“This is just bullshit. You’re full of it, full of crap, kid. This is something you and the princess cooked up. Her old man’s alive and kicking, and shaking in his sandals because I’ve got his precious daughter.”

Petrovitch reached into his own coat pocket for a little metal hoop from which dangled a pair of thin keys. “I disagree,” he said. “What are you going to do? The smart thing or the stupid thing? Let her go, or wait for the Jihad to make you let her go?”

Sorenson looked at Petrovitch’s gun, then at Petrovitch himself. “Here’s the deal: I’ll not toss your sorry ass off the top of this housing project, and you’ll make yourself scarce. Without the princess.” He started to stride forward, confident of overpowering his opponent.

Then the American staggered back, his big hands flapping in front of his face, trying to bat away the bullet that had already banged into the back of his skull. A black river of blood flowed down his face from his forehead, almost obscuring his last look of surprise.

He fell, twisted, eyes open. His heavily covered frame made the roof shake as it landed.

“What the huy do you know anyway?” Petrovitch swapped the gun for the rat and flipped it open.

The screen was covered with two words repeated endlessly: coming now. They were still scrolling, and it was clear that it was almost too late. He used the touch screen to scrawl the hasty message, “Petrovitch says stop.”

Gunfire, up to that point far away, became suddenly close.

“Pizdets,” he said and snapped the rat shut.

28

Petrovitch decided that if he did everything at a run, fewer people were going to question what he was doing. The flaw in his plan was that he’d never felt less like running.

He could barely grip the handle to the top door; his arm was a seething mass of pins and needles, and the only way he could tell he’d actually got hold of the thing was that his fingers wouldn’t close any further.

Nevertheless, he pulled and trip-trapped down the stairs as fast as he could. He slipped on the bottom step and collided with the lower door, hurting his shoulder.

“Halyavshchik!” Now wasn’t the time to get careless. He pocketed the Beretta and used his good right hand to enter the war room.

Everyone had rushed to the windows to see what was happening below, and no one noticed him as he weaved through the tables and darted for the cafeteria door.

Sonja noticed him, though. “Sam? What’s going on?”

He fished out the handcuff keys and threw them across the floor to her. “The New Machine Jihad is going on, and we have to leave.”

She scooped up the keys and applied them to the cuffs. “What about Sorenson?”

“Something we don’t need to worry about anymore. Which is, on balance, a good thing since we’ve got more trouble than we can cope with.” He limped to the window and pressed his face to the glass.

The road below looked like the rush-hour at Waterloo Bridge: cars, nose to tail, not a scrap of tarmac between them, grinding against each other like boulders.

“Huy na ny,” he breathed, misting the window. Sonja joined him, standing uncomfortably close as she frowned at the vehicles, which seemed to be pouring into the plaza at the foot of the tower from every direction. As they did so, they set up a current, a whirlpool of automation with them in the gyre.

“Is that the best they can do?” said Sonja. “How’s that going to help?”

“None of those cars has a driver. Makes them very hard to kill.” He stopped to catch his breath. “They’ve got this building surrounded, which leaves me wondering what else they have up their sleeve.”

“Because of the wheels.”

“Yeah. It’s the usual can’t-climb-stairs problem.” He slumped down, back to the wall and screwed his eyes up tight.

“Sam?”

“I’m having a heart attack. Possibly the last one I’ll ever have.” He put his fist against his chest, and breathed in against the pain.

“But we have to get out of here!”

“I know. I’m doing my best.” Petrovitch heard another noise against the rumble of the procession, a deep bass diesel sound. He dragged himself back upright using the window ledge as a crutch and peered out.

It was a riot wagon; swathed in electrified mesh and brandishing its weapons: tear-gas launchers, wide-barreled watercannon, plastic bullet guns. It rolled in on its six fat tires and started through the sea of cars. It rode up onto the bonnet of one, whose windscreen popped and shattered. The roof buckled as the wagon kept on moving, bursting all the other panes.

Then it was surfing across to the entrance, granulated glass spraying everywhere, dipping and sliding on the uneven, unstable surface below but entirely supported by the vehicles beneath.

Sparks were crackling over its front armor. The militia were fighting back.

“They’d do better saving their ammunition,” said Petrovitch. “Something tells me that it’s going to be the least of their worries.”

Sonja put a hand under his shoulder and tried to pull him away from the window. “If it’s under Jihad command, we have to get to it.”

“Don’t trust them.”

“You want to stay here?” she asked.

“Do you want to go out there?” he countered. “You’ll be at the mercy of a bunch of crotch-scratching code jockeys whose hallmark is ‘oops.’ They damn near killed me playing with their oversized train set. I’d much rather be the author of my own salvation than rely on them.”

He steeled himself to get as far as the door, and only had to stop once, when he thought he was going to black out. His vision grayed and his ears roared, but the moment passed.

The Paradise residents were still standing at the window, but had now started arguing with each other as to what to do. Petrovitch found a chair and slumped into it, and, despite Sonja’s best efforts, he refused to move.

“Hey,” he said, then when that made no impression, he fetched out Sorenson’s Magnum and banged the butt hard on the table. “Hey!”

A dozen people turned to face him. He slid the gun across the tabletop and let them draw their own conclusions.

“Does that mean we have to do what you say now?” A rodent-faced woman stepped forward and leaned against the back of a chair.

“Yeah, that’s right. All of your base belongs to us.” Petrovitch snorted in disgust. It hurt, but it showed his contempt. “Get a clue and sit down, the lot of you.”

“Sam, we don’t have time for this,” said Sonja.

“There’s always time for this. Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.” He watched them as they moved closer, perching on the edges of desks and plastic chairs. Their unspoken deference to him made him squirm.

When he thought they were ready, he flipped his glasses off and rubbed at his eyes.

“You know, I don’t give a shit about your culture or your traditions, because they suck. I don’t care that I killed your new leader who killed your previous leader, since that way of kingmaking died back in the seventeen hundreds, and wake up!” He slammed his hand down hard, and the resulting noise even made himself jump. “It’s the twenty-first century out there, people. The Metrozone functions quite happily without you taking part. All you’ve done is made yourself a ghetto—a dysfunctional, kleptocratic ghetto—that your own children fight to get out of. This is not freedom. This is slavery, and you’ve done it to yourselves.

“I don’t expect anything I say will change anything, but huy! It might make one of you think. The thing is, the fact that you’ve collectively screwed up all your lives isn’t particularly important right now. What is, is that you’re under attack from the New Machine Jihad. Do not use the lifts. Do not trust any networked technology, especially if your safety depends on it functioning properly. Don’t waste bullets shooting at the cars, because the Jihad has the resources of the entire Metrozone at its disposal.