CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SCOURGE OF THE SKYWAYS
AN HOUR LATER, at the other end of the main gondola, Victoria Valois sat behind the desk in her office, and regarded Marie over the steeple of her fingers. William Cole wasn’t there; the writer had been sedated. The man hadn’t slept in God only knew how long, and he’d had more than enough surprises for one day. Between the drugs, the car bomb, and everything else, his sanity had been dangling by a thread. Knocking him out had seemed by far the kindest option.
Sitting across the desk, Marie returned her gaze. Her hands, now unbound, were resting comfortably on the arms of her chair.
“So,” Victoria said. “You really are his wife?” The other woman brushed back an orange curl.
“A version of her.”
“From a parallel world; yes, I get it.” Victoria dropped her hands to the desk. “The question is: what are you doing here, now?”
Marie straightened in her chair. “I’ve come to protect him.”
“From whom?”
“Certain parties.”
Victoria chewed her lower lip. “You said he was writing memories. Is that why they’re trying to kill him, because of something he’s remembered?” “William’s special. He’s creative, and like a lot of creative people, he’s sort of attuned to the probabilities and possibilities of the timelines. Without knowing it, he’s picking up on the experiences of his other selves. Not memories as such, more like glimpses of the other world. I can’t really explain it, except to say that it’s like the rapport you get between identical twins. Sometimes, when something happens to one of his alternate selves, he senses it. He has dreams, and they feed into his writing. He thinks he’s making all those stories up, but he isn’t. He’s just trying to get down on paper what’s going on at the back of his head.”
“And what is that?”
Marie rubbed the bridge of her nose with her index finger. She stifled a yawn.
“Look, Captain, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but you seem a reasonable sort.”
“Telling me what?”
“That there’s a war going on.”
Victoria raised a sceptical eyebrow. “A war?” “William knows nothing about it, but he’s involved nevertheless, whether he likes it or not.”
“How so?”
“Because of his gift.” Her fingers picked at a loose thread on the armrest. “The truth is, the war hasn’t been going so well for us. We’ve been losing territory, falling back.”
“So, why come here?”
“Because the battle’s spreading.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Nor should you.”
From beyond the walls of the gondola, she heard the scream of a Rolls Royce engine; Ack-Ack Macaque was out there, putting his Spitfire through its paces, throwing it into loops and rolls above the airfield. She picked up a pen from the desk and clicked the end of it. Then she held it to her ear and clicked it again, two or three times. She could feel that they were getting close to the truth of things now; but her experience told her to stay quiet.
People often divulged more than they wanted to if she simply gave them the space to do it. Her silence unnerved them, and they spoke to fill it. Leaning back in her chair, she tapped the end of the pen against her lower lip. Would the tactic work here?
She liked to think of herself as a pretty good judge of character, and Marie struck her as a sharp cookie.
Nevertheless, she held her tongue, and waited to see what would happen.
Part of her was convinced that, all evidence to the contrary, the whole ‘parallel world’ story would fall apart. After all, how could it possibly be true? The idea ran counter to every instinct in her body. And yet, how else to explain William Cole’s doppelganger, and the reappearance of his dead wife? Across the desk, Marie’s position hadn’t changed. Her hands still rested loosely on the arms of her chair, and she showed no sign of agitation or discomfort, and certainly no burning urge to talk.
Okay, Victoria thought, this fish isn’t biting. She gave the pen a final click, and tossed it back onto the desk. But, before she could marshal her next round of questions, somebody tapped on the office door. “Come in.”
K8 stepped into the room.
“I’ve got a result for you.” She walked up to the desk and laid the printout in front of Victoria. “What does it say?”
The teenager ran her tongue around her teeth, and glanced at Marie.
“I found Legion Haulage. They’re a transport business, based in Rotterdam.” She leant over and tapped her finger on some of the words. Victoria looked, but the black marks on the paper may as well have been written in Martian for all the sense they made. “They’re a front for another company, who are a front for another in turn. If you follow the chain of front companies back far enough—” Her finger traced down the page. “You find out that they’re owned by the Gestalt.” She straightened up with a what-do-you-think-about-that look on her face. Victoria smoothed a hand backwards across her bald scalp.
