“He’s more than that.” Paul straightened up. Somehow he’d edited his appearance. The Hawaiian shirt and cargo pants were gone, replaced by blue jeans and a faded red sweatshirt, which he wore beneath a pristine white doctor’s coat, complete with pens in the breast pocket and a stethoscope slung around his neck. “At least, he might be.”
“Might be what?” Ack-Ack Macaque spoke around the cigar.
Paul pushed his glasses more firmly onto the bridge of his nose.
“Do you know what a Neanderthal is?”
“A type of cocktail?”
“Neanderthals were a type of intelligent hominid.”
Ack-Ack Macaque frowned. “A what?”
“Like a cave man.”
“Gotcha.”
Paul pointed to the man’s arms. “They had thicker bones than modern people, bigger jaws; and they lived in Europe around the time of the last ice age.”
“Great, so now we know what he is.”
“Yes, but that’s left us with a much bigger question.”
“Why does he smell so bad?”
“No.” Paul put his hands in the pockets of his white coat. “It’s that the last Neanderthals disappeared thirty thousand years ago. He shouldn’t even be here.”
“They’re extinct?”
“They died out, or interbred with modern humans.” He shrugged his shoulders. “The point is, there hasn’t been a Neanderthal on the Earth for thirty thousand years, and suddenly you run into three of them, all on the same night, in Bristol.”
Ack-Ack Macaque patted the Colts at his sides. “And I made two of the bastards extinct, all over again.”
Paul didn’t hear him. “It just doesn’t make any sense.” The skin between his eyebrows furrowed. He started to pace back and forth beside the bed, talking to himself. “Unless somebody’s breeding them from fossil remains. But that’s ludicrous. This one here’s at least twenty-five years old. How could you keep it a secret that long; and, assuming you could, why would you risk exposure now?”
“Beats me, I only work here.” Ack-Ack Macaque pulled the damp, oily-tasting cigar from his mouth. “Did you try going through his pockets?”
“One of the stewards did. He found a wallet. It’s on that table in the corner.” Paul held up his holographic hands. “I can’t touch it.”
Ack-Ack Macaque replaced his cigar and shuffled over to the table. The wallet lay on a shiny steel tray, along with a few coins, a flick knife, and a black plastic comb. The knife had a yellowish ivory handle. The comb had seen better days. He picked up the wallet and opened it.
“Not much here.” He pulled out a dog-eared business card. “Only this.”
A tiny electric motor whined as Paul’s image ‘walked’ over to him.
“What does it say?”
“It’s from a company called Legion Haulage. There’s a number, but no address.” Ack-Ack Macaque turned the card over. “The back’s blank.”
“Legion Haulage?” Paul tapped his chin. “They’re not in my database. Maybe K8 can find them?”
Ack-Ack Macaque slipped the card into his gun belt. “She’s asleep right now. I’ll ask her when she wakes up.” He looked down at the bed and wrinkled his nose. “In the meantime, what are we going to do with smelly here?”
“Victoria wants him kept alive, to see if he can tell us who he is, and where he came from.”
The monkey cracked his knuckles. “Wake him up, and I’ll slap it out of him.”
Paul shook his head. “He’s sedated at the moment. And she strictly forbade torture.”
Ack-Ack Macaque huffed. “She can talk.” He leant over the bed towards Paul. “Wasn’t it her that dropped an assassin off this ship?”
Paul looked uncomfortable, and Ack-Ack Macaque knew he’d been present at the time, existing as a virtual ghost inside Victoria’s neural gelware. “He was more robot than man.”
“Yes, but she didn’t know that at the time, though, did she?” While interrogating the prisoner in one of the Tereshkova’s cargo bays, Victoria had allowed the man to fall to his death, from several thousand feet above Windsor Castle.
“Those were... special circumstances.” Paul looked away. “That man was Cassius Berg. He killed me. He cut my brain out, and tried to do the same to Vicky. And he was threatening the safety of everyone on this airship.”
Ack-Ack Macaque grinned around his cigar. “Hey, I’m not criticising, I would’ve dumped the fucker myself.”
