The Petrovitch Trilogy

by Simon Morden

  “Okay.” He held up his hand. “Bang to rights. That’s exactly what I did. I thought that was what I had to do to break the Outies, and for the best of reasons, too: I wanted to find Maddy. Hers was the life I had to save, and the rest of them could go to hell. I behaved just like you’ve done.”

  “Maybe then,” said Sonja quietly, “we can work something out.”

  “One problem.” He still had his hand up, and he swapped his open palm for a rigid index finger. “Just one. I was wrong. I shouldn’t have taken away someone’s right to decide whether they fight or run, or to work out for themselves whose side they really want to be on. It was a mistake, and I won’t make it again.”

  She was staring at him, incredulous.

  “I’ve learned a better way of doing things,” he said. “I have friends now, and we do things for each other because we want to, and this is normal, you know? I have a wife, and yeah, things have been difficult between us for longer than they haven’t, but I know I’m supposed to do stuff for her because it’ll make her happy and not because I’ll get more sex, or I won’t have to go shopping with her, or whatever. And if I ask someone a favor, I hope they’ll say yes rather than no, but I won’t ruin their life if they refuse me, and I’ll only ask if it’s something I can’t do rather than something I think is beneath me or too dangerous. And in asking, I put myself in their debt, and they can call on that, and I should be grateful that they see me as reliable or competent enough to be able to help them. Chyort, I’ve changed so much, I can barely believe it.”

  “You can’t mean any of that,” said Sonja. “Tell me none of that is true.”

  “I can’t. That’s why I want nothing to do with this, or you. You’re not…” He felt he was ten again, and it made him squirm. “You’re not my friend anymore, because friends don’t do this to each other. They don’t take away each other’s dignity or freedom. They don’t connive with their enemies behind their backs, and they don’t lie to their faces. I understand all that now. I might not be very good at it, but I know what I should do.”

  He was spent, but his own confession had surprised him. He almost felt good about himself.

  Sonja reached down to her ankle and, with a rasp of Velcro, released the small pistol from its holster. She curled her finger over the trigger and pointed the barrel at Petrovitch.

  He raised his eyebrows, but not his own automatic, which still pressed cold and hard against his skin. “So is this your answer? Kill me: after all that effort you went to, to save my life?”

  She was breathing slow and deep. Her aim didn’t waver, and after a few moments of disquiet, Petrovitch found that he didn’t care.

  “Meh,” he shrugged, “if I’m going to fail, I may as well fail spectacularly.”

  He turned his back on her, and started to walk slowly toward the elevator. He hadn’t gone more than a couple of steps when he heard Sonja call his name. He looked over his shoulder just in time to see her take the gun in her mouth and blow the back of her head off.

  He couldn’t unsee the act itself, but he did manage to look away while her body fell with a thump onto the carpet.

  30

  There was nothing he could do. Not now. Not for her. He didn’t need to go over and check: he’d shot enough people in the head to know she wasn’t getting up again. He stared at her for a long time, thinking through everything and what might have been.

  It could have been so very different. He could have let Marchenkho kidnap her, and then Hijo wouldn’t have killed Old Man Oshicora, the New Machine Jihad would never have risen, and the Outies would never have broken through the cordon. Madeleine would have never broken her vows, Lucy’s parents would still be alive, and maybe, just maybe, Tabletop would be doing her backflips in a cheerleading squad rather than having herself turned into a weapon.

  He and Pif would still have discovered their equations. The world would still have turned.

  Instead, he had this. And even if it wasn’t his fault, it was his responsibility.

  “I still don’t know why you were on your own that morning. Perhaps you’d secretly arranged to meet a girlfriend, or a boy, and you didn’t want your bodyguards hanging around. Or maybe you just wanted to slum it with the rest of us, see how the little people lived. Marchenkho was waiting, had always been waiting. And there, right there on the curbside, I was given a chance to redeem myself. I didn’t think about where it would lead.” He sighed and took the weight of his left arm in his right hand. “But neither did you, and what I did was right, and I’m not sorry.”

