“On what?”
“Artificial brains in organic bodies. Brains into which they can download stored personalities. The skipper here, he was a prototype. A proof of concept. You, though.” She raised her palms to Merovech. “You’re the real prize.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
COMMAND MODE
VICTORIA VALOIS KEPT the end of her quarterstaff trained on the Smiling Man as he stood, hands bound before him, in front of the gaping doors of the Tereshkova’s cargo hold.
They were powering west, above Slough and Windsor. She could see the reservoirs at Colnbrook and Wraysbury; the grey ribbon of the M25; and the Georgian splendour of Windsor Castle, with its large central tower.
“Okay,” she said. “Tell me about that tattoo on your wrist.”
He looked down at his hands. One of his wrists was swollen, where she’d tried to break it in the graveyard.
“It’s Omega,” he said. “The last letter of the Greek alphabet.”
“I know that. But what does it mean?”
His eyes came up to meet hers.
“It’s the symbol of my order. We are the Undying. We believe in an end to things, a benevolent Eschaton at the end of the universe. An Omega Point.”
Victoria tightened her grip on the staff.
“What’s that got to do with Paul? With Lois and the King?” She had to know the full story.
Berg glanced over his shoulder at the town below. He was just inside the threshold of the open doors. Beyond, the deck’s lip extended another half a metre into the sky. When the doors closed, it would form a narrow ledge.
“Nguyen and his team were expendable. They knew too much of our plans.”
In Victoria’s head, Paul scratched his peroxide hair and said, “He’s talking about the night they brought the King in. The night of the assassination attempt.”
“What happened that night? Lois started to tell me, but we were interrupted.”
Thinking she was talking to him, Berg opened his mouth. She silenced him with a raised hand. She wanted to hear what Paul had to say.
“We were called into the Céleste facility. It was late. The King and the Duchess were there. We were told to remove the King’s soul-catcher.”
“Even though his injuries weren’t serious enough to warrant surgery?”
Paul shuffled his trainers.
“Nguyen told us it was necessary.”
“And you never spoke of it?”
“I couldn’t. We were told it was a national security matter. We had to sign all sorts of forms.”
Victoria considered this for a moment. Then she turned her attention back to Berg.
“And I suppose you’re tidying up the loose ends from that night?”
“Amongst other things.”
“So, tell me. Who gave the order to remove the King’s soul-catcher?”
Berg rolled his head from side to side, like a vulture trying to swallow a chunk of flesh.
“Oh, come on, Victoria. Isn’t it obvious?”
She narrowed her eyes. “You tell me. What would anyone have to gain by removing it?”
The Smiling Man turned and used his bound hands to gesture at the battleship silhouette of Windsor Castle.
“Control of the throne.”
Victoria frowned.
“No, that’s ridiculous. The Duchess—”
Berg let out a sound that could have been a chuckle.
“Yes, the Duchess. Of course, the Duchess. Her company. Her husband. Her technology.”
“So, the assassination attempt?”
“All part of her plan, I’m afraid. The King is indisposed, so the Duchess becomes Regent until Prince Merovech finishes his studies, at which point he assumes the throne.”
“So, Merovech’s part of this?”
“Yes, although he doesn’t know it yet.” Berg took a deep breath, as if preparing to unburden himself. The temperature in the hold had dropped considerably, and she could see him shivering.
“When Merovech takes the throne, he will be working for us. His first act as monarch will be to dissolve the civilian government and impose martial law. He will have the backing of the armed forces. We’ve spent years getting our people into key positions. When the takeover happens, it will be swift and decisive.”
Victoria adjusted her grip on the quarterstaff. Every instinct in her body screamed at her to slam the tip into his moronic smirk.
“How do we stop him?”
Berg raised his chin, looking down his nose at her.
“I don’t think you can. The plan’s already underway. When the Mars probe’s ready for launch, the Duchess will announce that she’s resigning the Regency, and Merovech will ascend.” He raised his hands, asking for the plastic binding to be removed. “Everything will be in place. The new order will rise.”
Victoria closed her eyes. She moved her consciousness away from the emotions swamping the organic side of her brain. There would be time for panic later. Right now, she had to keep going. She couldn’t afford to crumple. With her mind in command mode, she opened her eyes, her thoughts as cold and clear as the sky outside.
“You killed my husband,” she stated. “And you tried to kill me.”
Berg jerked, startled by the sudden calm in her voice, the sudden change in focus. His wrists chafed against the plastic cable tie, trying to pull free.
“Now, look—”
“Be quiet.” She took a step forward, swinging the quarterstaff, marvelling at the mathematical beauty of its arcs, the perfect unity of its form and function.
“But you don’t understand. I’m one of the Undying. I’m one of the survivors. I will make it to the life everlasting.”
