Саймон Морден - Degrees of Freedom

They were at Container Zero, and there were still ugly black bloodstains on the ground around its open doors. Those news teams who’d brought lights quickly extended them on their poles and clicked them on, and there was some jostling at the back as those coming late tried to push for a clear sightline.

“Look at them. It’s like a classroom.” Lucy slipped out from under Petrovitch’s arm and failed to notice that he nearly fell. His hand grasped for something solid, and Madeleine caught him.

“You can’t go on like this,” she said in his ear.

“I don’t have a choice. Not anymore. I put myself here, and now I have to see it through.”

“You can barely stand, Sam.”

“Then hold me up.” He scanned the people lining up in front of him, watching them more or less comply to Lucy’s rearranging of them: those closest were going to have to sit down in the dirt, those behind to kneel, then the third and fourth rows come to some arrangement whereby they looked over each other’s shoulders.

He couldn’t see Surur or her technician anywhere. He thought it odd, then realized that they’d still be stuck at Park Lane, Michael’s cable tethering them down, scared to move in case they broke his connection with the outside world.

It wasn’t needed now, hadn’t been needed since the AI had uploaded itself onto another computer, but he’d forgotten to tell Surur that. He hadn’t mentioned the details of Michael’s escape at all, content to let the question hang unanswered in the air.

He looked for the reporter’s phone, and found it. She didn’t pick up so he tried the one a bare meter away. The cameraman didn’t reply. So he went for the satellite link, riding down the microwave signal which he shared with the increasingly frantic attempts of her studio manager to speak to her, to him, to anyone.

The camera was still recording, still transferring its footage to the van. It showed a sideways world, lying on the road. The lens was focused on a drift of purple that could, at a squint, be resolved into the body of a woman with glossy hair and flawless skin.

Michael could multi-task. Petrovitch found it very difficult. He wanted to capture the last half-hour’s output from the Al Jazeera camera, then review it, all the while trying to speak to the assembled press.

He started off incoherent, then lost track of what he was saying and stopped mid-sentence when something of awful significance happened onscreen.

Madeleine held up her hand to the crowd, and dragged Petrovitch around to face her. “You’re doing it wrong.”

“Something terrible is happening,” he said. “There. That’s when it was. Five of them. Same time as the shooter. Coordinated attack. Distracted us. They’re going after Michael.”

“Sam. You called this press conference. You’re the public face of the Freezone. Either you can do this properly, or I’ll pull the plug.”

She didn’t know what he knew. She thought he was flaking out.

“Okay.” He took a deep breath. One thing at a time from now on, he promised himself, and turned to face the world. “This will only take a minute, and my daughter will have to stand in for me for questions if you really want to hang around afterward—but I don’t think you will.”

Lucy, standing with the press, blinked and her mouth opened to object. Petrovitch pointed at her and then placed his finger against his lips. “No interruptions. I’ve uploaded files to the major newswires, and you can grab them from there. One is Sonja Oshicora’s confession that ten months ago, she was strong-armed into cooperating with the CIA to neutralize me. The events of the last two days have been the outworking of that plot, which has failed with the suicide of Sonja. The second is of footage taken fifteen minutes ago by Al Jazeera’s cameraman, when both he and Yasmina Surur were killed by CIA agents intending to destroy the AI called Michael, and I suspect they’re carrying a nuclear demolition charge.”

All he could hear was the faint whirr of a motorized focus. Every sudden intake of breath was held, every heart skipped a beat. No one moved, not even to tremble.

“Michael is no longer in the vault under the Oshicora Tower—I made damn sure of that—and I’m appealing personally to President Mackensie to call off this futile attack before it goes any further. People are going to die and it’ll be for nothing.”

He paused. The turbine in his chest was spinning fast and his blood ran hot. He could feel the rage surge inside him.

“How dare they? How dare they come here, to the Metrozone, with a weapon like that. This is my city, my home, and I will not have it fucked up by a bunch of fuck-witted paranoid Reconstructionists acting like they’re in a fucking Western. The old order has failed. The new order is here. Long live the revolution.” He pulled his gun clear and ran as best he could through the middle of the press pack. “Lucy? You’re on. Madeleine? With me.”

He stumbled clear, and started issuing his orders. “Tabletop. Were you listening?”

“We’re already on our way.”

“Go straight to the tower. I don’t know if they’ve made it that far yet, so we might be able to trap them in the river. Take as many people as are willing to go with you, and please be careful. This is the end game, and they’re choosing to go out with a bang. I’ll send you my maps. Spread out along the line of the culvert, watch the manhole covers but don’t open any of them. Me and Madeleine are going to Park Lane: I’ll take the car.”

He limped as he went, his arm weighing him down, still festooned with three singularity bombs. He was much slower than Madeleine, who caught him up quickly.

“You have to get away,” she said.

“My Freezone, my responsibility.”

There was Valentina’s car. He reached out and started it up remotely, backing it around in a circle until it was pointing the right way along Euston Road. The wheels screeched, and he jumped in the driver’s seat. Madeleine launched herself in the back.

He didn’t touch the steering wheel, just plotted in a course and let the automatics take care of it.

“I can drive, you know,” said Madeleine. She folded the other half of the seat down so she could access the trunk. “I should have impounded her personal armory along with the rest.”

“Yeah. Tool up. We can’t afford to screw around.”

“Why can’t we just let them blow themselves up?” Her voice was muffled as she searched for heavy caliber weapons. “If it’s a nuke, it’s a small nuke. They’re setting it off underground.”

“I’m going to stop them because they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. I don’t need another reason. Bomb, no bomb. It doesn’t matter. They’re wrong. I’m right.” Petrovitch braced himself as the car hurtled around a corner. “Doing nothing is unforgivable.”

They were almost there, barreling down Park Lane toward the Wellington Arch. He looked in the rearview mirror: Madeleine had found an assault shotgun and enough shells to fill it. She caught his glance.

“This is it, then.”

“Yeah. Looks that way. Yebani v’rot. ” He banged his hand against the window, the door, his seat, the dashboard. “Why can’t the Yanks be smart like I am? Why can’t they work out that Michael’s gone?”

She slotted the last plastic shell into place and cranked one into the breach. “Even if one or all of those agents are having second thoughts about a suicide mission, they’re trained to follow orders. All the way to the end.”

The car screeched to a halt, delivering them next to the broadcast van. The body of Surur was behind the vehicle, a couple of meters shy of the back bumper. She’d been shot repeatedly, and was lying in a lake of congealed blood. The cameraman, still with his rig strapped to his body, was pole-axed near the side door.