Саймон Морден - Degrees of Freedom

The lights of the Freezone whipped by in a sodium-orange blur, but he knew where he was. He hat-navved them taking a sharp left—so sharp his knee almost scraped the tarmac—up the Edgware Road, and another right at Marylebone. Her old church had been on the corner there, reduced to burned timbers and scorched brick and then cleared to be yet another building site.

He’d first met her there; he’d been dying, she’d brought him back to life. He wondered if her choice of route was deliberate, as if to point out that it wasn’t just him who’d been doing the saving. Or it could just have been faster this way. He knew where they were going now.

Petrovitch had had a domik at Regent’s Park, a bolt-hole for when disaster struck. He’d lost it in the Long Night, along with his case of memories, courtesy of the New Machine Jihad. He’d not gone back, not looked for it amongst the tumbled chaos of containers.

The Freezone had been clearing it, crews with gas axes working day and night. They’d got almost to the lowest level. And now, as they turned another corner with the back wheel almost sliding out, there was no activity at all. No blue-white cutting flames, no noise of grinding metal or the grumble of heavy cranes.

She drove toward where the Inner Circle had been, and braked sharply. Petrovitch turned his head sideways to Madeleine’s back and pressed his cheek against her, frustrated only by the plastic and kevlar of the helmet.

The engine died, and it was silent. Despite the ferocity of the ride, they both sat there, perfectly still, him against her, she leaning slightly back to increase the contact.

“I know why we’re here,” he mumbled through the foam interior of the helmet.

“You do?” Her words were equally indistinct, numbed by the cold.

“Container Zero.”

“How do you do it? How do you make these wild guesses and come up with the right answer?” She flexed her shoulders, and he felt her muscles move, dense and fluid.

“Because there’s no other reason for us to be here. No other reason for me to be here. Everything else you can handle, but not the Last Armageddonist.”

“I never believed it was true. But it is.” She shrugged again, this time with purpose. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

Petrovitch found the ground and hopped off. She rolled the bike onto its stand and stepped over the seat. She knew the way—despite the anonymous jumble of containers, she turned unerringly right, left, right, following the line of compacted earth to her destination.

Petrovitch knew the way, too. Moreover, he could see. He blinked, and his vision changed to a slightly stuttering but bright zoetrope of images. He blinked again, and the scene was transformed into a wash of reds and blues, depending on their heat.

Madeleine’s head and hands were white, incandescent almost. That was the effect of fear, and he’d not known her to be so scared, ever. Which was saying something.

The path finished. A container blocked their way. Container Zero. The first domik to be planted on Regent’s Park. The door had been partially cut with a letterbox-sized window, burned through the metal at head height.

“Standard procedure. Cut a hole, check the contents, mark for disposal, opening or decontamination. When the wrecking crew cut this one…”

“How many people know?”

“Four—five now. I’ve told them not to talk.”

“Yeah, like that’s going to work. You’ve laid off the whole site. If it’s not round the Freezone by dinner time that something’s going on, I’ll be a shluha vokzal’naja. You’ve got a couple of hours before this goes global. If that.” He stretched himself up and looked through the slot. “Has anyone been in?”

“No.”

“Thank huy for that.” He looked up and around him. “Does the door mechanism work?”

“They’re welded shut. From the inside. We’re going to have to make that hole bigger.” The work crew’s cutting equipment was abandoned nearby. “Know how to use that?”

He didn’t. Then he did. “In theory.”

Petrovitch hefted the trolley holding the gas cylinders and wheeled it closer, then opened the valve on the acetylene. It burned with a smoky orange flame, flickering and bright in the dusk. Then he turned on the oxygen and the flame turned into a blue spearpoint.

He dialed back the gain on his eyes until he could just about see what he was doing, and no more. The tip of the fire touched the outside of the container, which started to dribble orange drops of molten steel.

“This could take a while.” He could feel the heat on his face, a dry, furnace heat. “Tell me what he’s doing in there.”

Madeleine tried to look past the burning metal. “Just… just sitting. Facing the door. There’s something on his left-hand side. I think it’s a bomb.”

“How big? Size, not megatonnage.”

“It’s about,” she started, and he interrupted.

“I can’t see how far your hands are apart because I’m holding a two-thousand-degree torch and I don’t want to go blind or accidentally set myself on fire. Again.”

“About a meter long. A tube in a cradle, maybe half a meter across.”

“Panel? Wires?”

“There were wires.”

“Any idea where the wires were coming from?”

“Couldn’t see. From him. From under the chair he’s in, perhaps.”

Petrovitch clenched his fists around the gas axe. “This doesn’t fill me with confidence.”

“You think it’s rigged?”

“I know it is. It just depends on how.” He turned the corner with the flame. “Still, if opening the container was going to trip it, it would have tripped already. Dodged that bullet, at least.”

“Sam…”

“Yeah?” It would be good if he could concentrate, but she was standing very close to him. He could feel her breath on the back of his head.

“I wish you’d told me about Michael.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “Do you really want to do this now? Considering the only imminent intimate mingling I might enjoy with you will be our atoms forming part of the same rapidly expanding fireball?”

She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

“Yeah. Sue me,” he muttered. “You know I want you back. But I need you to shut up for one minute.”

She walked away from him, and he slowly drew the gas torch back up toward the previously cut hole. When it was nearly complete, he stopped and turned the oxygen back off.

Madeleine reached forward to bend the metal aside. Petrovitch caught her wrist.

“Hot. Still hot. Will remain hot for a while yet.” He spun the valve on the acetylene, and the orange flame flickered and died. “If you weren’t in such a hurry to get rid of me, you’d have worked that out.”

“I’m not trying…” She looked at her wrist, and Petrovitch let go.

“You can’t keep away. You find excuses to pass by, but you always find excuses to go again before anything meaningful can happen.”

“You lied to me.” Madeleine leaned back against Container Zero, sliding down its pitted side until she was crouched on her haunches.

“I lied to the whole world. It seemed to me like it was the only option.” He copied her position, on the other side of the unopened cut. “It was the only option at the time.”

“No. You didn’t trust me. You wanted a pet AI to keep for yourself. All the business with the CIA: we could have skipped all that if you’d come clean.”

“That, I doubt. We would have ended up with gods-knows-what raining down on us from the sky, and still have had the Outies to deal with just on our own. I would have died at Waterloo Bridge, and you’d have been overrun on your overpass.” Petrovitch checked the clock in the corner of his vision. The metal should be cold enough to touch, but fighting with Madeleine was better than missing her. “We’d be dead, the Outies would have half the city, and Michael would have been hunted to extinction.”