Hive Monkey (3 page)

“No. Now, I’ve asked you to fuck off once.” He fixed the man with his one good eye. “Do I have to ask you again?”

Dean picked up his notebook and pushed it into the pocket of his coat. The tips of his ears were bright scarlet.

“There’s a story here, and one way or another, I’m not leaving until I get it.”

Ack-Ack Macaque blew a second, smaller smoke ring.

“Suit yourself.” His hand snaked out and plucked the camera drone from the air. In one fluid movement, he brought it slamming down against the edge of the bar. Its plastic casing shattered, and the little fan motors died.

“Hey!” Dean took a step forward. “Do you know how much those things cost?”

Ack-Ack Macaque grabbed him by the lapels and pulled him close enough that their faces almost touched.

“Do I look as if I give a shit?”

Dean flinched as spittle sprayed his face. He swallowed, and turned away from the smell of the cigar.

“You idiot,” he said. “You stupid, bloody idiot.”

Ack-Ack Macaque released him, and turned for the door.

Behind him, Dean said, “You’ll be hearing from my solicitor. That’s assault, matey. Assault and criminal damage.” His voice rose, buoyed up by righteous fury. “You’ll pay for this. I’ll crucify you in print, you just see if I don’t.”

Ack-Ack Macaque closed his eye.

“Get lost,” he said, voice low and dangerous.

Dean ignored him.

“I’ve got witnesses, haven’t I?” He pointed to the guy in the white suit. “You just wait until you see tomorrow’s headlines, pal. You just wait.”

For a second, Ack-Ack Macaque considered turning around and punching the guy’s Adam’s apple out through the back of his neck. He imagined the crunch of knuckles hitting larynx, and ground his teeth. So tempting...

In the end, though, he had to content himself with walking away. He couldn’t assault passengers, however annoying they might be. He couldn’t even hurl his own shit at them. He’d had that drummed into him time and time again, and was in no mood for another lecture. Instead, he stepped out into the corridor and let the door swing shut behind him.

Fists clenched and cigar clamped in his teeth, he stalked to the dining room, where he found the evening buffet still in full swing, and the airship’s owner drinking her first Martini of the night.

Victoria Valois had left her blonde wig in her cabin. Some days, she just didn’t care what she looked like. Looking at her now, the smooth lines of her bald scalp were misshapen by a thick ridge of scar tissue bulging from her right temple, into which had been inlaid various input jacks, USB ports, and infrared sensors. The victim of a severe head trauma a few years back, half her brain had been replaced with experimental gelware processors, making her as much of an artificial creature as he was.

“Hey, boss.” His voice was gruff. “How are we doing?”

She looked up from her glass. Her eyes were the same pale colour as the dawn sky. She wore a black t-shirt and blue jeans, and had a white military dress tunic draped over her shoulders. Her fighting stick lay on the table before her: a twelve-inch cylinder of metal that would, at a shake, spring out to almost six feet in length.

“We’re about ten minutes from the airport, still running on autopilot.” She picked the cocktail stick from the glass, and waved an impaled olive in his direction. “Do you want to bring us in, or are you still on leave?”

The tunic she wore came from the wardrobe of the
Tereshkova
’s former owner, the Commodore. An eccentric Russian millionaire with a proud military history, the Commodore had been killed in action while boarding the royal yacht during last November’s shenanigans, and had bequeathed his elderly skyliner to Victoria, his goddaughter and only living relative.

“I might as well.” Ack-Ack Macaque scowled around his cigar. “The evening’s pretty much ruined now, anyway.”

“How so?”

“That journalist who came on board in New York.”

“Has he been pestering you?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you hurt him?”

Ack-Ack Macaque shook his head. “He’s fine. I just told him to sling his hook.”

Victoria raised an eyebrow.

“Is that all?”

“Well, I may have squashed his bug.”

She rolled her eyes.

“How commendably restrained of you.” She dropped the cocktail stick back into her glass.

Ack-Ack Macaque grinned.

“Well,” he said, “I’d better get to work.” He threw her a floppy-armed salute and loped through the lounge, pausing only to snake an unguarded cheese and pickle sandwich from the buffet.

