Simon Morden - Theories of Flight

[Waterloo. How apposite.]

“You know what to do. I’ll talk to Valentina and warn her.”

[Cable Street has gone. They are on the approaches to Tower Bridge.]

Lucy took his arm and guided him up the slope at the end of the platform.

“Do I say this stuff out loud?” he asked her. “Or do I just think it?”

“You haven’t said a word since you plugged in.”

“Okay.” There was the coach, motor idling, and the vague shadows of people behind the smoked plate glass. Petrovitch pushed the doctor ahead of him, then ushered Lucy on board.

He climbed up and stood in the aisle, surveying his passengers. Maybe they thought he was going to sit in the driver’s seat, but he quickly scotched that expectation.

The doors closed and the coach nosed out into the road.

They murmured and gripped their arm rests. The doctor stared at him swaying between the two front seats and suffered the stomach-clenching realization that yes, the New Machine Jihad had risen again.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” announced Petrovitch. “Please fasten your seat belts.”

T hey took Chalk Farm Road toward Primrose Hill. The tanks had long since retreated from the heights back down toward Euston, but Petrovitch hoped to rendezvous with them there, along the porous front line that was developing east of the Westway: there were skirmishes in the narrow streets all around, as far south as Oxford Street. The Outies probed forward, met resistance, and tried to enfold the defenders.

In real time, the conflict between blues and reds looked like two amoebae, fighting to the death. The compact blue shape kept contracting in on itself, losing limbs to the vast red monster that seemed intent on swallowing it whole.

Tower Bridge had gone. MEA militia were parking armored cars on the broken carriageway under the iconic crenellated supports, suddenly brave now that there was no chance of contact. Bishopsgate had fallen. The open area in front of the old Bank of England was filling with Outies.

Petrovitch gnawed at his fist. All the ground he was losing was ground that would have to be retaken, but he couldn’t change his strategy now. Everything depended on allowing the enemy to come forward until his counterattack was ready.

The Outies were moving too quickly, though. They were taking street after street with too few casualties. They were winning.

[London Bridge is falling down.]

“My fair lady,” murmured Petrovitch.

[Cannon Street and Southwark will follow imminently. We will need to hold Blackfriars for longer.]

“No.”

[We are underprepared.]

“Pull everyone not currently in contact to behind the Farringdon Road. Hold the Edgware Road but the Euston Road people need to come down to Oxford Street.” He looked out of the window. Regent’s Park was passing on his right, domiks lying where they’d been spilled during the Long Night.

Then there were figures on the road, marked red on his map. A knot of a dozen, jogging down the white line in a loose pack. A close-up showed two guns, the rest with blades.

“Lie down on the floor if you can, the seats if you can’t,” he called. “Do not look up.”

He glanced around. Lucy was peering around the upholstery, watching the Outies as they heard the coach approach.

The windscreen pocked with a bang. If he’d been driving, he’d have been slumped at the wheel and careering across the narrow pavement into a wall. The bullet puffed out a cloud of white padding as it burrowed into the back of the driver’s seat.

The coach didn’t deviate from its previous line. The first shot hadn’t made Petrovitch flinch, but the subsequent eight did. Massive star-shaped wounds bloomed across the clear glass, cracks spiraling out to craze the whole pane, merging and spreading until only the plastic bonding held it together.

A body slammed against the flat front, and the Outies were now behind them. The rear of the coach was raked with gunfire. More glass patterned white, and suddenly they lurched to the left.

The drift corrected itself, then over-corrected. Right, left, right, and finally back under control.

[Rear tire.]

There was no time to worry about the damage the coach had suffered so far, because they were right in amongst them now.

The Inzone retreat had brought the Outies onto the streets. The carriageway was full of them. Petrovitch reached into his coat pocket and put the gun in his hand. The coach rocked as it was struck and, in striking, was struck again.

He ejected the magazine into his palm and counted the heads of the silver bullets. Six. He pushed them back home and dragged back on the slide.

The windscreen imploded, and a dark shape crashed down into the aisle, scattering a curtain of crystalline granules inside the coach. The shape, rags and dust, started to unfold. Though bloodied and dazed, the man had managed to keep hold of his knife.

Petrovitch raised his gun, and the crosshairs in his vision jerked left and right, up and down with each inconstant lurch of the coach. The Outie’s weather-beaten face screwed up as he spotted the man sitting on the edge of the stairwell, leaning out with metal in his fist.

He came at Petrovitch, crouched low, swinging his blade in an arc before him. And still Petrovitch couldn’t get a clear shot. He could have pulled the trigger anyway: one of the bullets would have hit its mark. The others would have each threatened everyone he’d fought so hard to save, so he held his fire.

The Outie lunged inexpertly forward, stabbing at Petrovitch’s arm. An arc of red drew itself across Petrovitch’s vision, and he pulled back just in time: they were two injured men trying to kill each other.

The knife-hand turned, ready for the return strike. He was close enough now that Petrovitch could bury the pistol’s barrel in the man’s sparse flesh and not miss. Before either of them could take the next move, a blur of black and white flew through the air. It landed on the Outie’s back and caused him to stagger and fall flat amid the shifting mass of broken glass.

He kicked out, and Lucy went flying again, back against a seat. Her hair came loose even as she tried to scramble up again. The Outie turned to face her, and Petrovitch saw the handle of a kitchen knife protruding from under the man’s shoulder blade.

He reached up and drove it home with the flat of his hand. The Outie stopped quite suddenly and Petrovitch reached around his throat and pulled him backward, away from Lucy, toward the gaping hole in the windscreen. He flung him out the way he’d come in.

His legs caught on the lower broken edge for a moment before flicking up and out of sight. The coach rose and fell, the mildest of bumps amongst the storm of shaking.

Petrovitch looked at Lucy. He’d corrupted her and destroyed her innocence, and all he could do was reach in his pocket for the other knife. He slid it down the aisle toward her with a nod of satisfaction, and she picked it up, her chin lifted high, her expression defiant.

[Brace.]

Too late.

They hit something solid. The driver’s airbag blossomed with a white flash of explosive and an expanding halo of powder. Petrovitch, on his feet and with nothing to hold on to, started to move irresistibly toward the front of the coach.

There was nothing to prevent his ejection outside. Sky and ground tumbled together, and he bounced off the roof of a car half-buried in a drift of rubble. The underside of the coach reared into the air, fell. Petrovitch rolled off the car and the coach wheels banged down on it, the interior collapsing, paint and plastic crazing.

The coach settled further, and he could have reached up and touched the hot engine casing.