Simon Morden - Theories of Flight

Petrovitch laughed, and Miyamoto was indignant.

“Not London.”

“No, not London. Neither of us were born here.”

And that, in some way entirely obscure to Petrovitch, seemed to satisfy the Outie boy. “Talk.”

He seized his chance. “How are you coordinating this attack? Are you one army, or lots of groups? Is there any one person in charge?”

The boy tugged his ragged fingernails through his matted hair. Perhaps he thought he was being asked to give away too much. “Why? You hated enemy.”

Petrovitch snorted. “Yeah, that’s us. I need to find my wife. The last I heard, she was in West Ham, which is on the other side of the city.”

“West Ham know. Wife know not.”

“I didn’t expect you to.”

“That is not what he means: he does not understand what a wife is,” said Miyamoto. He stepped forward, doing what the boy had done and listened to the city. It was unnatural, quiet. “His woman. He needs to find his woman.”

“A woman? Why?”

“Again I say,” said Miyamoto to Petrovitch, “we do not have time for this. Two decades of being Outzone has changed their language and culture so far that communication is impossible.”

“I want to know what we’re going to face out there. Is it a single army, or is it a rag-tag bunch of tribes who’d just as soon kill each other as kill us? Do they even have a plan? It’s important.” Petrovitch focused his attention on the boy. “Who’s your boss? Who’s the big man?”

“Fox,” said the boy. “He kill you, he kill you.” He pointed to each of them in turn.

“Yeah. He’ll probably kill you, too. Where is he?”

The boy pointed unerringly north.

“Waiting for you to come back and report, right? You going to tell him about us?”

“Why not?”

“Because we’re not interested in the same things. We’re not competing. He wants to take the city. I want to find my wife.”

“Fox not for city. Fox burn city. Burn all.”

“And there was me thinking that all he wanted to do was take in a West End show and do a bit of sightseeing.” Petrovitch rolled his eyes. “He’s welcome to burn whatever he wants, as long as it’s not me or mine. Though if he heads straight into the central zones from here, he’ll have to watch out for the tanks.”

“Tanks,” repeated the boy. “What tanks?”

“This Fox: older than us, right? One of the original Outies? He’ll know what a tank is,” he said with a sly smile. “And my colleague is right. We’re wasting time. Go on, back you go, wherever you came from.”

The boy—not much older than Petrovitch had been when he’d been running through the frozen streets—put his hand on his knife and started to draw it. Petrovitch raised his gun and aimed it straight at his face. The boy grinned.

“Not weak,” he said.

“No. Don’t confuse me with the rest of the sheep. I’m not like them.” Petrovitch waved the gun down the track. “Run.”

As they watched the boy scamper away, jumping from one side of the rail to the other and back, just because he could, Miyamoto growled deep in his throat.

“What did that achieve?”

“ Zatknis : I need to do something else.” Petrovitch fetched out his rat. “You’re tracking him?”

[Trivial,] said the avatar.

“Okay. Tag him, and anyone he comes into contact with. Then tag their contacts, too. Build me a map.”

“Your hatnav again?”

“Slightly more than that. My associate,” said Petrovitch, and watched as text scrolled across his vision.

[I have been promoted, then. Co-equal with a biological entity. Yet the status of my citizenship remains in question.]

“That’s…” he started. “Not now. Just tell me where the kid goes.”

[He is passing under Ladbroke Grove. Road very busy, vehicular traffic stationary. No way through there. Now he is climbing the fence to access Canal Way. It is a dead end. He is cutting back east along the towpath. There is a narrow footbridge across to the north side beside the road bridge.]

“Okay.” He closed the rat. “Got your breath back?”

“I would like for you,” said Miyamoto, “to explain to me what it is you are doing.”

“While we’re moving.” Petrovitch set off again, in the direction taken by the boy. When Miyamoto had caught up, he said. “Think of a virus. If being an Outie is a disease, and the kid is a carrier, everyone he talks to has to be an Outie too. And everyone they talk to. If they have any sort of organization, I’ll know where most of them are in a couple of hours.”

“Clever,” conceded Miyamoto. “Unless they use phones, or radios.”

“Which they don’t, otherwise their scouts would be carrying them.”

An explosion rumbled in the distance. To the north, a fresh pillar of black smoke rose into the sky to join all the others that punctuated the horizon.

[Petrol station. Willesden.]

“How, how is it possible, that they hope to win?”

“By stampeding millions of people straight at the forces who might have the yajtza to fight back. Since the roads are clogged with fleeing refugees and we’re reduced to running along railway lines, I’d say it was working.”

He pulled ahead again, running fast and free.

[You now have twenty kilometers to go, instead of the ten you started with.]

“You brought us this way.” Petrovitch hawked up phlegm and spat it between his feet. He straightened, pressing his hands into the hollow of his back. He was standing in a shunting yard between two lines of empty, rusting rail-trucks, and was taking the opportunity to rest. “I assume there was a good reason.”

[When you asked me to calculate travel time, this route was genuinely the quickest.] The avatar dug its hands in its pockets, something that it had seen Petrovitch do a hundred times before.

“I’m sensing a but.”

[You are not as fit as you wish to believe. I can identify places—probably several places—for water and food, since you have neglected to bring any with you.]

“Yeah. I didn’t figure on running halfway across the Metrozone when I got out of bed this morning.” He unstuck his T-shirt from his armpits. “That sounded like a subject change: why is this no longer the best way to go?”

Petrovitch’s vision switched from the side of a paint-peeled truck to a real-time map of the immediate area. To the north, near the end of the old M1, was a concentration of red spots like a blood rash, each point an Outie. There were more than he’d expected, and he was about to ask the AI for precise numbers when the map started to contract, revealing what lay beyond its original borders.

There was another clump near Wembley, and three large masses on and around the fringes of Hampstead Heath, bleeding into the surrounding streets. His perspective drew further back, and a ragged line of clots stretched all the way from Ruislip to Stoke Newington. Behind the broad front were arteries of color, fading away into occupied ground.

“Yobany stos.”

[The picture is incomplete. There are more data points in the east of the Metrozone, but the groups there have not yet been in contact with the western Outies. Also, information is passed across the line much quicker than it is passed back.]

“So how many are there?”

[One hundred and sixteen thousand, eight hundred and forty-three. Based on current densities, I estimate the total number of Outies to be in the region of two hundred thousand.] The scrolling text paused, and the avatar had the grace to affect a look of apology. [Does this qualify for the epithet pizdets? ]