The Curve of the Earth

3




Petrovitch kicked the door open again when the car had come to a halt. It was parked, two wheels up on the kerb, next to an extravagant length of corroded iron railings. Just ahead of the bonnet was a set of ornate gates hung between two blackened stone pillars, each topped with a chipped obelisk.

“Out,” he said.

“What about my luggage?” said Newcomen. He’d seen enough on the journey from Heathrow to convince him it was only a matter of minutes before someone tried to mug him.

“What about it? You thought you’d be here for less than a few hours: what could you possibly have brought that justifies that size of crate?”

“Well,” said Newcomen, “there’s—”

“Yeah, I know about the Secret Squirrel stuff already. If you lose it, so much the better.” Petrovitch climbed out of the car and used his backside to push the door closed. He started towards the gates, raising one hand and beckoning the agent.

Newcomen caught him up, puffing slightly.

“Out of shape, Newcomen? What would Coach say?”

“Do you have to bring that up?”

“Don’t have to. But it used to be important to you. Sorry if it’s a sore point.”

Newcomen unconsciously rubbed his arm, midway between right elbow and shoulder. He looked around him for the first time.

“We’re in a graveyard.”

“Yeah, that’d account for all the, you know, gravestones.”

Some of them were old, pre-Armageddon, the ones closest to the entrance. Most were not: some dated back to the foundation of the Metrozone, and then as they walked along the cracked tarmac paths deeper into the cemetery, the death dates got more and more recent.

Even the designs of the memorials marked an evolution of sorts: varied and effusive early on, to more uniform, utilitarian later, until almost all variation had been weeded out and a simple narrow rectangular slab became the norm. Name, date of birth, and the day they died. That was all.

They were passing by row upon row marked with May 2024. Petrovitch’s eyelid twitched as he remembered.

Those ended, and after a few more serried ranks, a vast field of November dates, same year.

It took a while to get to walk by those.

Finally, Petrovitch headed down one of the rows, off the path, disturbing the ragged grasses that were growing unchecked between the upright stones. It looked more or less a random choice, but he knew exactly where he was going.

Six graves down, there was a black marker engraved in faded kanji, with the dates in Roman numerals. He stopped in front of it and worried at his lip for a few moments.

Newcomen watched from a respectful distance, hands clasped behind his back.

“You’re probably thinking this is the first normal thing you’ve seen me do,” said Petrovitch.

“I, uh, I wouldn’t want to intrude, sir.”

“Stop calling me sir. I’m not sure you mean it, and I really, really don’t like it.” He knelt down in the wet grass and pulled a long-bladed knife from inside his coat. He gripped a handful of green leaf blades and hacked at their base. “We’re going to have to come to some sort of working relationship, Newcomen. Like I said, I don’t know why they sent you, out of all the people they had available. Personally, I don’t think you were chosen for any other quality but your ignorance. The less you know, the less information I can tear from your still-living flesh. That makes you a victim in someone else’s game, but unfortunately for you, it won’t stop me from ruthlessly exploiting any and every advantage that’s presented to me. I’m going to apologise in advance for that.”

He worked his way across the grave plot, holding and cutting the grass.

“You said he was a friend,” said Newcomen, nodding at the stone.

“She. She was a friend. Body cremated, ashes interred right here, half a world away from where she was born. She was twenty-two when she died.” Petrovitch straightened up, his left hand stained green. “I brought you out here deliberately, to see this almost-anonymous grave, because I wanted to show you what your countrymen are capable of. Sure, we can drive by the site of the Metrozone’s very own Ground Zero, but I can make my point better out here.”

He dug into his pockets again and came up with a steel lighter and a small flat candle in a foil container. He trod down the grass next to the headstone, and placed the candle in his bootprint.

“This is where Sonja Oshicora ended up. I don’t know if they’ve told you about her, or if you’ve bothered to look for yourself. It was a decade and another life ago for me. You were still in high school in Columbus and probably too busy being a jock to pay any attention to what was happening here. Maybe you remember the nuke and Mackensie resigning, but not necessarily the reasons why.”

