“Evenin’ squire.” His jaw flapped, caught in a loop. “Evenin’ squire. Evenin’ squire. Evenin’ squire...”
Ack-Ack Macaque kicked him aside. The kids on the nearest tables were starting to get to their feet, their mouths half open in alarm, their eyes wide with surprise. He shot them all, one at a time. Blam! Blam! Blam! Heads and arms flopped. Men and women screamed. Blood flew everywhere, but he knew it meant nothing. None of these deaths were real, they were just a means to an end: a way of attracting the big guy’s attention.
He reached out a hairy arm and grabbed an airman by the lapels.
“Where is he?” he snarled. The kid was seventeen or eighteen, with the first wispy suggestions of a goatee beard.
“I don’t understand.”
“The other monkey. Where is he?”
The kid’s eyes rolled in his head.
“What other monkey?”
Ack-Ack Macaque leaned in close, bringing his teeth right up to the kid’s cheek.
“There’s another version of me. A new one. He’s not here right now. Where is he?”
The kid wriggled in his grip.
“Took off about an hour ago, heading for the Brunel. But I thought that was you. What is this? What’s happening?”
Ack-Ack Macaque released him, letting him drop to the rough wooden boards of the tent’s floor.
“Things have changed,” he said. “There’s a new monkey in town. Tell your friends.”
He turned on his heel and stalked out onto the runway. A few of the mechanics were loitering, disturbed by the sound of gunfire but unsure how to react. He plugged them all. What did it matter? None of them were really here.
He swarmed up the side of the nearest Spitfire. It wasn’t his plane, but it would do. The seat would have been narrow for a man, but gave him plenty of room. He settled into position on the parachute pack and closed the pilot’s door. Then he pulled closed and latched the canopy hood. He wound the rudder to full right, to counter the plane’s torque, and pressed the starter buttons. The fuel pressure light came on and the engine coughed. The four-bladed prop spun into life, and the aircraft strained forward against its brakes.
Ack-Ack Macaque’s large nostrils quivered with the smell of aviation fuel and hot metal. He saw survivors stumbling from the Officers’ Mess, and pointed upward with his index finger.
“I’m going up,” he called. “Get out of the way.”
They looked at him with pale incomprehension, milling around in front of the plane. Frustrated, he switched to his middle finger. “Oh, up yours.”
He took hold of the throttle and the plane leapt forward, scattering the onlookers like chickens. Laughing, and still waving his one-fingered salute, Ack-Ack Macaque taxied to the end of the runway. He hadn’t bothered plugging his headset into the radio, so he couldn’t hear the protestations of the tower. Instead, he fixed his eyes on the horizon and let out a piercing, fang-filled jungle screech.
This was it. This was him, where he’d always been. Where he’d always belonged: behind the joystick of a Spitfire, ready to take on the world.
And boy, was the world in trouble.
HALF AN HOUR later, high in the clear skies above Northern France, Ack-Ack Macaque gripped the stick of his Spitfire as the plane vibrated around him. Ahead, enemy fighters danced like gnats in his crosshairs, harrying a much larger, far more ponderous vessel.
Flagship of the Allies’ aerial fleet, the aircraft carrier Brunel dominated the sky. With dimensions similar to one of its seagoing counterparts, it was easily the largest vessel in the European theatre. On its back, serried ranks of Nissen huts housed an entire squadron of single-seater Hurricane fighter-bombers. The planes were launched and recovered via a metal runway slung between the two over-sized, armoured airships that formed the bulk of the carrier’s mass. The propellers of fifty Rolls Royce engines powered the beast, and gun emplacements bristled along its flanks and undercarriage.
Half a dozen German fighters were currently attempting to mount an attack on the carrier, but were being held at bay by three of the Brunel’s Hurricanes, and a solitary Spitfire.
Ack-Ack Macaque leant on the throttle, urging his plane higher. The air in the cockpit turned bitterly cold. His breath came in puffs of vapour, but he didn’t care. It wasn’t real cold, was it? Just an illusion, like everything else. He kept his attention on the dogfight unfolding before him, squinting to pick his adversary from the wheeling wings and chattering cannons of the British planes.