Paul ‘s hands moved jerkily. He rubbed the back of his neck. “You don’t understand. It really cut her up inside to do it. She doesn’t want anything like that happening again. It nearly destroyed her.”
“Even with a scumbag like that?”
Paul sighed. “Perhaps you don’t know her as well as I do.”
Ack-Ack Macaque bridled. He’d been flying for Victoria Valois for over a year. “I know she’s a hell of a lot tougher than she thinks she is.” He spared the caveman a final glance, and turned for the door. “Where are you going?”
He didn’t turn around. “Up and out.”
“Taking the Spitfire up for a jaunt?”
In the doorway, Ack-Ack Macaque pulled out his lighter. “You’d better believe it, my friend.” He struck a flame and puffed the cigar to life. “It’s been a long night, and I’ve got a lot of aggression left to work off.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SCOURGE OF THE SKYWAYS
AN HOUR LATER, at the other end of the main gondola, Victoria Valois sat behind the desk in her office, and regarded Marie over the steeple of her fingers. William Cole wasn’t there; the writer had been sedated. The man hadn’t slept in God only knew how long, and he’d had more than enough surprises for one day. Between the drugs, the car bomb, and everything else, his sanity had been dangling by a thread. Knocking him out had seemed by far the kindest option.
Sitting across the desk, Marie returned her gaze. Her hands, now unbound, were resting comfortably on the arms of her chair.
“So,” Victoria said. “You really are his wife?” The other woman brushed back an orange curl. “A version of her.”
“From a parallel world; yes, I get it.” Victoria dropped her hands to the desk. “The question is: what are you doing here, now?”
Marie straightened in her chair. “I’ve come to protect him.”
“From whom?”
“Certain parties.”
Victoria chewed her lower lip. “You said he was writing memories. Is that why they’re trying to kill him, because of something he’s remembered?” “William’s special. He’s creative, and like a lot of creative people, he’s sort of attuned to the probabilities and possibilities of the timelines. Without knowing it, he’s picking up on the experiences of his other selves. Not memories as such, more like glimpses of the other world. I can’t really explain it, except to say that it’s like the rapport you get between identical twins. Sometimes, when something happens to one of his alternate selves, he senses it. He has dreams, and they feed into his writing. He thinks he’s making all those stories up, but he isn’t. He’s just trying to get down on paper what’s going on at the back of his head.”
“And what is that?”
Marie rubbed the bridge of her nose with her index finger. She stifled a yawn.
“Look, Captain, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but you seem a reasonable sort.”
“Telling me what?”
“That there’s a war going on.”
Victoria raised a sceptical eyebrow. “A war?” “William knows nothing about it, but he’s involved nevertheless, whether he likes it or not.”
“How so?”
“Because of his gift.” Her fingers picked at a loose thread on the armrest. “The truth is, the war hasn’t been going so well for us. We’ve been losing territory, falling back.”
“So, why come here?”
“Because the battle’s spreading.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Nor should
you.”
From beyond the walls of the gondola, she heard the scream of a Rolls Royce engine; Ack-Ack Macaque was out there, putting his Spitfire through its paces, throwing it into loops and rolls above the airfield. She picked up a pen from the desk and clicked the end of it. Then she held it to her ear and clicked it again, two or three times. She could feel that they were getting close to the truth of things now; but her experience told her to stay quiet.
People often divulged more than they wanted to if she simply gave them the space to do it. Her silence unnerved them, and they spoke to fill it. Leaning back in her chair, she tapped the end of the pen against her lower lip. Would the tactic work here?
She liked to think of herself as a pretty good judge of character, and Marie struck her as a sharp cookie.
Nevertheless, she held her tongue, and waited to see what would happen.
Part of her was convinced that, all evidence to the contrary, the whole ‘parallel world’ story would fall apart. After all, how could it possibly be true? The idea ran counter to every instinct in her body. And yet, how else to explain William Cole’s doppelganger, and the reappearance of his dead wife? Across the desk, Marie’s position hadn’t changed. Her hands still rested loosely on the arms of her chair, and she showed no sign of agitation or discomfort, and certainly no burning urge to talk.
