flayed. It felt like he was being eaten alive.
The door flapped as he writhed, and he knew he had to get through it, wedge it closed.
He rolled over. That was enough to make him gag and pant for breath. He screwed his eyes up and dug his nails into the palms of his hands. He crawled like a dog, like a worm, and crossed the threshold. He used his leg to kick the door shut behind him. It banged against the jamb, and creaked back, slightly ajar.