Victoria threw the staff up with one hand and caught it with the other. She reviewed her memories of Paul, from their first kiss to their wedding night. Whatever his faults, whatever he’d done, he hadn’t deserved to die such a horrible death.
“How many people have you killed?”
The Smiling Man took a step back, beyond the track of the doors, onto the very lip of the deck. He couldn’t retreat any further, yet Victoria still saw defiance in his eyes. He stood straight and tall, like a dinosaur stretching on its hind legs.
“Twenty-four,” he said.
Victoria took another pace towards him, staff held like a javelin. The gelware threw targeting graphics across her sight.
“And how many of their brains did you take?”
His eyes were on the staff now. He looked less certain of himself.
“Nineteen. But they will live again. They’re on the Mars probe. All the dead. All their soul-catchers. Even yours.”
“Mine?”
“All of them.”
“But why?”
“So they can live again, and take their places in the new global order.”
Victoria felt something sour rise in her throat. One of her hands gripped the staff, ready to strike if he tried to move. The other reached for the door controls. She pressed the red button with the heel of her hand, and the doors shuddered. With a piercing squeal, they began to close.
Afraid of being shut out on the ledge, Berg tried to step to safety, but a swipe from the staff kept him where he was.
“Hey! You can’t do this!” With his wrists bound in front of him, he found it hard to keep his balance. “Let me in.”
Victoria kept the staff poised.
“This is for my husband,” she said. Their eyes met. Berg’s were white all the way around. Without emotion, she watched him teeter. The wind snatched at his clothing. She saw one of his heels slip. For an instant, his entire weight rested on the toes of one foot. A cry escaped his smiling lips.
And he was gone.
Victoria ran forward, and caught a final glimpse of him: a black stick figure cart-wheeling down through the bright afternoon air, legs flailing. She saw office blocks; an industrial estate. And then, with an echoing clang, the doors shut, closing out everything but the cold.
BREAKING NEWS
From Le Journal de Nouvelle Science, online edition:
Mars Probe “Days From Launch”
26 NOVEMBER 2059 – Inside sources at Céleste Tech have indicated that their long-heralded interplanetary “light sail” probe may be just days from launch.
Designed by engineers at the Céleste Technologies facility near Paris, the probe, dubbed ‘New Dawn’, will slingshot around the sun before unfurling a large “sail” to catch the solar wind and ride it to Mars.
If the launch is successful, the probe should reach Mars some time in 2061.
The project, which has been shrouded in secrecy, recently caused controversy when rumours started to circulate that its payload would include so-called “terraforming packages”.
The packages are believed to contain specially-tailored microbial life forms, including algae and extremophile bacteria, designed to absorb carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere and replace it with oxygen.
Such packages would be a theoretical first step in any effort to turn the Red planet into a second Earth, but campaigners are opposed to what they see as the wanton contamination of an unspoilt wilderness, about which we still know comparatively little.
Although officials remain tight-lipped about a definite date for the launch, inside sources say they expect it to coincide with celebrations to mark the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the European Commonwealth.
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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CLOCKWORK NINJAS
THEY DROVE FOR the coast, Merovech at the wheel and Julie at his side. He needed to confront his mother, but wanted to do it on his terms, not hers; which meant finding his own way across the Channel.
Beside him, Julie seemed pensive. She kept chewing her bottom lip and wringing her hands in her lap. She hadn’t spoken in half an hour.
In the back of the van, K8 huddled with Ack-Ack Macaque over a SincPad screen. She’d been gently connecting wires from the jacks in his head to a router plugged into the pad. This was her idea of fighting back.
“The best way to hurt Céleste and draw a lot of attention is to take down the game,” she said. “And the best way to do that is to find the new monkey and kick its ass.”
Ack-Ack Macaque picked at his teeth.
“Find the big guy and take him out. Gotcha.”
K8 tapped a command into the pad, linking his artificially uplifted brain directly into the online game.
“Yeah, standard primate power play. Do you think you can handle it?”
“Do monkeys shit in the woods?”
His yellow eye flickered shut. K8 slid the final jack into place, covered his head with the leather skull cap, and rocked back. She met Merovech’s glance in the rear view mirror.
“He’s in.”
“Do you think this will work?”
K8 gave the monkey’s hand an affectionate pat.
“Aye, probably. If he can get in there and cause enough trouble to get noticed, then we can blow this thing sky high.” She shuffled forward and leaned between the front seats. “According to Techsnark, the game has ten thousand registered user accounts, and many more watching the action on YouTube. That’s a massive, ready-made audience, right there.”
They were on a back road, somewhere in Brittany, and it was now well after midnight. From the passenger seat, Julie said,
“Won’t they just block him?”
“I don’t know if they can. He’s hardwired into the game. He’s part of it. And besides, they might not even notice him. Not for a while, anyway. If they think digital rights activists snatched him, the last thing they’ll be expecting is for him to hook back in.” K8 looked between Merovech and Julie, and frowned. “How are you two holding up?”
