They crawled onwards in sullen silence. At the bottom of the hill, fresh explosions shook the fields. Handfuls of dirt and stones rained down into the ditch, showering their backs. The ground shook beneath them, and the crunching, screeching noise of a Leviathan grew steadily closer. Motioning his squad to stay down, Ack-Ack risked a peep over the edge of the lane. From the field on the other side of the tarmac, one of the giant machines rumbled in their direction, trying to get out from beneath the dreadnoughts’ barrage.
“Oh, balls.” There was no time to move. He hunched back into the ditch. “Change of plan, chaps. Get ready to follow my lead.”
He stayed down as the vast machine clattered across the road, shattering the tarmac. From above, he heard the sound of its cannons firing. As it loomed over the ditch where he hid, he leapt to his feet and threw himself forwards, into the wide space between the sets of the tracks. With the guns in action, the shield had dropped. Erik, Fang, Lumpy and Cuddles came after him, the latter just managing to clear the culvert before the bank gave way beneath the tank’s weight.
Now, they were under the Leviathan, within its protective force field envelope. Everything stank of diesel and wheel grease. The noise was almost indescribable, like being caught in the heart of an exploding steel foundry, and they had to duck as the underside of the vehicle slid past, centimetres above their heads. With no hope of being heard above the din, Ack-Ack Macaque settled for waving his squad towards the rear of the tank. It was their only choice of direction. Running on his hands and feet, he made for daylight, hoping the tank’s back end would be lightly armed, and that the gunners would all be facing forwards, looking for targets ahead or to the sides, rather than directly in their wake. If the monkeys could remain unobserved the next time the tank lowered its shield, they’d have time to dart across the field and into the trees.
Before he could reach the back end, the Leviathan squealed to a halt, rocking on its tracks, and figures dropped from the tail to block his way. A quick glance behind showed other figures at the front of the tank—all with the unmistakable tall, slim build of Nguyen’s cyborgs.
Ah, crap. They had been detected. If they were going to get out from under this tank, they were going to have to fight their way out.
“Erik! You and Fang take the front,” he barked over the din of the idling engine. “Cuddles and Lumpy, cover the rear.”
Directly above him, a hatch scraped open, spilling light into the shadows beneath the tank. From the overhead darkness, thin metallic arms reached for Ack-Ack Macaque. He snarled, and slipped his chainsaw from its strap. If the tank’s crew wanted a fight, he was going to give them more fight than they could possibly imagine.
With a howl, he bent his legs and sprang upwards, leaping headlong into the belly of the beast.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
JUST FLESH
THE HELICOPTERS TOUCHED down at the Sun Wukong’s stern, their wheels kissing the armoured deck only long enough to disgorge their passengers. With no appearance of haste, the willowy cyborgs—ten in all—arranged themselves into a V-shaped formation and began marching towards the nearest hatch, where Victoria stood, flanked by a dozen heavily armed monkeys. As they approached, she raised her sword, levelling the point at the chest of their leader.
“Arrêtez-vous, s’il vous plaît.”
To either side of her, the monkeys displayed their weapons—a motley collection of rifles, pistols and submachine guns.
The cyborgs stamped to a halt, just out of reach.
“You are required to surrender this vessel,” the leader said, his voice expressionless and devoid of emotion. He had high cheekbones, slicked-back hair and a pencil moustache. The skin on his face looked almost real, but his hands, where they protruded from his utilitarian one-piece overall, had the mirror-like finish of polished chrome. They resembled gauntlets from a suit of armour, and she couldn’t help but speculate about the rest of his body. Where had the line been drawn between man and machine—and which parts were still soft enough for her sword to penetrate?
“You’re not welcome here,” she said. “Get back in your tanks, turn around, and go back to where you came from.” Around her, the monkeys chattered appreciatively. The cyborgs, however, remained impassive.
“It’s for your own good,” said the one with the moustache. “You may fight us now, but you’ll thank us in the long run.”
Victoria raised her sword slightly, lining it up with his throat, which looked reassuringly organic and vulnerable.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
The half-man looked down at her. His pupils were black dots set in silver irises.
