Simon Morden - Theories of Flight

“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.”

They traveled down in the lift together—Petrovitch reluctantly—all the way to the foyer, where they parted amidst all the comings and goings of smartly dressed politicians and administrators, and the smarter gray-clad MEA officers.

Petrovitch wondered how Chain had felt, coming in here every morning, staring up at the retina scanner. Had he wondered how he’d got to where he was, or had he just accepted it as his lot in life?

Madeleine was right. He hadn’t liked Chain. But he knew so few people that the loss of even one bit hard.

“How are you getting home?” asked Daniels. “I can arrange for someone.”

“It’s fine,” said Petrovitch. “I’m being picked up.”

“Good luck,” said Daniels, “with everything.”

“Yeah.” The Metrozone was falling apart, MEA or no MEA. Luck was about all they had left. “And you.”

He stepped out of the revolving doors, past the guards, and out onto the street. A big car pulled up by the curbside, and, without breaking step, Petrovitch opened the back door and shoved the box along the seat. The yucca wobbled and tottered. As he got in he steadied it, then turned to close the door behind him. They were already moving.

“Did you get it?” asked Grigori.

“I got what he had. It might not be enough, but it’s something.”

S ince Oshicora’s star had burned itself out in a single night, Marchenkho’s had quietly risen again. No more domik life for the Ukrainian: he had bright, warm offices, and Soviet-styled secretaries in severe suits and seamed stockings.

One held the door open for Petrovitch as he stepped through. Her scent was distracting, enough for him to miss thin-faced Valentina sitting quietly in the corner of the room.

Marchenkho turned from the window, his red star lapel pin glinting in the low winter sun.

“Ah, my boy. Is good to see you.”

“Yeah. I’m surprised to find the feeling’s mutual.” Petrovitch held out the pot plant he was carrying. “Present from Harry Chain.”

“Is looking a little worse for wear. Not unlike you. You are, as they say, foxed?” He took the plant in his fat fingers and ruminated on its previous owner. “Bad business, bad business all around.”

Grigori stumbled in behind Petrovitch, carrying the cardboard box, and placed it on Marchenkho’s dark wooden desk: some things, at least, didn’t change.

“Thank you, Olga,” he said to the waiting secretary. “Make certain we are not disturbed.”

She strutted away on her high heels, and the door swished shut behind her.

“Olga?” said Petrovitch.

“Is not her name, but is good Soviet name. They are all Olga, da? ” He chuckled, but Petrovitch didn’t feel the need to join in. “You know Tina?”

“Yeah. Last seen blowing stuff up.”

“She is smart. She will help us look at what we have.”

Valentina’s smile was brief and ironic. “Comrade Marchenkho tells me you have bad case of Americans.”

Petrovitch tore at the tape securing the lid of the box. “They killed Chain. They nearly killed me. I’d like to get a few steps ahead of them before they come for me again.”

“And this is likely?” she asked.

“Yeah. It is.” He picked up the prowler file and presented it to her. “Unless they’re congenitally stupid, that is.”

“Is always possibility,” said Marchenkho. “Reconstruction has made them a little bit, you know.” He tapped his temple.

“What they might lack in intelligence, they make up for with sheer quantities of high explosive.” Petrovitch retrieved the other file and opened it up, taking time to read the information inside. A list of codenames, a copy of a memo to the director of the CIA from someone whose name was a string of “x”s, a single sheet giving the mission parameters for what they’d called, in their ludicrously overblown way, Operation Dark Sky.

“So, what is it the Amerikanskij want?” Marchenkho rumbled.

Petrovitch looked up from the paper with “ultra top secret” overprinted in red. “In order: work out what the chyort happened during the Long Night, decide whether it represents a threat to the U.S.A., then neutralize it. With extreme prejudice.”

“Hmm.” Marchenkho stroked his mustache. “We have not had the appropriate conversation yet.”

“No,” said Petrovitch emphatically.

“You are asking me to commit personnel, materials, to help you: I think you need to tell me why.”

“I…” He looked around for a chair. Aside from the one Valentina occupied, and the one behind the desk, there were none. “They’ll kill you if you know.”

“A risk for me, surely?” Marchenkho was standing uncomfortably close, his breath sharp and mint-fresh. “Come, Petrovitch. As a favor to an old friend: who was the New Machine Jihad?”