By the time he reached the bridge at the front of the gondola, brushing crumbs from the hairs on his chin and chest, the landing field had come into sight. Not that they would be landing, of course. Through the curved glass windscreen that comprised the entire front wall of the gondola, he could see helicopters and smaller blimps awaiting their arrival, ready to lift cargo and passengers to the helipads fixed onto the upper surfaces of the
Tereshkova
’s five hull sections.

He reached the pilot’s station and settled himself behind the instrument console, in the familiar scuffed and worn leather chair. The controls of the
Tereshkova
, like those of all modern aircraft, were computerised. There was no joystick like there had been in his Spitfire, and no old-fashioned nautical steering wheel like there had been in the early Zeppelins—only a glass SincPad screen that displayed an array of virtual instruments and readouts. He could adjust the craft’s heading and pitch by running his leathery fingertips over illuminated symbols, and control the vessel’s speed and height using animated slide bars. It looked deceptively simple—so simple, in fact, that a child could grasp it—but he knew from experience that there was a lot more to piloting something this large. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. For a start, the big, old airship would only turn sluggishly, and you had to finely balance the thrust to compensate for crosswinds and turbulence. If you wanted to bring it to a dead stop, you had to start slowing five miles in advance. Right now, as they approached the airfield’s perimeter, they were crawling forward at walking pace. Each of the airship’s engine nacelles could be controlled individually. Some were providing forward momentum, others reverse thrust, while the rest were pushing edge-on to the prevailing south-westerly, holding the big craft steady against the wind.

Looking forward through the big, curved windshield, Ack-Ack Macaque saw the city lights of Bristol laid out beyond the runways and hangars like sequins on a black cushion: the white and red streams of cars and buses; the twisted spider’s webs of orange streetlamps; and the harsh daylight glow of a stadium’s floods. The sight filled him with excitement. Nick Dean could go hang. Somewhere down there would be music and drinking, in a place with low lights and shadowy booths, where he could get comfortably shitfaced without attracting a large crowd. After a seventy-two hour crossing from New York, he intended to party: to get drunk with strangers, and see where the night took him.

Not that it would be enough, of course. It was never enough. Whatever he did, he couldn’t scratch the itch that niggled him. He couldn’t find anything to match the heady excitement of life in the game world, with the heightened reality of its constant action, and everything painted for him in the simple brushstrokes of a childhood summer’s afternoon. The memory of it haunted him like an addiction, and sometimes it was all he could do to blot it out with drink.

He sighed.

Later, he’d take the new Spitfire out for a few hours, he decided. Nothing blew away the cobwebs of a hard night like the high, thin clarity of the dawn. For him, flying was the only thing in this world even close to the exhilaration of the game.

The Spit was an original, one of a number built during the Second World War, but then packed in crates as the War drew to a close, and buried by British forces in Burma. Since their excavation in the early 2020s, more than thirty had been reassembled and refurbished. His had been one of the first out of the ground, and had been lovingly restored to full flightworthiness. Victoria had bought it for him as a present. It was her way of saying thank you and, since inheriting the Commodore’s billions, she could easily afford it.

Currently, he had the Spit housed in a hangar at the stern of the
Tereshkova
’s outermost starboard hull, along with the airship’s complement of passenger helicopters. A four-hundred-metre-long runway ran diagonally across the top of the five hulls, to the opposite edge of the airship. It was just long enough for him to take off and land, providing the wind was blowing in the right direction and the
Tereshkova
wasn’t moving too quickly.

Yes, a flight would be good. He’d enjoy getting up into the clouds: just him at the controls of the Spit, just the way it had been in the seemingly endless virtual summer of 1944, when all he’d had to worry about was the next dogfight.

Simian fingers tapping on the glass control screens, he brought the old airship into position above the airport’s main apron, and eased back on the forward thrust, slowing it to a halt so that its shadow hung over the waiting choppers, blotting out half the sky like the footprint of an alien mothership. He puffed on his cigar, and rubbed his hands together. The city lay before him like an untended buffet table, ripe for plundering, and alive with tantalising possibilities.

Oh yes, tonight was going to be a good night. He could feel it in his bones.

