“What do you mean?”
If you get a shot, child, you take it.
“Founder?”
Who else?
“But the Skipper, he said—”
I don’t care what he said. He’s a reckless fool. If you see a chance to end the fight, you end it.
“But the other monkeys...”
You leave them to me.
K8 closed one eye and squinted down the scope. Her cheek brushed the rifle’s wooden stock.
“They’re moving too fast.” She clicked the magnification up a notch. “If we shoot, we could kill them both.”
Then wait for one of them to get the upper hand.
Lurking behind the voice like the background hiss of a radio transmission, K8 sensed frustration, concern, and an exasperated, grudging respect for Ack-Ack Macaque and his hotheaded ways. She hunched around the rifle, arranging herself in order to minimise the amount of recoil her shoulder would have to absorb. Despite the cold wind, her hands were sweating. Through the sight, she saw Ack-Ack Macaque pull back his arm and let fly with a punch that sprayed blood and teeth from Bali’s mouth.
“Yay!” K8 whispered—but, even as Bali turned with the force of the blow, his foot swept around and caught Ack-Ack off balance. The big monkey went down on his back, and Bali was on him, hands locking around his throat, throttling him. Heart beating hard, K8 tried to focus the cross hairs.
Before she could, one of Ack-Ack Macaque’s hands came up to grab the side of Bali’s head, and his thumb pressed into the younger monkey’s eye. Bali twisted away with a cry of pain, but still the chokehold stayed in place.
Was Bali going to win? From where K8 knelt, he seemed to have the advantage. He was younger and faster, and coming to the fight fresh and rested instead of exhausted and bruised; and with his hands locked around the Skipper’s throat, surely it was only a matter of time...
Come on, girl.
K8 swallowed. Bali was still on top of Ack-Ack, who was writhing furiously, trying to throw his opponent off. If they could just hold still for half a second...
Ack-Ack Macaque’s thumb stabbed into Bali’s eye socket again, this time rupturing the soft jelly within. Bali screamed and pulled back, hands flying to his face. Vitreous fluid poured down his cheek like the contents of a broken egg. Freed from his stranglehold, Ack-Ack Macaque sat up and lunged forward with a vicious head-butt. The other monkey toppled back and they rolled apart. Bali was on his back now, feet in the air, hands clamped to his face.
NOW!
The force of the command swamped all other thoughts. K8’s finger twitched and the gun bucked—and a thousand metres away across the curving roof of the dreadnought, Bali’s left knee exploded.
A
CK-
A
CK
M
ACAQUE TIED
his white silk scarf around his fallen opponent’s thigh, pulling it tight to form an improvised tourniquet. Then he turned to glare at the distant figure of K8, who was standing up now, the rifle dangling from her right hand.
“Why the fuck did you do that? I was
winning
,for Christ’s sake.”
At his feet, Bali moved feebly, one hand on his shattered leg, the other covering his punctured eye.
“Hold still,” Ack-Ack Macaque told him. “You’ll be okay.”
Bali looked up at him, his remaining eye filled with anguish.
“You’re not going to kill me?”
Ack-Ack Macaque reached into his jacket and pulled out a pair of cigars. He lit both, and handed one over.
“I never was. I only planned to teach you a lesson.”
The other monkeys stood awkwardly around them. Some didn’t believe the fight could be over; others were just waiting to see what would happen next.
“A lesson?” Bali’s laugh was brittle. The hand holding the cigar shook so violently he almost dropped it. He was going into shock. To keep him focused, Ack-Ack Macaque bent down and slapped him across the cheek.
“I didn’t say I wasn’t going to kick your ass.” He stepped back a few paces, his boots leaving bloody footprints on the iron deck. Bali regarded him with horrified disbelief.
“But, you took my eye...”
Ack-Ack Macaque shrugged.“If you challenge the big dog, you’re going to get bitten.”
He straightened his jacket, and glowered at the assembled crowd.
