“I don’t know. Is he—?”
She glanced at the tangled wreck.
“How did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“How did you make his car blow up like that?”
“Me?” William felt the world roll giddily around his head. His brain hadn’t caught up yet, hadn’t fully processed what had happened. He elbowed himself up into a sitting position. “I didn’t do anything. How could I?”
The girl turned wide eyes to the black, greasy smoke belching up from the car’s gutted shell.
“Well, somebody certainly did.”
“It wasn’t me.”
Something popped in the wreckage, and they both flinched.
“Come on,” his neighbour said, “I think we’d better move.”
CHAPTER TWO
CITY LIGHTS
“WHO ARE YOU calling foul-mouthed, you twat?”
The tabloid journalist took a step back, brandishing his press ID like a shield. They were in the Tereshkova’s main passenger lounge, aft of the airship’s bridge.
“N-not me,” he stammered. “ I know what you’re like.”
Ack-Ack Macaque’s leather flight jacket creaked as he pushed up from his barstool.
“Then what are you saying?” The monkey rubbed the patch covering the socket that had once housed his left eye. He’d done a handful of interviews over the past twelve months, and hadn’t enjoyed any of them. And now here was this clown, bothering him when he was trying to enjoy a quiet cigar.
“You’re a national hero in the Commonwealth,” the man said. The name ‘Nick Dean’ was printed beneath his photo. “But some parts of the British Press have criticised you as a poor role model for children.”
Ack-Ack Macaque stood up straight. “Fuck them.” He slapped the counter. “I stopped a nuclear war, what more do they want?”
Dean pocketed his card. A tiny camera drone hovered above his right shoulder like a tame dragonfly. “They say you drink, swear and smoke too much, and you play with guns.”
“I don’t play with guns.”
“Yes, you do. You’re fiddling with one right now.”
Ack-Ack Macaque snatched his fingers away from his holster, and coughed.
“What can I say? When you’ve got a massive pair of Colts strapped to your hips, every problem coming your way looks like something that needs the shit shooting out of it.”
“And that’s why you were thrown out of the Plaza Hotel in New York, wasn’t it?”
He bristled. “I wasn’t thrown out. They simply asked me to leave.”
“The neighbours complained about the smell. And the ricochets.”
Ack-Ack Macaque grinned, exposing his yellow canines. “Hey, that wasn’t my fault. The clock radio startled me.”
“And so you blew it to bits?”
“When I left, they were still picking bits of plastic from the walls and ceiling.”
Dean leant forward. “The New York Times said that if Nobel Prizes were given out for smoking cigars and wrecking stuff, you’d be top of the list.”
“I suppose.” Ack-Ack Macaque looked around the lounge. They were alone apart from the barman and a guy in a white suit. “Now, how about you fuck off and leave me in peace?”
Ignoring him, Dean pulled out an electronic notepad and moved his finger down to the next question on his list.
“We’re currently approaching an airfield on the outskirts of Bristol,” he read aloud. “This is the first time you’ve returned to the UK since last winter, when you helped overthrow the previous political regime. What have you being doing with yourself since then?”
Ack-Ack Macaque tapped his knuckles against the bar. “Lying on tropical beaches,” he muttered. “Drinking cocktails, and taking pot shots at jet skis.”
Dean frowned at him. He wanted a proper interview. “What have you really been doing?”
Ack-Ack Macaque took a deep breath, and made an effort not to plant a fist in the guy’s stupid face. May as well get this over with, he thought. Then maybe the bastards will leave me alone.
“Well,” he said, trying to force some enthusiasm into his tone, “I’ve been working as a pilot.”
“Here on the Tereshkova?”
“Yes, here on the Tereshkova. We’ve been all over the North Atlantic. Middle America and the Caribbean; the East Coast of the United States; Newfoundland, and the North Polar Ocean.”
Dean’s finger tapped the notebook’s screen. “The events of last year thrust you into the limelight. You went from being a cult figure in a computer game to being a real life celebrity. Everybody wanted to interview you. There was even talk of a TV series. Why’d you turn your back on all of that?”
