The Prime Minister listened to the butler's outburst with consternation knitting his brow. Then a slow, reptilian smile spread across his face and he leapt onto the dais from which the speeches were to be made, with almost balletic joy. Not once did he question the veracity of the butler's words.
"Your Majesty, honoured guests, lords, ladies and gentlemen," he said into the microphone, his voice reverberating from speakers positioned throughout the Crystal Palace and being relayed to those enjoying the spectacle via the giant broadcast screens around Hyde Park, "I am sorry to interrupt these celebrations but it has come to my attention that those who traitorously seek to overthrow our glorious empire are making one last desperate move at the very heart of our nation, within the capital itself!"
Cries of disbelief erupted from the assembled throng.
"Even as I speak the most violent and dangerous criminals this nation has ever known are running amok through the streets of our capital and all reports suggest that they are bringing their wanton orgy of carnage and destruction to our very gates, whilst the self-styled evolutionary revolutionaries of the Darwinian Dawn are heading this way, intending to depose our most beneficent and dearly loved monarch!"
There were screams now, the clatter and crash of tables overturning as the great and the good rushed to escape the oncoming chaos. Outside, in the shadow of the newly unveiled monolithic statue of Britannia, the crowds of gathered patriots and well wishers panicked, jostling one another to get away from the approaching menace, not caring who they trampled beneath their feet. It was truly every man for himself, as the animal instinct to fight or flee took over.
Back inside the rapidly emptying Crystal Palace Wormwood went on with his address to the nation. "Magna Britannia is facing the greatest threat it has known in over fifty years. And so, by the powers invested in me by the Anti-Terror Bill I declare that this nation is facing a state of emergency and do submit myself to take full control of our proud nation's resources to put down this insurrection and bring an end to this crisis. Londinium Maximum is now under martial law.
"Inspector Allardyce, have your men ready to repel an attack from the ground and the air. And somebody turn off those cameras. This broadcast is over!"
Letting the guard's unconscious body slide to the floor of the corridor, Ulysses paused at the door to the zeppelin's flight deck to check the load of his pistol and unsheathe his sword-cane. It hadn't been hard for him to outwit a bunch of rank amateurs like those employed as guards by the Darwinian Dawn. What they lacked in ability and awareness they made up for in quasi-religious revolutionary zeal.
He paused with his hand on the door. As he was so fond of telling Nimrod, he was really just making this up as he went along. He wasn't sure who or what he would find waiting for him on the other side, or what he was going to do about it once he found out. But in all honesty anything that could be done to slow the approach of the airship or change its flight path would be better than nothing and would give the authorities the time they needed to neutralise the threat the zeppelin and the escaped prisoners posed.
With a bold move he pushed open the door and burst onto the flight deck of the lumbering craft. "Nobody move!" he shouted. "I am taking control of this airship in the name of the empire and Her Majesty Queen Victoria. Anyone who has a problem with that will be the first to get a bullet in the gut. Got that?"
Ulysses Quicksilver panned his outstretched pistol arm across the surprised faces of those on the flight deck. There was the scar-faced blackguard Jago Kane - turning up once again like a very bad penny indeed - an older man wearing a peaked cap and the innocuous plain black uniform of the Dawn at the helm whom Ulysses took to be its pilot and a tall, blond-haired gangling figure in lab coat and glasses.
"You're a harder man to kill than I gave you credit for, Quicksilver," Kane said with unsmiling humour.
"Let's hope the same doesn't prove to be the case with you," Ulysses threw back.
Ulysses' attention was momentarily drawn to the conglomeration of lights to the fore and below the still advancing airship. Through the glass bubble at the prow of the zeppelin's gondola he could see Hyde Park spread out beneath them.
"You've failed, Kane. You and your evolutionary revolutionaries," Ulysses sneered, savouring the moment. "It's over. Your little schemes for this great sceptre'd isle have all come to naught."
"Oh, I wouldn't be so sure of that," came a voice like honeyed silk, and suddenly Genevieve Galapagos - or rather Kitty Hawke - was behind him, the cold snub nose of a gun pressed to the back of his head. "And I won't miss this time, lover-boy."
