“Perhaps I can help?” He was the only one in shirtsleeves, the only one unmolested by the wind.
“What have you got?”
“Carry me down to Victoria’s office, and I’ll show you.”
“Carry?” Ack-Ack Macaque passed a hand through the image. It was no more tangible than moonlight.
“He means the car,” Victoria said. She crouched down and scooped the little vehicle into her hands. As she straightened back up, Paul’s image shimmered, broke apart, and disappeared. “It won’t go up or down steps.”
WHEN THEY GOT to the office, and Paul had been reactivated, the five of them clustered around Victoria’s desk. The screen inlaid into its surface had been switched on, and showed a satellite image of the surrounding countryside: a chequered bedspread of green, brown and yellow fields, grey towns, and dark, winding rivers.
“We’re here,” Paul said, peering down, over the top of his rimless spectacles. He indicated the landing strip at Filton, on the northwest tip of the city. “Now, when you last saw it, the Gestalt helicopter was here.” He moved his hand along the ribbon of the M4 motorway. “And you lost it here, at this junction.”
Beside him, Ack-Ack Macaque struggled to contain his impatience. His fingers squeezed the metal edge of the desk.
“Yeah, so?”
Paul smiled. His finger traced a route southwards, following the road that led from the motorway junction to a sprawl of streets and buildings clustered around the lazy curves of a wide river.
“Now, this is Bath,” he said. “It’s an old Roman city famous for the hot springs which give it its name.”
Ack-Ack Macaque suppressed a moan. Geeks, he thought bitterly. They can never just get to the motherfucking point.
“What about it?” He bent over the picture, trying to squint out likely places where they could have landed a helicopter. “You think they’re there?”
“No.” Paul pushed his glasses back up, onto the bridge of his nose. “But, according to what I’ve been able to dig up online, Legion Haulage has a corporate retreat on the outskirts. It’s an old stately home on the hill, just about here.” His finger tapped a building on a green hill overlooking the River Avon where it meandered between two hills, forming a grassy floodplain crossed by both the A4 and the Great Western mainline to London. It was a sprawling country house, with outbuildings and several acres of land. According to the map, it was called Larkin Hall.
“They have to be there,” Victoria said. Beside her, William and Marie Cole leaned over the display with interest. Cole looked rough: his hair stuck up more than usual, and his eyes drooped, still carrying the weight of the sedatives he’d been given. A week’s worth of bristles peppered his jowls.
“They’ll have security systems and armed guards,” Marie said, sounding worried. “We can’t just walk in through the front gate.”
Ack-Ack Macaque wrinkled his nose.
“Like hell we can’t.” He fixed her with his one good eye. “Listen, lady; breaking into places and busting stuff up is kind of what I do.”
Victoria gave him a look.
“What do you have in mind?”
His flight jacket hung open. He straightened up and scratched at the hair on his chest.
“Helicopter assault. Don’t bother with the front door; just blow a hole in the roof and abseil in. Find the girls, kick as many arses as possible, and then get the hell outta there before those Gestalt twats know what’s hit ’em.”
Marie gave him a long, thoughtful look.
“Is that possible?”
“Sure it’s possible. It’s just your basic smash and grab. Used to do it all the time, in the war.”
Paul raised a hand.
“I don’t want to be the voice of sanity in this little group; but shouldn’t we go to the police?”
“And do what?” Victoria stepped away from the desk. The medals on her chest clanked together as she moved. She went to stand by the floor-toceiling picture window, and stood with her hands clasped behind her, looking out at the aerodrome below. “The Gestalt have money, and lawyers like you wouldn’t believe. By the time the police get a warrant to search the place, there won’t be a trace of the girls.” She took a deep breath in through the nose. “Besides, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Gestalt already have a few of the local gendarmes in their pockets. Maybe even a few converts on the force.” She leaned forward, so that her forehead kissed the cold glass. “Macaque? If I let you do this, who will you take?”