Petrovitch bent down and flicked the lid of the lighter. He stroked the wheel with his thumb and fire flickered, yellow and trembling. Eventually, the candle wick caught, turned black, and glowed with its own fragile flame. He crouched down and watched the wax melt and turn clear.

“She was my friend. Accidentally so, but my friend all the same. She ran the Freezone – the first one, here – and this is where she died.”

“That’s, uh,” said Newcomen.

“Shut up and let me talk. I’m trying to warn you. You’ll probably think I’m the Antichrist by the time I’ve finished with you, the very embodiment of evil. The problem you have is that the worst acts against you have already happened, and I’ve had nothing to do with them whatsoever.” Petrovitch nodded at the gravestone. “I was at the sharp end of a CIA assassination squad, and Sonja tried to save me from them. But the way she chose to do that nearly broke me. She didn’t tell me about it, and she didn’t give me a choice. Her plan fell apart, and she ended up putting a bullet through her own brain. While I was watching.” He’d erased the recording long ago. Yet he could still see it with aching clarity. His name called, his head turned, the gunmetal-grey barrel slipped inside her pretty pink mouth.

Newcomen shifted his weight from one foot to the other. The bottoms of his suit trousers were wet, and were starting to cling. “I don’t understand what you’re saying, sir, Dr Petrovitch.”

“Of course you don’t. I don’t expect you to. You’re not going to believe that your own government, the people you work for, the people you look up to and think protect you, have not just determined that you’re completely expendable, but have deliberately and explicitly marked you for termination. You’re a dead man walking.” Petrovitch shrugged. “Sorry for that, but it wasn’t my choice.”

The candle flickered in the slight breeze, then burned brighter for a moment.

“They told me to expect this. The Assistant Director briefed me. Said you’d try and get inside my head. It won’t work.”

“I don’t give a shit what Buchannan said,” said Petrovitch mildly. “But you’ll remember this conversation. When the time comes and you realise I was right all along, you might suddenly discover that I’m your only hope for staying alive.”

“I’ll wait for you by the car,” said Newcomen. He walked away, a slowly dwindling figure in amongst the gravestones.

Petrovitch scratched at his chin. “I know we’re pretty much the same age, but yobany stos.”

[His upringing was not as cosmopolitan as yours.]

“Yeah.” He looked at Newcomen’s retreating back. “Chyort, I feel yebani ancient compared with vat-boy over there.”

[Not being irradiated in his mother’s womb might account for some of the differences between you. Not being in a womb at all for others. He was raised on an automatic farm, you in post-Armageddon St Petersburg. He was an athlete, whilst you had your failing heart. Apart from his one accident, I doubt he has ever felt pain.]

“What I meant…” Petrovitch rested his hand on top of Sonja’s grave marker. It was cold to the touch, the stone numbing his fingers. “I feel like I’m being dragged in again. Being forced to trace the old patterns that I thought I’d left behind. It didn’t end well the last time.”

[We are ten years wiser, Sasha. We have a whole decade of experience to consult. We are now many.]

“It’s not going to stop us making an utter pizdets of it, though.” He moved to trace the calligraphic strokes of Sonja’s name.

[It might. If nothing else, the Americans are now more scared of us than we are of them.]

“But they don’t learn, do they? They keep trying to slap us down, and we have to be quick every time. I’m afraid, Michael, that when it really matters, we’re going to be a fraction of a second too slow. Too slow for Lucy.”

[Then we must be ready for every eventuality, no matter how unlikely. I can calculate layer on layer of possibilities.]

“And still something might come out of nowhere and knock us off course.” Petrovitch stood up and put everything back in his pockets. “History’s not going to repeat itself, is it, Sonja? We’re too smart for that, right?”

She had no opinion to offer, one way or the other, so Petrovitch left her with the candle guttering in the fading daylight and made his way to the car, and the waiting Newcomen.

He unlocked the doors when he was still a good distance away, making the American jump. Newcomen’s phone was built into his tie: tucked down beside his now-sweat-stained collar was the earpiece. If it had been put together better, it would have been a poor imitation of Freezone tech. As it was, it was just a phone.

Petrovitch tagged it and made it ring.

“Hello?”