He saw a Messerschmitt fall from the fray, trailing smoke and flames, an aileron flapping loose. Above it, the Spitfire wheeled. Compared to the functional lines of its prey, it was as sleek as a hawk; and where its RAF roundels should have been, it sported a grinning, painted monkey’s face.
“There you are.” He pulled on the stick to give chase, ignoring the other planes. Coming up from beneath the fight, he hadn’t yet been spotted by the other pilots. For now, he had the element of surprise.
Okay, he thought, let’s hope the world’s watching. He mashed the trigger button with his leathery thumb, and felt the rattle of the wing-mounted cannons. His shots caught his target across the underside of its fuselage, midway between the wings and rudder. He caught a glimpse as he hurtled past vertically, propeller clawing the thin air, and his plane threatened to stall. He pulled back, flipping the bird over onto its back. The yellow nose of a Messerschmitt lunged at him, but he rolled away from its attack, snarling.
“I should have dealt with them first,” he muttered. “Too late now.”
He looked around for the other Spitfire, and was alarmed to see it looping around behind him. Its guns blazed and he felt the bullets rip into his wings. Swearing silently, he kicked the rudder pedal and hauled the stick back to his hip, tipping the horizon over in a vertiginous rolling turn.
More impacts, like rocks on a tin roof. The seat convulsed beneath him. He pulled harder. German planes whirled across his view, zooming and banking, thrown into disarray, and he kept his thumb on the trigger, hoping to clear a few from the sky.
With merciless savagery, he threw his Spitfire from side-to-side, feinting one way and then another. Two more bursts hit him, but then he went left as his pursuer went right. Both planes screamed around in a banking turn that brought them face-to-face.
Ack-Ack Macaque fired, and saw the cannons on his counterpart’s wings do likewise. The two planes were shredding each other. Bullets slammed into the cockpit around him. The propeller splintered. Invisible hammer blows shattered the windshield. But still he kept firing. Only when collision seemed unavoidable did he knock the stick sideways.
The air roared through his fur. He pulled his goggles down over his eyes and tried to turn for another attack. The engine spluttered ominously, releasing gouts of black smoke. Hot oil peppered his fur. The prop had been partially shattered and the stick felt sloppy in his hands.
Panicked and vulnerable, he scanned the skies for the other planes, only to see the German Messerschmitts circling at a distance, watching the duel in apparent confusion. For a few moments, he couldn’t place the other Spitfire. Then it appeared from behind the great sausage shape of the Brunel’s starboard gasbag, trailing smoke. As he watched, the pilot brought its nose up just enough to make the lip of the metal runway, and the plane hit the deck like a pancake, slithering on its belly, skidding around and around until — like an injured wasp blundering into a spider’s web — it was caught by the crash netting at the runway’s far end.
Trying to get a better view, Ack-Ack Macaque pressed his face to the jagged remnants of his cockpit’s canopy. For a moment, he dared to hope he’d been victorious. Then he saw a long-armed figure clambering from the wreck, and his lips peeled back in a snarl.
“You don’t get away that easily, monkey boy!”
With its prop splintered, the stricken Spit juddered violently. The engine, freed from the drag of the blades, threatened to shake itself, and the plane, apart. Ack-Ack Macaque fought to keep the wi
ngs level as he tried to reach the runway of the carrier Brunel, suspended between the twin dirigibles which bore its weight, an off-centre control tower midway down its length like the funnel of a ship. He side-slipped, bringing the plane’s nose into line with the crash netting at the runway’s end, where his opponent’s plane lay on its belly, smoke billowing from its shot-up engine.
