CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
STINGER
THE TERESHKOVA THUNDERED across the city at full power, startling pedestrians and shaking windows in their frames. From his seat on the bridge, Ack-Ack Macaque saw the shadow thrown by its five hulls—a great rectangular eclipse darkening office blocks and church spires. He made a few final adjustments and then, satisfied the airship was headed in the right direction, unclipped himself from the pilot’s chair and turned to Victoria.
“Nobody touches that throttle,” he said. “We’ll get there faster if we accelerate all the way. When we get close, I’ll jump out, and I’ll take the woman with me. When we’re gone, I’ve set the autopilot to bring the ship around in a wide loop. By the time you get back to the target, you’ll be at rest, and it should all be over on the ground, one way or another.”
Victoria watched him carefully.
“You missed a part.”
“Which part?”
“The part where I’m the captain and you’re the
pilot, and I give the orders.”
He glowered at her. He was still furious that they’d lost his plane—which now lay smashed and concertinaed in a supermarket car park—and this wasn’t the time for her to be playing hierarchy games.
“Would you do anything differently?”
She stroked her chin with finger and thumb, considering.
“Well,” she said after a moment, “no.”
“Then please, get out of my way, Captain.”
Victoria narrowed her eyes, and there was a glimmer in them that told him her objections weren’t entirely serious, that she was just making a point.
“Make sure you get them both back, okay?”
“Yes, boss.”
“And that’s an order.”
“Yes, boss.” He threw a floppy, long-armed salute and scampered aft, to where Marie Cole awaited him. She looked bulky with the bulletproof jacket that Victoria had given her, and bug-eyed with the goggles she’d put on over her face; but nevertheless, she exuded a fierce, furious determination that matched his own, and he had no doubt she’d do okay when the fighting got dirty and personal.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Lead on, monkey.”
He led her up through the Tereshkova’s corridors and companionways to the helipad on top of the airship, and one of the sleeker passenger choppers. The pilot was already on board, warming the engine, and Ack-Ack Macaque hopped in beside him.
“Have you got the box stowed?”
“In the back, sir.”
“Then take us up, as soon as you’re ready.”
“Aye, sir.”
As the five-pronged shadow of the Tereshkova’s nose cleared the final suburb of Bristol, the helicopter rose from the flight deck. It hovered in the air for a moment, allowing the behemoth to move away ahead of it, and then dropped, coming down in a swooping curve that brought it down past the giant fins and rudders at the stern, and forward, under the speeding airship.
“Keep low,” Ack-Ack Macaque told the pilot, “and follow the river. Watch out for bridges.”
He scrambled into the back, where Marie sat strapped into her seat, coil gun resting across her knees. A large metal case sat on the deck by her feet, held in place by bungee cords. He crouched beside it, bracing himself against the seat in the cramped space, and began to unfasten it.
“What’s that?” Marie leant forward for a better look.
Ack-Ack Macaque gave her a grin.
“This is our way in.”
From the front, the pilot called, “Two minutes to target.”
They were winding along the course of the River Avon. Ahead, they could see hills and main roads, Georgian terraces and the tower of Bath Cathedral.
The London mainline lay to their left, and they drew level with an eastbound train.
“Keep pace with the train,” Ack-Ack Macaque ordered. The land was opening out into a wide river valley, down the middle of which the track ran, side-by-side with the river. Larkin House stood on a hill to the north, and he hoped that by staying low, concealed visually and audibly by the train, they might be able to approach without raising an alarm.
Looking out of the side window, he saw faces looking back at him from the train’s carriages, and gave them the finger.
When they drew level with their target, the pilot pulled up and over the train.
“Thirty seconds,” he reported.
Ack-Ack Macaque exchanged looks with Marie. Then he flipped the fastening on the box and opened it, revealing a long, fat tube with a gun sight and a pistol grip. It had been painted olive green, with bright red, black and yellow warning decals. It was one of the Commodore’s hidden treasures, but there was no time to sit and admire the thing. He pulled it from the case and slung its strap over his shoulder, kicked his boots off, stuck a cigar into his mouth, and shuffled to the side hatch.
“Sit tight,” he told Marie. He slid the door open and climbed through, onto the helicopter’s landing strut. Cold winds tore at him but he gripped the strut with his toes. Ahead, the hillside came at them like a rising green wave and he could see the pale sandstone frontage of Larkin House in the centre of a tidy arrangement of fir trees, gravel paths and ornamental hedges.
Crouching, he wrapped his tail around the strut, and let go with his hands. Gripping hard with his toes, he swung around until he hung upside down by his feet. The helicopter rocked at this, but stayed on course. Below, white-suited figures emerged from the house and pointed guns at him. He saw muzzle flashes but, if any of the bullets hit the chopper, he didn’t see or feel them. Instead, he concentrated on getting the tube—which now swung from his arm on the end of its strap—onto his shoulder, where he was forced to hold it in position with both hands.