“Now, I’m going to let this one live,” he said, nodding down at his fallen challenger, “for one reason, and one reason only. And that’s because I’ve seen enough senseless killing to last me the rest of my days. There are too many assholes out there thinking they’ve got the right to kill and maim and enslave, and I’ve had a gut-full of all of it. I won’t be one of them.” He stomped to the edge of the deck and threw an arm out, pointing to the horizon. “If any of you want to leave this ship and live out your days on Kishkindha, you’re welcome. I won’t stop you. But let me just say this. You remember those tossers we were just fighting? The ones in the big tanks?” He recalled his woodland encounter with Apynja, and bared his teeth at his audience. “Do you know they killed everybody on their timeline, just because they fucking
could
? They murdered eight billion people because they were
in the way
.” He shook his head, feeling disgusted with himself, with Bali and K8, and the whole messy fuck-up.
“The woman leading them is called Alyssa Célestine. Some of you may have heard of her. She’s a grade-A fucking psychopath.” He sucked his cigar until the end glowed like a flare, then spoke through a plume of smoke. “She wants to live forever. She’s worked with copies of herself and Doctor Nguyen on a number of timelines, trying to convert people into undying machines. And that’s where we came from.” He jabbed the cigar butt at the nearest monkeys. “We’re byproducts of their experiments. They didn’t want to try uploading people until they’d tried it on monkeys first.” He hawked and spat over the edge of the deck, and watched his phlegm get snatched away by the wind. “And so, here we are. We’re the cast-offs, the prototypes. The ones sentenced to lives of loneliness and pain, separated from our species and surrounded by humans. And my question to you is this...” He paused, letting his words hang, watching their eyes widen. He was their boss and he was angry. This wasn’t a victory speech; it was a call to war.
“Are you motherfuckers ready to do something about it?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
NUCLEAR WINTER
A
S THE
S
UN
W
UKONG
approached the glittering ribbon of the English Channel, Merovech’s helicopter touched down on the airship’s upper deck. As he stepped out, into the downdraught from the rotors, two dark-suited bodyguards, a pair of armed Royal Marines, and a young lady with a briefcase accompanied him. Standing at a safe distance, Victoria watched them hurry towards her, their heads bent and hands shielding their eyes. As this was a royal visit, she’d made a point of wearing the Commodore’s old dress tunic and scabbard. She even wore a blonde wig to cover the scars on her scalp. She might not be in sole command of this airship, as she had been with the
Tereshkova
, but she’d be damned if she couldn’t look the part.
Once clear of the rotors, the boy-king’s pace slowed. He straightened up and fixed her with a smile.
“Victoria!” He took her hand and pumped it, then pulled her into an awkward, backslapping embrace. “I really thought we’d lost you.”
“No,” she said, gently extricating herself, “we’re still here, still alive and kicking.”
“But why did you have to stay away so long? Couldn’t you have sent word?”
“We’ve been busy.”
“And Ack-Ack?” Merovech looked around hopefully.
“He’ll join us later.” Victoria glanced past the King’s shoulder. “You must be Amy Llewellyn.”
The young woman swapped her briefcase into her left hand and extended her right.
“Captain Valois. We spoke on the phone.” Her voice was as cold as a Welsh mountain frost.
“Yes, well, I’m sorry if I was rude.” Victoria gave a halfhearted shrug. “But needs must, you know?”
“Quite.” Amy regarded the windswept deck and wrinkled her nose. “Frankly, I don’t even know what we’re doing here. But now we are here, is there somewhere a bit warmer where we can talk?”
V
ICTORIA TOOK THEM
down to the potted jungle at the nose of the airship, where they found Ack-Ack Macaque nursing a glass of medicinal rum and talking to the Founder.
“You’ve finally grown up,” the Founder was saying, touching him on the arm.
Ack-Ack Macaque didn’t reply. He looked around at the intruders with a guilty start. If Victoria hadn’t known him better, she would have sworn he looked embarrassed.
She made five coffees, and placed them on the patio table. The others took chairs. The bodyguards lurked between the trees, and the Marines—who were clearly uncomfortable about the number of armed monkeys prowling the
Sun Wukong
’s corridors—took up positions by the big brass door.
“Right,” she said, folding her hands on the iron tabletop, “now, perhaps you can tell me what’s more urgent than an invasion?”
Merovech moistened his lips. He looked so much older than she remembered, less angry and more careworn than the mental image of the teenager she’d carried with her for the past two years.
