CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
DIALLING OUT
WILLIAM COLE STOOD on the Tereshkova’s bridge, watching the countryside wheel around as the old airship slowed and turned, ready to begin its run back to Larkin Hall and the scene of the battle. From where he stood, he could see a black column of smoke rising into the autumn air. Most of the building’s roof was ablaze. And, somewhere down there, beneath that inferno, his wife and child were fighting for their lives.
He scratched fitfully at his wild hair.
“How could I have let her go like that?”
Behind him, Victoria Valois glanced up from her instruments.
“I don’t recall you having a choice.”
He turned on her.
“But I could have insisted! I could have gone in her place.”
“No, you couldn’t. What use would you have been, eh?” She looked back down at her console.
“At least Marie’s fought the Gestalt before. She knows what to expect.”
William shook his head. He had a pain in the back of his throat.
“I am such a coward.”
He turned back to the window. The smoke and flames looked thicker than before.
Had he lost her again?
THREE CAVEMEN CAME into the cellar. One of them held Lila at bay while the other two grabbed K8. She tried to fight them off but they were solidly built and seemingly impervious to the kicks and blows she aimed their way. She tried to gouge their eyes and knee their groins, but they simply held her tighter, and twisted her arms up behind her back until she cried out and stopped squirming. Her strength had been sapped by the drugs in her system.
“You come with us,” the Neanderthals said together. It was the first time she’d heard them speak, and she was surprised. Somehow, she’d been expecting a crude grunt rather than fully formed words.
Moving in perfect step, they pulled her out of the cellar and up a set of stone steps, into a whitetiled kitchen equipped with a wood-burning range, a walk-in larder, and a porcelain sink as big as a bathtub. As they led her through the room, the house rocked to the sound of an explosion. She heard a helicopter overhead, very low and very loud, and small arms fire coming from the front of the building.
“Are we under attack?”
The hands on her arms didn’t loosen. Without breaking stride or showing even the slightest curiosity, the three Neanderthals carried her through the kitchen and out, through a series of utility rooms, to a wooden door, which led out into a well-tended kitchen garden, with rows of herbs and vegetables and ornamental bay trees. After the dry, dust-laden air of the cellar, the bright sunshine and chill November breeze hit her like a double handful of cold water, and she sneezed. The fresh air helped her head to clear, and she struggled anew, to test their grip.
“Where are you taking me?”
From within the house behind, she heard the muffled thump of another explosion. Her heart surged. That had to be the Skipper. He’d come for her, as she’d known he would. Who else would be tossing grenades around inside a stately home? She stopped wriggling and laughed.
“You idiots are for it now.”
The Neanderthals weren’t listening; or, if they were, they were doing a very good job of ignoring her, and everything else around them. Still marching in perfect synchronisation, they marched her out onto the lawn, and stopped in the centre of a circular patch of dead grass maybe two metres in diameter.
Behind them, the roof of Larkin Hall was ablaze. Smoke billowed up into the blue sky, chased by orange tongues of flame. Gunshots went off like firecrackers.
The Neanderthals seemed to be in no hurry to get away. In fact, they could hardly have chosen a more exposed spot on which to stand. If the Skipper were in the house, all it would take for her to be rescued would be for him to look out of a window...
“Skip!” she hollered. “Skip, I’m out here!” But all that earned her was a cuff across the top of the head from one of her captors.
The caveman who’d whacked her pulled a device from the pocket of his white jacket. It was black and shiny, and resembled a fat SincPhone. The casing looked to be tough rubber, worn in places but designed to take abuse. She watched him tap the touchscreen with a fat, hairy-knuckled finger. Was he making a call?
Far beyond the conifers at the far end of the lawn, she caught sight of the Tereshkova. Impeller blades glittering in the sunlight; the old airship banked sharply, and came around to face the house. She felt the urge to wave her arms and shriek. It might be old and, with its black and white paint job, somewhat ugly, but the elderly skyliner was her home; the first permanent one she’d had since the offer of work with Céleste Tech had enabled her to escape the disintegration of her parents’ marriage.
The Neanderthal with the handset paused with his finger over the touchscreen, and muttered something in a language she didn’t understand.
“What?”
He grinned at her, exposing flat, shovel-like teeth in a too-wide jaw.
“I said, ‘hold on to yourself.’” He brought his hand down and stabbed the ‘phone’. K8 felt a quiver move through her entire body. Every muscle and membrane shook. Her eyes trembled in their sockets, blurring her vision, and the sky went dark.
When her sight cleared, she found they were still in the garden, standing in their circle of dead grass, but everything around them had changed. The house wasn’t on fire; in fact, it was larger than it had been a moment ago, with a couple of turrets that hadn’t been there before, and a whole extra wing that seemed to have materialised out of nowhere. The sounds of fighting had gone, and the Tereshkova had disappeared from the sky. In its place hung another airship—bigger, armoured, and unmistakably decked-out for war. Cannon poked from turrets along its length, and its upper surfaces bristled with radar emplacements and anti-aircraft batteries. Its impellers were much larger than the Tereshkova’s, and every inch of its hull had been painted black.
A VTOL passenger jet sat on the grass nearby, engines idling, and the Neanderthals carried her towards it. K8 had never flown in a plane before. To her, this one looked kind of like a helicopter without rotors, and she didn’t like it. Planes were rare in her world, and she didn’t trust them. The idea that a slim metal tube could be held aloft by the difference in speed between the air passing over and under its wing seemed ludicrous.
“Come along,” her captors said, bustling her forwards, “the Leader will see you now.”