Ack-Ack Macaque pulled out a cigar and sniffed it.
“A small team of two, maybe three people. All the guns.”
William Cole stood by the desk, blinking. He shuffled his weight from one foot to the other.
“I want to come.”
Ack-Ack Macaque shook his head.
“No way, José. Not if you’re going to flake out like you did last night.”
Cole smoothed down the hair on one side of his head.
“I’m serious. I feel a lot better now.”
“You look like shit, and you’re a fucking liability.”
Marie stepped forward, shouldering her way between them.
“That’s his daughter in there.”
“And that gives him the right to get himself, and the rest of us, killed?”
“It gives him the right to try.”
Ack-Ack Macaque curled his lip. “No, it doesn’t. I’m not taking him.”
“Then take me instead.” She stuck her chin forward. “She’s my daughter too.”
He looked her up and down. She stood with her weight on the balls of her feet, like a dancer. Her fists hung at her sides, but her shoulders were loose and relaxed, ready for anything.
“Think you can handle yourself?”
“I’ve been in worse places, and I know how the Gestalt work. I’ve fought them before. I could be useful.”
“Okay, then.” He couldn’t be bothered to argue. He turned to Victoria. “I’ll take her. Do you think you can get us there?”
Victoria turned away from the window, and pulled herself up. The overhead light shone on the bald skin of her scalp. The gold braid twinkled on her shoulders.
“We cast off in an hour.”
Now it was Ack-Ack Macaque’s turn to be surprised. He fought down the urge to grin.
“You’re taking the whole ship?”
“K8’s a member of its crew.” Victoria’s voice hardened. She ran a hand across the top of her head. “And if there’s one thing the Commodore taught me, it’s that nobody gets left behind.”
He rolled the cigar in his fingers. K8 had stuck by him for the past year, and he’d done nothing but take her for granted and treat her like a lackey. The thought was an uncomfortable one. He wasn’t used to thinking in those terms. Humans were humans; sometimes they were useful; sometimes they were friends. Being obligated to one of them, actually caring about them, was something he hadn’t experienced before. He’d always had a healthy respect for Victoria Valois, and he enjoyed bantering with Paul, but he’d never felt responsible for either of them. K8 was something else. He’d known her in the game, and she’d helped him when he escaped from it. She was the one constant linking his old life with this one, his longest-serving friend and most stalwart of colleagues, and the thought of losing her filled him with a hot, helpless fury.
“Take me to the armoury,” he said. “Those Gestalt wankers are going to be sorry. They’ll rue the day they messed with us.”
Marie leant on the desk with her fists.
“Do you think we can get them back?”
He sneered at her.
“Of course we’ll get them back. Trust me, they’ve pissed off the wrong primate this time. No more Mister Nice Monkey. By the time I’ve finished with them, they’ll be begging to give us the girls.”
Marie narrowed her eyes.
“I hope you’re right.”
“Of course I’m fucking right.” Ack-Ack Macaque drew one of his Colts. In the crowded confines of the office
, the gun looked about the size of a cannon. “Take it from me, lady, those arseholes are going to wish they’d never been born.”
PART TWO
WHAT ROUGH BEAST
I was thinking this globe enough till there sprang out so noiseless around me myriads of other globes.
(Walt Whitman, Night On The Prairies)
CHAPTER TWENTY
TOOLING UP
THE TERESHKOVA’S ARMOURY: Victoria Valois stood in the corridor and watched as Ack-Ack Macaque worked his way around the walk-in cupboard, pulling weapons from the shelves. There were few guns, but he already had his Colts on his hips. He added grenades, knives, and a couple of rusty throwing stars that he found in an old shoebox on one of the higher shelves. Beside him, Marie did the same, tooling herself up with the calm efficiency of an experienced soldier preparing for an operation.
“So, you say you’ve done this before?” he asked, pulling a wicked-looking machete from a rack of blades.