  After that, it was just a question of riding back down to the ground floor. Thirty seconds, almost like falling, not quite like flying. As the elevator slowed, the sensation was lost. The world returned in all its terrifying, dazzling complexity.

  The doors opened. A sea of silent people faced him. He stepped out across the threshold and saw their expressions suspended somewhere between hope and despair. Such was the weight of unrealistic expectation. Petrovitch was momentarily at a loss for words.

  “Yeah. That didn’t go well,” he said, pressing his finger against the bridge of his nose. “I could give you all the details, and I will, just as soon as I can make sense of it myself. You’ve been working for the Freezone, and I want you to keep doing that. Your wages will be paid, all contracts honored. If you don’t think you know what it is you’re supposed to be doing anymore, then tell me and I’ll find something. It’s not like we’re running out of jobs to do.”

  There came a reaction that he wasn’t expecting. It was relief.

  The elevator doors trundled shut, and he glanced around. “If you work upstairs, you might want to take the rest of the day off. I’ll get someone unconnected with you all to clean things up.”

  He waited for one of them to say something, but no one volunteered this time, not even to ask him what had happened to Miss Sonja.

  “Right, then. I’ll be going. You know where to reach me.” He set a routine running that would unlock their phones and computers, and as the crowd parted to let him through, all he could hear was the chiming and snatches of song as backed-up messages were delivered.

  He was through the foyer and onto the street. The air was cold and clear, and he trembled as he breathed it in.

  “Michael? We’ve got a problem. Amongst all the other problems.”

  [One that requires me to finish my conversation with the cardinals?]

  “Yeah, I reckon it does. For now, anyway. Just before Sonja shot herself, she told me she’d been following CIA orders all year: either she make me her pet, or they’d kill me.”

  [That is a premise based on the supposition that CIA agents could realistically assassinate you. Did Sonja believe such an action was likely to succeed?]

  “It doesn’t matter if she thought it likely or not. She was too scared to take the risk. So she bought into the whole package.”

  [And she is now dead. Which means it is entirely possible the CIA cell is mobilizing to carry out their threat.]

  “Or we’ve got incoming missiles, like before.” He turned the corner, starting up Cleveland Street toward Regent’s Park. “But unless they’re going to nuke the whole of the Freezone, they can’t guarantee they’ll hit me. I don’t think they’ll do that.”

  [I will start searching for them at once.]

  “That won’t work. They operate differently now you’ve appeared: no electronic comms until the very last minute, and they’ve been living off the grid—what grid we have here, anyway.”

  [You are suggesting a different course?]

  “Sonja pointed out how rubbish we were at finding the last lot of agents, even with you, even when there should have been plenty of traffic for us to find. We’ll just waste time and get it wrong. So what is it that we want?”

  [To be left in peace. To explore, to build, to dream.]

  “Huy, yes. So how are we going to persuade the Americans to do that? What is it that we can do that will make them believe it’s in their own best inter
ests to leave us alone?”

  Petrovitch was halfway up Cleveland Street, and almost level with the barricade he’d demolished. The fire had died out, but the wreckage remained, smoldering and hot. The guards had deserted their post, but he was gratified to see the red flags had stayed at the far end of the road.

  [Any proactive sanctions we take against the United States of America will have unpredictable consequences.]

  “You think?” He was being sarcastic, but Michael wasn’t.

  [Yes. You have been neglecting your news feeds,] said Michael, and a rectangle opened up at the side of his vision.

  There was a station ident in the corner of the virtual screen—CNN—and a tag in another proclaiming it was a live feed. A man with a dark-blue nylon jacket and a forehead so bulbous that studio lights would glare off it like a mirror was clutching his mic and virtually swallowing it to make himself heard. In the background, and somewhere between him and the camera, were thousands of protestors, chanting, shouting, blowing whistles and waving placards.

