The Petrovitch Trilogy

by Simon Morden

  The lights looked down on them from the end of the thing’s cantilevered neck. Petrovitch tilted his gaze up.

  “You know me, don’t you?” he said.

  The head descended until it was the same level as Petrovitch’s. One damaged, cut, bleeding: the other vast and cold and all but indestructible.

  “Look at me,” said Petrovitch. “Look at my face.” He tucked his thumb behind his ear and pulled at his dressing until it came loose. A stiff ribbon of bloody bandages looped out of his hand. “I am Samuil Petrovitch, and you need me.”

  A joint groaned. A ram stuttered. It smelled of oil and electricity.

  The construct crouched down, its open-framed body crushing everything below it: cars, street furniture, the road itself. It leaned forward until the heat from the lamps was scorching Petrovitch’s skin.

  With a slight deflection, a grind of pulleys, its attention turned to Madeleine.

  “Mine,” said Petrovitch. “She’s mine. We’re together, and we won’t be separated.”

  It held the lights on her for the longest time, then with a sigh it looked up.

  Petrovitch could see nothing but a smear of gray around the after-images burned onto his retinas, but he guessed what was in its sights now. He groped for Madeleine’s hand and tugged gently.

  She stumbled forward into him, clutched at him and held him to her, because she had been blinded too.

  “Crouch down,” he said, and they both got to their knees and pressed themselves against each other.

  The Jihad-built machine started moving. The air filled with creaks and pops, squeals and bass rumbles. The ground shook, rising up beneath them, falling away again. Dust billowed, walls collapsed, metal tore, glass cracked; a gun snapped three times, and was thereafter silenced forever.

  The concussions lessened, the air moved once as the great counterbalancing tail swung its spun above their heads, and it was gone, marching down a road far too narrow for it. A many-legged colossus, destroying everything in its path.

  Except for Petrovitch and Madeleine.

  He looked over the top of his glasses. The lights of the beast flickered away in the distance, but the sky itself was dark.

  33

  They could hear other machines in different parts of the Metrozone, signaling their presence with flares of burning gas and the slow, heavy rumble of collapsing buildings. The sky flickered with flame and echoes of explosions.

  Petrovitch half-expected them to start calling to each other, crying Ulla! across the rooftops.

  “The car’s a write-off,” said Madeleine. It was on its side against the buckled steel shutters.

  “To be fair, it wasn’t in much better condition when we stole it.” Petrovitch squinted at it. He still couldn’t see too well. “Can you get it back on its wheels?”

  She squeezed in behind it and braced herself against the shop front. Petrovitch stood well out of the way as the car toppled back down. Whatever glass there was left fell out into the road.

  “Good as new,” he said, and kicked at the driver’s door. It swung open, and he felt under the steering column for the wires.

  “You’re not seriously suggesting it’ll work?”

  He caught the battery wire with his fingertip. It bit him and he jerked away, growling. He reached farther up and took hold of the insulated part.

  “Out of gear?” she asked.

  He nodded, and she reached across the passenger seat to waggle the gear stick. He used touch to guide the wires together, flashes of blue worrying at his skin.

  The engine coughed. He moved the wire back and forward and finally found the right point. The car wound itself into life again.

  “Desperation plus East European engineering equals result,” he crowed. “Not pretty, but it works.”

  “We’re still not going to make it in time, are we?” She clambered over the bonnet, and put her hand under Petrovitch’s shoulder to help him up.

  “Not that one. Broken.”

  “Sorry.” She swapped her grip to the other side. “But we’re taking too long. They must be at the tower by now.”

  Petrovitch shook himself out. “You’d be forgiven for thinking so. But since the Jihad’s monsters are still crashing around, I can only conclude that Chain either hasn’t access to the secret room yet, or that it’s less use than he thought it was. Which means, we still have some wiggle room.”

  “Get in the car and shut up, Sam.”

  “Yes, babochka.”

