The corner of Nguyen’s mouth twisted in a skewed smile. “No, I don’t believe you will.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve always been a very good judge of character and you, my young friend, you’re not the type.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
The old man held up a gnarled finger. “Ah, but you’re wrong. I know you very well. Or rather, I know the version of you that lives on my world. As a matter of fact, he’s on my surgical team.”
Paul felt his stomach flip, as if he was riding a plane in turbulence.
“He’s still alive?”
“Of course, why shouldn’t he be?” Nguyen removed his spectacles and regarded Paul with narrowed eyes. “Ah, I see.” He gave a nod of understanding. “You are dead. You are a back-up.”
The words were like icicles in Paul’s gut.
“So are you,” he blurted.
Nguyen shook his head sorrowfully. “Alas, I surmised as much. Tell me, how did I die?”
“You were shot.”
“By your people?”
Paul forced a smile. “By Alyssa Célestine.”
Nguyen sighed. For a moment he looked old and genuinely sad. “How… disappointing.”
“And now I need you to tell me how to find her.”
“Ah, so she got away, did she?”
“She fell through some kind of portal.” Paul drew his gun. “And she took a friend of mine with her.”
“I see.”
“Will you help me?”
“Probably not.”
A cold wind blew across the platform. High above, gulls cried.
“Then you leave me no choice.” Paul raised his weapon.
“What are you going to do, shoot me?” Nguyen chuckled. “What good will it do here? I have already been shot.”
Paul levelled the gun and swallowed. It was a light, compact pistol.
“This is your last chance,” he said, voice wavering.
Nguyen laughed at him.
“You can’t kill me,” he said.
Paul clenched his jaw. His finger tightened on the trigger.
“Maybe not,” he admitted. The gun fired with a savage jolt. Nguyen fell to his knees. His hands went to his stomach. Blood welled between his fingers. “But I’ll bet that hurts.”
The old man groaned.
“I need the coordinates of Célestine’s world,” Paul insisted. Nguyen looked up at him helplessly. Blood dribbled from his lips.
“What’s the matter?” Paul asked. “Can’t you talk?”
Nguyen shook his head. He opened his mouth and retched ropes of thick, red gore. Disgusted, Paul stepped forward and pressed the gun barrel to the doctor’s temple. The hot metal sizzled against the old man’s mottled skin.
“Better luck next time.”
VICTORIA WATCHED AS Paul pulled the trigger. She really hadn’t believed he’d actually do it, and she didn’t know whether to be relieved or horrified.
Beside her, K8’s fingernails rattled against the console’s keypad.
“Okay,” she said, “we’re re-spawning Nguyen in five, four, three, two…”
DOCTOR NGUYEN REAPPEARED at the exact centre of the helipad to find himself standing astride his own dead body, facing his killer, who brandished a still-smoking pistol.
“We can do this all day,” Paul said. “And it’s going to hurt just as badly every time.”
Nguyen put a hand to his stomach. Slowly, he looked up to meet his own reflection in Paul’s mirrored lenses.
“Perhaps we could come to some form of arrangement?”
Blam!
Nguyen tottered back on his heels, half-blinded by the muzzle flash. A hot, red pain skewered his chest. His pulse roared in his ears.
“Sorry,” he heard Paul say. “No deals.”
“RE-SPAWNING IN FIVE, four, three…”
CHAPTER TEN
CLAP OF SILENCE
PAUL’S HOLOGRAM STOOD at the edge of the wooden verandah. He’d changed out of his military fatigues, back into his Hawaiian shirt and white lab coat. His head was down, looking out through the Sun Wukong’s nose at the island of Kishkindha, and his hands were in the pockets of his jeans. The sun slanting in from the glass panels above rendered his peroxide blond hair a dazzling white.
“Are you okay?” Victoria walked over to stand beside him.
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
She gripped the bamboo rail. “Look, I’m really sorry. I expected him to give up much sooner than that.”
“Stubborn old git.” Paul looked ready to spit. “I think he was hoping I’d get sick of it before he did.”
Victoria wanted to hug him. “Is there anything I can do? I mean, I can’t offer you a stiff drink or anything, but if there’s something…”
“I’ll be all right.” His fingers worried at the gold stud in his ear. “I just need some time. I just need to forget.”
“It was worth it, you know.”
“Was it?” Paul kicked the toe of one trainer against the back of the other.
“He told us how to find Ack-Ack.”
A shrug. “Yes, I suppose.”
“Come on.” Victoria tried to sound cheerful. “The monkey would have done the same for you.”
“Would he?” Paul’s shoulders slumped even further.
“Yes, of course he would.” Victoria smiled. “Only more so.”
They stood side by side, looking down at the steep, tree-covered slopes of the volcano and the clustered huts of the monkey village. After a few minutes, Paul said, “I want to go home.”
Victoria looked at him. He sounded like a lost child, and she wanted desperately to take him in her arms.
“I’m serious,” he continued, as if she’d spoken. “As soon as we’ve got the monkey back, I want to go home, to our world, to our London. I want to see my flat again.”