“I’m not cut out for fame.”
“You’d rather be a humble pilot?”
Ack-Ack Macaque caught hold of his tail and began grooming it, picking bits of fluff and lint from the hairs at the end. At a table across the room, the guy in the white suit sipped his coffee and pretended not to listen.
“For now. While I figure out what I’m going to do with my life.”
“Any ideas?”
“None so far.” He stopped cleaning his tail. “Moving from the game world to the real one takes some adjustment, you know.” Learning that he’d been raised to sentience in order to play the central figure in a computer game had been something of a shock, especially when he found himself pulled from the make believe online world and thrust head-first into a plot to assassinate the King of England. “And it doesn’t help that I’m the only one of my kind.”
“There were others like you, at the lab?”
“There was one.” He scowled down at his fingernails, remembering a desperate scuffle on the deck of a flying aircraft carrier, and the obscene feel of his knife cutting into another monkey’s throat. “Look,” he said, “can we talk about something else? It’s Friday night. I should be out drinking and puking.”
Dean ran his finger down the list. “Okay, just a few more questions. You started life as a normal macaque. Then Céleste Technologies filled your head with gelware processors and upgraded you to self-awareness.”
“I thought we were supposed to be changing the subject?”
“I’m getting there, okay? As my readers will know, they had you plugged into an online WWII roleplaying game, didn’t they?”
Ack-Ack felt his lips peel back. As the main character in the game, he’d been practically invincible. But he hadn’t known that, and he hadn’t known it was a game. As far as he’d been concerned, every day had been a fight for survival.
Since the events of last year, and the collapse of the Ack-Ack Macaque MMPORG, when he went from being one of the world’s most iconic video game characters to its most famous living, breathing monkey, several new games had arisen to fill the niche left by its demise. Captain Capuchin; Marmoset Madness; Heavy Metal Howler – according to K8, none of them were as realistic or convincing as his game had been, because their main characters were animated using standard computer simulated AI, instead of the artificially-uplifted brains of actual flesh and blood animals. In fact, the whole uplifting process had been made illegal. There were no other walking, talking animals left in the world; he was the only one, and now always would be.
“I don’t want to talk about this.” He pulled out a cigar, bit the tip off, and lit up. Dean sighed.
“You’re not making this easy,” he said.
Ack-Ack Macaque shrugged. Smoke curled between his teeth.
“Hey, it’s not my fault. This is my evening off, my chance to pull a Bueller. Spend all night drinking rum in the bath, that sort of thing. I didn’t ask to be pestered.”
Dean rolled his eyes. The camera drone hung in the air, a few centimetres from his ear. Its tiny fans made a gentle hissing noise.
“Don’t you want to tell your story?”
Ack-Ack Macaque huffed again. He pinched the cigar between his forefinger and thumb, and puffed a smoke ring at the ceiling.
�
�No. Now, I’ve asked you to fuck off once.” He fixed the man with his one good eye. “Do I have to ask you again?”
Dean picked up his notebook and pushed it into the pocket of his coat. The tips of his ears were bright scarlet.
“There’s a story here, and one way or another, I’m not leaving until I get it.”
Ack-Ack Macaque blew a second, smaller smoke ring.
“Suit yourself.” His hand snaked out and plucked the camera drone from the air. In one fluid movement, he brought it slamming down against the edge of the bar. Its plastic casing shattered, and the little fan motors died.
“Hey!” Dean took a step forward. “Do you know how much those things cost?”
Ack-Ack Macaque grabbed him by the lapels and pulled him close enough that their faces almost touched.
“Do I look as if I give a shit?”
Dean flinched as spittle sprayed his face. He swallowed, and turned away from the smell of the cigar.
“You idiot,” he said. “You stupid, bloody idiot.”
Ack-Ack Macaque released him, and turned for the door.
Behind him, Dean said, “You’ll be hearing from my solicitor. That’s assault, matey. Assault and criminal damage.” His voice rose, buoyed up by righteous fury. “You’ll pay for this. I’ll crucify you in print, you just see if I don’t.”