“It’s my mother,” he said quietly. Among the branches, a parrot squawked. The air smelled of blossoms and rich compost.
Abruptly, Ack-Ack Macaque climbed to his feet and went to lean on the bamboo rail at the edge of the verandah. He lit a cigar and looked down through the airship’s glass nose at the waves washing the French coast, his hairy head haloed in clouds of drifting blue.
Victoria frowned at his back, then turned her attention back to the King.
“She’s the one leading the tanks.”
“No, not her.” Merovech tapped his knuckles against the table. “She’s an alternate version. I’m talking about the Duchess, the one from this parallel.”
“The one who blew herself apart with a hand grenade?”
He gave a nod, wincing at the memory. “She had a back-up, on the Mars probe.”
“We knew that.”
“Well, the probe’s reached its destination, and she’s been in contact.”
Victoria’s eyes widened. “Already?”
“It’s taken them three years.”
“What does she have to say for herself?”
Merovech’s face clouded. “It’s not so much what she has to say, as what she’s done.” He turned to Amy Llewellyn. “Would you mind?”
The Welsh girl pulled a flexible display screen from her briefcase and unrolled it on the table, weighing down the corners with coffee cups.
“These are the best images we’ve been able to get so far,” she said. The pictures on the screen showed two grainy shots of the night sky, obviously taken through a telescope. “This first picture was taken yesterday at 1100 hours, this second one six hours later.”
Victoria bent forward to get a better look. The only difference between the two shots was the position of a fat white dot that had been ringed with red marker pen. Between the first picture and the second, it had moved relative to the stars behind it.
“What is it, a spaceship?”
“A projectile.”
“From Mars?”
Merovech cleared his throat. “My mother gave the world an ultimatum, to join her or suffer the consequences. When no-one replied, she launched this.”
“No-one replied?”
Merovech turned his coffee cup but didn’t lift it. “She was trying to turn country against country, but we’ve been doing a considerable amount of diplomatic work since the Gestalt attack. She couldn’t have foreseen that.”
Victoria was impressed. How different things were to the way they had been, three short years ago, when the West had been on the verge of nuclear war with China over the sovereignty of Hong Kong. Times had changed, relations had thawed; and all it had taken to usher in this era of peace and cooperation had been a global invasion from a parallel world.
She tapped the image on the screen with her fingernail. “So, what kind of projectile are we talking about? Is it a bomb?”
Amy enlarged the picture, but couldn’t resolve any further detail. The white dot remained a white dot. “As far as we can tell from spectrographic analysis, it’s a solid lump of rock, possibly a repurposed asteroid.”
“And what kind of damage are we talking about?”
Amy sniffed. “Projections vary, but it’s likely to be extensive. Given its mass and speed, it’ll hit with anything from several hundred to several thousand times the force of the Hiroshima explosion. There’ll be catastrophic damage, earthquakes and tsunamis, and the aftereffects won’t be much fun, either. At the very least, we’re looking at a worldwide nuclear winter lasting anywhere from ten to a hundred years.”
Victoria thought back to the parallel world she’d just left, to the grey skies and dying plants, and the thin, starving and disease-ridden survivors.
“Why are you telling me this?” She shuddered.
Amy gave Merovech a sideways glance. “I’ve been wondering that myself.”
Merovech had been leaning back, listening. Now he sat straight, and reached across the table for Victoria’s hands.
“You and Ack-Ack, you’ve saved the world twice in the last three years,” he said. “I guess I’m kind of hoping you’ll find a way to do it again.”
Leaning against the bamboo rail, Ack-Ack Macaque blew air through his nostrils in a low, animal grunt. Victoria ignored him.
“Can’t you fire a missile at it and blow it up?”
Merovech shook his head.
“It’s not possible,” said Amy Llewellyn. “We don’t have anything with that kind of range or stopping power. We could fire a hundred warheads at it and it still wouldn’t be enough.”
“Then what’s the plan?”
“We don’t have one.” The Welsh girl made a sour face. “If we did, we wouldn’t be here talking to you.”
Victoria reached up and pulled off her wig. She let it fall to the table.
“You want us to go up into space?” She ran a hand over her bald scalp, grimly amused at Amy’s attempts not to stare.