  She drove slowly down the road, moving this way and that to avoid the larger obstacles, rolling over the smaller ones. There were signs of the Jihad everywhere: gaps in the architecture where there ought to be none, straight furrows plowed across the fabric of the city, marked by fluttering yellow flames.

  There seemed no reason for the pattern—one building left, another destroyed—but Petrovitch rather fancied that, come daybreak, a passing satellite might notice the similarity between the new face of the London Metrozone and the Tokyo rail network.

  It hadn’t occurred to him that there might be people buried beneath the drifts of rubble, and that some of them might still be alive, until he saw a man bent over one of the mounds of rubble, picking at it piece by piece.

  They rolled past, Petrovitch transfixed by the man’s lonely labor. He never looked up, just went on flinging bricks behind him one after another, digging down.

  “Are you Okay?” Madeleine asked.

  “I’m getting worried, that’s all.” He gnawed at the back of his hand. “You. Me. Especially me. We’re the weak link in the chain. If we get killed trying to stop the Jihad, no one else knows what’s going on. If there was a way of getting a message to Marchenkho…”

  The Skoda scraped its already battered side against an abandoned fridge, lying in the street. There was more debris; boxes, clothes, shop fittings, loose packaging. Madeleine slowed to a crawl and peered out through the hole where the windscreen used to be.

  “Don’t these things normally come with lights?”

  “I thought it was going to be a five-minute dash to the tower. I didn’t connect them up.” Petrovitch kicked the footwell. “Maddy, turn right.”

  “Isn’t that toward the river?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sure?”

  “Turn already.”

  She remembered to depress the clutch as she spun the wheel. “Where are we going?”

  “Just bear with me, okay?”

  The university foyer was shattered—doors forced, glass like frost on the floor, tables and chairs scattered like stones. Petrovitch shoved a desk aside, and listened to the hollow clatter it made.

  “Chyort. Too late.”

  Madeleine tiptoed in behind him, letting her eyes adjust to the near-total darkness. “The river’s at the end of the street. Getting closer, too.”

  “The place is abandoned. I was hoping, you know?”

  “I know.” She suddenly became still, frozen mid-step. She ducked just as a beam of blue-white light flashed into Petrovitch’s eyes.

  He gasped, tried to raise his right hand to shield his face, groaned again as his broken bones ground together. He gave up and stood tall, blinking into the torchlight.

  “Nothing for you here,” said a voice. “Turn around and go.”

  “We’re armed,” said another. “Don’t think we won’t use them.”

  “That,” said Petrovitch, “is the best bit of news I’ve had all day. I’m going to reach into my pocket and get my student card out, and you’re not going to shoot me. Deal?”

  “You’re a student? Here?”

  “Postgrad. I share an office with Doctor Ekanobi in the Blackett building.” He slowly withdrew his battered student card and held it up.

  The torch beam wavered and the source moved closer. Behind the light, he could make out a gun.

  “Is that the Jericho?”

  “What?”

  “The gun. It’s the Jericho I gave Pif. Where did you get it?” The light centered on Petr
ovitch’s card, then back onto his face. “It was a true likeness, once upon a time.”

  “Okay. Sorry. Can’t be too careful.” Both the gun and the torch lowered, and the dark figure illuminated the makeshift sentry post set up at the rear of the foyer.

  Madeleine was poised behind the other guard, her fist raised. The other woman was holding a ball-bearing catapult made from bent steel, and oblivious to anyone standing near to her.

  “It’s fine!” called Petrovitch, “Maddy, stop it.”

  “It was just in case,” she said, and held her hands up. “No harm done.”

  “What’s going on?” asked the young man with the gun. “What’s happening?”

  “I was about to ask the same thing. Where are the paycops? Who’s in charge?”

  “The guards are gone. It’s just students and some of the staff. As to who’s in charge?” He shrugged and looked at his equally young colleague. “I don’t know.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Petrovitch picked his way to Madeleine. “Stay here with them. I’ll be back in five.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Arrange some insurance.” He stepped over the remains of the back doors.

