Simon Morden - Theories of Flight

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 prepared 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.

I t 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.