“Holy buggering shit,” he muttered. Every instinct he had screamed at him that he was falling—falling between trees forever—but he tried to ignore them. Heights had never bothered him all that much. He wouldn’t have made a very good pilot if they had, but this boundless infinity was something else again. With an effort of will, he tore his eyes from the sky and tried to concentrate on spying out the handholds inlaid into the ship’s skin. Designed to facilitate extravehicular maintenance, the little recesses were spaced evenly around the hull, allowing an astronaut to ‘walk’ around the outside of the ship with their hands. Every fourth one had a clip for tethering a safety line. Using them felt similar to rock climbing, only without any sense of weight or appreciable notion of either up or down.
Moving one hand at a time, keeping the other firmly gripped, Ack-Ack Macaque worked his way forwards, towards the Ameline’s blunt prow.
When he got there, he saw the alien weapon was a pod grafted beneath the bows. It looked like a cocoon made of melted candle wax. As he drew near to it, one end of it peeled apart like a banana and a helmeted head emerged. Behind the faceplate, sunlight flashed on Ed Rico’s roguish grin.
“Come and have a go,” he said, his voice sounding distant and scratchy in Ack-Ack Macaque’s headphones.
Ack-Ack watched the man drag himself from the weapon’s embrace like a butterfly pulling itself from a ruptured chrysalis. Then, holding the lip of the opening with one gauntleted hand, he beckoned.
“Just slide your feet in,” Rico said.
Moving slowly, Ack-Ack pushed himself forward. Ed took hold of one of his boots and guided him into the pod’s sticky-looking maw.
“I’m not sure about this,” Ack-Ack grumbled. The thing resembled a hungry maggot trying to latch onto his feet.
“Relax,” Ed said. “It’s not nearly as gross as it looks.”
“Yeah?” Ack-Ack Macaque made a face. “Because it looks pretty fucking disgusting from here.”
He allowed Ed to feed him into the hole, until his head sank beneath the lip and he was looking up at the sky through his helmet.
“What now?” he asked.
Ed maneuvered himself so that he was looking down at Ack-Ack. His head obscured the stars.
“Wait until the top closes, and then take off your helmet.”
Ack-Ack Macaque eyed the walls around him. They reminded him unpleasantly of pictures from a colonoscopy. “And what then?”
“Breathe in the liquid. Stay calm.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Ah, you’ll be fine.” Ed backed away as the edges of the opening began to pucker. Slowly and silently, they crinkled shut, leaving Ack-Ack Macaque swaddled in darkness. Huffing and muttering, he reached up and un-dogged the neck of his helmet. Raising his arms was tricky in the confined space—kind of like getting undressed in a coffin made of slime—but he managed to prise the glass bowl off his head.
Now that his eye was adjusting, he could see that the walls of his prison shone with a faint green luminosity. They glistened with white, gloopy sweat. His nose wrinkled in revulsion.
“This place smells like feet.”
Pressure on his boots and legs told him the gloop had begun to collect in the bottom of the cavity, gradually rising to fill the cramped space.
“Fuck.” He wanted to get out. As the rising liquid reached his waist, he began to struggle, instinctively trying to claw his way upwards to avoid drowning. As it reached his chest, he took a deep breath.
Come on, monkey. If a scrawny tosspot like Rico can do this, so can you.
He screwed up his eye and his courage, and clamped his lips together. The gunk came up over the neck of his suit and over his chin. Then it was exploring his face. Involuntarily, he jerked backwards, trying to reach clear air, but the stuff had already found its way into his nose. It seemed to flow with purpose. Within seconds, it had pushed its way into his lungs, invaded every opening, from ears to pores to arsehole. And he could breathe. Somehow, miraculously, the muck was feeding him air. Even as he choked on the obstruction in his throat, his lungs were drawing oxygen from the liquid.
Slowly, chest heaving, he began to calm down.
I’m not dying, I’m not dying…
He opened his eyes, cringing at the touch of the peculiar gel against his eyeballs.
Oh, holy fuck, this is disgusting.
