Her shoes echoed on the metal deck. The doors to the passenger staterooms were made of polished wood. The door to Ack-Ack Macaque’s, which was situated farther back, in the crew section, was metal. It was an oval hatch, with a lip like the hatch of a cabin in a seagoing ship. As she reached it, she heard the howl of the Spit’s Rolls Royce Merlin engine, and knew he was still out there, flinging himself around the sky, reliving his glory days as a fighter pilot.
Disappointed, she thought about going back to her own cabin, but didn’t feel like being alone. Instead, holding the toast in her mouth, she pushed down on the handle, intending to curl up on his spare bunk. He wouldn’t mind, and she could barricade herself in his cabin while she waited for him, wrapped in the reassuring, homely scents of old cigar smoke, leather and animal sweat.
She shouldered the door open and, taking the toast from her mouth, stifled a yawn with the back of her hand. The room was dark. Still yawning, she fumbled her hand along the inside of the wall, searching for the switch. As she did so, she heard the rustle of clothing, and became aware of another presence in the room.
Before she could cry out, gloved hands closed firmly around her arm. Other hands closed over her mouth and nose, and squeezed her throat, holding her head still. She kicked out in the darkness, but their grip only tightened. There were at least two people holding her. The pressure on her larynx stopped her from being able to shout. She couldn’t even breathe. Frantically, she kicked and thrashed, but the hands held her in place. Something cold pressed against her neck, and she flinched, expecting a gunshot. Instead, there was a loud, mechanical click, and a needle punched through the skin above her collarbone, into the muscle beneath.
THE SPITFIRE’S COCKPIT was cold, and smelled like a zoo, but that was just the way Ack-Ack Macaque liked it. Six thousand feet above the airfield, high above the uppermost antennae of the hovering Tereshkova, he wheeled the plane through the crisp morning air. From up here, through the perspex bubble of the cockpit, he could see down the length of the Estuary, towards the distant southerly hills of Exmoor; and west, across the rolling landscape of Wales, to the bracken-brown peaks of the Brecon Beacons. No trace remained of last night’s rain. The sky was an endless blue, the air as fresh and clear as a melt-water stream, and his heart sang an accompaniment to the engine’s holler.
Wrapped in his leather flying jacket and favourite silk scarf, he pushed his goggles up onto the top of his head, and peered down at the city streets whirling beneath his wings. He wondered how many people were still asleep in the houses on the outskirts of the airfield. Pushing the stick forward, he put the Spit into a screaming dive and held it—ignoring the screams of protest from air traffic control—until the altimeter dial had almost wound down to zero. At the last possible moment, less than a hundred feet above the deck, he hauled back and pulled up the nose, booming over the suburban roofs and gardens at three hundred miles per hour, rattling windows and setting off car alarms.
Cackling, he kept low, only pulling up once the houses gave way to fields and industrial units. Then, throttle pushed forward, he aimed the old plane’s nose at the sky. The Spit leapt like a prancing horse, eager to kick up its heels, and he gave it the beans, glorying in the shuddering roar of the engine. This was what he was, what he’d always been: first and foremost, a pilot.
“To slip the ugly bonds of Earth,” he misquoted around his cigar. “To punch the stupid, smiling face of God.” His voice sounded muffled. His ears still ached from last night’s gunfire, and the changes in pressure caused by these manoeuvres weren’t helping. He opened his mouth wide to let them pop, then pushed aside his left earphone and waggled his little finger in the hole. His whole head felt like a bubble that refused to burst. “Fuck it,” he muttered. Time to go home. A bit of rest and recuperation would do him more good than titting about in a plane, however chary he was to admit it.
He levelled out his climb at five thousand feet. By now, he was over the bronze-coloured waters of the Severn, so he put the plane into a wide turn, intending to bring it back to the Tereshkova.
He passed over the Second Severn Crossing, flashing through the gap between its massive concrete towers, and brought the nose around to face the rising sun.
As the cigar-shaped silhouette of the airship hove into view ahead, he clocked a helicopter lifting from its upper deck. But it wasn’t one of the tubby passenger choppers that belonged to the ship. This was a sleek, small, and expensive-looking dragonfly; able to carry no more than two or three people; maybe four, at a push.
“Special delivery,” he muttered, wondering if the ‘copter had just picked someone up, or just dropped them off. He watched it climb into the sky, heading eastwards over the city, away from him. In his experience, an expensive ‘copter like that usually belonged to a high ranking business person or celebrity—or, he thought with a scowl, that bloody film crew who wanted to make a movie about him. Couldn’t they get it though their thick, coke-addled heads that he wasn’t the slightest bit interested in seeing a Hollywood version of his life? If he’d wanted fame, he could have had all he could handle last year in the wake of that scrap in the Channel. But he hadn’t. He’d chosen to fly away on the Tereshkova instead. Couldn’t those people take a bloody hint?
