“Can you blame me?”
His pale eyebrows shot up. “And what’s that supposed to mean.”
Victoria’s voice was a murderous whisper. “It means, now is hardly the time to be bitching and moaning about what we do or do not have. Now, either say something constructive, or tais-toi.”
She needed to be closer to the stage. Directly beneath her balcony, a raised first-floor terrace ran all the way around the edge of the arena. If she could get down to that, she could hopefully work her way around to the stage without being seen by the crowds on the arena’s floor. She glanced over her shoulder, at the glass doors from which she’d emerged. If she went back inside, she was more likely to bump into a security patrol, and she didn’t fancy getting lost in the Maraldi’s warren-like maze of corridors and stairwells.
Moving as stealthily as possible, she stepped over to the balcony’s side rail and swung her legs over. For a moment, she dangled by her hands, and then dropped. The fall took longer than she’d expected, and she hit the deck harder than she would have liked; but her parachute training kicked in and she rolled with the impact.
She ended up lying on her front beside a potted palm tree, at the end of a row of white plastic sun loungers. Keeping as still as possible, she lifted her head, braced for the sounds of discovery and alarm. But none came. Of the guards she could see on the rim of the arena, none seemed to be looking in her direction. Bars and cafés ringed the terrace, but they were all in darkness, shutters pulled and glass doors closed. The waist-high rail at the edge of the terrace hid her from the eyes of the crowd around the pool below.
In her head, Paul swore. His hand clutched the chest of his Hawaiian shirt.
“Jesus Christ! You could have warned me you were going to do that.”
“Sorry.”
Below, the crowd applauded. Using her hands, she pushed herself up into a kneeling position, and risked a peep over the rail. On the plasma screen, the BBC had switched to a live feed from the launch site. The rocket was a silver needle poking skyward from the clunky industrial frame of the repurposed oil rig, its flanks picked out from the surrounding darkness by the glare of powerful spotlights. Vapour streamed from its skin, catching the light.
In front of the screen, another spotlight picked out the figure of a woman, and Victoria felt herself tense. There she was: Her Grace Alyssa Célestine, the Duchess of Brittany; CEO of Céleste Group; and mother to Merovech, the Prince of Wales.
As she approached the podium, the crowd subsided. A new window appeared, superimposed over part of the picture on the plasma screen, showing a close-up of her face and shoulders. She held herself regally, chin up and shoulders back. Her necklace and tiara sparkled. Her greying hair had tiny roses woven into it that matched her lipstick, and her teeth were dazzling white. Her eyes, narrow and grey, surveyed the crowd.
Duchess Alyssa had been a successful businesswoman before meeting and marrying William in 2039; and she’d kept her independence, playing an active boardroom role in all her companies, in addition to her royal duties.
“My friends and honoured guests,” she began, her words echoing from speakers placed all around the arena. “It is with the greatest regret that I have to announce that the journey from England has proven too great a strain for my husband, and that he sadly passed away a few minutes ago.” She lowered her head. The crowd stood stunned. Victoria heard gasps. After maybe thirty seconds, Duchess Alyssa raised her head again, and her eyes bored into the camera.
“Just before he died, he asked me to convey the following message—”
At that moment, rough hands seized Victoria’s ankles and pulled hard. She found herself sliding backwards across the polished floor of the terrace, into the shade of an empty café. She tried to struggle, but the hands grabbed her shoulder and thigh, and flipped her over, onto her back.
Ack-Ack Macaque stood over her, regarding her with his one good eye, his pistol pointing at the bridge of her nose.
“Oh,” he said, raising the weapon. “It’s you.”
Victoria looked up at him in disbelief.
“What the hell are you playing at? You almost gave me a heart attack!”
The monkey grinned.
“Sorry, I had to be sure. From behind, you humans all look alike.”
Victoria elbowed herself up into a sitting position, and Ack-Ack Macaque crouched beside her.
“I’ve been working my way around this level,” he said. “So far, I’ve run into three armed guards.” He drew a finger across his throat.
