Саймон Морден - Degrees of Freedom

There was nothing he could do. Not now. Not for her. He didn’t need to go over and check: he’d shot enough people in the head to know she wasn’t getting up again. He stared at her for a long time, thinking through everything and what might have been.

It could have been so very different. He could have let Marchenkho kidnap her, and then Hijo wouldn’t have killed Old Man Oshicora, the New Machine Jihad would never have risen, and the Outies would never have broken through the cordon. Madeleine would have never broken her vows, Lucy’s parents would still be alive, and maybe, just maybe, Tabletop would be doing her backflips in a cheerleading squad rather than having herself turned into a weapon.

He and Pif would still have discovered their equations. The world would still have turned.

Instead, he had this. And even if it wasn’t his fault, it was his responsibility.

“I still don’t know why you were on your own that morning. Perhaps you’d secretly arranged to meet a girlfriend, or a boy, and you didn’t want your bodyguards hanging around. Or maybe you just wanted to slum it with the rest of us, see how the little people lived. Marchenkho was waiting, had always been waiting. And there, right there on the curbside, I was given a chance to redeem myself. I didn’t think about where it would lead.” He sighed and took the weight of his left arm in his right hand. “But neither did you, and what I did was right, and I’m not sorry.”

After that, it was just a question of riding back down to the ground floor. Thirty seconds, almost like falling, not quite like flying. As the elevator slowed, the sensation was lost. The world returned in all its terrifying, dazzling complexity.

The doors opened. A sea of silent people faced him. He stepped out across the threshold and saw their expressions suspended somewhere between hope and despair. Such was the weight of unrealistic expectation. Petrovitch was momentarily at a loss for words.

“Yeah. That didn’t go well,” he said, pressing his finger against the bridge of his nose. “I could give you all the details, and I will, just as soon as I can make sense of it myself. You’ve been working for the Freezone, and I want you to keep doing that. Your wages will be paid, all contracts honored. If you don’t think you know what it is you’re supposed to be doing anymore, then tell me and I’ll find something. It’s not like we’re running out of jobs to do.”

There came a reaction that he wasn’t expecting. It was relief.

The elevator doors trundled shut, and he glanced around. “If you work upstairs, you might want to take the rest of the day off. I’ll get someone unconnected with you all to clean things up.”

He waited for one of them to say something, but no one volunteered this time, not even to ask him what had happened to Miss Sonja.

“Right, then. I’ll be going. You know where to reach me.” He set a routine running that would unlock their phones and computers, and as the crowd parted to let him through, all he could hear was the chiming and snatches of song as backed-up messages were delivered.

He was through the foyer and onto the street. The air was cold and clear, and he trembled as he breathed it in.

“Michael? We’ve got a problem. Amongst all the other problems.”

[One that requires me to finish my conversation with the cardinals?]

“Yeah, I reckon it does. For now, anyway. Just before Sonja shot herself, she told me she’d been following CIA orders all year: either she make me her pet, or they’d kill me.”

[That is a premise based on the supposition that CIA agents could realistically assassinate you. Did Sonja believe such an action was likely to succeed?]

“It doesn’t matter if she thought it likely or not. She was too scared to take the risk. So she bought into the whole package.”

[And she is now dead. Which means it is entirely possible the CIA cell is mobilizing to carry out their threat.]

“Or we’ve got incoming missiles, like before.” He turned the corner, starting up Cleveland Street toward Regent’s Park. “But unless they’re going to nuke the whole of the Freezone, they can’t guarantee they’ll hit me. I don’t think they’ll do that.”

[I will start searching for them at once.]

“That won’t work. They operate differently now you’ve appeared: no electronic comms until the very last minute, and they’ve been living off the grid—what grid we have here, anyway.”

[You are suggesting a different course?]

“Sonja pointed out how rubbish we were at finding the last lot of agents, even with you, even when there should have been plenty of traffic for us to find. We’ll just waste time and get it wrong. So what is it that we want?”

[To be left in peace. To explore, to build, to dream.]

“ Huy, yes. So how are we going to persuade the Americans to do that? What is it that we can do that will make them believe it’s in their own best interests to leave us alone?”

Petrovitch was halfway up Cleveland Street, and almost level with the barricade he’d demolished. The fire had died out, but the wreckage remained, smoldering and hot. The guards had deserted their post, but he was gratified to see the red flags had stayed at the far end of the road.

[Any proactive sanctions we take against the United States of America will have unpredictable consequences.]

“You think?” He was being sarcastic, but Michael wasn’t.

[Yes. You have been neglecting your news feeds,] said Michael, and a rectangle opened up at the side of his vision.

There was a station ident in the corner of the virtual screen—CNN—and a tag in another proclaiming it was a live feed. A man with a dark-blue nylon jacket and a forehead so bulbous that studio lights would glare off it like a mirror was clutching his mic and virtually swallowing it to make himself heard. In the background, and somewhere between him and the camera, were thousands of protestors, chanting, shouting, blowing whistles and waving placards.

There was clearly more to it than just a noisy rally—because a public demonstration of the sort Petrovitch was watching hadn’t happened in any part of the USA for two decades.

The screen jumped. No longer viewed from ground level, with images of a distant white stone facade in the neo-classical style, but from the air. What had looked like thousands now became tens of thousands, enveloping a whole city block and beyond, packed into the park in front of the largest building and spilling out into the surrounding streets.

The early morning sun hung low over the distant towers of an office district: that meant some, if not most, of the protestors had been there all night. And still the reporter was trying to get his message across.

The news ticker refreshed itself, and scrolled “California Supreme Court siege.”

“You have got to be yebani kidding me.” Petrovitch realized he’d stopped short of the junction, and his hastily organized militia were wondering why. “Dalton.”

[It appears that one Paul Dalton, attorney-at-law in New York state, has… ]

“I know what he’s done. I know. We talked about it. He was going to…”

[Present a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of Doctor Epiphany Ekanobi to the California Supreme Court. It appears such an action is unpopular with the local citizenry.]

“Where the huy are the police? The Yanks don’t allow this sort of thing to happen. Not now.” Petrovitch watched the aerial images as they zoomed and panned across the crowd, which went right up to the steps of the court itself. Fists raised, painted cardboard banners waved, bottles and sticks rattled off the first-floor windows. He was incredulous. “ Hooy na ny! ”