Marie reached for a coil gun: a magnetic projectile accelerator in the shape of a machine gun, capable of punching a titanium slug through a concrete wall. With practiced efficiency, she hefted it in one hand, braced the stock against her hip, and clicked a magazine into place.
“I can look after myself.” She had her orange hair tied back in a severe ponytail, and Victoria had given her a bulletproof vest from her own personal stash. Watching her, Victoria couldn’t help but be impressed by the way the woman stood up to the monkey.
“Take whatever you need,” she said, reaching down to touch the retractable fighting stick tucked into her own belt. Ack-Ack Macaque saw her doing it.
“Wishing you were coming with us, boss?” She smiled, but there was little humour in it. They were the assault team, and she was the skyliner captain.
“I’ll have more than enough to do here.” She had no doubt that, after the events of last year, every move the Tereshkova made would be closely scrutinised by both the authorities and the media. Larkin Hall was close to the skyliner’s scheduled route to London, so they could approach it without raising undue suspicion; but once there, she’d have to do some pretty fast talking to justify a helicopter assault on a stately home. If worse came to worst, she supposed, it would help that they had a friend in Buckingham Palace. Not that she’d presume on that friendship except in the direst of emergencies. Briefly, she wondered how Merovech was adjusting to life on the throne. She hadn’t seen him since the aftermath of the battle in the Channel, and still remembered him as he was when she first met him: a troubled young man in ratty jeans and a smelly red hoodie, struggling to come to terms with the death of his father. Now, he was king of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, France, Northern Ireland and Norway, and Head of the United European Commonwealth. He was preparing for his forthcoming marriage to Julie Girard, the digital activist who’d first drawn him into the intrigue that freed Ack-Ack Macaque from his virtual world and exposed the conspiracy at the heart of Céleste Technologies. The boy was a head of state, and still only barely out of his teens. He had quite enough on his plate without her turning up like Banquo’s ghost. If she could get along without involving him, she would. She had no wish to embarrass him, but she had no illusions that what they were about to do was illegal and could be construed as a terrorist act. The Gestalt might be a dangerous cult bent on global domination but, as far as the world at large was concerned, they were simply a group of technological eccentrics—a bit creepy, yes, but entitled to the same protections as everybody else. Launching an attack on one of the organisation’s properties was an action bound to provoke a response from the UK authorities and, if it came to a standoff with the Royal Air Force, she wouldn’t hesitate to pick up the phone.
“Besides,” she said, “the two of you are carrying enough ordnance to level the place by yourselves; you don’t need me tagging along.”
“Are you sure about that, boss?” The monkey picked up a crossbow. “You can be pretty handy in a scrap.” The crossbow had been made of some sort of carbon fibre, which made it light as well as tough.
Victoria turned to look up the corridor, in the direction of the airship’s bridge.
“I’ll have your backs from up here. If anything goes wrong, I’ll have a chopper snatch you out in seconds.”
Marie pulled a webbing harness over her shoulders and fastened it at the front. It had loops and pockets for weapons and equipment.
“How long will it take to get there?”
“About half an hour from when we cast off.” “That seems a long time.”
“We have to fly slowly over the city.”
“Can’t we go around?”
“We could, but it wouldn’t save any time.” She checked her watch. “Now, I’ve got to get to the bridge so we can get underway. Monkey Man, are you going to fly us out?”
Ack-Ack Macaque stood in the centre of the armoury, festooned with weaponry and ammunition.
“You think I’d trust any of you idiots to do it?”
f IVe mInuteS later, Victoria sat in her command chair, looking forward through the curved windshield of the Tereshkova’s bridge. She wore an insulated cap with fur earflaps. The temperature in here was colder than in the rest of the gondola. The heat leeched out through the glass of the big window and the metal of the walls and floor. The monkey sat at the pilot’s workstation to her right, and the Russian navigator to her left. The touchscreens set into the arms of her chair displayed graphical summaries of the airship’s systems. She couldn’t read the numbers, of course, but was reassured to see that everything that should be green appeared to be green, and nothing glowed red or amber. The engines were all online, and she fancied she could almost feel their vibration through the deck.
