Саймон Морден - Equations of Life

“I’ve come to talk to Oshicora-san. What about you?”

“He is dead,” he hissed. “I killed him myself.”

“And yet, when Sonja told you he was still alive, you had to come and find out for yourself.”

“You put these thoughts in her head. You told her she would find him here. Why did you do that?”

Petrovitch cackled. “You ignorant govnosos . You’ve no idea, have you? Even though she’s tried to explain it to you, over and over again, you wouldn’t believe her. Why should I waste what little time I have left on you?”

Hijo reached down and filled his fist with Petrovitch’s collar, hauling him half off the ground. He pressed the barrel of his gun at Petrovitch’s throat. “He is not a machine!”

“Trust you to get it zhopu- backward. The machine thinks it’s Oshicora, not the other way around. It’s not a resurrection—it’s reincarnation. A bit Shinto, in its way, really.” Petrovitch taunted Hijo, even though he knew the man could pull the trigger at any moment.

Hijo’s face went through several grotesque contortions. “How can this be?”

“I could tell you, but that’s dependent on you not killing me. In fact, it seems rather a lot depends on you not killing me. You can’t stop the New Machine Jihad, because you killed its creator. Sonja won’t, because she sees it as the last link to her father. Only I can do this. Only I can make sure you have something left by tomorrow morning.”

Petrovitch was released, and he fell back down to the ground in a crumpled heap. Hijo walked around him, agitated, uncertain, raising and lowering his pistol as he debated with himself as to whether to finish his prisoner off.

“You,” he finally said. “Get up.”

“That might be a problem,” said Petrovitch.

“Get. Up.” He punctuated the order with jabs of his shoes.

“Since you asked nicely, I’ll have to see what I can do.” He rolled onto his side and dragged his leaden legs up. He levered himself onto his knees and used a nearby maple to get him the rest of the way.

“Walk.”

“Yeah. If I could see where you were pointing, that’d be good. I’m waiting for the blood to get back to my brain.” He held onto the smooth-skinned trunk and waited for the grayness to resolve itself.

“Now.”

Petrovitch pushed himself away and managed a couple of steps. A bamboo screen banged open and Harry Chain stumbled through as if thrown. Madeleine, with Chain’s police special in her hand, stood in the doorway.

Hijo moved fast. He wrapped his arm around Petrovitch’s throat and held a gun to his temple.

“I can take him,” said Madeleine, advancing over Chain’s shuddering and retching form. “Sorry I’m late, by the way. This lard-ass has a concussion as well as being even more unfit than you.”

“Stop. Stop where you are, woman. Or I kill Petrovitch.” Hijo tightened his grip, and there was nothing Petrovitch could do about it.

“Head shot. By the time your neurones decide to tell your finger to move, you’ll be dead. And I am that accurate.” But she stayed where she was, on the border between the path and a moss-covered rockery.

“Put down your gun.”

“Put down yours.”

“ Yobany stos, one of you give in. I’m struggling to stay conscious.”

Hijo started to pull Petrovitch backward, then decided that he could win after all. He aimed at Madeleine and fired in one fluid movement, and she ducked, rolled and came up on her feet; closer, meaner, and unscathed.

The gun flicked back to Petrovitch’s head.

“No further.”

“You’re just going to try and shoot me again.” Madeleine started to move in a wide circle, forcing Hijo to spin with her.

Then she stopped and sighed, and held up her gun hand. “Okay. We’re done here.” She stooped and placed the special on the ground between her feet.

Petrovitch felt the muscles constricting his throat to relax and heard a grunt of satisfaction. He was pushed away and, as he turned to look back at Hijo, he saw Sonja lope silently up behind him. She danced lightly on the balls of her feet and swung her father’s katana at Hijo’s exposed neck.

The blade cut deep, coming to rest part way through his Adam’s apple. She twisted away, a spray of blood leaping from the tip of the sword, droplets spinning darkly in the air.

Hijo, with a look of immense surprise on his face, folded up onto the path. His half-severed head hung loosely from his body, and a lake of deep red formed under him, soaking away into the pale gravel.

“So ends the life of Hijo Masazumi,” said Sonja. The bright edge of the sword dripped as she hung it downward. “Always looking for threats, and never seeing the one that would kill him.”

Madeleine picked Petrovitch up, and held him to her like a rag doll. “Are you all right?”

“I thought you weren’t coming.”

“Chain. I had a mind to kick him all the way down the stairs to the cesspit that’s ground level. He used the wound on his head to appeal to my better nature.”

“Yeah, Okay. Sonja? Thanks.”

“I did it for me. I did it for my father. I did it because a world without Hijo is a better place.”

“Nice as this is,” said Petrovitch, untangling himself from Madeleine’s arms, “we still have something to do, and only a limited time to do it.”

“Follow me,” said Sonja, and didn’t look back once.

“I’ll get Chain,” said Madeleine, crouching to collect his gun. “It sounds like he’s finished coughing his guts up.”

Sonja led them over the wooden bridge and eventually to the temple. She hesitated at the steps. “Sam, what will you do?”

Petrovitch rested against one of the stone lions that guarded the entrance. “I don’t know,” he answered. “It depends on what’s possible.”

“You said you’d save the Jihad.”

“Funny,” said Chain, wiping red-flecked phlegm from his mouth, “he told us it had to go.”

There was a moment where it was equally likely that Sonja would raise her sword and Madeleine raise her gun. Petrovitch stood in the middle and bowed his head, wondering at the stupidity of people and realizing why he avoided them so much.

“I can do both,” he said.

“That makes no sense,” said Chain.

“This,” said Petrovitch, “coming from a man who had an armored car and Sonja, and still managed to screw up.”

Chain put his hand to his matted hair and showed Petrovitch the blood. “You didn’t have Godzilla chasing you half the night.”

He wasn’t impressed. “We’ve more important things to deal with than your lame excuses. Mainly, a nuclear missile is going to hit this building at dawn. It will vaporize it, and excavate a hole deep enough to destroy the quantum computer below. That will be the end of the New Machine Jihad.”

Chain wasn’t the only one to gape. “How? How do you know this?”

“I have every confidence that my university colleagues will get the message through to the EDF. They might decide not to wait that long, of course, and order an immediate strike. In which case, it’s a race between a bunch of electronics students with soldering irons and me. We can stand here and talk about how I’m a bad person for what I’ve done, or we can get on with trying to prevent disaster. What do you want to do?”

Sonja flexed her fingers around the katana ’s hilt. “Can you save it?”

“Yeah.”

“Promise?”

“Have I ever let you down?”

She looked puzzled. “No. No, you haven’t.”

Chain looked up at Madeleine, who asked. “Can you stop it?”

“Yeah.”

“And I have to trust you, don’t I?”

“Not if you don’t want to. If you think I’m going to betray you—now or at any point in the future—it’s probably best that you kill me now. It’ll save a lot of heartbreak.”