Okay, Victoria thought, this fish isn’t biting. She gave the pen a final click, and tossed it back onto the desk. But, before she could marshal her next round of questions, somebody tapped on the office door. “Come in.”
K8 stepped into the room.
“I’ve got a result for you.” She walked up to the desk and laid the printout in front of Victoria. “What does it say?”
The teenager ran her tongue around her teeth, and glanced at Marie.
“I found Legion Haulage. They’re a transport business, based in Rotterdam.” She leant over and tapped her finger on some of the words. Victoria looked, but the black marks on the paper may as well have been written in Martian for all the sense they made. “They’re a front for another company, who are a front for another in turn. If you follow the chain of front companies back far enough—” Her finger traced down the page. “You find out that they’re owned by the Gestalt.” She straightened up with a what-do-you-think-about-that look on her face. Victoria smoothed a hand backwards across her bald scalp.
“Are you sure?”
“It’s all there, in black and white.”
“So it’s possible the things that attacked you—”
“Were working for the men in white, yes. At least, it’s a possibility.”
Victoria frowned. “But what would the Gestalt want with William Cole?”
K8 shrugged. “Who knows? What would anyone want with him?” She glanced at Marie. “No offence.” The woman with the orange hair dipped her head and smiled. None taken.
“It still doesn’t explain where the Neanderthals came from.” Victoria hadn’t slept all night, and she’d spent much of the past hour listening to Paul’s speculations on the caveman nature of their prisoner. Now, she could feel her neural implant upping her production of adrenalin, fighting to keep her sharp.
“I mean, where did they get them?”
Marie cleared her throat. Sitting up in her chair, she raised a hand.
“Perhaps I can help, Captain?”
Victoria pulled her fighting staff from the pocket of her tunic.
“I was just thinking the very same thing.” With her head throbbing with fatigue, she clonked the staff onto the desktop. Time to stop acting like a journalist, she thought, and time to start behaving like a skyliner captain.
Under international law, skyliners were classed as autonomous city-states, able to travel where they wished, and govern themselves however their captains saw fit. They had been carrying passengers and freight around the world for almost a hundred years, and had become so vital to global commerce that now no country would risk interfering with the neutrality of a single vessel, for fear of boycott by the rest. On board, the captain’s word was law. They were the undisputed masters of their little flying cities, and had the final say on everything from criminal trials to business deals and marriages. Yet, they weren’t tyrants. At least, the majority weren’t.
Passengers tended to avoid skyliners famed for repressive laws or unusual punishments, and so, in order to survive economically, captains were obliged to run their ships with a modicum of fairness and equitability—but only a modicum. Skyliner captains enjoyed a reputation for eccentricity and ruthlessness unsurpassed by any profession since the eighteenth century sail ship captains of the Spanish Main. Among them, Victoria was something of an oddity: she hadn’t risen up through the ranks, and had no experience. But, as the Commodore’s appointed heir and successor, she had the respect of her crew, and a burgeoning reputation based on her striking physical appearance and the fact that it was the Tereshkova she commanded: a vessel now famous to the public as the skyliner which, last year, had rammed the royal yacht in the middle of the English Channel. The well-documented fact that she’d also thrown an assassin out of a cargo hatch helped. According to the British tabloids, she was Victoria Valois, the half-human scourge of the skyways. Sometimes, it took her a while to remember that.
With a French curse, she pushed back her chair and rose to her feet.
“I have a dead guy in my infirmary, and a cave man in the bed next to him.” She waved a finger in Marie’s face. “Now, how about you start talking. I want to know why you’re here, and how you got here!”
Marie’s knuckles whitened on the arms of her chair.
“I told you—”
“That you’re here to protect Cole? Yes, I know.
But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? You didn’t just come here to find him, did you?” The other woman’s eyes widened. Victoria saw her nostrils flare.
“No.”
“Then, what?”
Marie looked down at her knees. She ran her tongue around her lips, and her shoulders tensed.
She seemed to be steeling herself to speak. When she looked up, her eyes were bright with desperation. “It’s my daughter.”
“Your daughter?”
Marie glanced at K8. “She’s about your age. Her name’s Lila.”
