Back we go…
She gripped the arms of the chair. Unlike the world she called home, on this parallel France and England were separate countries, and she guessed the French wouldn’t be too keen at the prospect of a heavily armed dreadnought ploughing through their airspace.
Still, it’s not as if they’ve got anything big enough to shoot us down.
For a moment, her thoughts turned back to the apartment, and the blonde woman lying dead on the parquet floor.
Just let them try…
Over the past two years, she’d seen dozens of worlds, each a little different to the last. She’d seen versions of Europe riven by war and famine; versions ruled over by resurgent British, German or Roman Empires; and versions controlled by every ‘-ism’ under the sun, from capitalism to communism to religious fundamentalism. She’d walked their streets listening to the put-put-put of steam-driven cars; seen gleaming supersonic airliners cleave the skies; watched gigantic Soviet hovercraft patrol the Thames Estuary; and taken a ride through a Transatlantic Tunnel wide enough for four lanes of traffic. And in all that time, on all those worlds, had encountered nothing capable of putting more than the most cursory of dents in the Sun Wukong’s armour plate.
“All engines online and showing green,” reported Paul.
Victoria glanced around at the bare metal walls with their lines of rivets. She’d been away for a month and half, and now saw the cold, spartan interior with fresh eyes. She knew the monkeys didn’t care about the lack of décor, but she missed the shabby elegance of her old skyliner, the Tereshkova. At least she had the bridge of this vessel pretty much to herself. Paul could run the ship, it didn’t need a crew; and none of the monkeys were all that interested in acting like one. To them, the airship was simply a moving home—a means to get from one adventure to the next. Even Ack-Ack Macaque came up here only occasionally. He was happy in his potted jungle, and could issue commands from there as well as anywhere.
Victoria tapped her nails against the chair’s armrests.
“Then, full speed ahead, all engines.”
“Aye.”
At the rear of the dreadnought, on a forest of engine nacelles, huge black blades began to turn. Moving slowly at first, they gradually increased their speed until they blurred into whirring grey discs, and the vast craft to which they were attached began to slide reluctantly forwards, slowly picking up momentum. Sunlight glimmered from its gun turrets and sensor pods. Two thousand metres in length, it moved like an eclipse across the world’s busiest shipping lane, its rippling shadow dwarfing even the largest of the Channel’s car ferries and container ships.
Victoria Valois felt the vibration of the airship’s engines through the gondola’s steel deck and smiled. Even though they were riding into battle, it was comforting to be airborne again, and to know that she rode the largest flying machine this particular version of the Earth had ever seen.
STANDING AT THE window of her cabin, K8 looked out through a ten-inch thick porthole. Despite her exertions with the seaplane, she still wore her habitual white skirt and blouse. It was her uniform now, as seemly and natural as blue jeans and a black t-shirt had been to her younger self.
“We’re not a child any more. We’re nearly twenty.”
Beside her, Ack-Ack Macaque scratched at the leather patch covering his left eye.
“Yeah, but—”
“You can’t stop us.”
“I fucking can.”
She looked him in the eye. “No, you fucking can’t.”
He watched her cross her arms across her chest, and turn back to the window. Her hair looked bronze in the light; her freckles like sprinkles fallen across her nose and cheeks. He pulled the cigar from his mouth and rolled it between finger and thumb.
“So, what am I supposed to do?”
She didn’t look around.
“Just take us somewhere we can connect back into the hive mind.”
Ack-Ack sighed. He watched the smoke twisting in the cabin’s air.
“This is partly my fault, isn’t it?”
K8 made a scornful noise. “Of course it’s your fault. It’s your entire fault. You gave us to the hive.”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“We never said you did.” She hunched her shoulders. “We just need to get back, to reconnect.”
“But why?”
She hugged herself, gripping her upper arms. “You wouldn’t understand.”
Ack-Ack Macaque frowned. He could see sweat on her lip.
“I thought you’d be better off here,” he said, “cut off from the rest of them.”
“You were wrong.”
“Well, excuse me.”
K8 winced at his sarcasm. She passed a hand across her face, and turned to face him. “Look, we’re sorry, okay? We know you were trying to help. It’s just tough for us now, to be alone.”
“Tell me about it.”
“This is different.”
Ack-Ack Macaque sat heavily on the edge of the bed. “I don’t see how. So you’re the only Gestalt drone on this rock. Big whoop. I spent years as the world’s only talking monkey.”
“But now you have an army.”
He grinned. “Yeah, but most of them are assholes.”
K8 looked him in the eye, expression serious. “Most of them are variations of you.”
“Asshole variations.”
“Well, imagine losing them.” She straightened the hem of her jacket with a tug. “Imagine going back to being the only one of your kind after being surrounded by all those others. How do you think that would feel?”
Ack-Ack Macaque shifted his position on the bed, getting more comfortable on the mussed blankets.
“Pretty shitty,” he admitted.