Victoria bit her lip, all attempts at forced jollity abandoned.
“Pourquoi?”
Paul looked up at the sky and clicked his tongue behind his teeth.
“I don’t think I have much time left, and I’d rather be somewhere familiar, somewhere I remember, when it runs out. I don’t want to die in a strange place.”
Victoria felt her eyes prickle. Her vision swam.
“Okay,” she said.
“You promise?”
“Whatever you want, whatever I can do.”
Paul walked over to the edge of the potted jungle. A blue butterfly flapped between the trees.
“And I want you to promise me something else,” he said.
“Anything.”
He stopped beside a vine, and tried to cup his hand beneath the bloom of a large white flower, but his hologram fingers passed through its petals without disturbing them.
“When I’m gone, I want you to go back to the world where we left Cole and his daughter.”
“The one we’ve just come from?” Victoria shook her head. “After all the chaos we’ve just caused, I don’t think I’d be very welcome.”
“Nevertheless, you have to go back,” Paul maintained. “Sneak in, go in disguise, anything.”
Arms folded, Victoria walked over to him.
“But why?”
Paul’s hand dropped from the flower.
“Nguyen said that the Paul on his world still lived.” He gave her a sad, sly look. “And we already know Berg killed the Victoria that was there.”
“What are you saying?”
“Do I have to spell it out? You’ll be a Victoria without a Paul; he’ll be a Paul without a Victoria. You’ll need each other. You’ll need to be together.”
Victoria’s cheeks burned. A tear ran down her face.
“No,” she said.
Paul looked crestfallen. “I think you should do it, for me.”
Victoria shook her head again. “No, it wouldn’t be the same. He wouldn’t be you.”
Paul pursed his lips. “He’d be close. Maybe too close to tell apart
. Cole managed to find another version of his dead wife. Why can’t you do the same with me?”
Victoria felt her cheeks flush. “I don’t want another version, you idiot. I want you.”
“I’m just a recording.”
“You’re more than that!” She paused, letting the anger subside. “You’ve changed, you’ve grown.” He was now, she thought with a twinge of guilt, a far more caring and considerate person than he’d ever been while alive. Dreadful as it was to admit to herself, his death had, in some ways, improved their relationship beyond all recognition and, after everything they’d been through over the past three years, she couldn’t imagine starting again with a stranger—even a stranger with his face and mannerisms.
“No.” She wiped her eyes on the back of her sleeve and sniffed. She hadn’t cried properly in years, and she wasn’t about to start now. “No, that’s not going to happen. You’re my Paul, and I don’t want anybody else.” She swallowed down the lump in her throat. “I’m not going to lose you.”
He watched her as she straightened the collar of her tunic, brushed the medals into place, and gripped the pommel of her sword.
“Now, pull yourself together,” she said, straightening her back, unsure if she was talking to him or herself. “We’ve got a monkey to rescue.” She walked back to the edge of the verandah and looked out at the island. “Are the crew all aboard?”
Paul joined her.
“The Founder recalled them as soon as we had the coordinates.”
“She’s still here?” After the monkey’s long detention, Victoria had expected her to be down on the ground, enjoying the daylight and open space.
“She’s as interested in finding Ack-Ack as we are.”
“Very well. Sound the alarm. We jump in thirty seconds.”
“Thirty seconds?”
“There’s no telling what sort of trouble he’s in,” Victoria said. “The sooner we find him, the better.”
Paul gave a nod. He clicked his fingers and alarms wailed in the corridors and open spaces beyond the indoor jungle.
“I’m going to bring the engines online,” he said. He became very still, like a figure in a paused video, and Victoria knew his attention had moved elsewhere, focused on the Sun Wukong’s navigation systems. She looked down, over the bamboo rail, to where dark machines bulked in the verandah’s shadow. As the power rose, she felt the vibration through her hands and feet.
“Five,” Paul’s voice said over the ship-wide address system. “Four.”
Blue static danced over the machines.
“Three.”
A rising whine came from below, building rapidly, like the sound of an approaching train. Victoria braced herself.
“Two.”
The airship’s skin crackled with a green aurora.
“One.”
Victoria’s ears pulsed with a noise beyond hearing: a silent detonation. She felt her stomach turn itself inside out.
And they were gone.
BREAKING NEWS
From B&FBC NEWS ONLINE:
MESSAGE RECEIVED FROM MARS PROBE?
LONDON 17/11/2062 – Government sources are staying tight-lipped this evening regarding earlier reports of a possible message from the surface of Mars.
First mention of the message came at 04:20 GMT this morning, when an anonymous operator at the Parkes Observatory in Australia posted a report on the observatory’s website, as well as on a number of online message boards, claiming to have received a radio message from the Céleste probe. This report has since been taken down, and all references to it have been deleted.
At 06:40, NASA’s press office released a statement saying that they were monitoring the situation and, while ‘an anomalous signal’ had been received, it was ‘most likely natural in origin’, and ‘no cause for alarm’.