“You have no idea of our capabilities.”
Victoria kept her expression neutral, making use of her best poker face. “On the contrary, I’ve met your sort before.”
“Then you should know that we’re very hard to kill.”
Without breaking his gaze, she turned her chin a little to the side, so he could see the thick scars at the back of her head and neck.
“As am I.”
The moustache kinked as the cyborg’s mouth twitched up at the side in what was probably meant to be a smile. He held up his fists, and a pair of foot-long machete-like blades slid from recesses concealed beneath his cuffs. A series of snicks came from each of the cyborgs behind him as their own blades slid into place—one from each arm. In the winter sunlight, the edges looked sharp enough to cut the air itself, and certainly strong and heavy enough to snap Victoria’s thin sword like dry spaghetti.
“You’re just flesh,” the leading cyborg said, contempt dripping from his lips.
Victoria felt her pulse quicken. Her fist tightened on the grip of her weapon.
“And you’re not even that.”
Her gelware came online. It reacted to her elevated heart rate by flooding her body with adrenaline. She felt the clarity and speed of her thoughts increase as sections of her consciousness were shunted from her brain’s natural cells to the crisp lucidity of the artificial processors in her neural prosthesis. Her thinking became clearer and more dispassionate, and she realised that she was going to have to kill or be killed. These creatures had come to take the dreadnought and slaughter or convert its crew. They weren’t interested in negotiation or compromise, and they’d dismissed their helicopters because they had no plans to surrender or retreat. They were here to fight and win, and Victoria was the only obstacle in their path.
Well, that’s just fine.
She glanced sideways at the snarling monkeys. “Take ’em out, boys,” she said, and lunged forward. Striking with all the accelerated speed her gelware could muster, her first thrust took the guy with the moustache through the Adam’s apple. He gurgled and choked, and blood spewed down his chest. But, even as she withdrew the sword, his hands scythed up, gleaming blades describing two neat parabolas in the winter air—and she found herself holding only the grip and guard. With the cut-off point of her sword still protruding from his neck, he came for her, and she backed away. Around her, the shrieking monkeys grappled with the other cyborgs. Shots were fired, blades flashed. She saw one macaque—a gorgeous Japanese snow macaque with thick beige fur and a bright red face—impaled on the end of a cyborg’s fist.
“Merde.”
Moustache Man swung at her and she danced away. To her left another monkey went down, throat slit. Fast as the monkeys were, the cyborgs were faster, and the blades protruding from their synthetic wrists added half a metre to their reach.
“Retreat!” she called. “Fall back to the hatches!”
MEANWHILE, BELOW:
“Pass us those cables.” K8 pointed across the engine room to a bundle sticking from a power socket. She had a lot to do, but the pair of chimps she’d been assigned weren’t being a great deal of help. At first, it had been because her habit of referring to herself using plural pronouns, such as ‘we’ and ‘us’, confused them; but now they were just plain distracted. Over the past few minutes, more and more o
f their attention had become fixed on the sounds of combat coming from above. As K8 toiled, preparing the groundwork for the second part of Ack-Ack Macaque’s plan, she heard small arms fire, monkey screams, and even the dull crump of a grenade. As the fighting grew closer, the chimps, whose names were Oing and Boing, grew increasingly skittish. They kept chattering to each other and fingering the holsters slung around their waists, leaving K8 to do the bulk of the work herself.
Not that she minded so much. Sometimes it was just quicker and easier to do something yourself, rather than explain it to someone else, and, as the majority of the work here involved wiring—setting up a power feed from the airship’s generators, and a six-foot cradle to hold the force field device the Skipper planned to bring back from one of the Leviathans—it was nothing she couldn’t handle alone.