  There was clearly more to it than just a noisy rally—because a public demonstration of the sort Petrovitch was watching hadn’t happened in any part of the USA for two decades.

  The screen jumped. No longer viewed from ground level, with images of a distant white stone facade in the neo-classical style, but from the air. What had looked like thousands now became tens of thousands, enveloping a whole city block and beyond, packed into the park in front of the largest building and spilling out into the surrounding streets.

  The early morning sun hung low over the distant towers of an office district: that meant some, if not most, of the protestors had been there all night. And still the reporter was trying to get his message across.

  The news ticker refreshed itself, and scrolled “California Supreme Court siege.”

  “You have got to be yebani kidding me.” Petrovitch realized he’d stopped short of the junction, and his hastily organized militia were wondering why. “Dalton.”

  [It appears that one Paul Dalton, attorney-at-law in New York state, has… ]

  “I know what he’s done. I know. We talked about it. He was going to…”

  [Present a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of Doctor Epiphany Ekanobi to the California Supreme Court. It appears such an action is unpopular with the local citizenry.]

  “Where the huy are the police? The Yanks don’t allow this sort of thing to happen. Not now.” Petrovitch watched the aerial images as they zoomed and panned across the crowd, which went right up to the steps of the court itself. Fists raised, painted cardboard banners waved, bottles and sticks rattled off the first-floor windows. He was incredulous. “Hooy na ny!”

  “Sam? Sam!” Madeleine ran toward him, closing the distance with her long-legged strides.

  He looked through the pictures from half a world away to Madeleine, standing right in front of him. “Hey.”

  “What happened? Where’s Sonja. Why are you just standing there?”

  He blinked CNN away. “We need to call a press conference.”

  “A what?” She grabbed his shoulders and inspected him for wounds. “What are you on about?”

  “A press conference. Ten minutes. At Container Zero.” He grabbed a list of accredited journalists in the Freezone and flashed them the message. “If they’re going to kill me, they’re going to have to do it in public.”

  She spun him around and checked his back and his skull. “You’re not hurt—anymore than you were before. So please make some sense.”

  “Okay, okay. I will explain, but if you thought it was pizdets before, it’s worse now. We don’t have time to hang around.” He faced her and put his hand behind her neck. When their foreheads were touching, he told her. “The CIA told Sonja they’d take me down if she didn’t do something about me first. Now she’s killed herself. And they’re rioting in America.”

  “I don’t understand. She… she did what?”

  “This, everything that’s happened: Sonja was trying to save me. And now she’s dead, I guess the CIA really are coming for me. And Dalton went to California to try and get Pif out: a crowd of around twenty thousand Reconstructionists are attacking the courthouse.” His fingers lightly gripped the rope of her hair and his hand ran the length of it from tip to tail. “We’re not going to lose.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Because in a moment, I’ll tell the world what Sonja told me. Better still, I’ll show them. What’s the point of having eyes that work like cameras if I don’t record the important events?”

  “Oh God. You’ve got it all saved. Even, even that.”

  “Yeah. Even that.” He let go of her. “Come on. We need to get ready.”

  “But what about all these armed people we’ve just turned out onto the street?”

  He thought furiously for a moment. “I’ll appoint one in ten to collect the guns back in and return them to the trucks. They can guard them, and any other ones the Oshicora security teams turn in. I’ll give everyone the headlines and, chyort: running a city would be so much easier if foreign agents weren’t trying to kill me.”

  Petrovitch composed a short message and pushed it out first to the Freezone, then to the newswires. Already, there were steadicams and portable satellite dishes wending their way into Regent’s Park. Red flags flapped overhead, and there seemed to be people everywhere, moving in front and behind and all around, happy they’d not have to fight.

  Tabletop took Petrovitch down in a flying tackle that came from nowhere, and she lay on top of him, spreading herself out like a starfish over his flattened form. “Stay still.”