Céleste Technologies launched the probe three years ago, to coincide with celebrations to mark the centenary of the union of Great Britain and France. However the company, which was owned by the Duchess of Brittany, was disbanded following her foiled plot to assassinate her husband, King William V, and seize control of the Franco-British throne.
The controversial probe reached the red planet yesterday, carrying a cargo of allegedly stolen ‘souls’.
When it was launched, Céleste Technologies claimed the probe carried only scientific instruments, but according to recently unearthed documents, the probe actually carried ‘back-up’ personality recordings of the Duchess and other high-ranking members of Céleste Technologies staff, as well as several hundred personalities harvested from former employees, including some from murder victims. In addition, it also carried machinery capable of turning material from the Martian soil into cyborg bodies designed to house those stored personalities.
A spokesperson for the ESA said, “Mars is 225 million miles from the Earth. Even if these cyborgs exist, and I’m very far from being convinced that they do, there’s almost nothing they could do to threaten us from that distance.”
However, inside sources tell us the agency will be allocating additional funding to its experimental nuclear engine programme, designed to create boosters capable of pushing craft through interplanetary space.
When confronted with this information, the ESA spokesperson said, “While it is true that the project exists, and a number of test engines have been built, we have neither the resources nor the funding to construct a spacecraft capable of making the journey to Mars.”
Read more | Like | Comment | Share
Related Stories
Parallel worlds: How likely are we to be invaded again?
The King cancels royal visit to Canada.
Is there life on Mars?
Troubled ‘Ack-Ack Macaque’ film to premiere at Cannes.
Crew of the Tereshkova declared officially ‘lost’.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
TOUGH TO KILL
ACK-ACK MACAQUE TOOK shelter in the front room of a burned-out cottage, and peered through a broken window at the bridge. If he was right, the river it spanned was the Seine, and he was a few kilometres south of Paris. He could see a small town on the far bank, and a distant church tower. At each end of the bridge, barbed wire had been strewn across the road. The middle section of the bridge had collapsed into the water, leaving a tangled mess of girders and concrete. If he could somehow get across, he might be able to shake off his pursuers. Even a temporary reprieve would give him time to take stock, to look around and figure out how he’d get a message to Victoria. He was sure she’d be looking for him, but had no idea how she’d find him. Even if she somehow traced him to this new world, how would she know where he was hiding, and how could he let her know without giving his position away to the cyborgs on his trail?
He shivered, and pulled his sodden jacket tighter. The cottage smelled of damp and ashes. A few sticks of charred furniture remained. Every time he moved his feet, his boots crunched on shards of broken glass and crockery. Outside, rain fell from a bruised sky, pocking the surface of the river. The wind whipped dead leaves across the road. Thunder rumbled in the overcast.
When he’d woken up this morning, getting trapped in a post-apocalyptic wasteland hadn’t been high on his list of things to do—and yet, here he was. One instant he’d been charging the figure in the office, keeping low to avoid bullets. The next, he’d been rolling and sprawling on the shiny white floor of a different laboratory, on a different world altogether. The black-clad version of Célestine lay beside him on the tiles, winded, sucking in air. Behind them, the portal died, its light sputtering out like a dying candle. For long moments, Ack-Ack Macaque lay looking up at the strip lights. Then a squad of soldiers entered the room and he took flight, leaping through a window and hurling himself away, into the ruins of an industrial park.
Now, hours later, he was wet, cold and hungry, and the bastards were still chasing him.
“I should have stood and fought,” he grumbled, but he knew he couldn’t have won. The soldiers hadn’t been human. Each
had displayed the unnaturally smooth features, the waxy, sepia-coloured skin and tall, graceful builds he remembered from the last time he’d tangled with one of Nguyen’s cyborgs, back on his own timeline. They were human back-ups running on gelware brains, housed inside bodies equipped with titanium skulls and carbon fibre skeletons. One of them had been tough to kill; a whole squad would have been next to impossible. And so he’d run, and kept running.
Now, he needed food, ammunition and allies, and he needed time to think, to work out where he was and how he could find his friends—but he couldn’t do any of that until he got away from his pursuers.
He’d skirted several villages and suburbs, crossed half a dozen major roads, and had yet to meet a single human. Where was everybody? Thunder cracked and rolled, almost directly overhead. He could feel the rumble of it in his chest. He scratched at the leather patch covering his left eye socket, and yawned. If his geography was correct, the forest of Sénart lay a kilometre or so east of the river and, if he could only get to the trees, they’d never catch him.
First, though, he had to get across the river. It was too wide to swim, and looked to be running fast, swollen with rainwater. The broken bridge was his only option. It was a modern, two-lane highway with little in the way of cover, only steel railings on either side.
Well, I can’t stay here.
He stood and slithered over the windowsill, back out into the rain. Nguyen’s cyborgs were fast, and he’d have to keep moving if he wanted to stay ahead of them.
Macaque Attack! Page 7