Victoria leant forward across the desk, her palms either side of the retracted fighting staff.
“What about her?”
Marie thrust her chin forward defiantly. Her eyes glittered.
“They have her.”
“Who?”
“The Gestalt. They have her, and I’m here to get her back.”
“By yourself?”
“Bill was helping me.” The woman ran a hand across her eyes. “They killed him.”
“And Cole?” Victoria bent her elbows, leaning closer. “Where does he figure into this?”
Marie squeezed her hands shut. She looked at K8. “Lila’s his daughter too.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
FIRE POSITION
K8 LEFT THE Captain talking to the orange-haired lady, and wandered back in the direction of her cabin. As she passed through the gondola’s main lounge, the sun shone through the brass-rimmed portholes. Motes danced in the light. Uniformed stewards bustled back and forth, serving breakfast to a handful of passengers, clustered in ones and twos around the small, circular tables. As a plate went past, she caught the smell of bacon and scrambled eggs, and her stomach growled. She’d been awake all night, and hadn’t eaten anything for hours. For a moment, she dithered, trying to decide whether to sit down and eat, or head back to her cabin and crash in her bunk. In the end, sleep won out. She was young, and needed her rest. Pausing only to snag a slice of toast from the serving table, she went aft, along the main accommodation corridor.
As she walked, she nibbled a corner of the toast, and pondered the events of the night. One thing particularly bugged her. She’d heard Marie claim the Gestalt had killed William Cole’s doppelganger. But if Reynolds had
been with the Captain when Bill was shot, he couldn’t have done the deed—which meant Bill’s killer could still be on board, somewhere, waiting for the chance to strike again.
How many members of the Gestalt were on the current passenger list?
She needed to talk to Ack-Ack Macaque. He’d know what to do. He always knew what to do. Just being around him made her feel safe. Partly it was his proclivity for violence—she knew he’d rip apart anyone who tried to harm her. He was like the big brother she’d never had, and the pet she’d always wanted: a big, sweary monkey who drank and smoked and was dangerous to other people, but always safe, safe, safe for her.
Not, of course, that she’d ever admit to such feelings. Where she came from, you learned to keep your emotions to yourself and never show a hint of weakness, or dependence on anyone else. And besides, she knew that if she tried to tell him how she felt, he’d laugh at her. Not in a cruel way, maybe; but not in a sympathetic way, either. As far as he was concerned, they were comrades in arms. She was his wingman, and that was all there was to it.
They’d first met in the game world. Impressed by her hacking and gaming skills, Céleste Tech had brought her in to help monitor the monkey’s behaviour. They plucked her from the slums of Glasgow and flew her to their labs on the outskirts of Paris, where they had the monkey strapped to a couch in a lab, his artificially enhanced brain hooked into the simulated world, believing the dogfights and battles around him were real. They’d already used up four previous primates, and couldn’t work out why the monkeys kept cracking up. It was K8’s job to keep the latest, Ack-Ack Macaque himself, sane and operational. Instead, when he escaped into the countryside outside Paris, she went after him—not to get him back, but rather to help him bring down the company, and everything for which it stood.
When she’d gone to Paris, it had been the first time she’d left her native Glasgow. Most of her teens up until that point had been spent in her bedroom, illuminated by the blue glow of a computer monitor. Now, just over a year later, she’d been all around the world working as a navigator on the Tereshkova, playing co-pilot to an ill-tempered, cigar-chomping monkey. She’d walked the streets of New York and San Francisco, feeling like a character in a movie; seen the sun set over the Pacific; looked down from her porthole at the splendour of the Grand Canyon. And yet, despite it all, she was still the shorthaired little ginger kid from the Easterside estate, acting tough because she had to; because that was the only way she knew how. The irony was, she no longer had to worry about the mean kids, the schoolyard bullies, or her parents’ fighting. Her hacking skills had taken her out of Scotland, and anyone who tried to intimidate her now would first have to deal with an angry, and heavily armed primate; but she’d been putting up a front so long she couldn’t let go of it. It had become a part of who she was. She’d been acting the plucky little tough girl so long that now she couldn’t tell exactly where the role ended and the real her began.
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