Theories of Flight

to come and get him.

Moments before, everything had been indistinct and uncertain. He knew now what he was going to do. He was almost grateful to her, for giving him this distraction. He had not been quite this angry for a very long time. Not since Chain’s death. Days, at least.

“Yeah. I know how to stop people like you.”

She must have hit Lucy again.

“Then what are you waiting for?”

And again.

“Tell her,” said Petrovitch, “tell her I’m coming.”

“Kind of counting on that. Don’t take too long.” Sorenson’s last sentence was punctuated with a crack at the end of each syllable.

Petrovitch terminated the call, and waited until he had finished shaking with rage. He focused on Valentina.

“Forget what I just said. Something else has come up.”

She simply nodded, and climbed back over the barricade. A car was weaving its way up the flyover toward them.

31

A squad of Oshicora security guards met them outside the entrance to the university, dressed in full armor and carrying carbines. They had more hardware dangling from their webbing straps. Sonja was in the middle of them, her normally immaculate hair awry.

“I told you I didn’t need them,” said Petrovitch. He climbed out of the car and stalked across the pavement.

“Sam,” said Sonja. She finally saw him as he’d become, not as he had pretended to be on all the video conversations they’d had. “What have you done?”

“Yeah. In Russia, the medical experiments have you.” He spread his arms wide and parted the guards. Valentina followed in his wake, cocking her rifle and sneering disdainfully at the unbloodied poseurs.

He pushed at the doors to the foyer: they were self-opening, and although they still had power, they weren’t opening to anyone. It was a moment’s work to hack them, and they flew aside. He marched across the tiled concourse. At the start of the week, that place had echoed to the ludicrous scrum that had accompanied his scientific discovery. Now, it rang only to tramping boots and the muted rattles of military equipment.

At the foot of the stairs, he turned. “Wait here.”

Sonja put her hands on her hips. “Sam, Sorenson’s going to kill you.”

“She’s going to try,” he corrected. He pulled out the tank major’s side-arm and pulled the slide. “Your crew will wait right here, and they will not interfere. I’m doing this on my own.”

“She’s going with you, isn’t she?” Sonja pointed at Valentina.

“She’s my right arm. Neither of us has a choice whether she comes with me.”

“Well, I’m coming too.”

Petrovitch turned his camera on her, and judged how much damage she could do to his fragile psyche in the time it took to get to his lab.

“Only up to the door, then.” He started up the stairs. “Tell me about the Americans.”

“Publicly, there’s not going to be a change in policy. You, me, everyone involved, is a member of the terrorist organization the New Machine Jihad, which is as stupid as it sounds but their foreign policy doesn’t do nuanced. Privately, the President will not sign any further Executive Orders against us. I think that means we can ignore the saber-rattling for now.”

“That promise is as meaningless as it sounds if we don’t know what Executive Orders he’s signed already.”

“It was the best I could do!”

“Then you have to do better. Yobany stos, Sonja. The art of leadership is delegation: your father understood that. If you don’t think playing hardball with the Yanks is your thing, find someone else who’ll go back for a third time and threaten to cut Mackensie’s yajtza off. I’ve handed you half a city; do not lose it. If you screw up, the AI has nowhere to go. Old man Oshicora’s work, pfft. Gone.”

“What about you? Why don’t you do it?”

Petrovitch stopped abruptly, his foot hovering over a step. He looked at her, leaning in toward her until she didn’t know whether to stare into the blank lens of the camera or at the stained bandages that covered his eyes.

“You don’t want me making decisions for you right now, vrubatsa?”

She nodded mutely.

“Good.” He resumed walking, and told her many other things: how the AI was going to lose its map shortly, how she was to secure the power stations and repair the grid as a priority, how leaving the Outies a means of escape from the Metrozone was really important because she needed victory, not a blood-bath.

“You’re talking like you’re not intending to come back,” she said.

It was true, although he hadn’t meant it that way at all. “Something might go wrong,” he said. He kicked out at the door to the corridor. If he’d been Sorenson, he’d have been lying in wait just there, just beside the hinges, crouched down so no one could see him. He’d count the people through, then sight between his retreating shoulder blades.

She wasn’t that smart. She was going to want to humiliate him first, make him feel fear. She’d lost sight of her objective, whereas Petrovitch was so focused he believed he could almost storyboard out the next few minutes.

He let the door swing back toward him, then he pushed it open to its fullest extent, peering through the wire-strung glass. No, she definitely wasn’t that smart.

“Okay,” he said to Valentina. “The lab where they are has two rows of benches, four each. Heavy wood, good cover. A couple of desks on the right-hand side, also good. Loads of govno against the walls, windows down the left. Far end is a blackboard, facing the door. I’m guessing that’s where they’ll be. You go left, I’ll go right. Keep low, and listen carefully.”

“Da,” said Valentina. She checked her magazine, counting the shiny bullets with her thumbnail, then slammed it home.

The lab had double doors, and they took up positions either side. Sonja hovered. “Sam?”

“You have your work,” he said. “I have mine.”

He dipped his chin, and both he and Valentina rolled around the door frame, heading for the furniture they knew would be there. Again, if Sorenson had been smart, she would have used her time profitably in moving everything to her end of the room, giving her the cover and denying him.

Petrovitch caught the briefest of glimpses of her as he spun and rolled for the desk. She was standing, pistol against Lucy’s head, who sat taped to a wheelie chair in front of her.

He put his back against the column of desk drawers and glanced across at Valentina. She sat poised like he was, spine to the woodwork, knees slightly bent and feet planted on the floor. Her rifle, like his gun, pointed up at the ceiling lights that burned with unforgiving fluorescence.

To work: he rewound the last clip of video and examined it frame by frame. Lucy was still alive, because her eyes went from screwed tight shut to wide open as he crashed in. Sorenson looked even more crazy than she had been when she’d half-destroyed Wong’s.

Maybe she thought she was genuinely going to get revenge this time.

“Lucy?”

She had a thick strip of silver tape over her mouth, but she made a noise.

“Sit really still.” Petrovitch slipped his camera out of its cradle and checked he had a long enough lead. He