Then he saw the hair-fine filaments extruding from the walls like the tentacles of albino sea anemones. He tried to flinch away but the walls of the fissure contracted like a sphincter, squeezing against him and holding him in place. He tried to snarl, but the filaments pushed their way into his mouth and nose and he gagged as he felt them slither into his throat. Another insinuated itself into his left ear, and another two drilled into his eyelids. For a second, every nerve in his body flared with intolerable pain.
And then he saw everything.
The walls of the chamber were replaced with a three-dimensional tactical view of the surrounding volume. He saw the rock ahead, his target, outlined in red. He felt the caress of the solar wind, the touch of its warmth against his cheek, and he felt the weapon like a Spitfire beneath him—responsive, keen, and ready to do as he bade. He felt its power like an electrical shock to his spine. He’d seen what it had done to Célestine’s Leviathans and now, as the weapon integrated itself with his frontal lobes, came the knowledge of how it worked. Suddenly he knew, as if he’d always known, that the weapon displaced plasma from the heart of the nearest star and squirted it in a tight beam at its target. That pencil-thin line of brilliant white, crackling energy he’d seen in France had been raw fire from the core of the Sun. Thirteen million degrees centigrade. No wonder it had carved metal like butter and eaten through the bedrock beneath.
And now that insane destructive beam was his to control!
Heart beating, he opened himself to the weapon’s interface. All he had to do was think of the target and the gun would do the rest. Like a god, his will would be made manifest; a single thought would be enough to unleash a lightning bolt of pure, sizzling energy.
“Oh baby,” he muttered to the system swaddling him, “where have you been all my life?”
ON THE AMELINE’S bridge, Victoria watched as the white line stabbed out, spearing the oncoming asteroid. Where it hit, the surface turned a livid molten yellow. If the ship’s cameras hadn’t automatically polarised, she would have been blinded. As it was, the line was reduced to a dull grey laceration in the fabric of reality. On the asteroid’s surface, dust and loose rock blew away from the boiling incision. Then the beam moved. Slowly, it tracked upwards, slicing though the stone like a hot wire through a block of cheese. Then it blinked off. When it reappeared, it moved laterally, cutting from left to right. Then it jumped again, and now it moved from right to left. Faster and faster it slashed, hacking back and forth, up and down, until it became a flickering blur.
Under its assault, the asteroid seemed to fall apart. Glowing chunks broke away into space, only to be skewered and reduced still further. Within a couple of minutes, the potato had become a mass of cooling, tumbling fragments, each no bigger than a basketball.
Kat said, “Your monkey did well.”
Victoria let herself smile. “He likes blowing things up.” She felt a strange kind of pride. “It’s kind of what he does.”
“I can see that.” Kat tapped the screen. “But those fragments will still do a lot of damage if they hit the Earth like that. Let’s hope your airship can mop them up. They’re small enough that a nuclear blast should vaporise most of them. The rest can burn in the atmosphere.”
“So, that’s it?’
“If the plan works, yes. Actual surface hits should be minimal. All we have to do now is track this cloud of debris and wait until the airship gets in range.”
“Where is the Sun Wukong?” Victoria asked, looking at the inscrutable instruments above her. “How’s it doing?”
Kat consulted the ship. “Almost in orbit. It’s had a bit
of a shaky ride, apparently, but the thing’s more or less intact. They should be firing up the ion engines at any minute.”
Victoria let out a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding. Something eased inside her.
“Well, fingers-crossed they work.”
Kat’s face remained grim. “We’ll soon find out. I’m plotting in a course to jump back there now.” She jerked her head towards the hatch at the back of the bridge. “Why don’t you go below and share the good news?”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
EMPIRE STATE
LATER, STANDING ON the verandah inside the Sun Wukong’s glass nose, Ack-Ack Macaque looked out at a dark sky filled with stars. His fur was still damp from the alien goo of the weapon, and his throat and eyes were sore from the intrusion of its questing fibers; but despite all that, he felt good. The demolition of the asteroid had been an almost religious experience for him—an act of epic cosmic vandalism that dwarfed all his previous accomplishments. And the best bit was that there was more fun to come, as soon as the lumbering, slowly accelerating airship got close enough to unleash its nuclear torpedoes.