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Importance of Being Simeon
"Goodbye, lover," Kitty said.
There was a sharp crack. Ulysses flinched whilst Jago Kane gave a stifled groan, his scarred face twisting into an even more ugly grimace as he crumpled to the floor of the flight deck.
Momentarily deafened Ulysses spun round, instinct taking over, bringing both pistol and sword to bear.
"Don't look so shocked," Kitty said, levelling her gun at Ulysses. "He had served his purpose. As have you, Ulysses darling."
In the split second that followed it seemed to Ulysses as if time had slowed and yet, despite his state of heightened awareness, he could not move any more quickly himself. It was like he was trying to run through treacle. He could see Kitty's finger tightening on the trigger of the gun, see the barrel rotating to bring the next chambered round into the breach, see the sinister glint in her eye, the lascivious smile on her perfect rosebud lips. He was aware of the distant chatter of what he thought was gunfire. He could feel the thrumming of the airship's engines through the metal panels of the floor beneath his feet; smell the weird mixture of combusted fuel and hot rubber.
And then time sped up again as an almighty explosion shook the gondola. Kitty's shot went wide, the high velocity round striking one of the floor-to-ceiling windows at the nose of the craft. There was a sharp plink. All eyes focused on the perfectly round hole in the glass and Ulysses felt the rush of air being sucked out of the cabin. A spider's web of cracks skittered across the glass and then the window exploded, a sudden strong wind howling through the cockpit.
The airship lurched and its course altered dramatically as the pilot fought to regain control. Then the zeppelin nose-dived, the floor dropping away beneath their feet. Ulysses smacked into the observation bubble at the front of the flight deck, landing facedown on the glass, his cheekbone and jaw receiving a nasty smack. His right shoulder clenched in pain and his ribs felt bruised and sore.
The blond-haired gangling scientist was not so lucky.
Dr Cornelius Wilde felt the rush of air as the window blew out and looked around in frantic panic at the chaos consuming the cockpit. What was going on? Who was the interloper who had just burst onto the flight deck at this crucial moment? And what exactly did he think he was going to achieve? For that matter why were fellow agents of the Darwinian Dawn suddenly shooting at each another?
Before any of his questions could be answered the gondola lurched sharply. The floor dropped away and suddenly he was falling through the cockpit cabin. He flung out an arm to arrest his fall but cried out in pain as it struck the iron girder of an exposed structural beam. And then he was pitched sideways out of the shattered hole where only moments before there had been a floor to ceiling window.
With a shrill scream Dr Cornelius Wilde plunged groundward, dropping through the unresisting air, the cigar of the dirigible seeming to fall away from him into the night sky.
As he hit the ground pain so fierce and shocking, that it would have taken his breath away even if it had not already been forced from him, seized his body in its bone-wrenching grip. He tried to move but a dislocated part of his mind told him that he had broken both legs, his right arm and probably his back, whilst various ruptured organs were even now filling his internal spaces with blood and other bodily fluids.
He suddenly felt so inexplicably tired that he decided
he would just stay where he was and let sleep take him. The police would doubtless pick him up soon - the prospect seemed quite appealing - but until then he would just close his eyes for a few moments...
Hearing a savage grunt, Dr Wilde forced his drooping eyes open again. Standing over him was a colossal brute of a creature. It looked almost like a man in shape and form but there were some distinct differences, which that same detached part of his mind now focused on. The creature had the pronounced brow of a Neanderthal and its bruised and battered features looked like those of the lower orders of primates. Its shoulders were broad, its arms long and muscular and much of its exposed skin was covered with thick, wiry hair. From the waist down it was still wearing its grubby prison fatigues.
Wilde was gripped by a sudden and fearful realisation, just as a glimmer of what could almost have been recognition entered the apeman's eyes. Then he took in the collar clamped around the creature's bulging neck and the improvised club - what looked like part of a drainpipe - clenched in one curled fist.
