Macaque Attack!

by Gareth L. Powell

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  INCOMING

  WITH VICTORIA AND Merovech on the bridge, the Sun Wukong retraced its steps, back towards the field near Paris where the portal stood. Merovech had stayed on board despite the express objections of his security people. He didn’t want to miss this. The only concession he’d made to their concerns was to don a helmet and flak jacket.

  As the site of the incursion became obvious on the horizon, Victoria saw at least twenty of the large vehicles spread out in a fan shape, their huge caterpillar tracks having flattened trees, power lines and stone walls with as much ease as the first tank had flattened her helicopter. Above them, four ex-Gestalt dreadnoughts hung like armoured thunderclouds, dispensing volleys of missiles whenever a Leviathan dropped its shields for a split second.

  “Looks like a stalemate,” she said. “The tanks can’t shoot the airships because they daren’t lower their force fields in order to fire, and the airships can’t hurt them in return while their force fields are in place.”

  Merovech stood silhouetted against the front window, peering forward.

  “So they’re just sitting there, looking at each other?”

  “Not exactly.”

  The cannon on the front of one of the Leviathans boomed, gushing smoke and flame. At the same instant, a rain of black torpedoes fell from the nearest dreadnought. Both vehicles rocked with the forces of impacts and explosions.

  “It’s a war of attrition,” Victoria said from the command chair. “They’re going to keep plugging away at each other until eventually someone’s going to score a lucky hit, or they all run out of fuel and ordnance.”

  “It seems so pointless.”

  “Well, nobody ever said war had to make sense.” She rose and walked over to join him, right hand resting on the pommel of her sword. “The Founder says there are Gestalt advisors on each of the airships, helping coordinate the attacks.”

  “I suppose that makes sense.”

  “You don’t sound too keen?”

  Merovech let his hands fall to his sides. “I know they surrendered, and I know they’ve been a big help with the rebuilding and everything.” His voice caught. The light shimmered in his eyes. “I just can’t forgive them for what happened to Julie.”

  Without thinking, Victoria reached out and took him by the shoulder.

  “It’ll be okay.”

  He shook his head and put a hand to his mouth. “How can you know that?”

  “Because I’m going through the same thing with Paul.”

  “Paul’s dead?”

  “Paul’s been dead for three years.”

  “But his back-up?”

  “It’s falling apart.”

  Merovech swallowed, and wiped his eyes. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Not unless you’ve got a way to get us to Mars.” Ahead, one of the dreadnoughts took a hit to one of its engine nacelles and peeled off, side-slipping away from the fight with all the majesty of an iceberg calving. Smoke trailed from its damaged impeller.

  “If I had,” Merovech said, “I’d be using it to stop that asteroid.” He looked sideways at her. “Do you really think Ack-Ack’s got a plan?”

  “He says he does.”

  “What do you think?”

  Victoria gave an elaborate shrug. “Who knows? But he’s been talking it over with K8; I think he’s confident.”

  “He hasn’t told you what it is?”

  “He will when he’s ready.”

  “But you trust him?”

  “Trust him?” Victoria laughed at the absurdity of the idea. How could she trust somebody so fundamentally unreliable?

  And yet…

  “He’s never let me down.”

  Merovech looked hopeful. “You think he’s onto something?”

  “Could be.”

  “He’s really going to try to save the world?”

  “Or die trying.”

  The young king gave a nervous laugh. “Well, that’s all I can ask.”

  Victoria gave his arm a comradely pat. She knew she should leave it there, change the subject or walk away, but found she couldn’t.

  “What happens if he can’t save it?” The old journalistic itch was playing up again, and she just had to know. “Is there a plan B?”

  Merovech’s jaw tightened. “We have the nuclear shelters. A few of us might survive, but only until the stored food runs out.”

  “What about the dreadnoughts?”

  “What about them?”

  “They can jump to other parallels. You could load them up with people, use them as life rafts.”

  Merovech’s brow creased thoughtfully. “How many can they hold?”

  “I don’t know. A thousand each, maybe.”

  “It’s not enough.”

  “You have six months.” Victoria waved her arms helplessly. “You could keep coming back for more, right up until the impact. You’d get tens of thousands out. It would be worth doing.”

  “But how would we decide who to take?”

  “Does it matter?” She barked with incredulous laughter. “Just take as many as you can.”

  “But where would we go?”

  “We’d find somewhere. If the monkey army can set up a homeland, we can too.”

  Merovech looked unconvinced. “But the ones left behind, they’d still be killed.”

