Hive Monkey (15 page)

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 caveman 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.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

FIRE POSITION

K8
LEFT THE
Captain talking to the orange-haired lady, and wandered back in the direction of her cabin. As she passed through the gondola’s main lounge, the sun shone through the brass-rimmed portholes. Motes danced in the light. Uniformed stewards bustled back and forth, serving breakfast to a handful of passengers, clustered in ones and twos around the small, circular tables. As a plate went past, she caught the smell of bacon and scrambled eggs, and her stomach growled. She’d been awake all night, and hadn’t eaten anything for hours. For a moment, she dithered, trying to decide whether to sit down and eat, or head back to her cabin and crash in her bunk.

In the end, sleep won out. She was young, and needed her rest. Pausing only to snag a slice of toast from the serving table, she went aft, along the main accommodation corridor.

As she walked, she nibbled a corner of the toast, and pondered the events of the night. One thing particularly bugged her. She’d heard Marie claim the Gestalt had killed William Cole’s doppelganger. But if Reynolds had been with the Captain when Bill was shot, he couldn’t have done the deed—which meant Bill’s killer could still be on board, somewhere, waiting for the chance to strike again.

How many members of the Gestalt were on the current passenger list?

She needed to talk to Ack-Ack Macaque. He’d know what to do. He always knew what to do. Just being around him made her feel safe. Partly it was his proclivity for violence—she knew he’d rip apart anyone who tried to harm her. He was like the big brother she’d never had, and the pet she’d always wanted: a big, sweary monkey who drank and smoked and was dangerous to other people, but always safe, safe, safe for her.

Not, of course, that she’d ever admit to such feelings. Where she came from, you learned to keep your emotions to yourself and never show a hint of weakness, or dependence on anyone else. And besides, she knew that if she tried to tell him how she felt, he’d laugh at her. Not in a cruel way, maybe; but not in a sympathetic way, either. As far as he was concerned, they were comrades in arms. She was his wingman, and that was all there was to it.

They’d first met in the game world. Impressed by her hacking and gaming skills, Céleste Tech had brought her in to help monitor the monkey’s behaviour. They plucked her from the slums of Glasgow and flew her to their labs on the outskirts of Paris, where they had the monkey strapped to a couch in a lab, his artificially enhanced brain hooked into the simulated world, believing the dogfights and battles around him were real. They’d already used up four previous primates, and couldn’t work out why the monkeys kept cracking up. It was K8’s job to keep the latest, Ack-Ack Macaque himself, sane and operational. Instead, when he escaped into the countryside outside Paris, she went after him—not to get him back, but rather to help him bring down the company, and everything for which it stood.

When she’d gone to Paris, it had been the first time she’d left her native Glasgow. Most of her teens up until that point had been spent in her bedroom, illuminated by the blue glow of a computer monitor. Now, just over a year later, she’d been all around the world working as a navigator on the
Tereshkova
, playing co-pilot to an ill-tempered, cigar-chomping monkey. She’d walked the streets of New York and San Francisco, feeling like a character in a movie; seen the sun set over the Pacific; looked down from her porthole at the splendour of the Grand Canyon. And yet, despite it all, she was still the shorthaired little ginger kid from the Easterside estate, acting tough because she had to; because that was the only way she knew how. The irony was, she no longer had to worry about the mean kids, the schoolyard bullies, or her parents’ fighting. Her hacking skills had taken her out of Scotland, and anyone who tried to intimidate her now would first have to deal with an angry and heavily armed primate; but she’d been putting up a front so long she couldn’t let go of it. It had become a part of who she was. She’d been acting the plucky little tough girl so long that now she couldn’t tell exactly where the role ended and the real her began.

Her shoes echoed on the metal deck. The doors to the passenger staterooms were made of polished wood. The door to Ack-Ack Macaque’s, which was situated farther back, in the crew section, was metal. It was an oval hatch, with a lip like the hatch of a cabin in a seagoing ship. As she reached it, she heard the howl of the Spit’s Rolls Royce Merlin engine, and knew he was still out there, flinging himself around the sky, reliving his glory days as a fighter pilot.

Disappointed, she thought about going back to her own cabin, but didn’t feel like being alone. Instead, holding the toast in her mouth, she pushed down on the handle, intending to curl up on his spare bunk. He wouldn’t mind, and she could barricade herself in his cabin while she waited for him, wrapped in the reassuring, homely scents of old cigar smoke, leather and animal sweat.

She shouldered the door open and, taking the toast from her mouth, stifled a yawn with the back of her hand. The room was dark. Still yawning, she fumbled her hand along the inside of the wall, searching for the switch. As she did so, she heard the rustle of clothing, and became aware of another presence in the room.