Merovech stifled a yawn. For the past hour, he’d been watching the road’s central white line spool through the headlamps’ arc, his fingers squeezing the wheel as his mind struggled to parse the evening’s revelations.
He thought back to his time in the South Atlantic, before the helicopter crash.
“When in doubt,” his old commanding officer had been fond of saying, “make a plan and stick to it. Chunk everything down into small, achievable objectives.”
Rather than try to plan how he was going to get across the Channel, travel to Cornwall, and confront his mother without running afoul of either customs officials or her personal security team, he was focusing instead on reaching the coast. He knew that the parents of an old school friend had a yacht at Saint-Malo, and he hoped he’d be able to persuade them to take him across. In the meantime, he had the morale of his troops to consider.
“I could do with a break,” he said. “And a coffee.”
Beside him, Julie stretched like a waking cat.
“Coffee sounds good.”
ACK-ACK MACAQUE STOOD blinking in the sudden light. He’d asked K8 to spawn him on the edge of one of the British airfields, at dawn, and the transition from the gloom and discomfort of the rattling old van to the warm sun and summer smells of the English countryside had been almost instantaneous. He took a deep breath in through his flattened nose. From his point of view, he was now standing in a meadow adjacent to the airfield’s perimeter fence. Buttercups waved in a light breeze. Bees droned. He drank it all in. Then, as if remembering something, his hands dropped to his hips, and his fingers closed eagerly on the holstered butts of his giant Colts.
“Hello, old friends.”
The guns were familiar and reassuring and, for a moment, everything seemed to be back the way it had been. But he knew in his heart that it wasn’t. Now he’d discovered the truth about himself, the rules had changed. He no longer cared who won the war. He could see the game world for the sham it had always been, and he was here to tear it down. He’d broken out of his prison, and now he’d returned to wreak bloody vengeance on his former jailers. This wasn’t a homecoming, it was a farewell tour.
A bazooka lay in the grass at his feet, like a long section of drainpipe. Beside it, a box of shells and a dozen grenades. K8 had hacked his profile to include the extra items. He wasn’t sure what ‘hacking’ meant, but he appreciated her efforts. For what he had in mind, he’d need all the firepower he could get his hands on.
He pulled a cigar from the inside pocket of his flight jacket and lit up, thinking what a shame it was that K8 couldn’t be there herself, in her guise as Mindy Morris. He’d grown used to having her as his co-pilot, and it seemed wrong for her to miss out on all the fun.
He heard a deep growling thrum from the south-east: a wave of boomerang-shaped flying wings powering in across the rolling fields, their triple propellers shimmering in the morning light. There were maybe a dozen in all, hurried along by six or seven darting, shark-like Messerschmitts.
Behind him, on the aerodrome, he heard the scramble bell ring. Another ninja parachute raid, as predictable as clockwork.
As the planes approached, he stood his ground, watching the funny-looking craft loom larger and larger in the morning sky. When the first parachute canopies blossomed, he drew the Colts and grinned around his cigar. This was going to be a riot.
He put bullets through the two lowest paratroopers. The others jerked around in their harnesses, searching the ground for the source of the shots. He heard them calling to each other
in a panicky mixture of German and Japanese. Then they were down, rolling in the grass, their shrouds settling around them in clouds of gently falling silk.
Swords sang from their scabbards. Japanese steel flashed in the English summertime. Colts firing and fangs bared, Ack-Ack Macaque leapt to meet them.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
EXPIRED LEASE
VICTORIA VALOIS SAT on a bar stool, in a lounge on one of the skyliner’s starboard gondolas. She was watching the spirits quiver in the bottles hanging behind the bar. They were rippling in time to the almost subliminal vibrations of the Tereshkova’s engines.
The lounge had been decorated in a 1930s ‘Golden Era of Travel’ style, with art deco fixtures, ceiling fans, and plenty of prominent rivets on the bulkheads. A painting hung over the cash register, portraying the Commodore as a young man, in a white dress uniform with a bright scarlet sash.
A row of large circular portholes filled much of the starboard wall. Perched on her stool at the counter, Victoria had her back to them. She didn’t feel much like looking out, or down.
The bar counter itself had a thin copper top which had, over the years, acquired a patina of dents and nicks as unique as a fingerprint. The steward wore white gloves and served the drinks on small cork coasters.
Victoria was on her third gin and tonic. Her flaxen wig lay scrunched on the bar before her. Right now, she didn’t care what she looked like, and her scarred, shaven head kept the other passengers from trying to engage her in conversation. She couldn’t read the labels on the bottles behind the bar because she’d disabled the text recognition on her visual feed. She didn’t want it whispering brand names in her mind every time she glanced at the shelves.
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