  She shouted at his back: “Sam, one day you’re going to have to tell me what you’re doing before you do it.”

  “Yeah. We haven’t got time for a democracy.” He started down the back lane between the faculties. The high walls refracted the sounds from the city: the grinding, the roaring, the howling. The machines of the Jihad were still carving their songlines without distraction. No time for voting, perhaps, but enough for a last will and testament.

  He felt his way up the stairs in the pitch black, closing his eyes and counting the landings until he’d reached his floor. There was the door, and there the corridor. He ran his hand down the wall, chanting the names of the occupants of each room until he got to his.

  There was a faintest glimmer of light seeping from under the door.

  “Pif? That you?” he whispered as he opened it a crack.

  “Hey, Sam,” said Pif. She was surrounded by ornamental tea lights, her pen nib scratching over the page she was working on. “Almost done.”

  She kept writing. Petrovitch borrowed one of the candles and carried it over to his desk. He started pulling out his drawers one by one and sorting through them. He found the night-vision goggles he’d taken from the Paradise militiaman, and his second-best pair of glasses.

  The ones on his face had become part of him; the scab that covered the top of his ear also contained the spectacle arm. There was nothing for it but to break it free. It left him more breathless than he was already.

  Pif put down her pen and sorted her papers out into two piles, each of which she folded in half and slid inside identical envelopes.

  “That’s that,” she said, and finally looked up. “Sam. What have they done to you?”

  “Yeah. You should see the other guy.” He eased on his spare glasses. He could see properly again. “We need to talk.”

  “Yes,” she said, holding up one of the plain brown envelopes. “You need to take this with you.”

  “Sure.” He nodded.

  “It’s a mostly complete solution to the theory of everything. I’ve done as much as I can on it, but I have a feeling if I wait any longer, I won’t have time to make a copy. Now, I have some undergrads scavenging parts for a short-wave transmitter, but otherwise it’s up to you to get it out of the city.”

  “Me? Pif, you don’t know…”

  She held up her hand, and her palm shone in the candlelight. “We’re going to try and hold the university for as long as we can. The gangs we should be able to fight off. But those… things. We can’t stand up to them.”

  “About those,” started Petrovitch, but she cut him off.

  “Sam! We’ve solved the biggest problem in science for two centuries. If the proof stays here, it’ll die with us. This,” and she hit the papers with the back of her hand, “this is the most important thing in the whole world.”

  “Stanford’ll work it out. Or Bern.”

  “Fuck Stanford,” she yelled. “It’s our work. And there’s no guarantee of anyone ever finding this solution ever again. Three words: Fermat’s Last Theorem.”

  “He lied. He didn’t have a proof. Group theory wasn’t even around in the seventeenth century.”

  “How do you know? The idiot didn’t write anything down, and it took us three hundred years to do it differently.” She strode over to Petrovitch’s desk and slapped the envelope down in front of him. “Get it out of the city. Any way you can.”

  “Pif,” he said, “if I had the rat, which I did for all of half an hour earlier on today, I’d try and mail it to UNESCO straight away.” He picked up the envelope and felt the weight of it before he slid it in his inside coat pocket. “I have something else I have to do. Something even more important than this.”

  She stared at him as if he was mad.

  “Okay. Listen, because that short-wave radio of yours is going to work and if I screw up, the outside world needs to know this: the AI known as the New Machine Jihad has its physical location in a vault below the Oshicora Tower. The vault is rad- and emp-hard, and I have to assume it has its own uninterruptible power supply. It has to be destroyed. I don’t know if it can migrate to another host, or whether it already has, but if the sun comes up and it’s still in control, someone’s going to have to nuke it.” He raised his filthy bandaged hand and nudged his glasses back up his nose. “Preferably from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”

  “Sam,” said Pif, “what about science?”

  “I think trying to save the world trumps even science.”

