“I always thought it was pillage first, then burn. But whatever,” said Petrovitch, “there’s been a change of plan. Prepare for the New Machine Jihad.”

Behind them, a car rolled around a corner, its red bonnet already badly dented, its windscreen punched through and roof warped. It was leaking radiator fluid, but it would last long enough for what he was going to use it for.

It gunned its engine and raced forward.

23

They walked on in silence as Petrovitch pushed shotgun cartridges out of their loops and into his pocket. Some of the houses either side of them were on fire, burning freely, always centered on one property that was starting to collapse. Bright embers spilled into the air like seeds and rose up on fiery drafts. The heat from them made the air flicker.

“What?” he finally said.

Miyamoto wouldn’t look at him. “That was… distasteful.”

“I’m sorry? Distasteful? What the huy is this?” Petrovitch took the last shell and examined the breach mechanism. He downloaded a video that told him how to load it safely and not shoot his foot off in the process.

“You… we should have given them a chance to surrender. That would have been more,” and Miyamoto pursed his lips, “honorable.”

“You know what? You can take your stupid bushido code and you can za cyun v’shopu. This isn’t feudal Japan. This is yebani Stalingrad: a meat-grinder battle where the first thing that dies is mercy.” He rammed the plastic cartridge home and snapped the gun closed. “The Soviets won Stalingrad by being utterly ruthless about human life. That meant not tying half their men down looking after Nazi prisoners.”

“Seeing who your teachers are, I am not surprised by the lessons you have learned.”

Petrovitch snorted. “In Russia, lessons learn you. But let’s go with this for a moment: they didn’t look like they wanted to surrender. Quite the opposite.”

“You drove over them.”

“Yeah. No cries of ‘we surrender’ at that point.”

“And then you reversed back.”

“Even then one of them was still trying to get up, and you made me waste a bullet on him. Swords don’t need reloading.” The road they turned into to head up the hill toward Highgate was littered with bodies like spilled grains of cooked rice. Some of them were still just about alive. Others lay in pools of wet blood and were patently dead.

Petrovitch scanned the ground for guns, or other ranged weapons, but couldn’t see any. Just blades and clubs and spikes. At the top of the road, there were tail-lights and sounds of mayhem.

“So, let’s say that they’d surrendered, the four of them. We’d have three Outies, plus the one I’d shot. What were we going to do with them? Disarm them? They’d just walk into the nearest house and tool up. Tie them up? The next Outies through would let them go. Take them back to the relevant authorities? The two of us are the authorities.”

Miyamoto stepped over a twisted corpse, spine broken, arm bent unnaturally. “You labor the point. We still should have offered.”

“And that’s precisely why they’re five k from the Thames and have turfed twelve million people out of their homes.” Petrovitch studied his map. The cars were a stop-gap, enough to clear a path for him to the coach depot and little more. The Outies would be back. “We’re too yebani civilized. We’ve forgotten that there’s something to fight for.”

“But do we have to fight like this?”

“Yeah. We do.”

“You mean you do.” Miyamoto almost sneered, and Petrovitch was tempted to hit him very hard somewhere painful.

Instead he stopped, stood in front of him and waited until they were toe to toe, then screamed in his face.

“Wake up! What the huy is wrong with you, man? Two hundred thousand Outies are busy slaughtering their way to victory, and you want to play nice? Nice is what put us in this pizdets in the first place. Look around you: where are the people who normally live here? The ones that didn’t run are waiting, cowering behind locked doors before they’re cut up into little bits like those two kids outside Lucy’s.” He took a breath. “Or they’ve already been cut up. So, yeah. I’m going to kill and kill and kill until the Outies finally get the message that they’re not wanted here. And I will carry on killing them all the way back to the M25. And then I’m going to bomb the survivors and send an army out to sweep the rest away. Then, and only then, will I think about nice. Got that?”

Miyamoto wiped the spittle from his cheeks. “I understand.” He sounded more subdued.

“I want you to go.”

“I have to stay.”

“I don’t have to justify myself to you.”

“Then stop.”

Petrovitch ground his teeth together. “Come on. We’ve got a bus to catch.”

He turned on his heel and stamped his way up the hill. Smoke was drifting across the road, obscuring it from his eyes and the satellites. Infrared was a mess, bright blooms of incandescence blotting out other smaller heat sources.

His assault on the summit of Highgate was petering out. The Outies were in the cemetery, while the cars growled outside the iron gates and brick walls.

He summoned the AI. “Fifty-one, thirty-three, fifty-six north: zero, eight, forty west. Get the tanks at Primrose Hill to smash it.”

The avatar walked by his side for a few steps. [You know you’re about to destroy the tomb of Karl Marx.]

“Yeah. What did he ever do for me?” Petrovitch involuntarily raised the shotgun to his shoulder, aiming down a side street. “Engels did most of the hard work, anyway.”

He remembered to pull the butt in hard before he squeezed the trigger, the only two conscious decisions he had to make. The gun kicked back and a man—he thought it was a man, but in reality it was only a half-seen blur behind a line of low concrete bollards—fell backward.

The inexorable advance was pressing down on him once more. He summoned more cars, raising them from sleep and sending them out to battle. The Outies were fluid, trying to flow around his forces like a flood, but the garage the coach hire operated from was just around the corner. He only had to hold back the tide for a few more moments.

The storm broke around him. Even as cars pulled out from curbsides and threw themselves at the gray figures, gunfire popped and glass shattered in curtains of shining crystal.

The avatar raised his hand and vanished, and Petrovitch got on with the task of surviving the next minute. He crouched down and took a look at the pitiful cover he’d given himself: halfway across the road, with Outies to his left and more in front. They might not even have noticed him yet, but a stray shot was going to hurt just as much as an aimed one.

Miyamoto was faring no better, a few meters behind him. Two cars were coming up the street, side by side. Not fast, not yet, but if he ran it would be into the path of one or the other of them.

Petrovitch had an idea. He took those two cars and slowed them down, taking them out of hunter-killer mode and telling them to do something different. He ran back to Miyamoto and forced his head low.

The cars flanked them, and rumbled on at jogging speed. Other cars overtook them, wheels up on the pavement, swerving with screeching tires to avoid the lamp-posts and signs, then hurtled away straight at the Outies.

The first artillery shells howled overhead, and there was an almost simultaneous flash of fire. The windows all around disintegrated as the shockwave hammered into the buildings around them. Petrovitch ducked.

Speech was rendered impossible by the simple fact he thought he was deaf. A burning vehicle, everything ablaze, even the wheels, rolled back out of the side street.

Straight toward them.

Petrovitch grabbed Miyamoto’s arm and threw him forward, slaving their moving shields to his position. It wasn’t quite fast enough. The car on their left shuddered as it was struck. By the time it managed to tear free, it was on fire itself.