“Are you sure?”
“It’s all there, in black and white.”
“So it’s possible the things that attacked you—”
“Were working for the men in white, yes. At least, it’s a possibility.”
Victoria frowned. “But what would the Gestalt want with William Cole?”
K8 shrugged. “Who knows? What would anyone want with him?” She glanced at Marie. “No offence.” The woman with the orange hair dipped her head and smiled. None taken.
“It still doesn’t explain where the Neanderthals came from.” Victoria hadn’t slept all night, and she’d spent much of the past hour listening to Paul’s speculations on the caveman nature of their prisoner. Now, she could feel her neural implant upping her production of adrenalin, fighting to keep her sharp.
“I mean, where did they get them?”
Marie cleared her throat. Sitting up in her chair, she raised a hand.
“Perhaps I can help, Captain?”
Victoria pulled her fighting staff from the pocket of her tunic.
“I was just thinking the very same thing.” With her head throbbing with fatigue, she clonked the staff onto the desktop. Time to stop acting like a journalist, she thought, and time to start behaving like a skyliner captain.
Under international law, skyliners were classed as autonomous city-states, able to travel where they wished, and govern themselves however their captains saw fit. They had been carrying passengers and freight around the world for almost a hundred years, and had become so vital to global commerce that now no country would risk interfering with the neutrality of a single vessel, for fear of boycott by the rest. On board, the captain’s word was law. They were the undisputed masters of their little flying cities, and had the final say on everything from criminal trials to business deals and marriages. Yet, they weren’t tyrants. At least, the majority weren’t.
Passengers tended to avoid skyliners famed for repressive laws or unusual punishments, and so, in order to survive economically, captains were obliged to run their ships with a modicum of fairness and equitability—but only a modicum. Skyliner captains enjoyed a reputation for eccentricity and ruthlessness unsurpassed by any profession since the eighteenth century sail ship captains of the Spanish Main. Among them, Victoria was something of an oddity: she hadn’t risen up through the ranks, and had no experience. But, as the Commodore’s appointed heir and successor, she had the respect of her crew, and a burgeoning reputation based on her striking physical appearance and the fact that it was the Tereshkova she commanded: a vessel now famous to the public as the skyliner which, last year, had rammed the royal yacht in the middle of the English Channel. The well-documented fact that she’d also thrown an assassin out of a cargo hatch helped. According to the British tabloids, she was Victoria Valois, the half-human scourge of the skyways. Sometimes, it took her a while to remember that.
With a French curse, she pushed back her chair and rose to her feet.
“I have a dead guy in my infirmary, and a cave man in the bed next to him.” She waved a finger in Marie’s face. “Now, how about you start talking. I want to know why you’re here, and how you got here!”
Marie’s knuckles whitened on the arms of her chair.
“I told you—”
“That you’re here to protect Cole? Yes, I know.
But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? You didn’t just come here to find him, did you?” The other woman’s eyes widened. Victoria saw her nostrils flare.
“No.”
“Then, what?”
Marie looked down at her knees. She ran her tongue around her lips, and her shoulders tensed.
She seemed to be steeling herself to speak. When she looked up, her eyes were bright with desperation. “It’s my daughter.”
“Your daughter?”
Marie glanced at K8. “She’s about your age. Her name’s Lila.”
Victoria leant forward across the desk, her palms either side of the retracted fighting staff.
“What about her?”
Marie thrust her chin forward defiantly. Her eyes glittered.
“They have her.”
“Who?”
“The Gestalt. They have her, and I’m here to get her back.”
“By yourself?”
“Bill was helping me.” The woman ran a hand across her eyes. “They killed him.”
“And Cole?” Victoria bent her elbows, leaning closer. “Where does he figure into this?”
Marie squeezed her hands shut. She looked at K8. “Lila’s his daughter too.”