It was a warm day, a Sunday, and the Portobello was experiencing a rebirth, the shoppers and strollers out watching jugglers and musicians, browsing through open-front shacks of merchandise and ancient shopfronts, window-shopping for goods ranging from the exquisite to trash-with-a-price-tag. For most of the war the Portobello had languished, doing poor business. Now the New-Soviets had been driven back over their borders and commerce was beginning to flow again. It wouldn’t be long before the airlines were back, jets crowding Heathrow like cars on a rush-hour freeway. But Jo Ann, Barrabas knew, was sick to death of London. And of waiting.
She was opening her carrybag. Time to step in.
Barrabas plunged into the crowd, drew some sarcastic remarks as he elbowed through and stepped into the shop. Musty, dark, crowded, all of which meant old-fashioned; not like the new shops, where campy antiques were bathed in mellow stage lighting and arranged in postmodern, irony-pungent composition. This one had been here since the middle twentieth century probably, accumulating dust and questionable profits.
“I wouldn’t, Jo Ann,” Barrabas said.
She stiffened, then shot a glare at him over her shoulder. “Leave me alone.”
“If you can afford the ticket, then the ticket’s no good,” Barrabas said. “They usually aren’t any good no matter how much you pay for them.”
“Now see ’ere,” the man behind the counter said. “I’ve been in business ’ere for—”
“Shut your hole,” Barrabas snapped.
Jo Ann turned to face him, her cheeks mottled from anger. “You still trying to impress me by bullying people?”
Wrong move, he thought, and told her, “You’re right.” He turned to the shopkeeper. “Sorry, mate. Been worried about the girl. Didn’t mean to take it out on you.” Thinking: I’d like to kick your fat arse up around your ears.
Jo Ann was looking at the ticket on the counter, frowning. “Goddamn you, Patrick.” She closed her carrybag with an angry jerk of her hand and stalked past Barrabas toward the door.
“’Ere, now, miss!” the shopkeeper began.
Barrabas grinned at him. “Better luck next time.”
He followed her into the street. She shouted something over her shoulder at him. A one-man band, clashing cymbals together with his knees, playing banjo, blowing a mouth harp on a rack, and banging a bass drum with his foot pedal, was adding his racket to the street’s hum of electric cars and rumble of methanol lorries and hissing fuel-cell SUVs, and Barrabas couldn’t hear what she was shouting at him. But he got the gist of it.
“Right, I’ll fuck off, right out of your life, I promise!” he shouted, catching up with her. “If you’ll just have a cup of tea with me. Maybe some chips. What d’you say? And then I solemnly pledge to be gone forever, if you still want. I’m sorry about what I did the other night. Please.”
She stopped, turned, and shouted in his face, embarrassingly loud, “I don’t truck with racists!”
“Look—it’s just the way I was raised, you know? I mean, I’ve been thinking about it. You’re right about all that stuff.” He wondered if he was lying convincingly. And then he wondered if he was lying. “Just have a bite with me and hear me out.”
She stared at him.
He added, “I can get that erasure you wanted. Come on. Cup of tea.”
She tossed her head resignedly. “Okay. Just for a few minutes.”
The autonomous weapon was drawing a bead on the sod hut, its cannon swinging around, the PA grid on its turret emitting a warning siren as the tank plowed through the shacks. The autotank was khaki-colored, on shiny stainless-steel treads, and it was shaped like a dull hatchet with a flattened, streamlined turret studded with electronic sensors. Refugees scrambled to get out of its way; children shrieked and hooted, some terrified and others elated at the break in the monotony. Their mothers simply grabbed them and ran.
The robot tank had an insignia showing the Arc de Triomphe, the new symbol of the Unity Party, on its armored front, and one of the symbols of the Second Alliance, the eye and cross, stenciled on its sides. An old man stood in its path, staring at it, gaping in hunger-dulled confusion till it simply ran him down, crushing him against a wooden shack so that blood fountained from his mouth onto the image of the Arc.
Seeing this, Roseland muttered, “Winning hearts and minds as always,” as he worked his way toward the tank from its left side.
Flame strobed at the muzzle of the autotank’s cannon. Thunder, and the shack just in front of the sod hut flung itself in four directions at once, as the shell exploded inside it. The ground quivered. Debris rained. Blue-black smoke billowed, then elongated in the faint breeze and drew itself over Roseland. He coughed, tasting caustic chemicals and oil. Shreds of tarpaper and chunks of wood were burning raggedly around him. The next round would hit the sod hut.
He heard Torrence yelling at some of the refugees, telling them to get down. Saw the sun blazing off helmets of SA guards approaching cautiously, in a line of six, well behind the first autotank.
Torrence was drawing off the second autotank, thirty yards to Roseland’s right, dodging through the shacks, firing short, innocuous bursts at the unmanned killing machine to get its attention. Roseland was moving toward the other autotank, thinking, This is crazy, I ought to be running away from this thing.
But they couldn’t. They were surrounded. And Bibisch was busy with something vital…
Roseland was forty feet from the hulking robot vehicle now, imagining he could feel its camera watching him, feel the crosshairs of its machine gun sight in on his head. It shouldered through another shack, crunching and splintering, churning the debris with its treads, spewing dust, its machinery whining. He let go a burst from his Ingram autopistol at the tank, making a broken line of sparks across its beveled prow; accomplishing nothing except scoring the paint.
And making the thing notice him.
Its cannon and machine gun whirred smoothly around to sight in on him. He sprinted off to the left, farther from the sod hut. Heard a crack—and felt the air buzz—as one of the SA bulls took a potshot at him. He felt the faint pulse of the tank’s microwaves bouncing off his chest, targeting him.
Roseland dived behind something metallic and rusty. Thud. The ground erupted where he’d been a moment before. He shivered as the shock wave rippled past and dirt pattered down over him. He’d taken cover behind an old Audi hulk, just the rust-pitted body of the car remained, half-filled with trash and scraps of cloth laid out in an oversize bird’s nest for some refugee.
He heard the autotank whining toward the old car. Raising his head to look through the Audi, he saw the autotank framed in the farther car window. It was only about thirty feet away. Well beyond it, the SA bulls were hanging back, hoping the autotank would take the risks, do the work for them.
Halfway between Roseland and the tank someone was lying on an improvised mattress made of the front and back seats of the old Audi. The seats had been pulled from the car and dragged into the sun. It was a woman, hard to tell her age; all he could tell was that she was sick, maybe from cholera. Too weak to run for cover, just hoping the thing would pass her by. But Roseland had inadvertently drawn the autotank toward her: Whining, rumbling right at her, blaring its warning siren.
She turned and, mewling wordlessly, tried to drag herself out of its way. She didn’t have the strength to get to her feet. She crawled.