Саймон Морден - Equations of Life

“Keeping us alive.”

The mechanical wheezing and gasping ceased. Even the Paradise militia were silent, their booty forgotten in a rare moment of terrified awe.

The lights looked down on them from the end of the thing’s cantilevered neck. Petrovitch tilted his gaze up.

“You know me, don’t you?” he said.

The head descended until it was the same level as Petrovitch’s. One damaged, cut, bleeding: the other vast and cold and all but indestructible.

“Look at me,” said Petrovitch. “Look at my face.” He tucked his thumb behind his ear and pulled at his dressing until it came loose. A stiff ribbon of bloody bandages looped out of his hand. “I am Samuil Petrovitch, and you need me.”

A joint groaned. A ram stuttered. It smelled of oil and electricity.

The construct crouched down, its open-framed body crushing everything below it: cars, street furniture, the road itself. It leaned forward until the heat from the lamps was scorching Petrovitch’s skin.

With a slight deflection, a grind of pulleys, its attention turned to Madeleine.

“Mine,” said Petrovitch. “She’s mine. We’re together, and we won’t be separated.”

It held the lights on her for the longest time, then with a sigh it looked up.

Petrovitch could see nothing but a smear of gray around the after-images burned onto his retinas, but he guessed what was in its sights now. He groped for Madeleine’s hand and tugged gently.

She stumbled forward into him, clutched at him and held him to her, because she had been blinded too.

“Crouch down,” he said, and they both got to their knees and pressed themselves against each other.

The Jihad-built machine started moving. The air filled with creaks and pops, squeals and bass rumbles. The ground shook, rising up beneath them, falling away again. Dust billowed, walls collapsed, metal tore, glass cracked; a gun snapped three times, and was thereafter silenced forever.

The concussions lessened, the air moved once as the great counterbalancing tail swung its spun above their heads, and it was gone, marching down a road far too narrow for it. A many-legged colossus, destroying everything in its path.

Except for Petrovitch and Madeleine.

He looked over the top of his glasses. The lights of the beast flickered away in the distance, but the sky itself was dark.

They could hear other machines in different parts of the Metrozone, signaling their presence with flares of burning gas and the slow, heavy rumble of collapsing buildings. The sky flickered with flame and echoes of explosions.

Petrovitch half-expected them to start calling to each other, crying Ulla! across the rooftops.

“The car’s a write-off,” said Madeleine. It was on its side against the buckled steel shutters.

“To be fair, it wasn’t in much better condition when we stole it.” Petrovitch squinted at it. He still couldn’t see too well. “Can you get it back on its wheels?”

She squeezed in behind it and braced herself against the shop front. Petrovitch stood well out of the way as the car toppled back down. Whatever glass there was left fell out into the road.

“Good as new,” he said, and kicked at the driver’s door. It swung open, and he felt under the steering column for the wires.

“You’re not seriously suggesting it’ll work?”

He caught the battery wire with his fingertip. It bit him and he jerked away, growling. He reached farther up and took hold of the insulated part.

“Out of gear?” she asked.

He nodded, and she reached across the passenger seat to waggle the gear stick. He used touch to guide the wires together, flashes of blue worrying at his skin.

The engine coughed. He moved the wire back and forward and finally found the right point. The car wound itself into life again.

“Desperation plus East European engineering equals result,” he crowed. “Not pretty, but it works.”

“We’re still not going to make it in time, are we?” She clambered over the bonnet, and put her hand under Petrovitch’s shoulder to help him up.

“Not that one. Broken.”

“Sorry.” She swapped her grip to the other side. “But we’re taking too long. They must be at the tower by now.”

Petrovitch shook himself out. “You’d be forgiven for thinking so. But since the Jihad’s monsters are still crashing around, I can only conclude that Chain either hasn’t access to the secret room yet, or that it’s less use than he thought it was. Which means, we still have some wiggle room.”

“Get in the car and shut up, Sam.”

“Yes, babochka .”

She drove slowly down the road, moving this way and that to avoid the larger obstacles, rolling over the smaller ones. There were signs of the Jihad everywhere: gaps in the architecture where there ought to be none, straight furrows plowed across the fabric of the city, marked by fluttering yellow flames.

There seemed no reason for the pattern—one building left, another destroyed—but Petrovitch rather fancied that, come daybreak, a passing satellite might notice the similarity between the new face of the London Metrozone and the Tokyo rail network.

It hadn’t occurred to him that there might be people buried beneath the drifts of rubble, and that some of them might still be alive, until he saw a man bent over one of the mounds of rubble, picking at it piece by piece.

They rolled past, Petrovitch transfixed by the man’s lonely labor. He never looked up, just went on flinging bricks behind him one after another, digging down.

“Are you Okay?” Madeleine asked.

“I’m getting worried, that’s all.” He gnawed at the back of his hand. “You. Me. Especially me. We’re the weak link in the chain. If we get killed trying to stop the Jihad, no one else knows what’s going on. If there was a way of getting a message to Marchenkho…”

The Skoda scraped its already battered side against an abandoned fridge, lying in the street. There was more debris; boxes, clothes, shop fittings, loose packaging. Madeleine slowed to a crawl and peered out through the hole where the windscreen used to be.

“Don’t these things normally come with lights?”

“I thought it was going to be a five-minute dash to the tower. I didn’t connect them up.” Petrovitch kicked the footwell. “Maddy, turn right.”

“Isn’t that toward the river?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure?”

“Turn already.”

She remembered to depress the clutch as she spun the wheel. “Where are we going?”

“Just bear with me, okay?”

The university foyer was shattered—doors forced, glass like frost on the floor, tables and chairs scattered like stones. Petrovitch shoved a desk aside, and listened to the hollow clatter it made.

“ Chyort . Too late.”

Madeleine tiptoed in behind him, letting her eyes adjust to the near-total darkness. “The river’s at the end of the street. Getting closer, too.”

“The place is abandoned. I was hoping, you know?”

“I know.” She suddenly became still, frozen mid-step. She ducked just as a beam of blue-white light flashed into Petrovitch’s eyes.

He gasped, tried to raise his right hand to shield his face, groaned again as his broken bones ground together. He gave up and stood tall, blinking into the torchlight.

“Nothing for you here,” said a voice. “Turn around and go.”

“We’re armed,” said another. “Don’t think we won’t use them.”

“That,” said Petrovitch, “is the best bit of news I’ve had all day. I’m going to reach into my pocket and get my student card out, and you’re not going to shoot me. Deal?”

“You’re a student? Here?”