Come on, he thought, this isn’t any harder than hanging from a tree branch. Travelling at a hundred miles an hour. Through a cyclone.
The tube housed one of the Commodore’s most prized souvenirs, taken from a cupboard in his cabin. It was a portable ground-to-air missile picked up off a battlefield somewhere in the Middle East thirty years ago.
Steadying the launcher, Ack-Ack Macaque lined the sight up on the eaves of the old house.
“Okay,” he muttered to himself around the cigar, “time to blow shit up.”
He pulled the trigger. There was a sharp whoosh, and the tube bucked in his hands so hard he almost lost his grip on the strut. The missile leapt forward on a candle of flame, and the helicopter dipped its nose to follow.
Squirming around, Ack-Ack Macaque managed to pull himself back up to the helicopter’s open hatch. He let the empty launcher fall away into the fields below, and drew one of his big, shiny Colts. Marie looked at him, and he gave her a big thumbs-up.
“Everything’s okay!” he hollered above the engine noise. Ahead, the missile hit the roof and blew apart in a huge fireball. Tiles and bits of wooden joist flew into the air, and black smoke mushroomed over the house. “Okay, as long as they weren’t keeping your kid in the attic.”
They passed over the front gates of the house, and he dropped a grenade, to make the clowns with guns keep their heads down. Then the helicopter was over the hole in the roof, its downdraught whipping the smoke and flames. The drop was somewhere between fifteen to twenty feet.
“Okay, lets go.” Cigar clamped securely in his teeth, he leaned out of the helicopter, and dropped.
The wind tore at him. His jacket flapped. He fell into the fire, and through, into the space beneath the roof. His bare feet hit wooden planks hard enough to jar his spine, and he rolled onto his shoulder, just getting out of the way in time before Marie crashed through the smoke and hit the deck beside him.
By the time she’d picked herself up, he was on his feet, both Colts at the ready, as the helicopter peeled away, heading back towards the Tereshkova, which was hammering past, a couple of kilometres to the south.
Black smoke filled the attic. He coughed and pulled his scarf up to cover his nose and mouth. There wasn’t time to waste looking for a hatch leading down, so he yanked the pin from a grenade, sang, “Have a banana,” and rolled it as far along the floorboards as it would go.
A second explosion rocked the house. When it had cleared, the floor had a ragged, burning hole in it.
Marie brushed dust and splinters from her clothes. She looked at him with an expression of respect, astonishment, and irritation.
“Please,” she said, “warn me the next time you’re going to do that.”
He grinned at her, scooped up a smouldering stick of wood, and lit his cigar.
“There’s something you need to know about me, lady—”
“That you’re dangerously irresponsible with explosives?”
He frowned, pulled out his cigar, and exhaled smoke.
“Uh, yeah,” he said. “That’s near enough.”
DROPPING DOWN THROUGH the hole in the floorboards, they found themselves in a dormitory. The room had probably once been a grand bedroom; now it contained three rows of triple bunk beds. Chunks of shattered plaster lay on the blankets and floor, and the bunk closest to the hole was alight.
“Well,” Ack-Ack Macaque said, “I told you I’d get us into the house, didn’t I?”
Marie cradled the coil gun, keeping its barrel pointed at the door.
“You certainly did. I can’t fault you on that. But it’s lucky the girls weren’t in this room.”
Ack-Ack Macaque gave a shrug.
“Ah, they’d have been okay. I needed a grenade to get through those ceiling beams.”
From the landing beyond, they heard the sound of shoes running on a polished wooden floor. Holding his Colts at arm’s length, Ack-Ack Macaque drew a bead on the door. Marie waved him away.
“No, you’ll give away our position,” she said. “We need to kill them quickly, before they know what’s hit them, otherwise they’ll alert the rest of the hive. Leave this to me.”
He glanced at her gun. It was a slim metal tube wrapped in electromagnets, with batteries in the stock, and a foot-long magazine protruding from the bottom of the barrel, just in front of the trigger. It looked like something knocked up in somebody’s garden shed. Christ alone knew where the Commodore had found it.
“Really?”
She took up a firing stance.
“Have you ever seen one of these at work?”
He waggled his head.
“Nah.”
“Then you might want to stand back.”
The footsteps reached the door, and the handle rattled as somebody seized it. Marie clicked the coil gun’s trigger, and moved the barrel back and forth. Firing without sound or recoil, the gun peppered the door, punching dozens of pencil-thin holes through the wooden panels, the frame, and the walls to either side. The effect was as if she’d taken a chainsaw to it. As the stream of tungsten darts crossed and recrossed the door, chunks of wood were cut away and blown out into the corridor. By the time she clicked the trigger off again, only one large piece remained, attached to the lower hinge, and even that had a few holes through it. Outside in the corridor, two Neanderthals lay slumped against the far wall, their white suits ragged and soaked in bright red blood.