She stomped over and picked up the cables she wanted, and hauled one end back to the improvised metal frame she had built in the centre of the room. The design of the contraption wasn’t entirely of her own devising. As she laboured on it, she received a constant flow of suggestions and comments from other members of the Gestalt, their minds attuned to her thoughts, seeing the project through her eyes. To a girl used to loneliness, whose only real friend had been a foul-mouthed, unappreciative monkey, their warmth and companionship gave constant comfort, and the reassurance that she would never be alone again. Right at this moment, as she tugged the power leads into place and connected them to a socket hastily screwed to the side of the structure, her thoughts were communing with members of the Gestalt in London, Cairo, San Francisco and Dubai. Their shared awareness stretched like a web of light around the world, binding and bonding them in ways far more intimate than the ties of familial or sexual love. The Founder, with the help and encouragement of her puppet, the Leader, had tried to use the Gestalt’s hive mind as a weapon—but K8 thought that by doing so, they’d missed the point. As far as she was concerned, this interconnectedness wasn’t a tool to be used to achieve a goal, it was an end in itself. It was a beautiful way to live and work and collaborate—not in pursuit of power or greed, but simply to enrich the lives of all by sharing knowledge, skill and camaraderie.
She picked up a wrench. The noise of battle grew louder still. It sounded as if scuffles were taking place in the corridor outside the engine room. She heard a monkey screech. Something thumped against the wall; there were two gunshots in quick succession, and then silence.
The chimps drew their pistols.
“Hurry up, girlie,” warned Oing, extending a hairy arm to level his weapon at the door.
“Yeah,” Boing agreed, using his free hand to pull a bayonet from his belt, “make it quick.”
ON THE AIRSHIP’S bridge, Merovech watched the computer plot different coloured vector lines across a map of Europe.
“Extrapolating from initial sightings,” Amy said, “projected analysis shows the unknown craft arriving in our airspace within ten minutes.”
“You definitely think it’s coming here?”
“Where else would it be going?” She cast a hand at the forward window, and the battle raging below. “It’s too much of a coincidence for it to be going anywhere else.”
“What can we do?”
“You could give the order to scramble jet fighters.”
“Would they get here in time?”
“They might.”
Merovech rubbed his chin. He was twelve hours overdue for a shave. “Okay, do it.”
“Yes, sir.” Amy signalled to one of the Marines, who began talking urgently into his radio.
“Not that I expect it’ll do much good.”
“Sir?”
Merovech shrugged. “You say it overtook one of our fastest planes and left it for dust. It’s the size of a large house, yet it doesn’t show up on radar. Whatever it is, it’s an order of magnitude more advanced than anything we can put in the air.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
PURÉED BRAINS
THE LEVIATHAN’S INTERIOR was a maze of noisy steel chambers and cramped, badly lit companionways. It felt like the inside of a submarine. Slashing and stabbing with his chainsaw, Ack-Ack Macaque fought his way deeper. With each swing, sparks flew and severed metal limbs dropped to the deck, twitching and writhing like decapitated snakes. Somewhere along the line, he’d lost his flying cap and goggles, and the cigar he held chomped between his teeth had been snapped in half. The arm holding the chainsaw had become slathered to the elbow in blood and synthetic fluids, and he was down to his last three bullets—yet he felt better than he had in months. He’d never wanted to lead an army. He was a soldier, not a general, and this was where he belonged: at the heart of the mêlée, grappling overwhelming odds, with the fate of the world on his shoulders.
The confined spaces in the heart of the Leviathan proved an advantage, as Célestine’s cybernetic soldiers couldn’t overwhelm him; they could only attack one at a time, which suited him fine. When he swung his chainsaw in the narrow gangways, they didn’t have the leeway to dodge, and more than one of them went down with their faces shredded from their skulls and their brains ripped to purée.
His other advantage was that his strategy seemed to be confusing them. They were deploying themselves to defend access to the control room at the top of the vehicle, whereas Ack-Ack Macaque’s target was lower, and to the rear. They thought he wanted to destroy the tank, or capture it; that he gave a flying fuck about their nuisance invasion, when, in reality, stopping it wasn’t on his immediate to-do list—later maybe, but not right now. Right now, he had another objective. As they moved to block his upward progress, he moved back and to the side, wrong-footing them at every turn.