“Well, that’s what we’re going through. The majority of the Gestalt aren’t fanatics. Only the leaders were evil. Most of the drones are ordinary, decent people caught up in something bigger than themselves. And they welcomed us. They took us for who we were and welcomed us. For the first time in our life, we felt truly accepted; truly part of a family.”
“The ‘first time’, huh?”
“Don’t be like that.” She stuck her chin forward. “We come from a broken home. Our only friend was a talking monkey.”
“I thought we were doing okay.”
“We were.” She rapped the side of her head. “But now it’s too quiet. We can’t stand it.”
Ack-Ack Macaque looked down at his hairy hands.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “If I could get that computer stuff out of your head…”
“We don’t want it out.”
He pulled a cigar from the inside pocket of his flight jacket.
“Then what should I do? I can’t just give you back to the hive.”
“It’s what we want. We need to be whole again.”
“But, Nguyen—”
“We’ll help you with Nguyen. But after that, you take us back, okay?”
He huffed air through his cheeks. He could tell she wasn’t going to drop the subject, and he couldn’t be bothered to argue any more. Best just to agree now and deal with the consequences later.
“Okay,” he said.
“You promise?”
Ack-Ack Macaque screwed the cigar into his lips and lit it. All he wanted was some peace and quiet. “Sure.”
“Then we have a deal.”
“Thank fuck for that.”
K8 uncrossed her arms and perched beside him. “What do you need us to do?”
Ack-Ack suppressed a yawn. “I need you to get on the jump engines and plot our escape. I don’t want to hang around after we’ve trashed Nguyen’s lab. I can do without a run-in with the French air force.”
K8 raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t sound like you, Skipper.”
“Maybe I’m getting old.”
“Seriously?”
“We’re about to attack a civilian government contractor.” He blew at the tip of his cigar, watching the cherry-red ember flar
e. “The French are going to take that as an act of terrorism. They’ll send planes.”
“They don’t have anything that can hurt us.”
“Not straight away.” Ack-Ack Macaque got to his feet and shambled to the door. “But as soon as we shoot one of them down, they’ll send ten more. We’ll be fighting a war and, frankly, I’m just too tired for all that crap.” He scratched his belly. Some mornings, he ached all over, and he had to get up at least twice every night to take a piss.
“So, you want us to go in fast, hit them hard, and then vanish?”
“Bingo.” He turned the handle and stepped out into the gangway beyond. “Oh, and K8?”
“Yes, Skip?”
“Try to find us somewhere nice, okay?”
“Define ‘nice’.”
“Ah, you know.” He waved a hand. “All the usual shit. White sand, blue sea, coconut trees. No incoming fire.”
“You want us to plot a course back to Kishkindha?”
Ack-Ack Macaque let his shoulders and cigar droop.
“If you must.”
MEANWHILE, AS THE Sun Wukong crossed the coast of France, Victoria stood on the verandah inside the airship’s glass nose. Paul’s image stood beside her. Together, they watched the craft’s shadow pass over the white waves and yellow beaches of the Normandy shore, and Victoria caught herself wondering how many human bones lay forever buried in those deceptively welcoming sands. Was there anywhere in Europe that hadn’t been a battlefield at least once? She squeezed the verandah’s bamboo rail. Behind her, in the potted forest, birds chirped and squawked.
“So,” she said.
Paul gave her a sideways glance. “So?”
“This forgetfulness…”
He made a face. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“You’re supposed to be running this ship.”
“I know, I know.” He looked down at his red baseball boots, and rubbed the side of his nose with the index finger of his right hand. “It’s just, I get these headaches.”
Victoria blew air through pursed lips. “Merde.”
“What?”
“You’re the expert, you tell me.”
Paul looked up at the sky. “You think I’m de-cohering?”
“You’ve lasted a lot longer than most.”
He sighed. “Maybe you’re right.”
“Seriously?”
“Don’t think it hasn’t occurred to me. Don’t think that, since I found I was a back-up, I haven’t thought about it every single minute of every single day.” He waved his arms in exasperation. “How do you think it feels to realise you have a built-in expiry date?”
Victoria watched as his image walked to the wrought iron table and appeared to flop onto one of its attendant chairs.
“What can we do?” she asked.
He gave an angry shrug. “How the hell would I know?”
“You know more than most.”
“Still not enough.”
They fell silent. Below, the beaches had given way to brown fields and winding lanes.
“I don’t want to do it,” Victoria said quietly, “but, if you need me to, I can always switch you off, permanently.”
Paul’s eyes widened. “No. No, absolutely not. Why would you say that?”
She walked over and crouched in front of him, wishing she could take his hand in hers.
“Then, I’ll be here for you,” she promised, “as long as you need me.”
Paul looked down at her. His forehead wrinkled. “Do I sense a ‘but’?”
Victoria rocked backwards on her heels. “But I think we should disengage you from some of the airship’s more vital systems.”
She let out a breath.
There, I’ve said it.
The apparition on the chair blinked at her from behind his spectacles. “You think I can’t handle this?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think.”
“Of course it does.” He leaned forward. “Vicky, I need to know that you believe in me.”