For the past half an hour, he’d been ignoring the radio chatter from the ground. Mostly, they’d been shouting at him for breaking rules and flying dangerously, and he’d sort of tuned them out. Now though, as he watched the helicopter pull away, he became aware of a new note of urgency in their voices.
Ack-ster, Ack-ster, respond please. This is Paul. Respond please.
“Hey Paul, what’s up?”
Oh, man, where have you been? I’ve been calling you.
“I’m here, I’m here. What’s the problem? Are the Hollywood people here again?”
It’s K8. They’ve got K8.
Ack-Ack Macaque felt the hairs prickle on his neck. “Who’s got her?”
The Gestalt. They grabbed her from your cabin. They were disguised as passengers. They disabled some of our cameras, but I caught them taking her up to the roof. She looked drugged.
His hands squeezed the stick.
“Where are they now?”
They had a helicopter waiting. It was registered as a courier from Legion Haulage.
Ack-Ack Macaque glared forward, through the bulletproof windshield.
“Small, pricey-looking job?”
Yes.
“I see it.”
What are you going to do?
The push-button control for firing the Spitfire’s eight machine guns was mounted on the stick. A cover prevented accidental firing during manoeuvres.
“What the hell do you think I’m going to do?” He took the cover between finger and thumb, and rotated it a quarter turn, from the ‘safe’ position to the ‘fire’ position. “I’m going to get her back.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
MY EYES
WILLIAM COLE LAY on his bunk, staring up at the painted metal ceiling. He felt washed-out and his thoughts, trodden down by the sedatives he’d been given, were soft and gloopy.
“My daughter?” His mouth was dry, his voice a croak.
“Yes, my love.” Marie knelt beside the bed, and placed her hands on his arm. “Lila, our daughter.”
“But, I don’t have a daughter.”
“Yes, you do. Or rather, you should have done.” “I don’t follow.” In the gloom of the curtained cabin, she looked and sounded so much like his Marie that he felt a hard, hot lump in his chest. Even her breath smelled the way he remembered.
“Do you recall when you and your Marie first got together, about sixteen years ago?” They’d run into each other at a book launch in Greenwich Village, for the autobiography of some flavour-of-the-month artist with hardly enough years behind her to fill the pages. Marie had been covering it for The Guardian; he’d been trying to buttonhole a literary agent with one of his manuscripts. Somehow, they’d ended up standing next to each other at th
e bar.
“How could I forget?” Two weeks after that first meeting, she’d come out to visit him in Dayton, and stayed for six months.
“And Marie had that miscarriage?”
William felt his eyes widen. “How do you know about that?” He and Marie had never spoken of it to anyone. It had been something they kept to themselves, even though the fact of it had driven them apart. After it happened, they just couldn’t be around each other. She went back to England, to her job at The Guardian, and he didn’t hear from her for another five years; didn’t see her for another ten. By the time he came to the UK to live with her, they were both in their very late thirties, both divorced, and both still childless. It was going to be a second chance for both of them; but, five years later, she was dead, and he was left alone again, this time on the wrong side of the Atlantic.
So many wasted years.
He felt Marie’s fingers squeeze his arm through the bedclothes.
“Well,” she said, “in my timeline, the baby lived.”
He turned towards her. “I beg your pardon?”
“The miscarriage never happened.” Marie let go of him and put a hand to her abdomen. “The baby survived. She grew up fit and strong.”
William frowned in confusion.
“So we stayed together? You never went back to England?”
“We were a family.”
William let his head roll back onto the pillow, trying to imagine all the what-ifs and if-onlys.
“But, she’s not my daughter, is she? Not really. She’s yours. You and the other me, from your world.”
Without looking up, Marie shook her head. He saw her orange ringlets move in the corner of his peripheral vision.
“No, she is yours. The worlds didn’t split until she died.” She looked up at him, and he could see the care lines in the skin around her eyes. “She has your DNA. She came from you, before our world’s diverged. Just because she’s from a different version of events, doesn’t mean she isn’t your flesh and blood.” She reached up and brushed a loose hair from his forehead. The touch of her fingers sent little shivers though the muscles in his neck and jaw. “It doesn’t mean you aren’t her father.”
William bit his lip. “I’m not sure I understand.”
Marie cocked her head to one side.
“What’s to understand? You fathered a child, but then the timelines diverged, and you got stuck on one and she got stuck on another. You got separated, but now you can be together again, after all this time.”
He swallowed.
“How? How is this even possible?”
“There are machines. Big powerful machines that can nudge a person from one timeline to another.”
“And you used one of those?”
“The Gestalt on our world have them. Bill, Lila and I used one. We broke into one of their facilities and sent ourselves here.”
“So, you didn’t bring it with you?”
“Strictly a one-way trip. We couldn’t even choose our destination, they already had it programmed in, but that’s okay. We don’t want to go back. We were trying to escape.”
“Escape what?”
Marie dropped her gaze and shook her head.