Ack-Ack Macaque walked forward carefully, keeping his guns trained on the them; but he needn’t have bothered—when he got closer, he saw they were both quite definitively dead. Bits of their massive jaws and swollen craniums were missing, torn away by the deadly rain of miniature projectiles, and their chests and stomachs had been minced to hamburger. He poked one in the shoulder with the barrel of his gun, and the man’s arm fell off, severed in three or four places, as if it had been hacked apart with a meat cleaver.
“Man,” Ack-Ack Macaque muttered, “I have got to get me one of those guns.”
The walls of the landing had been painted red; the floors were dark, varnished wood, and heavily framed paintings adorned the walls. Ack-Ack Macaque ran a finger across one of the paintings, and it came away covered in dust. Other doors led off from the landing, presumably into other bedrooms, and a wide stone staircase swept down to an entrance hall. Crouching by the wrought iron rail, he peeped over. The entrance hall had a bulbous, black metal chandelier hanging from a chain above its diamond-patterned flagstone floor, and a reception desk installed just inside the main doors of the house, at the foot of the stairs. A whitesuited man and woman stood behind the desk, consulting a fire alarm console, on which several red lights were illuminated. As he watched, they stopped what they were doing, and both turned to look at the stairs. He ducked back.
Damn, he thought, they’re all linked, aren’t they? Marie had done her best, but it made no difference; as soon as you killed one of the Gestalt, the others all knew something had happened. They might not know the cause, but they sensed the loss. Now, they’d all be converging on this landing to find out what was going on, and he wasn’t sure he could hold them all off.
Well, he thought, so much for stealth. If I wanted a sneak attack, I wouldn’t have blown up the roof.
He picked another grenade from his belt, and tossed it over the rail. He heard a shout, then a satisfying crump, and the clatter of broken glass.
“Maybe that’ll make them more cautious,” he muttered, standing up and dusting himself down. The two by the reception desk were either unconscious or dead. He kept one gun trained on them and the other on the front door, as he made his way down, step-by-step. The back of his leather jacket squeaked as he pressed it against the painted wall. His cigar left a descending trail of grey smoke.
Marie said, “They don’t know there are two of us. You keep them distracted, and I’ll stay up here and check the other rooms.”
“Knock yourself out.”
They had only seconds, and a staircase was no place for a shootout. Three doors led off the hallway, deeper into the rest of the house, and he knew he had to choose one. Rather than cross the hallway, he chose to slip around to the door beneath the stairs. His caution wasn’t the result of fear; at this point, he had no regard for own his physical safety, he just wanted to make sure he survived long enough to find K8, and get her out of this madhouse.
The door opened to his touch and he stepped inside, guns at the ready. If one Gestalt member saw him, the rest would be on his trail instantly, so he had no time for subtlety. The rule for today was to kill or be killed; and he couldn’t afford to die before he freed K8.She might be a brat, but she was a damn clever brat, and a dependable friend. She’d been there for him in reality, and in the game, and now she was his only remaining link to the game world, and the person he used to be. She was his colleague and his comrade, and he couldn’t imagine life without her. She’d saved his life in the past; now it was his turn to repay the favour. Monkeys were instinctively social creatures, yet he was the only one of his kind. She was the closest thing he had to a member of his troupe, and those primate loyalties ran deep. He knew he’d get her back even if—especially if—he had to kill every last motherf*cker in the building.
The door brought him into a long corridor, which seemed to run the length of the house, with doors leading off to either side. As he stood there, three of the doors opened, and men and women in white suits stepped out, blocking the way. They were of all ages and nationalities, but their faces all carried the same eerie smile. Some clutched guns, but most were armed with whatever they’d had to hand: knives, letter openers, chair legs…
“You cannot win,” they said in unison, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, not attacking. “You are one, we are legion. You will join us.”
“Go suck an egg.”
“You will join us willingly.” The crowd took a pace forwards. “Or otherwise...”
Ack-Ack Macaque glanced at his Colts. Both were fully loaded, which meant he had twelve shots—not nearly enough to deal with the mob in front of him. He might get the first few rows, but he wouldn’t have time to reload before the others were upon him. He’d have to drop the revolvers and switch to the automatic pistol tucked into the waistband of his trousers, under his jacket. That would give him another ten shots. Then there was the knife at his belt and, if all else failed, his bare hands and fangs.
He fixed the closest two with a glare, and rolled the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other.
“F*ck you,” he said.
As one, they took another step towards him, and raised their weapons. That was all he needed. He opened his mouth with a shriek, and leapt to the attack.