Саймон Морден - Degrees of Freedom

“The feeling isn’t mutual. If you go now, you might just live.” He had nothing to use as a weapon. They had the crowbars, the rotary saw, and several stout lengths of wood.

But they didn’t stop to argue with him: they knew he’d called for help, and knew they only had minutes. Four of them went to the bomb, two—the biggest—stepped between it and Petrovitch. All of them just seemed like regular people: they could have been scaffolders, fitters, plumbers, caterers, drivers.

“Hey, hey!” Petrovitch saw them put straps under the bomb, and tried to push past to reach it. “Don’t do that.”

And while he was distracted, one of the men took his legs out from under him, hitting him across the back of his knees with the crowbar. He didn’t fall, because the other one caught him in a headlock and reached around to the nape of his neck.

They knew exactly what they were doing. Petrovitch felt the cable in his head rotate and jerk out.

Then, and only then, did the pain hit him. Not just from being struck with a metal bar and half-choked, but from all the other injuries that he carried and hadn’t been healed.

They dropped him, and the man swung the crowbar again. He was aiming for Petrovitch’s skull, but struck his arm instead. A bone went crack.

“ Nu vse, tebe pizda. ” Petrovitch tried to work out where his feet were. He kicked out, then realized that wasn’t the smart thing to do. “Okay. Stop.”

“Sorry, Doctor Petrovitch. No time for that.” They’d cut the cables from the dead man’s switch and the battery. They had the bomb hanging free inside the straps. They were walking out of the container.

“I can’t let you take it.” He tried to stand, and put his hand down on the now vacant table. The jagged ends of the break further up his arm slipped past each other and threatened to puncture his skin.

And while he was gasping and gaping and gagging, they left.

He dreamed. It was so perfect, so beautiful. The fat, yellow sun was slanting off the sea, sinking toward the west and the wide, uninterrupted ocean. The grass he stood on gave way to white sand across a sinuous, nibbled line, and on that sand were children, six of them, and some of them were his. They laughed and they ran and they played some complicated game that involved throwing seaweed and catching shells. He watched them, and when he’d watched them enough, he vaulted down onto the sand; with a great monster’s roar he set after them, scooping up a ribbon of green weed and waving it above his head as he sent them giggling and scattering down to the shore line.

So when consciousness returned, he struggled to remember where or when he was. His eyes slowly opened, and lit on Madeleine. She wasn’t wearing her Joan robes, so it wasn’t eighteen months ago and he hadn’t just suffered a massive heart attack.

Then there was Valentina with her favorite kalash across her knees, and Lucy standing next to her, and a redhead who used to be a blonde: Tabletop, in her info-rich stealth suit. And Sonja. Petrovitch ignored what she was wearing and considered the fact that she looked like she’d swallowed a wasp.

He’d just lost an atomic bomb. She probably had a right to be pissed with him.

“ Pizdets, ” he said. His arm—his left arm—was stuck out at a stupid angle. While he was asleep, some sadist had fitted him with an aerial array that made it easy to pick up radio signals but impossible for him to change the angle of his elbow. Four encircling titanium rings were spaced down the length of his arm, locked together with cross-struts.

He lifted his arm from his shoulder. The iodine-stained flesh moved around the metal wires that were anchored in his bone. There should have been pain, but morphine had seen to that.

He searched for the clock in the corner of his eye. It had gone. There was no connection to the outside. He frowned and glanced up at the clock on the wall, busy ticking away the seconds. He did the maths stupidly and slowly, and came up with a guess that three and a half hours had passed; hours he was never going to get back.

He tried to sit up. With only one hand and a soft mattress to push against, he struggled until Madeleine stepped forward. She held him while she rearranged his pillows, then let him down gently against them. A moment later, she would be embarrassed, but for now she was caught up in the act of caring.

“So,” he croaked. His throat burned like he’d downed half a litre of cheap vodka. “The bomb’s gone. You don’t know where it is, or who has it. You don’t know what they want with it or what they’ll accept for its return. About right?”

No one contradicted him.

“Except that’s not true, is it?” Petrovitch tried to adjust the surgical gown he was wearing, and found himself frustrated again by his lack of mobility. He’d been awake no more than a minute, and he was already wishing he’d insisted they’d amputated and grafted on a prosthetic.

“I don’t get it,” said Lucy. She looked from face to face. “One of us…”

“Yeah. One of you. Those men knew where I was, knew I was alone, knew how long they had, knew exactly how to disable me, knew there was a bomb there. They were prepared. They were ready. They weren’t armed, but they knew I didn’t have a pushka either: who, outside of this room, knows for certain I don’t carry? That I’ve been ordered not to carry? They put me in a head-lock and unplugged me: only you lot know what that’ll do to me.”

Valentina pursed her lips. “Your wire is no longer secret. Is common knowledge, da? Maybe they get lucky.”

“Lucky?”

She shrugged. “Unlikely. But I would look for reasons other than one of your friends has betrayed you. Start with those who cut Container Zero open.”

“They’ve disappeared,” said Madeleine. She leaned heavily against the wall, nudging the painting behind her out of true. “Vanished off the face of the earth, and I’m not going to be able to go and find them now.”

Petrovitch turned uncomfortably toward her. “Because…”

“Sonja’s sacked me,” said Madeleine through clenched teeth. “Apparently, my judgment is in question.”

“What the hell was I supposed to do?” Sonja’s face contorted into several unlikely expressions before she exploded. “You lost the bomb. You lost it. You had it, and you lost it. You’re head of security and you left one unarmed man alone with a nuclear bomb. It’s not your judgment I’m questioning. It’s your sanity.”

Madeleine levered herself upright, which in itself should have been scary. “Sonja,” she started.

But Sonja wasn’t intimidated. “That’s Madam fucking President to you. They could have killed him! That might not mean anything to a frigid bitch like you, but I actually care about him.”

She’d gone white, all except the tip of her nose, which remained stubbornly pink.

“I’m going now to try and clear up your mess. If I catch you within a hundred meters of me, I’ll make sure someone shoots you. Is that perfectly clear?”

The only thing that was perfectly clear was Madeleine’s desire to straight-arm Sonja through the wall. The effort to hold back was titanic, every muscle straining.

“Yeah, go on then,” said Petrovitch from the bed. “This makes it so much better, doesn’t it? If any of you were listening earlier, I said that you had no idea who took the bomb. Doesn’t mean I don’t. Up to the point where my mitigator was unplugged, I have a recording of what happened, including the six men who took the bomb. And in a couple of seconds I can tell you who they are and where they live. Lived. Three and a half hours ago.”

“They took your rat,” said Lucy. “It wasn’t on you when we found you.”