Yes, he thought, an airship. Here I am riding a goddamn Zeppelin through the motherfucking universe. Even to his own ears, it sounded batshit insane—and it had been his plan! He took a deep puff on his cigar and glanced around at his comrades. They had gathered here to toast their success with the rock, and the airship’s successful launch. Even Apynja had been let out of the brig, once he’d convinced Victoria that mere walls couldn’t hold the female monkey if she decided to do that teleport trick he’d seen her do in the forest.
“So,” he rumbled, “what should I call you? Founder or Apynja?”
She looked up at him through her monocle. She wore a specially made black corset and skirt, and a top hat with a black veil that angled down across her face, covering her other eye.
“Does it matter?”
“I suppose not.” He returned his gaze to the void beyond the windows. It would take weeks until they reached the remains of the asteroid, months after that until they reached Mars and the final confrontation with Célestine. He huffed smoke at the stars. Beside him, the Founder clicked her tongue and ran a protective hand over the bulge at her middle.
“You shouldn’t be smoking around me, you know.”
He looked down.
“Sorry.” He dropped the butt to the deck and ground it out with the toe of his boot. The truth was, he hadn’t been enjoying it anyway. Smoking had become a habit that had outlived its pleasures. Maybe now, with the babies on the way, it was time for him to quit.
He felt the Founder move closer along the rail, until their elbows were almost touching.
“You’re an old soul, monkey man.”
He fixed her with his good eye. “What?”
She smiled and shook her head fondly. “You don’t remember at all, do you?”
“Remember what, lady?”
“All the times we’ve done this before.”
He looked incredulously at the walls of the airship and the star field beyond.
“Lady, nobody’s done this before.”
Her smile broadened, but he thought he caught an edge of sadness in her eyes, and something else in the way she drew a ragged breath through her nose.
“You’re an old soul, Napoleon. One of the oldest, just like me, just like Célestine. You’ve been here from the beginning, in one form or another.”
“What in holy hell are you talking about?”
The Founder raised her chin. “When we built the multiverse, there was one resurrected soul who opposed what we were doing. He was a man named Napoleon Jones—a human brought to our time by The Recollection. He thought we should embrace the chaos instead of hiding from it. When we took shelter in our creation, he plagued us with his sabotages and pranks for millennia. Somehow, when we were copying him into our virtual creation, he found a way to embed himself in the very warp and weft of the world. However many times we caught and killed him, he always resurfaced, always came back to cause trouble, and usually in the form of a talking beast.”
“Wut?”
“A thousand times I’ve tried to build a paradise, and a thousand times you’ve thwarted me, Jones.” She waved a bony finger in his face. “The Gestalt was only my most recent attempt.”
“My name ain’t Jones.” Ack-Ack Macaque glowered. “And this paradise of yours sounds more like slavery to me.”
The Founder glared defiantly. “I didn’t say it would be a paradise for everyone.”
“Just for you?”
She turned slightly and indicated the rest of the assembly with a twitch of her lace-covered hand.
“These people aren’t real, you know.”
Ack-Ack looked at Victoria and K8, who were engaged in earnest conversation with Merovech and Cuddles. “They think they’re real, and that makes them real enough for me.”
Leaving her where she stood, he stalked over to Katherine Abdulov, who was leaning against one of the giant pots at the edge of the jungle, nursing a glass of white wine.
“What are you going to do with her?” he asked.
Kat looked at the Founder and gave a one-shouldered shrug.
“She’s done unspeakable things. All we can do is try to lock her up.”
“Even knowing she’ll escape?”
The young pilot gave him a curious look. “We can’t kill her, if that’s what you mean.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s the sort of thing she would do.”
Ack-Ack Macaque growled in his throat. Then he looked down at his arm. The fur stood on end. Static sparked from teaspoons. He felt his hackles bristle.