Behind him, the rest of his squad raced to keep up, fighting off pursuers and pausing only to finish off those wounded cyborgs he’d left in his wake that were still capable of offensive action.
“How much further?” he shouted over the noise and vibration of the Leviathan’s engines. Behind him, Erik consulted an infrared photo of the tank, taken via scopes on the Sun Wukong, his rubbery-looking fingers measuring the distance from where they thought they were to the large heat source at the Leviathan’s stern.
“Five metres. Just the other side of the next hatch.”
“Are you sure?”
“No.”
“Ah, fuck it.” Ack-Ack Macaque spat out the soggy butt of the broken cigar. He was gambling everything on the assumption that the heat source marked the position of the engine room, and that the engine room housed the device he sought.
“Well, it’s certainly loud enough. Tell Cuddles to get his arse up here. If what we’re looking for is in here, we’re going to need him to carry it.”
“Roger, Chief.”
Ack-Ack Macaque put a hand against the hatch. Like the rest, it was made of thick, uncoated steel, with rivets the size of golf balls, and he could feel it throbbing to the beat of the Leviathan’s mechanical heart.
“This has to be the place.” Hefting the chainsaw in his right hand, he holstered his Colt and gripped the wheel that opened the door. The steel was shiny with use. He gave it two quick yanks and it spun open. The locks disengaged, and the hatch swung inwards.
Beyond, the engine room was a mass of ducts, pipes and tangled wiring, at the centre of which lay two vast and thundering turbine engines. He sniffed. The air stank of hot oil and choking exhaust fumes, and the racket was so loud he couldn’t hear the whine of his chainsaw—only feel it juddering through the bones and muscles of his arm.
“Right,” he yelled over his shoulder, hoping his troops could hear him, or at least get the gist, “let’s get in and out before they have a chance to figure out what we’re doing.”
He stepped over the raised threshold, onto a catwalk suspended above the grinding turbines. At the far end, the device he’d come for stood bolted to a bulkhead, looking like an upturned coffin leant against a wall. Between him and it stood a cyborg, and Ack-Ack Macaque sighed. The walkway didn’t seem all that secure underfoot, and
he could feel it sway with the cyborg’s movements. There was no point trying to speak over the din, so he simply bared his teeth and drew his revolver.
“Adios, muchacho.” He squeezed the trigger and the gun bucked in his hand, once, twice, three times. The advancing figure stopped. The first shot had torn a gash across its temple, exposing the shiny silver skull beneath the skin and biting away a sizeable chunk of ear. The second and third had hit it in the chest, but Ack-Ack Macaque could see no evidence of damage. He’d hoped to hit something vital, but the shots didn’t seem to have penetrated anything save for the cyborg’s cotton overalls.
“Bollocks,” he muttered, tossing aside the empty handgun. Facing him, the cyborg frowned, and put a hand to its ruined ear. Anger flashed across its features. With slow deliberation, it started walking forward, hands grasping at the air. Ack-Ack Macaque swore under his breath. He needed the box at the other end of the gangway. He needed it to save the world—and if that meant going through this robotic motherfucker to get his hands on it, then that was the way it had to be.
“Okay,” he snarled, shaking the chainsaw, “you want some more, eh?” He ran to meet his opponent, and they crashed together at the walkway’s midpoint, suspended above the spinning turbines. The cyborg parried Ack-Ack Macaque’s first swing, using his left forearm to deflect the whirring teeth, while swinging his right fist at the monkey’s midriff. Luckily, Ack-Ack was ready for the move, and twisted aside, bringing his chainsaw back and around for another swipe. As he did so, the cyborg smiled, and vicious-looking blades sprang from his wrists. He used one to block Ack-Ack’s second attack, and stabbed with the other. Unable to counter the thrust, Ack-Ack Macaque was forced to relinquish the chainsaw and skip back. He only just made it. The tip of the attacking blade ripped a razor-straight gash across the front of his jacket and the leather sagged open, revealing the white sheepskin beneath.
Macaque Attack! Page 21