PART TWO
WHAT ROUGH BEAST
I was thinking this globe enough till there sprang out so noiseless around me myriads of other globes.
(Walt Whitman, Night On The Prairies)
CHAPTER TWENTY
TOOLING UP
THE TERESHKOVA’S ARMOURY: Victoria Valois stood in the corridor and watched as Ack-Ack Macaque worked his way around the walk-in cupboard, pulling weapons from the shelves. There were few guns, but he already had his Colts on his hips. He added grenades, knives, and a couple of rusty throwing stars that he found in an old shoebox on one of the higher shelves. Beside him, Marie did the same, tooling herself up with the calm efficiency of an experienced soldier preparing for an operation.
“So, you say you’ve done this before?” he asked, pulling a wicked-looking machete from a rack of blades.
Marie reached for a coil gun: a magnetic projectile accelerator in the shape of a machine gun, capable of punching a titanium slug through a concrete wall. With practiced efficiency, she hefted it in one hand, braced the stock against her hip, and clicked a magazine into place.
“I can look after myself.” She had her orange hair tied back in a severe ponytail, and Victoria had given her a bulletproof vest from her own personal stash. Watching her, Victoria couldn’t help but be impressed by the way the woman stood up to the monkey.
“Take whatever you need,” she said, reaching down to touch the retractable fighting stick tucked into her own belt. Ack-Ack Macaque saw her doing it.
“Wishing you were coming with us, boss?”
She smiled, but there was little humour in it. They were the assault team, and she was the skyliner captain.
“I’ll have more than enough to do here.” She had no doubt that, after the events of last year, every move the Tereshkova made would be closely scrutinised by both the authorities and the media. Larkin Hall was close to the skyliner’s scheduled route to London, so they could approach it without raising undue suspicion; but once there, she’d have to do some pretty fast talking to justify a helicopter assault on a stately home. If worse came to worst, she supposed, it would help that they had a friend in Buckingham Palace. Not that she’d presume on that friendship except in the direst of emergencies. Briefly, she wondered how Merovech was adjusting to life on the throne. She hadn’t seen him since the aftermath of the battle in the Channel, and still remembered him as he was when she first met him: a troubled young man in ratty jeans and a smelly red hoodie, struggling to come to terms with the death of his father. Now, he was king of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, France, Northern Ireland and Norway, and Head of the United European Commonwealth. He was preparing for his forthcoming marriage to Julie Girard, the digital activist who’d first drawn him into the intrigue that freed Ack-Ack Macaque from his virtual world and exposed the conspiracy at the heart of Céleste Technologies. The boy was a head of state, and still only barely out of his teens. He had quite enough on his plate without her turning up like Banquo’s ghost. If she could get along without involving him, she would. She had no wish to embarrass him, but she had no illusions that what they were about to do was illegal and could be construed as a terrorist act. The Gestalt might be a dangerous cult bent on global domination but, as far as the world at large was concerned, they were simply a group of technological eccentrics—a bit creepy, yes, but entitled to the same protections as everybody else. Launching an attack on one of the organisation’s properties was an action bound to provoke a response from the UK authorities and, if it came to a standoff with the Royal Air Force, she wouldn’t hesitate to pick up the phone.
“Besides,” she said, “the two of you are carrying enough ordnance to level the place by yourselves; you don’t need me tagging along.”
“Are you sure about that, boss?” The monkey picked up a crossbow. “You can be pretty handy in a scrap.” The crossbow had been made of some sort of carbon fibre, which made it light as well as tough.
Victoria turned to look up the corridor, in the direction of the airship’s bridge.
“I’ll have your backs from up here. If anything goes wrong, I’ll have a chopper snatch you out in seconds.”
Marie pulled a webbing harness over her shoulders and fastened it at the front. It had loops and pockets for weapons and equipment.
“How long will it take to get there?”
“About half an hour from when we cast off.” “That seems a long time.”
“We have to fly slowly over the city.”
“Can’t we go around?”
“We could, but it wouldn’t save any time.” She checked her watch. “Now, I’ve got to get to the bridge so we can get underway. Monkey Man, are you going to fly us out?”
Ack-Ack Macaque stood in the centre of the armoury, festooned with weaponry and ammunition.
“You think I’d trust any of you idiots to do it?”
f IVe mInuteS later, Victoria sat in her command chair, looking forward through the curved windshield of the Tereshkova’s bridge. She wore an insulated cap with fur earflaps. The temperature in here was colder than in the rest of the gondola. The heat leeched out through the glass of the big window and the metal of the walls and floor. The monkey sat at the pilot’s workstation to her right, and the Russian navigator to her left. The touchscreens set into the arms of her chair displayed graphical summaries of the airship’s systems. She couldn’t read the numbers, of course, but was reassured to see that everything that should be green appeared to be green, and nothing glowed red or amber. The engines were all online, and she fancied she could almost feel their vibration through the deck.