Ack-Ack Macaque closed his eye.
“Get lost,” he said, voice low and dangerous. Dean ignored him.
“I’ve got witnesses, haven’t I?” He pointed to the guy in the white suit. “You just wait until you see tomorrow’s headlines, pal. You just wait.”
For a second, Ack-Ack Macaque considered turning around and punching the guy’s Adam’s apple out through the back of his neck. He imagined the crunch of knuckles hitting larynx, and ground his teeth. So tempting…
In the end, though, he had to content himself with walking away. He couldn’t assault passengers, however annoying they might be. He couldn’t even hurl his own shit at them. He’d had that drummed into him time and time again, and was in no mood for another lecture. Instead, he stepped out into the corridor and let the door swing shut behind him.
Fists clenched and cigar clamped in his teeth, he stalked to the dining room, where he found the evening buffet still in full swing, and the airship’s owner drinking her first Martini of the night.
Victoria Valois had left her blonde wig in her cabin. Some days, she just didn’t care what she looked like. Looking at her now, the smooth lines of her bald scalp were misshapen by a thick ridge of scar tissue bulging from her right temple, into which had been inlaid various input jacks, USB ports, and infrared sensors. The victim of a severe head trauma a few years back, half her brain had been replaced with experimental gelware processors, making her as much of an artificial creature as he was.
“Hey, boss.” His voice was gruff. “How are we doing?”
She looked up from her glass. Her eyes were the same pale colour as the dawn sky. She wore a black t-shirt and blue jeans, and had a white military dress tunic draped over her shoulders. Her fighting stick lay on the table before her: a twelve-inch cylinder of metal that would, at a shake, spring out to almost six feet in length.
“We’re about ten minutes from the airport, still running on autopilot.” She picked the cocktail stick from the glass, and waved an impaled olive in his direction. “Do you want to bring us in, or are you still on leave?”
The tunic she wore came from the wardrobe of the Tereshkova’s former owner, the Commodore. An eccentric Russian millionaire with a proud military history, the Commodore had been killed in action while boarding the royal yacht during last November’s shenanigans, and had bequeathed his elderly skyliner to Victoria, his goddaughter and only living relative.
“I might as well.” Ack-Ack Macaque scowled around his cigar. “The evening’s pretty much ruined now, anyway.”
“How so?”
“That journalist who came on board in New York.”
“Has he been pestering you?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you hurt him?”
Ack-Ack Macaque shook his head. “He’s fine. I just told him to sling his hook.”
Victoria raised an eyebrow.
“Is that all?”
“Well, I may have squashed his bug.”
She rolled her eyes.
“How commendably restrained of you.” She dropped the cocktail stick back into her glass.
Ack-Ack Macaque grinned.
“Well,” he said, “I’d better get to work.” He threw her a floppy-armed salute and loped through the lounge, pausing only to snake an unguarded cheese and pickle sandwich from the buffet.
By the time he reached the bridge at the front of the gondola, brushing crumbs from the hairs on his chin and chest, the landing field had come into sight. Not that they would be landing, of course. Through the curved glass windscreen that comprised the entire front wall of the gondola, he could see helicopters and smaller blimps awaiting their arrival, ready to lift cargo and passengers to the helipads fixed onto the upper surfaces of the Tereshkova’s five hull sections. He reached the pilot’s station, and settled himself behind the instrument console, in the familiar scuffed and worn leather chair. The controls of the Tereshkova, like those of all modern aircraft, were computerised. There was no joystick like there had been in his Spitfire, and no old-fashioned nautical steering wheel like there had been in the early Zeppelins – only a glass SincPad screen that displayed an array of virtual instruments and readouts. He could adjust the craft’s heading and pitch by running his leathery fingertips over illuminated symbols, and control the vessel’s speed and height using animated slide bars. It looked deceptively simple—so simple, in fact, that a child could grasp it—but he knew from experience that there was a lot more to piloting something this large. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. For a start, the big, old airship would only turn sluggishly, and you had to finely balance the thrust to compensate for crosswinds and turbulence. If you wanted to bring it to a dead stop, you had to start slowing five miles in advance. Right now, as they approached the airfield’s perimeter, they were crawling forward at walking pace. Each of the airship’s engine nacelles could be controlled individually. Some were providing forward momentum, others reverse thrust, while the rest were pushing edge-on to the prevailing south-westerly, holding the big craft steady against the wind.