Paul stood by her shoulder. He’d been tinkering with his image again, and now appeared to be clad in a black polo neck and slate grey chinos.
“You know,” he whispered, “I could do this.” “What?”
“Fly the ship.”
Victoria turned to look at him.
“Are you serious?”
“Perfectly. After all, it’s just another computer system, isn’t it? I don’t see any reason I couldn’t learn it, given enough time.”
“Don’t let the monkey hear you say that.”
Paul gave Ack-Ack Macaque’s back a guilty glance. “Of course not.” He adjusted his glasses. “I don’t want to undermine him or anything. It’s just that if things go badly and we ever lost him, I’d want you to know that you had another pilot on standby. Potentially. If you needed me.” He wouldn’t meet her eyes, and Victoria felt a prickle at the back of her throat. This was, she realised, his way of trying to be useful.
“I’ll always need you,” she said.
At the helm, Ack-Ack Macaque cleared his throat.
“Will you two stop yapping? I’m trying to concentrate.” He spoke without taking his eye from the controls, and Victoria knew he was busily aligning the engines to propel the airship’s kilometrelong bulk eastward. She watched his hairy hands dance on his workstation’s screen.
“All right, Mister Macaque.” She sat up straight, and tugged the hem of her tunic into place. “In your own time.”
The monkey hit a switch. A warning bell chimed over the intercom, followed by an announcement recorded in both Franglais and Russian. Down below, the delivery trucks, tenders and other vehicles had scattered from the runway to avoid the downdraught of the skyliner’s fifteen giant impellers.
“Here we go.” He dragged a fingertip down one side of the screen, and the bow tipped upward by twenty degrees. The airframe gave a series of creaks. A pen rolled from the navigator’s console and skittered across the deck until it clanged into the bridge’s rear wall. Victoria winced. She knew that in the gondola behind her—and in those hanging from the other four hulls—drinks would be spilling, plates would be sliding off tables, and people would be stumbling and tripping into each other.
Needs must, she thought. One of their crew was in trouble, and that took p
riority over a few spilled gin and tonics.
The thrust kicked in, pushing her backwards in her seat. She’d never felt anything like it in all her time on the Tereshkova, and hadn’t thought the old airship capable of such acceleration. The monkey must have pushed all fifteen engines into the red. The whole ship seemed to judder, and she gripped the arms of her chair as the airfield fell away.
“Watch your speed,” Paul said nervously. AckAck Macaque didn’t bother turning around.
“Screw the limits. What are they going to do, shoot us down over the city?” He touched a control and increased the thrust even further. Around them, the bulkheads moaned in protest, like the timbers of a galleon caught in a storm. The old airship rose, as if hoisted on the crest of a wave, and Victoria’s communication display lit up. The airfield’s control tower wanted to talk to her. She smiled, and dismissed their call. Inside, she felt a wild surge of pride. The Tereshkova was hers, and it was doing something unsuspected and spectacular— something that would further cement its reputation as a maverick in the skyliner community; a true individual in a company of rogues.
Silently, she offered up a prayer of thanks to the Commodore. Losing her ability to write, her career in journalism, and her husband had left her lost and rudderless, and it had taken the Tereshkova to rekindle her sense of purpose. She hoped that in whatever vodka-soaked afterlife the old man now found himself, he knew how thoroughly he’d saved her.
Beside her, Paul’s hologram stood stroking his chin, unaffected by the tilt of the deck. She poked a finger at him.
“You’d be able to fly like this, would you?”
His eyes were locked on the forward view, and she saw his Adam’s apple bob in his throat as he swallowed nervously.
“I don’t know. Maybe. If I really had to.”
“You think so?”
Wide eyes met her gaze over the tops of his spectacles.
“Perhaps.”
“Are you monitoring the internal cameras?”
“Yes. It’s a mess back there.”
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