  Victoria took a deep breath, feeling suddenly powerless. However much she tried, there was no way around the scale of the coming catastrophe. She’d seen the damage projections. Whatever she did, whatever any of them did, that rock was going to hit the Earth like a hammer, and when it did, there would be a colossal explosion. Everything in an area the size of Australia would be vaporised on impact. The rest of the world would be battered by secondary impacts, rattled by earthquakes, and drowned beneath tsunamis. So much dust and ash would be thrown up into the atmosphere that the sun’s rays would be unable to heat the surface for years, maybe decades. Without its warmth, the remaining plants would wither and die, as would the animals and people that depended on them. The food chains would collapse. Some life might survive, clinging to hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the deepest oceans, but within a few years, the human race would be as dead as the dinosaurs and the ravaged Earth left for Célestine and her army of Martian cyborgs to inherit. It was Armageddon, Ragnarök and the Mayan Apocalypse, all rolled into one, and all Victoria could do was cross her fingers and hope Ack-Ack Macaque wasn’t bullshitting when he claimed to know what he was doing.

  AMY LLEWELLYN MARCHED onto the bridge, heels tapping across the deck with staccato urgency.

  “I’m sorry, sir.” She was out of breath. “I have to show you something.” Without waiting for a reply, she crossed to the tactical display and pulled out a data crystal. “May I, Captain?”

  Victoria waved a generous hand. “Be my guest.” She watched the Welsh girl slot the crystal into the console and tap at the glass-topped controls with a painted nail. Above the forward window, the main display screen fuzzed, and then brought up a blurred picture.

  “This was taken twenty minutes ago,” Amy explained, “by one of our high-altitude reconnaissance planes.”

  Victoria frowned at the image. It showed a black triangle, obviously an aircraft of some kind, hanging above the curve of the Earth. The sky behind it was mauve, shading to black. Where the harsh sunlight struck its flank, it gleamed a metallic blue.

  “What is it?” Merovech asked.

  “I don’t know.” Amy’s voice held the brittleness of an icicle. “But it’s the size of a house and it doesn’t show up on radar.”

  “Have you checked with the Americans?”

  “They think it’s Chinese.”

  “And the Chinese?”

  “They think it’s American.”

  Merovech gaped. “Are you telling me nobody knows what it is?”

  Victoria stepped forwards. “Could
it be from Mars?”

  They both looked at her. Amy Llewellyn shrugged and increased the magnification, which made the blurred triangle larger but revealed little in the way of additional detail. “It’s big and it’s fast,” she said, “and we have absolutely no idea what it is or where it’s from.”

  “Jesus.” Merovech rubbed his knuckles into his eyes. He looked ready to drop. “Can we track it?”

  “No, sir,” Amy tapped her knuckle against the image. “It outpaced our guys as if they were standing still. They only had time to snap this picture.”

  “Where were they when they took it?”

  “Over the Atlantic, sir.” Without seeming to notice, Amy bit the corner of one of her perfectly manicured nails.

  “Did they get a fix on its course?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well?”

  She blew a fragment of painted nail from the corner of her mouth. Behind her professional façade, her eyes were wide and scared. When she spoke, her accent was more pronounced than before. “Well, it seems to be heading this way.”

  An alarm sounded on the Sun Wukong’s bridge. Victoria shouldered the girl aside and checked the tactical display.

  “Merde. We’ve got incoming. A pair of helicopters.”

  “Hostile?” Merovech asked.

  “Without a doubt.”

  “Can you shoot them down?”

  “No, they’re wrapped in the same energy fields as the tanks.”

  “What about when they fire?”

  “They’re not firing. I think they’re a boarding party.”

  “What do we do?” Merovech looked around, as if searching for a weapon.

  “You stay here,” Victoria told him. “Post guards on the door. Take command of the flotilla, keep up the attack.”

  “And you?”

  Victoria drew her sword. “I’m taking the remaining monkeys topside. We’re going to be there to welcome them when they land.”

  BREAKING NEWS

  From Curious Occurrences (online edition):

  UFO sightings

  American authorities are investigating a series of bizarre UFO sightings, with reports coming in from as far afield as Tokyo, San Diego, and Havana.

  At 15:00 hours GMT, observers in Japan reported a large fireball, which moved slowly across the sky from west to east, accompanied by a loud roaring noise. An hour later, the crew and passengers of a Puerto Rican cruise liner watched a ‘gigantic’ spacecraft pass slowly overhead, again accompanied by a loud roaring sound. One of the British passengers on the vessel, Mr. Richard Lewis from Birmingham, filmed the incident on his mobile phone and uploaded the footage to his social media profile.

  “It was incredible,” he wrote in his status update, “I’ve never seen anything like it. It wasn’t an airship. I don’t know what it was.”

  In another peculiar instance, the pilot of an airliner called in to report a ‘close encounter’ over Baja California, describing a craft that looked “A bit like a space shuttle without wings. It was blue, and had these huge rocket exhausts sticking out the back.”

  Online speculation suggests the appearance of these craft could herald another invasion from a parallel world but, so far, the US Air Force has refused to confirm or deny the validity of the sightings. In a brief statement, it acknowledged that an investigation was under way, urged people not to panic, and promised that the public would be ‘kept informed’ of developments.