A low growl issued from deep within the chest of the creature and Wilde felt what little blood there was left in his cheeks drain from them, the perspiration of shock and horror beading on his forehead. His blurring vision was drawn to a smudge of blue ink that was the mark of something on the flesh of the creature's chest under the fur that now covered much of it. The image had been stretched and distorted by the physiological changes that the creature's body had undergone, but it was still recognisable as a death's-head tattoo.
"M-McCabe?"
The apeman growled again, baring sharp yellow teeth in a grimace of simian aggression. Suddenly Wilde found himself surrounded by more of the de-evolved prisoners, all displaying the same stooping gait, arms pent up with furious muscular strength.
Shock forcing any desire for sleep from his mind, Wilde scrabbled for the control box with his shaking left hand. It lay at his side, the leather harness broken. He was dimly aware of buckled metal beneath his fingertips. Then they found purchase on the controls and Wilde furiously flicked at the switches and twisted the dials. But no matter what he did, it made no difference to the behaviour of the creature looming over him now. A high-pitched mewling whimper escaped Wilde's lips as he realised what was going to happen to him.
Wilde's degenerate army of psychotic apemen had reached Hyde Park. And now there was no one capable of controlling them.
The ape-beast that had once been the serial killer and cannibal, Ramsey 'The Shark' McCabe, felt a murmur of something in its primitive brain, an emotion that a more intelligent species might have called satisfaction, a feeling that justice had at last been served. Was there even a hint of something that a creature which could still articulate would have named, 'revenge'? Whatever the truth, it was its own creature again, with a mind of its own - with a mind to kill.
The airship jolted slightly as the shots hit home.
"That was a lucky hit," Nimrod muttered, slighting the Met's efforts.
"Lucky or not we got them!' Allardyce declared with grim triumph. "All units!" he called into his communicator. "Hit them again with everything we've got!"
At his command, the armed officers and droids of the Metropolitan Police Force opened fire once more on the zeppelin, which was even now dropping lower over the park, as if making a final strafing attack run. Truth be told, no one quite knew how they had managed to hit the zeppelin and take out an engine but they were certainly going to try to do the same again.
The zeppelin pulled out of its nose-dive and, hearing a cat-like shriek, Ulysses uncanny prescience flared and he rolled quickly onto his back. Then Kitty Hawke was on him. Carefully manicured nails clawed at his face, drawing blood. Her taut toned thighs gripped him around the waist, painfully squeezing his kidneys.
Pistol and sword abandoned, Ulysses grabbed Kitty's wrists and pushed her back up off him.
"Oh, Mr Quicksilver," she purred, her eyes those of some feral creature, mad and staring beneath the loosened fringe of her auburn hair, "are you always so rough on a first date?"
Swinging from the hips, pushing with his legs and pulling at the same time with his arms, Ulysses rolled onto his side again only this time trapping the coquettish Miss Hawke beneath him.
"First date?" he queried. "I thought this was the break-up!"
The two of them wrestled across the steel plate of the flight deck, the rattle of gunfire besetting the zeppelin and shattering windows around them. Until only recently, the thought of enjoying such vigorous physical contact with the erstwhile Genevieve Galapagos would have brought a twinkle to his eye and a yearning to his loins.
"I bet you never thought Genevieve Galapagos could be so frisky," Kitty teased, as if reading his mind.
Part of Ulysses still couldn't help finding the tousle-haired beauty beneath him attractive, the heave of her bosom in danger of escaping from her low-cut blouse, her lithe legs wrapped tight around his waist, hugging his flat stomach against hers. Only it wasn't Genevieve Galapagos, and although it had been Kitty Hawke's physique he had found arousing, it had been Genevieve's demure vulnerability he had been smitten by.
"Nothing but lies and deception, my dear, that's all it was," Ulysses stated accusingly. "I wanted to believe you. I wanted all my suspicions to be proved wrong. Genevieve Galapagos was such a charming, demure and sensitive young woman, whereas it would appear that Miss Kitty Hawke - streetwalker and gun-for-hire - is another manner of creature altogether. A complete and utter - how shall I put this? - bitch!"