Duchess Alyssa’s voice continued from the podium. Victoria said, “We should be down there. We need to get to the stage.”
“No worries.” Ack-Ack Macaque holstered his gun and drew a wicked-looking hunting knife. Victoria felt her eyes widen. Lord only knew where he’d got it, but she was prepared to bet its former owner wouldn’t be needing it back any time soon. He sprang to his feet, and reached down to pull her upright.
“Enough sneaking around,” he said. “Let’s try a good, old-fashioned frontal assault. I’ll clear a path, you get to the microphone.”
Victoria glanced up at the armed guards: tiny silhouettes against the night sky.
“What about them?”
“They won’t fire into the crowd.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Hell, no.” That goofy grin again. He led her over to the edge of the terrace.
“It’s too far for you to jump,” he said. “I’ll hold the rail and lower you.”
“Can you do that?”
“I’m stronger than I look.”
On the plasma screen behind the stage, the launch countdown had reached t-minus five minutes. In the upper right-hand corner of the screen, large white digits ticked off the remaining seconds.
They might as well be counting down to the end of the world, Victoria thought. She looked at Paul’s ghost, projected over her field of vision, and sighed.
“If we’ve got to go, I guess we may as well go out fighting.”
Before Paul could answer, Ack-Ack Macaque clapped Victoria on the shoulder.
“That’s the spirit!” He slithered over the rail and dangled by one hand. He raised the other to her. “Now you. Come on!”
Victoria hooked a leg over the precipice. The floor looked very distant. She guessed five or six metres. In her eye, she saw Paul cover his face with his hands.
Where’s your sarcasm now?
She let herself hang. Ack-Ack Macaque took her hand in his and lowered her. His grip felt like a wire trap. His body stank like a zoo. He lowered her and adjusted his hold. And before she knew it, her boots dangled above the arena floor, her hand gripped in the prehensile toes of his feet.
“Ready?”
She licked her lips. Now or never.
“Ready.”
The toes uncurled and she fell. She tried to roll as she hit the floor but, this time, she smacked her knee against the deck.
Swearing, she rolled over and scrambled painfully to her feet, trying to put as little weight on the throbbing joint as possible.
Ack-Ack Macaque landed beside her, lithe and nimble, hunting knife at the ready.
“Okay, lady,” he said. “I’ll see you at the stage.”
And with that, he was off, bounding towards the crowd. She flicked her quarterstaff to its full extent and followed, hobbling as best she could.
Ahead, the monkey crashed through the hindmost ranks of the audience. His knife flashed. His arms and legs became a windmill of savage blows. Taken by surprise, men and women screamed. Some crashed into the pool; others were felled where they stood. Panic spread like a bow wave before him, as the rows nearer the front turned to find the source of the disturbance bearing down upon them, yellow eye glaring, fangs gnashing. And on he ploughed, hardly breaking stride, as they scrambled to get out of his way.
She tried to keep pace. At first, the crowd were mostly too busy fleeing to pay her much attention; but that didn’t last. As they picked themsel
ves up from the monkey’s assault, they turned on her, their eyes and mouths wide with murderous anger.
A young man in a white tux tried to rush her, and she fought him back. But by then, she was surrounded. She held the staff in front of her, circling warily.
“Stay back,” she warned.
On the stage, Duchess Alyssa had become aware of the commotion. Her speech faltered. And, at that moment, the BBC coverage behind her changed abruptly. The floodlit silver rocket vanished, and Merovech’s face appeared. He was seated in the Commodore’s chair on the bridge of the Tereshkova. A ‘breaking news’ banner scrolled beneath him.
“That’s enough!” he shouted, his voice ringing from the speakers around the arena. He drew himself up in the chair and glared into the camera lens. “My name’s Merovech, Prince of Wales. I am the rightful heir to the throne, and I hereby claim what is mine.”
Duchess Alyssa’s crimson lips drew back from her perfect teeth in a snarl of rage.
“No!” She turned to the side of the stage making ‘cutting’ motions with her hands.
