One of the Jihad’s first manifestations had been the processions of automated cars, used as a child’s playthings. Petrovitch could do so much more with them. The station on the far side of the tunnel was formed either of solid brick or transparent glass, but it mattered little which. He could stretch out beyond the reach of his hand.

[I have done as you asked,] said the AI. [EDF command in Brussels is being fed an alterable, delayed feed. How do you want your forces deployed?]

“I need to give Sonja time to gather her nikkeijin. Put a third of them on the Marylebone flyover, another third at the far end of Euston Road. Send the rest of them to Primrose Hill. There are tanks there already, but they need infantry support. Divide them up with a mix of units, and keep them concentrated. Standard military doctrine is that they should spread out, so if they show signs of that, yell at them.”

[Do you want to know what we have?]

“No. Either it’s enough and they’ll hold, or it isn’t and I’m sending them to their deaths. How’s the network holding up?”

[Bandwidth is a problem. I am making great demands on it, even with outsourcing many of my routine processing functions.] He looked sulky. [The NSA is aware of the unusual activity, but the United States has the highest density of computer resources on the planet. I have no choice but to use them.]

“They’ll use their giant axe at some point and try to isolate their network. We’re going to have to think of something else you can run on.” Petrovitch flexed his arms. “How are you?”

[Busy. I have never felt stretched before.]

“That’s very human.” Petrovitch smiled. He patted the avatar on its back. He could feel it. He could feel the cloth, and the body under it. “It’s hard for both of us.”

[Will we win?]

“We haven’t lost yet.”

He walked on, and hauled himself up onto a platform, with Miyamoto springing up behind him. The access to the outside was through a deactivated screen and a set of turnstiles. Petrovitch thought he should be able to just stroll through the wall.

“Madeleine’s mother’s around here somewhere. Or was earlier on this week. She’s an Outie now.”

“You know this how?” Miyamoto sheathed his sword and slid across the top of the turnstiles.

“She shot Maddy. Not something either of them are likely to be mistaken about.” Petrovitch followed him over and dropped to the tiled floor. “We’ll stick to the roads from now on.”

“We would be less obvious crossing the parkland to the north of here.”

“Yeah. That doesn’t matter anymore. Let them notice us.” He walked out of the station entrance to the curb, to the new registration white Ford. He didn’t have to, but he laid the palm of his hand on its roof.

He disabled the security measures with one algorithm, and terrified the on-board computer with another. “Who’s my suka now?” He started its engine and plotted a route for it.

Miyamoto jumped back. “You did that.”

“Yeah. I can do this, too.” He dispatched his agents to every car and van in the neighborhood. They broke their way in, kicked their engines into life, and pulled out in a synchronized wave into the middle of whichever road they were on.

There were hundreds of them, and when they had all passed, when they had filled the surrounding streets with their noise, Petrovitch stepped out after them. He drew his gun and practiced sighting down his arm. There were crosshairs in his vision. The targeting moved to where he pointed. Then he looked at a stray dog that had come out to investigate the sudden commotion.

The muscles in his arm twitched, and guided the gun around until it was aiming at the fat black Labrador.

He glanced at a street sign, a front door, then a passing bird. His arm snapped right, left, up and tracked, fast enough to make it ache.

“This. This is what I signed up for.”

“What are you doing?” asked Miyamoto.

“I’m being awesome. Don’t interrupt.”

Sporadic gunfire rattled the air from some distance ahead, echoing off the walls. The first of the cars had met the first of the Outies. He sent another command to them, and gave them access to his map. The Outies were the red dots, the cars were blue.

Run them down, he said.

How to kill a car? Petrovitch knew—put a bullet in its tiny electronic brain. The Outies had no way of finding it under the bodywork. A lucky shot here and there, but for the most part they’d have to reduce them to piles of scrap metal to stop them. And this being the real world, they were going to run out of ammunition long before then.

He watched the red dots ripple and recoil. The cars worked crudely, without cooperating, crashing into dumb objects and reversing, coming back for another go. More intelligence was needed. They could hunt in packs, with ambushes laid in side streets, traps in alleyways. He wasn’t going to be able to coordinate that at that moment, and the AI had already said it was busy—which for a machine intelligence of unknown capabilities was a startling admission.

It would have to do for now.

Some of the red dots were spilling their way, undisciplined dribbles of color draining off the blocked artery of Highgate Road.

“Company.”

Petrovitch strode on, and suddenly, there were four—no, five—Outies coming down the street at him. They stopped when they saw him, though a couple of them looked around fearfully behind them to check for cars.

Miyamoto drew his sword, and Petrovitch had the opportunity to reflect on what a brilliant sound it made, a clear ringing like a bell.

One of the Outies had a gun, what looked like a shotgun: fat barrels side by side, and a half-empty bandolier of red shells. The others had crude spears, nothing more than pre-Armageddon blades grafted onto long poles. Effective, but hardly worth emptying a city for.

The Outies had been smart, too. They’d made sure their vanguard all had guns. Whenever MEA fought them, it had been bullet for bullet, shell for shell. It had given the illusion of a massive well-equipped army, an illusion they’d all fallen for.

It was kon govno, pure and simple. The speed of the advance, the crushing tidal wave of panic, the complete absence of information from beyond the front line, had served just one purpose.

Petrovitch stared at the man with the shotgun, who was feeding two cartridges into the cracked breach.

Crosshairs formed, and Petrovitch felt his arm come up, lock into place. It was extreme range for both of them, but it was closing every moment as they walked toward each other.

The shotgun snapped shut, and it was raised to a shoulder.

Miyamoto started to look left and right for cover. “You must get down.”

Petrovitch squeezed the trigger, smooth and certain. His aim was adjusted for everything: his motion, his target’s, air pressure, windspeed, bullet trajectory, but still there were variables. Imperfect aerodynamics, uneven powder burn, the barrel of the automatic being out of true by fractions of a millimeter.

He was aiming for his chest, and caught his upper arm instead. The man spun around, the shotgun pointing briefly at the sky before crashing down. One of the barrels boomed and spat smoke, and an Outie was thrown hard against the side of a parked van. He slid down and didn’t move.

Now it was three against two: one older woman, two younger men, all dressed in that uniform of dirty browns and blacks. They looked at each other, uncertain.

Petrovitch spread his arms out wide and kept on walking. “You seem to be in my city.”

The woman found her voice. “City ours,” she called out, even though she was of an age to have received a formal education in what had been England. “City burns.”

It struck him that these Outies were a family group: a tribe, a clan, at the very least a mother and her two sons, and the man dead would have been an uncle or a cousin. The other man on the ground had made it to his knees, and he was shuffling toward the fallen shotgun. There was one cartridge still loaded, and he seemed determined to show he could fire the thing one-handed.