With that Kitty Hawke spat at Ulysses, making him jerk back as the gobbet of saliva hit him squarely in the face. "You bastard!" she snarled.
Ulysses winced as she raised a knee, ramming it into his groin. As his own grip slackened in reaction to the sickening pain, the gorge rising in his throat, Kitty seized her chance. Managing to free one hand from Ulysses' grip, she grabbed his left arm, pulled her head up and sank her teeth into his wrist. Ulysses couldn't help but cry out in pain.
"I don't normally make a habit of hitting women," Ulysses gasped as Kitty hung on with her teeth, "but in your case I think I'll make an exception!"
His own right hand was free now and bunched into a fist. The punch descended, delivering a resounding blow to the side of Kitty's head. Her grip slackened and the hellcat slumped unconscious to the deck.
Wind howled around the cabin-cockpit, smoke boiling in from the burning engine. The remainder of the Darwinian Dawn were dead, unconscious or missing. The pilot lay broken at the helm. There was no one controlling the course of the zeppelin now.
Wrapping a handkerchief around his wrist to stem the flow of blood, Ulysses got rather unsteadily to his feet. He glanced down at the beaten beauty who looked so peaceful and innocent now, as if merely sleeping.
"Consider our relationship over," he said snidely, carefully probing his groin with one hand. And then, to no one in particular, "Now, let's see about stopping this thing."
"What's the situation on the ground, Nimrod?" his employer's voice crackled over the comm.
"In a word, chaos, sir," Nimrod replied matter-of-factly. "It's madness down here. The fugitives from the Tower have reached the park and are going on a bloody rampage. There are hundreds of them, sir and they're all..." Nimrod broke off, suddenly lost for words as he gazed upon the scene of carnage before him.
He stood at one of the entrances to the New Crystal Palace looking out across the darkened lawns of Hyde Park. Everywhere he saw the public fleeing as the savage subhumans slaughtered policemen and fleeing dinner guests in an orgy of violence.
Simeon loitered at Nimrod's side, rocking from one foot to the other, as if just waiting for the command to join the fray.
The officers of the Met were fighting back but the savage brutes seemed able to sustain endless injuries, some unnatural vigour keeping them going even after they had been shot. The automata-policemen were faring little better, the ape-like creatures tearing them limb-from-robotic-limb, twisting off the droids' heads as if unstopper
ing bottles of beer.
"Nimrod, please repeat, I missed that last bit," Ulysses' voice came back.
"It's as you feared, sir. They're de-evolving. They're apemen, primitive savages with a taste for blood that delight in killing."
"Just as I suspected. Then I have a solution. Nimrod, get everyone out of the Crystal Palace: the Queen, Prime Minister Wormwood, everyone. And then get the apemen contained within it."
"And how do you suggest I do that, sir?" he asked, letting off a shot from his pistol as a tattooed ape smashed a droid-constable into the ground not ten feet away from him.
"There was some hare-brained scientist fellow on board using some kind of device to control them. He took it with him when he made his unexpected exit from the zeppelin through a window."
"I don't think anyone's controlling them now..." Nimrod broke off again as his eyes focused on the massive brute at the centre of the ape-pack. The creature was bellowing whilst holding something above its head.
"Nimrod? Come again old chap. I lost you again there."
The manservant said nothing as he stared at the mangled, blood-splattered wreckage of what could very well have been the device that Ulysses was talking about. Then the roar of aero-engines filled his ears and he looked up to see the zeppelin bearing down on the New Crystal Palace out of the flickering night's sky.
"Get them inside!" Ulysses was shouting. "I can't keep this thing airborne much longer. Ready or not, I'm coming!"
Nimrod jumped as Simeon gave a great bellowing hoot beside him and then leapt into the fray, barging policemen, party-goers and apemen out of the way as he made for his target.
He might only be a primitive imitation of a man but he understood enough to know that his new masters needed his help and he knew an alpha male of a pack when he saw one too.
Pax Britannia: Unnatural History Page 23