  Madeleine’s gun was in her hand, and Valentina’s AK panned the crowd, then the windows and rooftops overlooking the road. Lucy planted her red flag in the road and held it out to cover him. A single shot echoed across the open space, and a hole pocked the flag, passing under Lucy’s outstretched arm. The tarmac sparked in front of Petrovitch’s head, and Tabletop immediately picked him up and laid him down again so she could curl around his back. A man in overalls dropped with a cry, clutching at a stain on his leg.

  The ripple of awareness flowed outward. Madeleine shouted. “Shooter. Everyone down.” Some in earshot started to duck, while others were left standing, briefly.

  “Michael?”

  [One moment.]

  Lucy looked down at the hole. She shut her eyes tight, but didn’t move.

  [Park Crescent. Fourteen. Second floor, third window from the right. Encrypted digital transmissions of the same type as used in Tabletop’s stealth suit.]

  Petrovitch couldn’t move. “Let me up, I know where they are.”

  “No, you tell us. We’ll deal with it.” She tightened her hold, and he knew he wasn’t going anywhere without her permission.

  “You’ve got it on your wrist.”

  She let go, glanced down at her forearm and pointed. “Three up, three right. Building on the left. Suppressing fire.”

  Not all the guns had been handed back, and from the noise, it sounded like none of them had. The entire frontage of the terrace smoked with pulverized stone and every window pane shattered.

  [Target is moving. Staircase down. Going to the back of the building.]

  “Send it to Tabletop.” Already she and Valentina were running, waving their troops on. It looked wild and uncoordinated, but he couldn’t see it for himself. Madeleine’s hand had closed around his backbrace and she carried him like a piece of luggage, his legs bouncing and skidding on the road, to find cover behind one of the trucks parked at the entrance.

  She dumped him down, and glanced back out. The door to number fourteen was being kicked in, with scores more people branching off down side streets to cut off the agent’s escape.

  Lucy wandered past in a daze, still carrying her flag, and Madeleine eased her down next to Petrovitch.

  “Thanks,” he said to her. “I wish you’d decide whether you’re a hero or not. I’m getting gray hair.”

  Lucy laughed, then
sobbed. “I don’t know. I just do stupid stuff sometimes.”

  “It worked this time. If you didn’t save my life, you saved Tabletop’s.”

  “Why are they doing this?”

  “Because they’re scared of us.”

  More gunfire sounded across the rooftops, sustained bursts that cackled and rattled in waves as the wind blew the sound.

  [They have the target surrounded.]

  “Now I’m thinking clearly: tell them to try and get him to surrender. Rights under the Geneva Convention, repatriation, all that. Assuming it’s a him, don’t know why.”

  [And if he will not comply?]

  “I want it on record that we offered. If he won’t go for it, see if you can hack his suit: it carries enough injectable painkillers to render him insensible.”

  [He is using a burst transmitter. It is non-trivial to hold the signal long enough to negotiate with the suit’s hosting protocol.]

  “A miracle would be really useful.”

  The shooting stuttered to a halt.

  “Safe to move?” asked Madeleine.

  “I don’t know.” His arm was aching, bleeding pain through the blocks he’d put into place. When he inspected it, he found that his superstructure was bent. The fragments of bone had shifted. “Chyort voz’mi.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Forget it. We need to get these journos inside the park.” He clawed his way upright. “Give them a couple of minutes to set up, dial their satellites if they need them, then just push me in front of them. Come on, Lucy.”

  [We have an unconscious CIA agent in custody.]

  “Yobany stos, we’ve done something right at last.” He put his good arm around Lucy’s shoulders and together they rode the tide of people toward Container Zero. Madeleine stayed very close behind them, gun drawn, trying to make certain no one else was going to pop up and have a go.

  Petrovitch called Tabletop. “Strip the suit off him: I want him and it separated by the largest distance possible.”