Merovech ignored her. “I have been the victim of a dark conspiracy, an attempted coup. But despite that, I am here to take up my father’s crown.” He leant forward, towards the camera, his projected face glowering down at the crowd. “And my first act as your new king is to order the immediate withdrawal of our ships in the South China Sea, and the arrest of my mother, the Duchess of Brittany.”
The crowd erupted. Some were horrified, others applauded. Their voices filled the arena. The men surrounding Victoria looked at each other. And then one of them tried to grab her. She stepped back and brought the tip of the staff smacking up into his left temple, dropping him where he stood. But by doing so, she’d put herself in reach of the man behind her. His hands clawed at her shoulders. She tried to twist away, but the other two caught hold of the ends of her staff and yanked it from her fingers.
She heard gunfire, and renewed screams, but couldn’t see where they came from, or who was shooting. Her world collapsed into a blur of thrashing arms and legs. She felt herself punched and kicked. The gelware did its best to smother the pain of each blow. She lashed out and felt her knuckles crunch into meat and bone, but too many people were on her now, and she was suffocating beneath their weight. It was like trying to fight the incoming tide. She couldn’t breathe. She tried to kick, but her legs were pinned.
Okay, she thought. Time to get drastic.
Retreating back inside herself, she kicked her consciousness up into command mode and dialled all the settings as high as she could. Time stretched. The pummelling of fists and bodies slowed to an insistent jostling. She opened her eyes, and felt her heart buck in her ribcage as her adrenal glands came online, flooding her bloodstream with hysterical strength.
At least two hands held her right arm. She tugged it free and punched upward, towards the stars. Her knuckles clipped one man’s face, and buried themselves in the gut of another. She pulled back and struck again. And again. Voices cried in pain and indignation. Some of the weight pinning her eased. She squirmed a leg free and let fly a kick that lifted one of her attackers off the ground, sending him rolling and tumbling into the swimming pool. A sideways jab with her left elbow broke somebody’s nose. And then the survivors were scrambling to get away from her, leaving only the unconscious and unmoving to weigh her down. She struggled free and scrambled to her feet. At least one of her ribs was cracked. Her nose bled and her knuckles were a ragged mess, but she didn’t care. Terror and regret were safely confined to the biological section of her brain, their voices muffled like those of noisy neighbours, and quite separate from the rest of her thoughts. Locked into the artificial clarity of her operating system, all she felt was fierce exhilaration. Nuclear fire might pour from the heavens at any moment but, until it did, she wasn’t going to surrender to anybody. She’d been hurt enough. She’d been drugged, attacked and operated upon, and now it was her turn to fight back. At least thirty guys ringed her now. She didn’t stand a chance, and knew it; yet, somehow, it hardly mattered. She flexed her shoulders. The faces surrounding her betrayed fear and anger. Somewhere near the stage, Ack-Ack Macaque fought a similar battle of his own, against equally insurmountable odds.
As she glanced in that direction, she saw the plasma screen cut to static. A pulled plug or an electromagnetic pulse? Were the bombs falling on London already?
The Duchess stood in front of the screen, caught in the glare of the world’s media. She pointed a long finger into the crowd, shouting instructions no-one could hear.
Victoria looked back to the men around her. They were edging forward. She recognised a few from her days as a journalist: a scattering of minor politicians, a few media types, one or two millionaires. Some of them clutched broken chair legs; others held champagne bottles as improvised clubs. She turned around slowly, staring them each in the eye. Then she hawked, and spat bloody phlegm at their feet.
One of the men stepped forward. He was a good head and shoulders taller than her, and built like the proverbial brick shithouse. The arms of his tuxedo bulged with muscle. He had the shaven head and swollen neck of a professional boxer, and each and every one of his fingers sported a thick gold ring.
Here we go, she thought.
But then, before he could get close enough to strike, the sky flashed, and heads turned. The light came from the west. Instinctively, Victoria flinched away, waiting for the heat and fire of a nuclear blast. But the shockwave never came, and when she raised her head again, she saw a spear of light rising into the night sky.