Before she could cry out, gloved hands closed firmly around her arm. Other hands closed over her mouth and nose, and squeezed her throat, holding her head still. She kicked out in the darkness, but their grip only tightened. There were at least two people holding her. The pressure on her larynx stopped her from being able to shout. She couldn’t even breathe. Frantically, she kicked and thrashed, but the hands held her in place. Something cold pressed against her neck, and she flinched, expecting a gunshot. Instead, there was a loud, mechanical click, and a needle punched through the skin above her collarbone, into the muscle beneath.

T
HE
S
PITFIRE’S COCKPIT
was cold, and smelled like a zoo, but that was just the way Ack-Ack Macaque liked it. Six thousand feet above the airfield, high above the uppermost antennae of the hovering
Tereshkova
, he wheeled the plane through the crisp morning air. From up here, through the perspex bubble of the cockpit, he could see down the length of the Estuary, towards the distant southerly hills of Exmoor; and west, across the rolling landscape of Wales, to the bracken-brown peaks of the Brecon Beacons. No trace remained of last night’s rain. The sky was an endless blue, the air as fresh and clear as a melt-water stream, and his heart sang an accompaniment to the engine’s holler.

Wrapped in his leather flying jacket and favourite silk scarf, he pushed his goggles up onto the top of his head, and peered down at the city streets whirling beneath his wings. He wondered how many people were still asleep in the houses on the outskirts of the airfield. Pushing the stick forward, he put the Spit into a screaming dive and held it—ignoring the screams of protest from air traffic control—until the altimeter dial had almost wound down to zero. At the last possible moment, less than a hundred feet above the deck, he hauled back and pulled up the nose, booming over the suburban roofs and gardens at three hundred miles per hour, rattling windows and setting off car alarms.

Cackling, he kept low, only pulling up once the houses gave way to fields and industrial units. Then, throttle pushed forward, he aimed the old plane’s nose at the sky. The Spit leapt like a prancing horse, eager to kick up its heels, and he gave it the beans, glorying in the shuddering roar of the engine. This was what he was, what he’d always been: first and foremost, a pilot.

“To slip the ugly bonds of Earth,” he misquoted around his cigar. “To punch the stupid, smiling face of God.” His voice sounded muffled. His ears still ached from last night’s gunfire, and the changes in pressure caused by these manoeuvres weren’t helping. He opened his mouth wide to let them pop, then pushed aside his left earphone and waggled his little finger in the hole. His whole head felt like a bubble that refused to burst. “Fuck it,” he muttered. Time to go home. A bit of rest and recuperation would do him more good than titting about in a plane, however chary he was to admit it.

He levelled out his climb at five thousand feet. By now, he was over the bronze-coloured waters of the Severn, so he put the plane into a wide turn, intending to bring it back to the
Tereshkova
.

He passed over the Second Severn Crossing, flashing through the gap between its massive concrete towers, and brought the nose around to face the rising sun.

As the cigar-shaped silhouette of the airship hove into view ahead, he clocked a helicopter lifting from its upper deck. But it wasn’t one of the tubby passenger choppers that belonged to the ship. This was a sleek, small, and expensive-looking dragonfly; able to carry no more than two or three people; maybe four, at a push.

“Special delivery,” he muttered, wondering if the ‘copter had just picked someone up, or just dropped them off. He watched it climb into the sky, heading eastwards over the city, away from him. In his experience, an expensive ’copter like that usually belonged to a high-ranking business person or celebrity—or, he thought with a scowl, that bloody film crew who wanted to make a movie about him. Couldn’t they get it though their thick, coke-addled heads that he wasn’t the slightest bit interested in seeing a Hollywood version of his life? If he’d wanted fame, he could have had all he could handle last year in the wake of that scrap in the Channel. But he hadn’t. He’d chosen to fly away on the
Tereshkova
instead. Couldn’t those people take a bloody hint?

For the past half an hour, he’d been ignoring the radio chatter from the ground. Mostly, they’d been shouting at him for breaking rules and flying dangerously, and he’d sort of tuned them out. Now though, as he watched the helicopter pull away, he became aware of a new note of urgency in their voices.

Ack-ster, Ack-ster, respond please. This is Paul. Respond please.

“Hey Paul, what’s up?”

Oh, man, where have you been? I’ve been calling you.

“I’m here, I’m here. What’s the problem? Are the Hollywood people here again?”

It’s K8. They’ve got K8.

Ack-Ack Macaque felt the hairs prickle on his neck. “Who’s got her?”

The Gestalt. They grabbed her from your cabin. They were disguised as passengers. They disabled some of our cameras, but I caught them taking her up to the roof. She looked drugged.

His hands squeezed the stick.

“Where are they now?”

They had a helicopter waiting. It was registered as a courier from Legion Haulage.

Ack-Ack Macaque glared forward, through the bulletproof windshield.

“Small, pricey-looking job?”

Yes.