And there was Célestine, standing in the centre of the room. A few final blue flickers of static danced down her metal legs. The air smelled of ozone.
Ack-Ack Macaque went for his holsters. He had both guns pointing at her head before she’d fully finished materialising—but when he pulled the triggers, nothing happened. Célestine held up a hand and the metal grew hot. With a screech of pain and annoyance, he dropped them both.
“I’m tired,” Célestine’s voice boomed. “Tired of being interfered with. Tired of playing by the rules. Tired of playing these stupid games.”
She clicked her fingers, and they were elsewhere.
SUNLIGHT DAZZLED HIM. A cold wind tugged at his jacket.
“What the fuck?” Ack-Ack Macaque put up a hand to shade his eye and squinted into the early morning light. He was back on Earth, on top of a building. A city stretched beneath him, all glass and stone. Vapour steamed from rooftop vents. The sound of traffic drifted up from street level.
“Where are we?”
“New York.” Célestine stood ten metres away, beside a telescope mounted on a metal pole. “At the top of the Empire State Building.”
He blinked, eye still adjusting. The Founder was here too, standing away to the side like a referee in a boxing match.
“How?”
“I told you.” Célestine’s voice was loud and dangerous. “I’m sick of playing by the rules. We built this world. If we have to, we can change whatever we want.”
“Then why have you waited this long?”
She glared at him. “Because I was trying to do it properly. I was trying to build an empire that would last a hundred thousand years.”
“But you’ve fucked it up now, yeah?”
“Because of you, you loathsome fleabag.”
His Colts were gone. He had nothing except the knife in his boot, and he didn’t think that would do much good against her titanium skeleton—especially if she could change the laws of physics at a whim. He looked desperately around the viewing gallery.
“But why bring me here?” he said, playing for time, hunting for a weapon.
Célestine laughed, and it wasn’t a pleasant sound.
“Have you ever seen King Kong?”
Ack-Ack Macaque shrugged. “I’ve never been to China.”
“She means,” the Founder said, interjecting at last, voice sour with exasperation, “that she’s going to kill you.”
Ack-Ack huffed. He didn’t like the look of this at all. In the space of an hour, he’d gone from glorying in the power of the alien weapon to standing helpless and unarmed in front of his greatest enemy. The turnaround seemed far too fast, and tipped in favour of the wrong party.
“She can try.” He took up a fighting stance. He knew he was outgunned and outclassed, but that wouldn’t stop him. If the metal bitch wanted to end him, she’d have a fight on her hands. He wasn’t about to go gently into any goodnight, no sir, and he’d rather go down fighting than give her the satisfaction of admitting defeat.
In fact, screw her. Screw the lot of them.
With a yell, he flung himself forward. Célestine didn’t even try to dodge. She stood her ground as his fingers clawed for her, and slapped him away at the last minute with a backhand that felt like a blow from an aluminium baseball bat.
He tumbled over and over, fetching up against the wall at the foot of the rail.
“Ouch, fuck.” Stunned, he shook his head, trying to clear the red mist that interfered with his vision. Dimly, he saw the cyborg striding towards him. He grabbed a railing and pulled himself unsteadily to his feet.
“Had enough?” he asked her, and hawked a wedge of bloody phlegm into the dust. “Because I can do this all day.”
Her lip curled. With a gesture, she parted the railings behind him. Off-balance, he teetered on the edge of a drop that seemed to fall away beneath his heels forever. The cars four hundred metres below looked like ants; the people like bacteria.
Hey, that’s cheating!
He windmilled his arms to keep his balance, and had a sudden flash of another time and place, of a metal bridge over a deep canyon, and an airship passing beneath.
Célestine stepped forward. She had her hand pulled back, ready to shove him over the edge. As she lunged towards him, he grabbed her wrist and heaved backwards. If he was going over, he was going to take her with him. He heard the Founder yell, “No!” But it was too late. He was already falling, and Célestine’s body toppled after him. He kept a death grip on her arm. If she tried to teleport, he’d go with her. If not, well…
Macaque Attack! Page 28