With great effort, William elbowed himself up until he was half-sitting, with his back against the pillows and his head against the cabin wall.
“If you want me to help find your daughter,” he said, “I want to be sure I know what I’m getting myself into.”
Marie pursed her lips. She rocked back on her heels, and got to her feet. “Okay, then, here it is.” Her voice had become brusque and business-like. “There are an infinite number of identical worlds, all occupying the same space but separated by wafer thin membranes of probability. A decision taken in one world will be reversed in the next, and so on to eternity. Every time one of us makes a choice, every time the wind blows left instead of right, every time a subatomic particle wobbles one way instead of another, the timelines fork, and new worlds are born. Trillions every second.”
William was familiar with the concept, but when tried to imagine it, he couldn’t grasp the scale.
“That’s hard to visualise.”
“Think of them as branches.” She clasped her hands behind her back. “Forks in the timelines.”
“An infinite number of worlds?”
“Only a tiny percentage are inhabited by humans, but even that percentage accounts for a number so big that to write it down would take longer than the remaining age of the universe.”
He licked his lips. They were rough and dehydrated.
“So, why are people trying to kill me?”
“Who?”
His face darkened. “There was a guy in a car yesterday afternoon, and those two Gestalt guys outside Sparky’s place last night.”
“You’ve met the Gestalt already?”
“They wanted me to go with them. They were armed.”
For the first time in the conversation, she seemed off-balance. “I was hoping we’d get to you first. What happened?”
“I shot them.”
She gave him a long, thoughtful look.
“Okay,” she said at length, “I’ll level with you. Bill and I, we’ve been fighting for a long time, trying to free our world.”
“Free it from what?”
“From the Gestalt.”
William raised an eyebrow. The Gestalt was a cult, a curiosity. They were rich and secretive, but nobody took them seriously. The media lumped them in with groups like the Scientologists or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They were eccentric, a little secretive, but essentially harmless. Until last night, he would never have thought them capable of carrying guns, let alone threatening anybody.
Marie said, “They evolved on a different parallel to ours. We don’t know which one, but they’ve been trying to spread ever since.” Her fingertips brushed the edge of his blanket. “They want to turn the whole multiverse into one giant hive mind. In order to do it, they recruit locals and convert them, then use them to spread their message and build support.”
“Can’t they be stopped?”
Marie shook her head. “That’s just the first stage. On our world, they started kidnapping people and converting them by force. They bought up media companies and used them to broadcast propaganda. And in the end, when they got numerous enough, they staged a coup.”
“They have soldiers?”
“Human and Neanderthal. They recruit the Neanderthals as muscle, from timelines where the species never died out.”
“You think that’s what they’re planning here?”
“From what I’ve seen, I’d say they’re almost certainly planning an invasion. Maybe even something worse.”
“Worse than invasion?”
Marie looked tired. An orange curl fell across her forehead and she flicked it aside with her finger. “The Gestalt have been here on your world for a while now. They will have been studying your soulcatchers, finding out how they work; and you can bet they’ve thought of half a dozen ways to subvert the technology. When their main force gets here, they’ll unleash something—could be a signal or a virus, depending on the way the technology works; maybe even a something nanotechnological—to turn those implants against their owners, and assimilate them into the Gestalt.”
William tried to sit up. Half the people he knew wore soul-catchers. Although the gelware recording devices sat comfortably beneath the skin at the base of the skull, their tendrils extended deep into the grey matter of the brain, recording and monitoring everything. If the Gestalt had some way to reverse the process, to turn output to input, the results could be catastrophic.
Beside him, Marie laced her fingers and stretched her arms, popping the knuckles. “The good news is, we’ve got people fighting them on my world, and we can fight them here.”
“But why are the Gestalt trying to kill me?” Spoken aloud, and weighed against the idea of an impending battle, the thought sounded petty and selfish; but still, he needed to know. “I
haven’t done anything. I didn’t even know about any of this.”
Her head tipped to the side again. “In my world, Bill was one of our leaders. For years, he kept us going, and kept us united. And now he’s dead.” She gave a matter-of-fact shrug, but he could see the pain in the way the lines bunched around her eyes. “So it goes. But the Gestalt worry that another version of him might rise up in his place. And they know about you. They’ve seen your work, and they know you’re getting glimpses of our world. Your last book, The Collective was a dead giveaway.”
“They’re trying to kill me because of my books?”
“No, they’re trying to kill you because they’re concerned you might warn the people of this world of their plans. That you might use your knowledge to lead the fight against them the way Bill did. The fact they’re here, now, means they’re ready to make their move on this world, and they don’t want you standing against them.”
“And where does Lila come into all this?”
Marie pulled a photograph from her pocket, and handed it to him. It was a snap taken outdoors, on a bright day. Maybe it had been taken at the seaside; it had that quality of light. A teenage girl looked back over her shoulder, laughing into the camera. She wore a thick coat, and a strong wind teased her hair into long, dark straggles.
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