  She knelt down next to him. “These equations will save more than the world. They’re going to open up the universe to us. Fusion power. Bias drives. Black hole engines if we can find something strong enough to hold one. Space elevators. O’Neill habitats. Generation ships. Colonies on Mars, around Jupiter, in other systems. Flying cars, Sam. You finally get flying cars. And they’ll all be named after you: the Ekanobi-Petrovitch laws.”

  He swallowed. How would he do it? Top-of-the-range electronics shop, one that hadn’t already been stripped clean? Charge up the battery pack? Physically take the information with him, maybe. Find a boat dragged loose from its moorings by the rising river and head for mainland Europe. How long would it take? Half a day?

  Petrovitch sighed. He scooped up the night-vision gear and held the goggles to his face. She appeared green and anxious on his screen. “Sorry, Pif. The moment I can, I’ll get the proof away. The moment you can, get them to hit the Oshicora Tower. It’s the best I can do.”

  She patted his arm. “Good luck, Sam.”

  “And you.”

  He pushed his seat away and walked to the door.

  “Sam?”

  “Yeah?”

  “An AI? Really an AI?” she asked. “And it phoned you up here?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, it did.”

  She grinned. “How cool is that?”

  Petrovitch started to laugh. It hurt, it hurt everywhere. “It’s pretty cool,” he admitted. “Now I have to go. Maddy’s waiting for me.”

  34

  The car rolled to a stop at the edge of the flood. Madeleine pulled on the handbrake, and ran her fingers through the wires under the steering column. The engine spluttered on for a few seconds, then shuddered to a halt.

  Water lapped around the base of the monumental arch where Petrovitch had stood just that morning. He realized how many hours ago that was, standing in the morning cold without a coat and only the homeless for company.

  Now he was back, armed with nothing but his wits and some equations. But he did have Madeleine, night-vision goggles pushed up onto her forehead. He groped in the footwell for the steel pipe, and passed it to her.

  “Did you ever feel so incredibly underprepared?” he asked.

  “I’m only nineteen. I haven’t really had that much experience,” she s
aid. She kicked the door open and stepped out. Water pooled around her feet.

  Petrovitch reached through the missing window for the door handle and leaned against the frame. It popped free, and he half-fell, half-crawled from the interior.

  “No sign of the riot wagon. If they’re not here, we’re screwed.” He turned his gaze on the Oshicora Tower, which was lit from within and from without. Sealed floodlights made bright circles in the filthy water, and the glass of the tower glittered like tinsel. Up it soared, story after story of blazing light, until it reached the park at the very top, which shone like a great jewel.

  Everywhere else was dark, making the tower seem like a fairy castle rising from a lake, full of feyness and eldrich wizardry.

  Madeleine slipped the goggles down over her eyes, and scanned the way ahead. “There’s nothing moving.”

  Petrovitch took a deep breath. It didn’t help. “Where the chyort is Chain? If he’s going to kidnap the one person we need, at least he should have the decency to bring her along.”

  “Perhaps the Jihad has made another mistake. Perhaps they’re all dead.”

  “That would be just great.” He waded out into the black water. Things barked against his shins, and he tried not to imagine what they might be. “Come on. Stick to the left where it’s shallower. There’s an underpass around here, and we don’t want to fall in.”

  Her hand shot out and grabbed his arm. It forced his shoulder and he saw stars. “Sam. It’s alive.”

  “What is?”

  “This… everything!”

  He reached up with his bandaged hand and dragged the goggles down off her face until they hung glowing around her neck. “Yeah. Rats. They’ve come to eat the bodies that are choking the ground floor of the tower. I was going to tell you about those, but not until we got to them.”

  “Sam,” she started.

  “It’s not like they’re going to be hungry, is it?”

  “I suppose it depends on how many rats there are.”

  “It’d take a lot of rats. Trust me on that.” He splashed further on. The water was up to his knees and dragging at his coattails. “If you decide not to come, I’ll understand.”