K8 thought he was practically indestructible, and he hoped she was right, because this wasn’t going to be the daintiest landing he’d ever made. The Brunel loomed larger and larger in his crosshairs, filling his forward view. He could see deck hands sprinting for cover. Pale faces at the windows of the control tower. At the last moment, he pulled his knees up to his chest and braced his feet against the dashboard. A wild scream filled his throat, and the Spitfire’s prop buried itself in the metal deck at upwards of sixty miles per hour.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
WINGSUIT
MEROVECH AND JULIE found themselves alone in one of the first class cabins, behind the dining room in the main gondola. They perched opposite each other, he on the edge of the bed, she on a chair by the nightstand.
The walls of the cabin were currently a blank, gunmetal grey, but the SincPad screens covering them offered a variety of augmented reality options, from the lush greens and plunging cliffs of Big Sur to the lone and level sands of the Egyptian desert, and he watched Julie’s purple fingernail flick through the menu. As she scrolled, she said,
“I am sorry I got you into this.”
Merovech leaned forward.
“You didn’t get me into it. I was in it already, I just didn’t know.”
“But if I had not taken you on that raid—”
“You did me a favour. I had to find out sometime. If I hadn’t gone along with you, I might never have known the truth. I might have gone back into that clinic one day and come back out as somebody else. In fact, I’m pretty sure you’ve saved my life.”
“You say that, and yet you want to risk it all by going back there and confronting her?”
“I have to. Whatever else she is, she’s still my mother.”
The walls were still grey, like the inside of a battleship. Merovech felt a chill pass through him.
“But my father. He’s not really my father at all.”
“I am sorry. I know you loved him.”
“I can hardly believe it.” He shook his head, trying to clear it.
“I am sorry.”
“But how could he not have known?”
“Why should he have done? Your mother simply lied to him. With Nguyen’s help, she could have faked the pregnancy easily enough.”
Merovech closed his eyes. His mother and father had always been distant figures, more so than the parents of most of the boys at his boarding school, and even as a young child, he’d come to understand that they were people to be visited rather than lived with. He’d left his nursery at four years old, and had never gone back. The school had been his home. And when he’d left there at eighteen, he’d gone straight into the army for a year’s national service; and then on to university in Paris. School holidays aside, he hadn’t lived under the same roof as his mother in over fifteen years.
He knelt before Julie.
“Okay, she grew me and lied to me and filled my head with gelware.” He put his hands on her knees. “But what does that make me, Jules? What am I? Am I even human?”
Her eyes glittered. She reached a hand to cup his chin.
“Oh, Merovech. You are whoever you want to be. You are not to blame for any of this.” She put a hand up to touch the fading bruise at the side of her eye. “Whatever our parents have done to us, it is not our fault. We did not ask for any of it. We have to think of ourselves now. We have to salvage whatever we can.”
“No.” Merovech climbed to his feet. “If I have to live with what she’s done to me, the only way I can do so is by understanding why she did it.”
“But you do not have to confront her. You could send her a message. Make a phone call.”
“No. I want to hear her say it in person. I want to look into her eyes.”
“But, the danger—”
He crossed his arms.
“Life’s short, Jules. All we can do is make the best of it. I learned that lesson in the Falklands.”
Julie wiped her face with the sleeve of her cardigan.
“Why don’t you just stay here? The Tereshkova is going all the way to Mexico. We could go together, leave all this behind.”
Merovech sighed.
“I’ve got one of the planet’s most recognisable faces. Wherever I go, there’ll always be somebody trying to dig up a story or take a picture. I can’t run from this. And besides, I need to know why she’s done what she’s done.”
Julie pushed up the sleeves of her grey wool cardigan, and then pulled them back down again.
“Please, Merovech.”
He reached down and picked her hand from her lap.
“I need to do this, Jules. I need answers. And the only way I’ll get them is by facing up to her.”
Julie’s fingers pulled at his.
“Or you could just, you know, stay here, with me.”
“I can’t.”
“But why not? If we go to South America, we can find a little place and start again, somewhere away from your mother. It will just be the two of us. No parents at all.”
Merovech pursed his lips, enticing visions of white sand, grass huts and palm trees momentarily flickering, and then dying, behind his eyes.