CHAPTER THREE

BETTER ANGELS

“P
LEASE,
C
APTAIN.
” T
HE
American threw his arms wide. “I’m desperate.”

Victoria Valois considered him. Lack of sleep had left his eyes rheumy and red; the pores on his nose were enlarged; and his hair and beard were uncombed and wild, as if he’d dragged himself backwards through a hedge—an impression reinforced by the myriad nicks and scratches on his cheeks and forehead.

“I don’t doubt it.”

His name was William Cole. Apparently, he’d come aboard with the first of the passengers, and had immediately asked to see her, to request sanctuary. They were in her cabin now, behind the
Tereshkova
’s bridge, and she was sitting at her desk, in front of the large picture window that comprised most of the back wall. The office, like the skyliner itself, had once belonged to the Commodore, and there were still traces of him everywhere. She had hardly changed a thing. The books on the bookshelves were his, as was the ancient Persian rug covering the steel deck, and the cutlass sticking at an angle from the tasteless old elephant-foot umbrella stand.

She sat back.

“Pourquoi?”

“Because somebody’s trying to kill me.”

Victoria made a steeple of her fingers. “So you said, but why have you come here? Why have you come to me?”

Cole leant forward. Beneath the scratches, his face looked puffy and soft. She had him pegged for an alcoholic, or maybe a junkie.

“Firstly, because you’re the only skyliner in town right now.” He counted off the reasons on his fingers. “And secondly, because you’ve got a reputation for pretty tight security. Nobody can get on board without being scanned for weapons.”

Victoria picked up one of the fountain pens that lay on the desk jotter. The brain surgery she’d undergone had left her unable to read or write, and so the pen was useless to her; but she still liked to fiddle with it while she talked, like an ex-smoker sucking on a plastic straw. “Who are you, Mister Cole?”

“I’m a writer.”

“Oh?” She raised an eyebrow. “What sort of a writer?” She herself had been a journalist, back before the head wound that left her incapable of parsing written text.

Cole looked down at his hands. “I’m a novelist.”

Victoria frowned.

“Who’d want to kill a novelist?” She drummed the end of the pen against the blotter. “Aside from another novelist, I mean. What sort of stuff do you write?”

“Science fiction.”

“Ah, I see.” She sat back in her chair. “Well, of course, I don’t really read that stuff myself.” She rubbed her nose with a forefinger. “But my husband does.”

“Your husband?” It was Cole’s turn to frown. “Forgive me, ma’am, but on the flight up here, I checked your public profile. It said your husband was dead.”

Victoria narrowed her eyes. Even after a year of unwanted fame, she couldn’t get used to the idea that strangers could be familiar with details of her personal life.

“Yes, he is.” She put the pen on the desk. “But he still has his uses.” She raised her gaze to the security camera above the door. “Paul? I assume you’re listening?”

“Oh, yes.” The voice came from an intercom speaker bolted to the metal ceiling. Paul had been murdered a year ago, for his unwitting part in the conspiracy to bring about Armageddon; but Victoria had managed to rescue a back-up copy of his personality. At first, she’d stored it in her own head, running it on the neural gelware prosthesis that filled half her skull; but that hadn’t been a very satisfactory arrangement for either of them. She needed her privacy, and he needed something to occupy him. And so, a couple of months ago, with K8’s help, she had uploaded his electronic essence to the
Tereshkova
’s main processors, where there was enough computing power to sustain him almost indefinitely. The process had been difficult and risky. They couldn’t turn him off without resetting him to his initial state, which would have meant losing all the memories he’d accumulated since being reactivated. So they’d been forced to set up a seamless fibre optic link between Victoria’s cranial processors and the computers in the
Tereshkova
, and then transfer him along it. Back-ups were notoriously delicate, prone to falling apart at the slightest disruption, but somehow they’d done it. He had the chance to survive a little longer. And their relationship, which had once been torrid, then awkward, seemed now to have settled into a deep, caring friendship. The love was still there. Love, for them, had never been a problem. They’d stayed close all through their disastrous marriage and subsequent separation; it was only his sexuality that drove them apart. He’d stopped finding her desirable, and it had broken both their hearts.