Paul stood by her shoulder. He’d been tinkering with his image again, and now appeared to be clad in a black polo neck and slate grey chinos.
“You know,” he whispered, “I could do this.” “What?”
“Fly the ship.”
Victoria turned to look at him.
“Are you serious?”
“Perfectly. After all, it’s just another computer system, isn’t it? I don’t see any reason I couldn’t learn it, given enough time.”
“Don’t let the monkey hear you say that.”
Paul gave Ack-Ack Macaque’s back a guilty glance. “Of course not.” He adjusted his glasses. “I don’t want to undermine him or anything. It’s just that if things go badly and we ever lost him, I’d want you to know that you had another pilot on standby. Potentially. If you needed me.” He wouldn’t meet her eyes, and Victoria felt a prickle at the back of her throat. This was, she realised, his way of trying to be useful.
“I’ll always need you,” she said.
At the helm, Ack-Ack Macaque cleared his throat.
“Will you two stop yapping? I’m trying to concentrate.” He spoke without taking his eye from the controls, and Victoria knew he was busily aligning the engines to propel the airship’s kilometrelong bulk eastward. She watched his hairy hands dance on his workstation’s screen.
“All right, Mister Macaque.” She sat up straight, and tugged the hem of her tunic into place. “In your own time.”
The monkey hit a switch. A warning bell chimed over the intercom, followed by an announcement recorded in both Franglais and Russian. Down below, the delivery trucks, tenders and other vehicles had scattered from the runway to avoid the downdraught of the skyliner’s fifteen giant impellers.
“Here we go.” He dragged a fingertip down one side of the screen, and the bow tipped upward by twenty degrees. The airframe gave a series of creaks. A pen rolled from the navigator’s console and skittered across the deck until it clanged into the bridge’s rear wall. Victoria winced. She knew that in the gondola behind her—and in those hanging from the other four hulls—drinks would be spilling, plates would be sliding off tables, and people would be stumbling and tripping into each other.
Needs must, she thought. One of their crew was in trouble, and that took priority over a few spilled gin and tonics.
The thrust kicked in, pushing her backwards in her seat. She’d never felt anything like it in all her time on the Tereshkova, and hadn’t thought the old airship capable of such acceleration. The monkey must have pushed all fifteen engines into the red. The whole ship seemed to judder, and she gripped the arms of her chair as the airfield fell away.
“Watch your speed,” Paul said nervously. AckAck Macaque didn’t bother turning around.
“Screw the limits. What are they going to do, shoot us down over the city?” He touched a control and increased the thrust even further. Around them, the bulkheads moaned in protest, like the timbers of a galleon caught in a storm. The old airship rose, as if hoisted on the crest of a wave, and Victoria’s communication display lit up. The airfield’s control tower wanted to talk to her. She smiled, and dismissed their call. Inside, she felt a wild surge of pride. The Tereshkova was hers, and it was doing something unsuspected and spectacular— something that would further cement its reputation as a maverick in the skyliner community; a true individual in a company of rogues.
Silently, she offered up a prayer of thanks to the Commodore. Losing her ability to write, her career in journalism, and her husband had left her lost and rudderless, and it had taken the Tereshkova to rekindle her sense of purpose. She hoped that in whatever vodka-soaked afterlife the old man now found himself, he knew how thoroughly he’d saved her.
Beside her, Paul’s hologram stood stroking his chin, unaffected by the tilt of the deck. She poked a finger at him.
“You’d be able to fly like this, would you?”
His eyes were locked on the forward view, and she saw his Adam’s apple bob in his throat as he swallowed nervously.
“I don’t know. Maybe. If I really had to.”
“You think so?”
Wide eyes met her gaze over the tops of his spectacles.
“Perhaps.”
“Are you monitoring the internal cameras?”
“Yes. It’s a mess back there.”
“Any serious damage?”
“Nothing dreadful; mostly crockery and furniture falling over. A few bumps and bruises. Everything else is secured against turbulence. Except—” He bit his lower lip. “Oh dear, oh dear. Our furry friend’s going to be very upset.”
“Why, what is it?”
He glanced at the back of the monkey’s head, and then leant in close to whisper in her ear.
“It’s his Spitfire.”
“What about it?”
“It’s fallen off.”