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  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CUDDLES

  THE CHURCH STOOD at the edge of the village. Like many churches in that part of rural France, it was small, rectangular and austere, with little in the way of carvings or other ornamentation, just a single stained glass window and a lone bell at the top of a modest tower. In its graveyard, Ack-Ack Macaque crouched behind a headstone and looked out at the tanks lumbering through the fields beyond the village. Even at this range, he didn’t need binoculars. The damned things were the size of buildings and he could feel the earth tremble with the vibration of their tracks. Behind him, the village itself had already suffered half a dozen hits, but he couldn’t tell whether these had been the result of accident or deliberate attack. The inhabitants, clutching suitcases, children and cats, were fleeing in the direction of the main road. In the village square, two houses and a boulangerie were on fire and the war memorial had been toppled. He could smell wood smoke and hot bread, and the faintest traces of incense and candle wax from the church.

  He took a moment to consider the memorial’s broken column. How many times had this territory been fought over? The First and Second World Wars had left their scars on the landscape from here to Norway, but there was a history of conflict and dispute in this area stretching back through the Napoleonic Wars, the French Revolution and the Hundred Years War. Europe, which liked to see itself as a cradle of civilisation and enlightenment, had for much of its history been a seething cauldron of blood and death—a rag caught between the jaws of fighting dogs.

  “And here we are again,” he muttered with disgust, adjusting the strap of the chainsaw he carried on his back.

  “What’s that, Chief?” Erik the orangutan crouched a little further along the wall, clad in beige fatigues. Beyond him, hunkered low behind a pair of gravestones, the red-faced macaques Lumpy and Fang sat curled around their submachine guns. Fang wore a horned Viking helmet and carried a sword at his belt; Lumpy was naked, save for a leather tunic. Cuddles, the big gorilla, lurked in the church porch. He wore aviator sunglasses, a white vest, and a pair of cut-off camouflage shorts. In his thick arms he cradled the dead weight of a six-barrelled minigun.

  “Nothing.” Ack-Ack Macaque dragged his thoughts back to the objective at hand. “Okay,” he said, “you see the Leviathan on the left by the copse, the burning one?”

  “Yes, Chief.”

  “That’s our target.”

  Erik ducked back into the wall’s shadow, resting his back against the ancient, mossy stones.

  “How are we going to get down there?”

  “Carefully.” Ack-Ack Macaque pulled out a cigar and fastened it between his teeth. “If we get caught in the open, it’s all over.” He beckoned them closer, and unrolled a printed photomosaic of the battlefield, taken from a camera on the Sun Wukong. “There’s a culvert running alongside the lane,” he said, tracing the ditch with his finger. “We can follow it down the hill as far as the copse.”

  Lumpy leant in. “What we going to do then, Chief?”

  Ack-Ack Macaque rocked back on his heels and glared at him.

  “They’re trees, we’re primates. What the fuck do you think we’re going to do?”

  “HEY, CUDDLES, UNLESS you want your arse shot off, keep it down.”

  “Sorry, Chief.”

  They were about halfway down the hill from the village now, moving in the direction of the battle and the ruined tank Ack-Ack Macaque had picked out as the most likely target for his purposes. The culvert along which they were crawling smelled of mouldering leaves and old dog shit, but he was past caring. He’d been running, crawling and fighting so long, all he knew how to do was keep going—keep soldiering on. He could rest when all this was over; until then, nothing else mattered. And, after all this skulking around, he was actually looking forward to getting in among the Leviathan’s cyborg crew. He’d had enough hiding; it was time to fight back, and blow off steam by blowing off a few heads.

  Ahead, the Leviathan resembled a land-going warship, its superstructure ris
ing in successive levels, each bristling with gun turrets and missile launchers.

  “I figure they’re heavily defended at ground level,” he said. “But maybe they don’t expect enemy troops to come at them from above.”

  “So,” Erik asked, “we’re going to drop out of the trees?”

  “Bingo.” Ack-Ack Macaque stopped crawling. His elbows and knees were sore and the front of his jacket was caked in mud. When he swallowed, his neck still hurt from being throttled by Bali. “I reckon, if we get up onto that second level, we’ll find an access hatch or something.”

  “You reckon?”

  “I’ve studied the motherfucking photos.” He started moving again, muttering under his breath about smartarses. Behind him, Erik cleared his throat.

  “What about Cuddles, Chief?”

  Ack-Ack Macaque turned to glare over his shoulder.

  “What about him?”

  “Well,” Erik lowered his voice. “He’s a silverback. He weighs like five hundred pounds.”

  “So?”

  “So, how’s he going to climb a tree?”

  Behind them, Cuddles let out an aggressive snort. “You see these arms?” he growled. “If I can peel a car apart with my bare hands, I think I’ve got the strength to pull myself up a damn tree.”

  Erik cringed. “No offence, big lad. It’s just I never heard of a gorilla doing that.”

  “And I never heard of such an ignorant orangutan.”