“Of course I believe in you.” She felt flustered. “But you’ve lasted so long, so much longer than anybody else in your position. I just—”
“What?”
“I think we need to take precautions.”
His chin dropped to his chest, and his eyes closed. When he finally spoke, his voice was small and tired. “Look, I know you’re right. But, not just yet, okay?”
“Then, when?”
He raised his eyes to her. “I don’t know. I want to be useful. I know I’m deteriorating, but there’s something I want to do first, before…” He coughed, stumbling over his words. “Before the end.”
“What?”
“It’s a surprise. I just need a bit of time. Can you give me that?”
Hands pressing on her thighs, Victoria pushed herself back up onto her feet. “I don’t know. If you start to—”
“If I endanger the ship, you can cut me out of the loop. I’ll rig up a protocol.”
She chewed her lower lip. The Sun Wukong was a monster: two thousand metres of gasbags, aluminium struts and thick armour plating, powered by dozens of nuclear-electric turbines. If something went wrong and it crashed into a populated area, the devastation would be appalling.
Paul looked at her over the rim of his glasses. “Please?”
Victoria took a deep breath. She couldn’t refuse him; she never could. He was like a little boy. “Okay, for now. But the second you start to have any doubts, you tell me.”
“I love you.”
She felt her cheeks redden. “I know. I love you too.”
Paul’s nervous smile was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. He jumped to his feet. “In that case, let’s go and cause some trouble.”
Victoria grinned despite herself. She wiped her eyes on the back of her wrist, and drew herself up to her full height. Further discussion could wait. For now, it was time to focus on the task at hand.
“Right,” she said, “give me full speed ahead and don’t stop for anything.”
“There isn’t anything that can stop us, short of a nuclear blast.”
“Well, let’s hope we don’t run into any of those.”
“Amen to that. Now, hold on tight. I’m putting us on an…” He clicked his fingers, searching for the right words. “Um…”
“Attack approach?”
“Yeah.” He looked sheepish. Victoria rolled her eyes.
“Oh, mon dieu.”
CHAPTER FOUR
PHOENIX EGGS
FROM THE WINDOW of his office on the third floor of Buckingham Palace, Merovech watched the rain falling over London. On the mahogany desk behind him, sheaves of paperwork awaited his attention and his inbox bulged with unanswered email. He wasn’t in the mood to pay either more than a cursory glance. He’d rolled up his shirtsleeves and loosened his black tie. A glass of single malt nestled, half forgotten, in his hand.
At first, he’d intended to remain king only as long as it took to restore national calm following the death of his parents and the revelation of his mother’s complicity in an attempted coup d’état. But that had been three years ago, before the Gestalt invasion and the death of his fiancée. Since then, everything had changed. The world had become stranger and more threatening than anybody could have guessed, and his Commonwealth needed him. They needed a figurehead and a sense of continuity, and he was the most qualified to offer both. Whatever the secret truth of his origins—that he’d been cloned in a lab from one of his mother’s cells—he’d been raised to be monarch, and nobody else had his level of training or preparation. His people needed him and, truth be told, he needed them. With Julie gone, he had nothing else.
The rain blew across the Mall, shaking the leafless trees lining the road. Car headlights shimmered through the gloom. To the east, a twin-hulled skyliner thrummed its way upriver, following the twists and turns of the Thames. Its navigation lights blinked red and green. As he watched, it passed behind the forest of cranes towering over Westm
inster, where the government buildings were still being rebuilt, rising like misshapen, blocky phoenix eggs from the craters left by the Gestalt’s bombardment.
How many times had this city rebuilt itself? The inhabitants seemed used to chaos and ruin; in fact, they seemed to revel in their resilience. From the destruction wrought by Boudicca, and then the Great Fire of 1666, through to bomb attacks by the IRA and Al Qaeda, via the Zeppelin raids of the First World War and the Blitzkrieg pummelling of the Second, Londoners had always been fiercely proud of their ability to keep calm and carry on, even in the most trying of circumstances. And these past two years had been no exception. Faced with a baffling multiverse of potential threats, the capital was doing what it had always done: going about its daily life with scarcely more than a shrug and tut. As long as the Tube ran, the people were happy. Whereas other cities such as Pompeii, Petra, Hashima Island, and Detroit had fallen by the wayside during London’s two thousand years of history, the Mother of All Cities had simply endured, and always would.
Looking down, Merovech remembered the glass in his hand, and raised it to his lips. Set against the ravages of the past, the damage left by the Gestalt—a few dozen bomb craters, some demolished buildings—seemed minor and ephemeral, a hiss and a pop in history’s sizzling pan; but that was only until you remembered the three thousand dead bodies that had been pulled from the rubble. Three thousand innocent men, women and children who had been caught in a conflict they couldn’t possibly have foreseen or understood, killed in a surprise attack.
He rinsed the whisky around his teeth. His wife had been among them. At least, she would have been his wife if she’d lived. The date of their wedding had been set, and the preparations had been under way. Then a Gestalt dreadnought appeared in the skies over London and showered missiles on Whitehall.
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