Hive Monkey (24 page)

She smiled at him.

“Hello.” She held out her hand. Her accent was pure cut glass. “Mother’s resting at the moment, but I thought you and I should probably meet.”

William rubbed his palm against his trouser leg before taking her hand. Her skin was cool and unexpectedly rough, and her grip was strong.

“Pleasure to meet you,” he stammered as they shook formally.

She really did have his eyes; but on her, they looked much better.

After a moment of awkwardness, he realised he was still holding her hand, and hurriedly let go.

“Would you like a drink?”

She shook her head and pursed her lips. She seemed as nervous as he was. After a moment’s hesitation, she slid onto the bar stool next to his, crossed her legs at the ankle, and clasped her hands in her lap.

“How are you?” she said. She had a wine-coloured bruise on her right cheek.

William straightened his back, and unconsciously reached up to flatten the hair at the side of his head.

“I’m okay,” he said, meaning it. “The past twenty-four hours have been kind of rough, but I’m getting there.”

“You don’t find this peculiar, meeting me like this?”

He gave a snort of not-quite laughter.

“Yeah, of course I do. It’s all extremely, majorly, fundamentally
weird
. But you don’t know what my life was like up until yesterday.” He looked into her eyes, fighting down the sudden urge to confess, to drag up his dust ball of a life and lay it all out in front of her, so she could see how miserable and alone he’d been. “Compared to that, weird is kind of good.” He pulled back slightly. “Listen, I don’t pretend to understand half of what’s happened. All I know is that right now, you and your mother are here, alive and breathing, and that’s all that really matters.”

Lila tugged at the hem of her borrowed jacket, and glanced around the room. She seemed to be grappling with something.

“I don’t know what to call you.” Her brow furrowed. “I don’t even know what you should call me.”

William blinked. “What would you like me to call you? You’re my daughter.”

She shrugged, clearly uncomfortable.

“I don’t know. I just lost my father.”

William felt an odd, fluttering sensation in his chest. He gripped the edge of the copper counter.

“You weren’t even
born
when I lost you.”

Her eyes were like perfect jewels set into the marble of her face. They filled him with a strange mourning for his own lost youth—for the gawky Ohio farm boy he’d misplaced somewhere along the way. How different his life would have been if he’d had a girl like this to care for and raise. How much better a man he’d have had to be.

“So...” His voice wavered. “What do we do now?”

Lila bit her lower lip, and brushed her hair behind her ear. The gesture was one she’d picked up from her mother, and it brought a lump to his throat.

“I don’t know about you, Dad,” she said hesitantly, trying out the word, “but there’s a fight coming, and I’m going to be part of it.”

BREAKING NEWS

From
The European Sentinel
, online edition:

Jets Scramble as Europe

Put on Military Alert

P
ARIS
16/11/2060 – Official sources remain tight-lipped about unconfirmed reports of frenzied activity at RAF and Commonwealth airbases across Europe, and speculation that this could be part of a massive, Europe-wide mobilisation of air defence forces. All that is known for certain is that all leave has been cancelled for service men and women from all branches of the armed forces, and that the aircraft carriers HMS
Shakespeare
and HMS
Jules Verne,
which had both been en route to Oslo for a special visit to mark the centenary of Norway’s integration into the United Kingdom, have instead been diverted, and are now believed to be steaming for the mouth of the Thames Estuary.

Are these measures a prelude to hostilities with another country, and if so, which one? Or could they be somehow related to last year’s attempted royal coup d’etat?

So far, official sources have refused to comment, saying only that Commonwealth citizens should remain calm, and monitor news channels for further updates.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE

T
HE
VTOL
PLANE
took K8 and her three minders to the armoured airship. As soon as it touched down, they went to seize her again, but she slapped their hands away.

“Hey, I can walk by myself, okay?” She straightened her jumper, tired of being manhandled. “We’re on an airship, remember? You’ve got me. Where am I going to go?”

The Neanderthals frowned at each other, then the one who’d spoken before said, “Okay, you walk. But don’t try anything stupid.”

K8 pulled herself up out of her seat, and moved along the aisle to the aircraft’s cabin door. The plane had come down on the upper surface of the armoured airship, in a gap between gun emplacements and sensor pods. Carefully, K8 climbed down the steps, followed by the three cavemen in white. When they were at the bottom, she put her fists on her hips.

“Okay, Ug, which way?”

The one with the voice raised his arm.

“That way, through the hatch,” he said. “Down the ladder. No funny stuff.”

K8 turned in the direction he pointed.

“Oh, don’t worry, sunshine. I’ll leave the jokes to you.”

She went over to the open hatch. Pleated metal stairs led down into the bowels of the ship. She paused to take a last look at the boundless sky, and to draw a last lungful of clear, untainted air. Then she started down. As she clumped towards the bottom rung, she took note of the thickness of the armour plate on the hull to either side of her. It was at least ten centimetres deep. That was enough to stop all but the most powerful machine guns. If the thickness remained consistent all over the hull, the airship would be nigh-on bulletproof, not to mention weighing about the same as a small mountain. Most of its interior would have to be given over to gasbags, she thought, just to support that immensity.

At the bottom of the stairs, the Neanderthals led her forwards, through the airship’s interior, towards the bows. She saw racks holding automatic rifles and submachine guns, piles of ammo boxes, and heaps of white-painted body armour. The walls had been decorated in a deep, sumptuous olive, and the door handles and other fittings had been fashioned from brightly polished brass.