“Get in the car. You’ll catch a cold, and I’m not having you sneezing on me all the way across the Atlantic tomorrow.”

Newcomen crawled in, next to his luggage. “Doctor?”

“Yeah, we’re going to have to sort this out now. I only use the title when I want something, or you’ve pissed me off so much I won’t answer to anything else. Call me Petrovitch and have done with it.”

“That would be disrespectful, si… Doc… I can’t call you just ‘Petrovitch’. What would people think?”

“Oh, f*ck off, Newcomen. Call me whatever you want. I don’t care. We’re going to find some dinner.”

It was getting dark, and the less salubrious side of the Metrozone was asserting itself. The authorities had reverted to the municipal model of government after the years’ hiatus of the Freezone. Petrovitch thought that his way of doing things was demonstrably better – an AI-administered co-operative had its own particular problems, but scaring off three desperate-looking men from robbing him wasn’t one of them.

He got closer to the car as they circled it. One of them had a half-brick, which wasn’t a surprise as they weren’t exactly in short supply. Knives, too. Perhaps they hadn’t spotted him, or maybe they had and thought that they could take this slight, short guy as well as the one crouched on the back seat. Petrovitch wasn’t armed, except for his weed-cutter, and Newcomen wouldn’t be allowed to carry outside his jurisdiction – unless Auden had slipped him a piece. Which would be typical of the man.

All three would-be thieves had phones. He tagged them and chased down their numbers, call histories, came up with a few houses over Wembley way where most of the calls geolocated. From there it was a short step to dragging identities off a database, bundling it all up with video footage of the current scene and posting it to the police.

They’d all be gone by the time anyone turned up, but he had an affection for the Metrozone that never went away. It was still his city, mean streets and all.

One of the men hefted the brick, circling the car with its terrified occupant.

“Don’t throw that,” Petrovitch called when he was within earshot. “Because then I’ll get pissed with you and you wouldn’t like it.”

There were no street lights outside the cemetery, and he switched to active infrared. Everything became so much clearer. He could see their hot bodies swaddled in thick clothes against the cold, could see their blood run bright. Meatsacks. So easily damaged.

He kept on walking: not a moment of falter or hesitation. Even when the brick was thrown at his head. He’d calculated the entire trajectory of the missile almost before it had left the man’s hand, and he didn’t need to so much as duck.

Petrovitch was beside the car. He rested his palm on its dusty roof and started it up, though he deliberately kept the headlights off. It was tempting to try the “don’t you know who I am?” line, but it was clear that in their in-between state of drugged joy and dragging withdrawal, they had no idea. The dull red glow coming from his eyes didn’t appear to jog their memories either.

“I’m happy to run you over. I’m equally happy for you to disappear. Your call.”

The one who came for him had obscured his face with a scarf and pulled his hood tight around his head. Petrovitch knew enough about him already to know he wasn’t a kid doing something stupid for the first time, but a really not-very-nice man who hurt people and made their lives a misery.

After the first missed swing and before the second milling arm could reach him, Petrovitch casually pushed out his left hand against the bigger man’s sternum. He used enough force to crack ribs, momentarily stop the heart and send the body hurtling to the far side of the road.

“You can go home if you want,” he said to the other two, then ignored them. He opened the door and got behind the wheel. “You okay, Newcomen?”

“How…?”

“This file on me the FBI gave you: what did it actually say?” The car’s engine whined, and they drove off. After a while, another car passed theirs, and he remembered to put the lights on.

“I can’t tell you. It’s classified.”

“Yeah, course it is, though to be honest, I think so little of it I haven’t bothered hacking it. But judging from your reaction, I’m guessing it didn’t mention either the automatic car thing, or that I’ve got extensive cybernetic replacements.” He turned off the infrared before looking directly at Newcomen. “I can do these things because I’m a yebani cyborg. Vrubatsa?”

Newcomen wasn’t confirming or denying whether he understood. He was busy trying to push himself backwards through the upholstery, intent on putting as much distance as possible between him and the aberration before him.

Petrovitch faced the windscreen again and watched the Metrozone glide by. “We’ve fallen right into Uncanny Valley there, haven’t we? Don’t worry, Newcomen. You’ll get used to me.”