Looking forward through the big, curved windshield, Ack-Ack Macaque saw the city lights of Bristol laid out beyond the runways and hangars like sequins on a black cushion: the white and red streams of cars and buses; the twisted spider’s webs of orange streetlamps; and the harsh daylight glow of a stadium’s floods. The sight filled him with excitement. Nick Dean could go hang. Somewhere down there would be music and drinking, in a place with low lights and shadowy booths, where he could get comfortably shitfaced without attracting a large crowd. After a seventy-two hour crossing from New York, he intended to party: to get drunk with strangers, and see where the night took him.
Not that it would be enough, of course. It was never enough. Whatever he did, he couldn’t scratch the itch that niggled him. He couldn’t find anything to match the heady excitement of life in the game world, with the heightened reality of its constant action, and everything painted for him in the simple brushstrokes of a childhood summer’s afternoon. The memory of it haunted him like an addiction, and sometimes it was all he could do to blot it out with drink.
He sighed.
Later, he’d take the new Spitfire out for a few hours, he decided. Nothing blew away the cobwebs of a hard night like the high, thin clarity of the dawn. For him, flying was the only thing in this world even close to the exhilaration of the game.
The Spit was an original, one of a number built during the Second World War, but then packed in crates as the War drew to a close, and buried by British forces in Burma. Since their excavation in the early 2020s, more than thirty had been reassembled and refurbished. His had been one of the
first out of the ground, and had been lovingly restored to full flightworthiness. Victoria had bought it for him as a present. It was her way of saying thank you and, since inheriting the Commodore’s billions, she could easily afford it.
Currently, he had the Spit housed in a hangar at the stern of the Tereshkova’s outermost starboard hull, along with the airship’s complement of passenger helicopters. A four hundred metre-long runway ran diagonally across the top of the five hulls, to the opposite edge of the airship. It was just long enough for him to take off and land, providing the wind was blowing in the right direction and the Tereshkova wasn’t moving too quickly.
Yes, a flight would be good. He’d enjoy getting up into the clouds: just him at the controls of the Spit, just the way it had been in the seemingly endless virtual summer of 1944, when all he’d had to worry about was the next dogfight.
Simian fingers tapping on the glass control screens, he brought the old airship into position above the airport’s main apron, and eased back on the forward thrust, slowing it to a halt so that its shadow hung over the waiting choppers, blotting out half the sky like the footprint of an alien mothership. He puffed on his cigar, and rubbed his hands together. The city lay before him like an untended buffet table, ripe for plundering, and alive with tantalising possibilities.
Oh yes, tonight was going to be a good night. He could feel it in his bones.
CHAPTER THREE
BETTER ANGELS
“PLEASE, CAPTAIN.” THE American threw his arms wide. “I’m desperate.”
Victoria Valois considered him. Lack of sleep had left his eyes rheumy and red; the pores on his nose were enlarged; and his hair and beard were uncombed and wild, as if he’d dragged himself backwards through a hedge—an impression reinforced by the myriad nicks and scratches on his cheeks and forehead.
“I don’t doubt it.” His name was William Cole. Apparently, he’d come aboard with the first of the passengers, and had immediately asked to see her, to request sanctuary. They were in her cabin now, behind the Tereshkova’s bridge, and she was sitting at her desk, in front of the large picture window that comprised most of the back wall. The office, like the skyliner itself, had once belonged to the Commodore, and there were still traces of him everywhere. She had hardly changed a thing. The books on the bookshelves were his, as was the ancient Persian rug covering the steel deck, and the cutlass sticking at an angle from the tasteless old elephant foot umbrella stand.
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