The rocket had launched.
All those stolen souls were on their way to Mars, and she could do nothing to stop them. Was there a copy of her aboard, or had Vic been the only one?
She didn’t have much time to consider the question, as no-neck turned his attention back to her, his lip curled in a sneer. Behind him, the rest of the mob flexed. His contempt of her made them brave. They were getting ready to rush her again and, this time, she wouldn’t be able to fight them all off.
This was it.
“Goodbye, Paul.”
She took up a defiant stance, bloodied knuckles raised and ready.
And something huge blocked out the stars.
The big guy didn’t see it: he had his back to it. He swung at her with a paw like a bag of pig’s trotters, and she ducked to the side. But by now, the others had seen what was coming, and they had started to run.
Victoria laughed at them. Where could they go? The Tereshkova was longer and wider than the Maraldi, and it was diving right at them. There could be no escape.
She stood and watched the crippled airship grow larger and larger, filling the oval of sky described by the rim of the arena. And then, just as she judged it was about to hit, she turned and threw herself full-length into the swimming pool.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
MONKEY-EX-MACHINA
THE CRASH WENT on and on. Coming in at a relatively shallow angle, the Tereshkova pancaked onto the liner like a whale throwing itself onto a rock. The belly of the gondola scraped the upper surfaces of the ship, snapping off radar and communication antennae. The tops of the funnels crumpled, and the Maraldi heaved sideways, pushed almost completely over, before righting itself as the Tereshkova’s five sterns dropped into the sea and the noses came up, relieving some of the pressure on the liner’s superstructure.
Glass and debris rained into the arena. The water in the swimming pool sloshed back and forth, and Victoria had to fight to stay afloat. Struggling against the weight of her sodden clothes, she pushed through a floating morass of dead bodies and broken patio furniture. She reached the edge of the pool and hauled herself out. Water ran from her, and she collapsed onto the deck.
Overhead, the five hulls of the Tereshkova formed a roof to the arena. The hatches of the main gondola were flung open, and ropes thrown out. Then, before anyone on the Maraldi had time to react, white-jacketed stewards were sliding down, rifles and submachine guns from
the Commodore’s armoury slung over their crisply-ironed shoulders.
Victoria lay on the deck, bleeding from a dozen separate wounds, and laughed.
“You mad old goat,” she said. “You crazy, stubborn, brilliant man.”
And then, he was there in person, coming down one of the ropes, hand-over-hand. She recognised his white hair and red sash, and the cutlass dangling from his belt. And there, behind him, was Merovech: the new king himself, sliding into battle with the troops.
In her eye, she saw Paul hovering over her, looking concerned.
“Vicky? Are you okay?”
She laughed again. “I’m fine. I’m going to hurt like hell tomorrow; but right now, I feel brilliant.”
“That’s the drugs talking.”
“Damn straight.”
She used her sleeve to wipe blood and snot from her nose, then sat up and pulled herself stiffly to her feet. The Commodore’s boots had touched down on the deck a short distance away, and she limped over to greet him.
The old man had his cutlass drawn, and was using it to direct his stewards, while barking orders in Russian. His yellow teeth gnashed beneath the white forest of his moustache.
“Be careful.” She squinted at the sword. “Or you’ll have somebody’s eye out with that.”
He turned to her. Despite the white hair and injured hip, he looked twenty years younger, and his eyes held a wild glint. He gripped her shoulder with his free hand. “Good to see you, girl.”
Her soaked clothes were dripping onto the deck. She looked at the stage. “Where’s Célestine?”
“The Duchess?” The Commodore scowled. From his belt, he pulled an automatic pistol. “Take this,” he said.
Victoria palmed the gun. It was heavier than she’d been expecting: a solid chunk of metal in her hand.
“Over there.” The Commodore waved the tip of his sword at the other side of the pool, where Merovech stalked in the direction of the stage, still clad in his ratty jeans and red hoodie, a black Uzi machine pistol clasped in his hands. “Follow him.”
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