“My mother owns one of the biggest technology companies on the planet. She’s one of the world’s richest women, and she has at her disposal the combined resources of the British and French secret services. Do you seriously think there’s anywhere in this world she couldn’t find us?” He pointed to his face. “And as I said, it’s not like I can easily hide, is it?”
Julie pouted. She tapped the touch screen menu, and the grey walls flickered away, replaced by a view across Hong Kong harbour, taken from the hundredth floor of a hotel at dawn, with low red mist over the water and the skyscrapers shining like bronze spears. She looked at the view for a long time and then said:
“So, how are you planning to do it?”
At first, Merovech assumed the wall image to be a still photograph. The city and its surroundings seemed motionless, like a held breath at sunrise. Then his eye caught a small boat cutting through the water.
“I’m not sure. I need time to think.”
He pulled off his hoodie. He’d been wearing the t-shirt beneath for three days now, and it stank. The Commodore’s staff had left clean towels on the bed, and white robes hanging on a hook on the back of the cabin door. He picked up a towel.
“I’m going to take a shower.” He reached for the door handle but, as he did so, a knock came from the other side. He pulled it aside to find Victoria Valois standing in the gangway with a large kit bag slung over her shoulder. She’d shed the heavy coat she’d been wearing when they met earlier, and was clad from toe to chin in black. She’d replaced her fleece hat with a long silk headscarf.
“We need to talk.”
VICTORIA LED HIM up the metal steps and along the wire-supported walkways of the airship’s interior, back up to the helipad at the top of the vessel. As he climbed out onto the springy black surface, the wind snatched at him like a thousand frozen fingers, and he rubbed his arms, wishing for his discarded hoodie.
“What can I do for you, Miss Valois?”
She gave a flick of her hand. “Please, call me Victoria.” She walked to the rail at the forward edge and looked out, across the bows. The silk scarf streamed back from her head like a mare’s mane.
“As we were in the hospital together,” she said. “I just wanted to ask: now you know about Céleste, and what they did to you while you were in there, what are you planning to do about it?”
Beyond the curve of the airship’s bow, Merovech could see the coast of Hampshire, with its submerged beaches and flooded har
bours. He took a long breath in through his nose.
“I’m going to find a way to confront my mother. After that, I’m not sure.”
“Would you like some help?”
He slid his fingers into the pockets of his jeans.
“No, thank you. This is about me. It’s my problem, and it’s up to me to fix it.”
She turned to him, scarf whipping.
“What if it can’t be fixed? This affects us both, Merovech. My husband worked for your mother’s company, and they killed him for it. If there’s a reckoning to be had, I want to be in on the action.” She leant her hip on the rail and crossed her arms. “You’re a smart kid, and you’ve done well to get this far. But what are you going to do, arrest her?”
Merovech shrugged. The thought had crossed his mind.
Victoria clicked her tongue.
“Forget it. She’s surrounded by her own security people. Berg said she had members of the army supporting her. You wouldn’t last five minutes. Remember, she tried to kill your father, and she’s planning to kill you. Your personality, at least. If you try to tackle her alone, you’ll be giving her exactly what she wants.”
Merovech shivered. The cold air seemed to slice right through him.
“We’re going to expose her,” he said. “We’re going to make the whole plot public. That’s why we’ve hooked the monkey back into the game. We’re going to use it to get the word out. These plots rely on power and secrecy. Once enough people know, we’ll have the weight of numbers on our side. She can’t run from the Internet.”
Victoria let the kit bag slip from her shoulder, onto the deck. She said, “That won’t be enough, I’m afraid. Not without concrete proof.”
“Then what do you suggest?”
“Tomorrow’s Unification Day. From what I can gather from the news channels, the Duchess will be celebrating it onboard her liner, the Maraldi, where she’ll be supervising the launch of the Martian probe. The invited guests will include most of the people on the Commodore’s list of the Undying. The King will be there too, moved by private ambulance, and, if what Berg implied is true, I don’t give much for his chances of surviving the night.”
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