Several times, they passed human members of the Gestalt. All were dressed in identical white suits, and all were silent. Even groups who appeared to be clustered together for discussion stood without speaking or smiling. Nobody on the airship spoke a word, and yet they were working and cooperating seamlessly. Some of them turned to watch her as she walked past, their eyes flat and passive and their expressions unreadable. On the
Tereshkova
, you could always hear voices—stewards making their rounds; passengers coming and going; mechanics changing light strips or unblocking sinks, whistling as they worked—but here, she heard only the distant thrum of turbines and the gentle whir of air in the vents.

She didn’t like it. The mute, emotionless Gestalt made her think of an old black and white horror film she’d seen once, about a group of white-haired children in a small English village. She’d been twelve years old when it came on the TV one evening, and it had given her nightmares for a week.

At one point, the corridor turned into a metal walkway suspended over a chamber with the appearance and approximate dimensions of a drained swimming pool. Four black boxes stood spaced along its bottom, each the size of an upended coffin. Frost glittered on their shiny sides, and K8 slowed to take a look.

“What are they?” She leaned over the railing. She thought they might be computer servers of some kind. Thick power cables and a variety of coloured data leads plugged into ports on the deck. The air in the chamber felt itchy with static.

“Engines.” One of the Neanderthals poked her between the shoulder blades. “Now, move.”

Reluctantly, she let them shepherd her onwards, until they reached an armoured door plated entirely in brass.

“Wait.”

K8 crossed her arms.“Why? What’s—?”

“Shush.” The Neanderthal tapped a thick finger against his temple. “Am talking to Leader.”

All three of them were motionless for a few seconds, just long enough for K8 to start feeling fidgety, before the vocal one gave a grunt and motioned at the door.

“You can go in now.”

“In here?” She eyed the door dubiously, remembering Lila’s fear of the Gestalt Leader, and the bruise on the girl’s cheek.

The Neanderthal gave her an insistent shove.

“Leader will see you now.”

K8
PUSHED OPEN
the brass door and stepped through into warmth and steam, and an overpowering greenhouse smell of dank compost and ripe vegetation. Trees stood in large pots, seemingly placed at random, with vines and creepers trailing between them. Smaller pots held ferns and sprays of bamboo, and butterflies flickered hither and thither like animated scraps of colourful cloth. Reed mats covered the floor, strewn with fallen leaves, and, from somewhere nearby, she heard the lazy trickle of a fountain.

Pushing through the dangling branches, she emerged onto a wooden veranda. Surrounded by trees on three sides, the veranda looked forward, through the blunt nose of the airship’s prow, which was transparent, having been constructed from thick panes of glass.

“Ah, there you are.” The Leader sat at a wrought iron patio table, one leg crossed over the other, and a china teacup halfway to his lips. Looking at him, K8 felt herself go cold inside and, for a second, stopped breathing.

“You—” She couldn’t get the words out. “You’re—”

The Leader placed his cup and saucer on the table. Black monkey hair stuck out from his white cuffs. A furry tail snaked from the back of his sharply creased trousers.

“Please,” he said, “have a seat. Can I offer you something to drink?”

Feeling suddenly faint, K8 tottered forward and sat on the closest of the three iron chairs set around the table.

“No,” she said. “No, thank you.”

“As you wish.” He brushed his knee with fastidious fingers, and straightened his posture. “Now, you may be wondering why I wanted to touch base with you?”

K8 took a deep breath. She couldn’t stop staring.

“I was wondering, aye.”

The monkey glanced at his fingernails, and then interlaced his fingers. “I believe that you and I have an acquaintance in common.”

“The Skipper?”

“If by that you mean the primate going by the ridiculous moniker of ‘Ack-Ack Macaque’, then yes.”

“What about him?”

The Leader smiled. His teeth were impossibly white. “I’ve just been negotiating with him. He’s a bit rough at the edges, but I think he’s got definite potential. If we could find a way to optimise his temper management, and thereby redirect his physicality towards more profitable goals, he and I could collaborate together very well.”

“He’d rather die.”

“Yes, his lively exchange of views with Mister Reynolds rather gave me that impression. Still, nobody’s perfect.”

He picked up his teacup between leathery fingers and K8 fidgeted in her chair. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. He looked so much like the Skipper, yet spoke and acted so, so differently.

Glancing back into the ersatz jungle, she said, “Those black boxes...”

His single eye looked at her over the rim of his cup.

“The engines.”

“Are they what moves you between parallels?”

He took a sip of tea, rolled it around the inside of his cheeks, and swallowed.

“Indeed they do. I call them my ‘probability engines’, but I won’t bore you with their technical specifications.” He put the cup back onto the table and wiped his palms on a white silk handkerchief from his top pocket. “Suffice to say, moving between worlds takes a lot of power, both in terms of energy input and in the amount of processing power needed to make the requisite calculations.”

“What do they run on?”

The Leader dabbed his lips, and pushed the hankie back into his jacket. “They draw power from the airship’s fusion plant.”

“You have fusion?” The idea sent a shiver the length of her spine. In her world, fusion had been one of a number of advances that always seemed to be about ten years away, forever on the horizon—like cheap space travel or a cure for AIDs—but never quite materialising. The idea that the inhabitants of another world had found a way to make it work, and a way to make it portable, filled her with unease, and an unreasonable stab of jealousy. And then, for the first time, she began to understand the reality of her situation. Wherever she was, she surely wasn’t in Kansas anymore.