BREAKING NEWS
From
Le Journal de Nouvelle Science
, online edition:
Mars Probe “Days From Launch”
26 N
OVEMBER
2059 – Inside sources at Céleste Tech have indicated that their long-heralded interplanetary “light sail” probe may be just days from launch.
Designed by engineers at the Céleste Technologies facility near Paris, the probe, dubbed ‘New Dawn’, will slingshot around the sun before unfurling a large “sail” to catch the solar wind and ride it to Mars.
If the launch is successful, the probe should reach Mars some time in 2061.
The project, which has been shrouded in secrecy, recently caused controversy when rumours started to circulate that its payload would include so-called “terraforming packages”.
The packages are believed to contain specially-tailored microbial life forms, including algae and extremophile bacteria, designed to absorb carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere and replace it with oxygen.
Such packages would be a theoretical first step in any effort to turn the Red planet into a second Earth, but campaigners are opposed to what they see as the wanton contamination of an unspoilt wilderness, about which we still know comparatively little.
Although officials remain tight-lipped about a definite date for the launch, inside sources say they expect it to coincide with celebrations to mark the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the European Commonwealth.
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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CLOCKWORK NINJAS
T
HEY DROVE FOR
the coast, Merovech at the wheel and Julie at his side. He needed to confront his mother, but wanted to do it on his terms, not hers; which meant finding his own way across the Channel.
Beside him, Julie seemed pensive. She kept chewing her bottom lip and wringing her hands in her lap. She hadn’t spoken in half an hour.
In the back of the van, K8 huddled with Ack-Ack Macaque over a SincPad screen. She’d been gently connecting wires from the jacks in his head to a router plugged into the pad. This was her idea of fighting back.
“The best way to hurt Céleste and draw a lot of attention is to take down the game,” she said. “And the best way to do that is to find the new monkey and kick its ass.”
Ack-Ack Macaque picked at his teeth.
“Find the big guy and take him out. Gotcha.”
K8 tapped a command into the pad, linking his artificially uplifted brain directly into the online game.
“Yeah, standard primate power play. Do you think you can handle it?”
“Do monkeys shit in the woods?”
His yellow eye flickered shut. K8 slid the final jack into place, covered his head with the leather skull cap, and rocked back. She met Merovech’s glance in the rear view mirror.
“He’s in.”
“Do you think this will work?”
K8 gave the monkey’s hand an affectionate pat.
“Aye, probably. If he can get in there and cause enough trouble to get noticed, then we can blow this thing sky high.” She shuffled forward and leaned between the front seats. “According to
Techsnark
, the game has ten thousand registered user accounts, and many more watching the action on YouTube. That’s a massive, ready-made audience, right there.”
They were on a back road, somewhere in Brittany, and it was now well after midnight. From the passenger seat, Julie said,
“Won’t they just block him?”
“I don’t know if they can. He’s hardwired into the game. He’s part of it. And besides, they might not even notice him. Not for a while, anyway. If they think digital rights activists snatched him, the last thing they’ll be expecting is for him to hook back in.” K8 looked between Merovech and Julie, and frowned. “How are you two holding up?”
Merovech stifled a yawn. For the past hour, he’d been watching the road’s central white line spool through the headlamps’ arc, his fingers squeezing the wheel as his mind struggled to parse the evening’s revelations.
He thought back to his time in the South Atlantic, before the helicopter crash.
“When in doubt,” his old commanding officer had been fond of saying, “make a plan and stick to it. Chunk everything down into small, achievable objectives.”
Rather than try to plan how he was going to get across the Channel, travel to Cornwall, and confront his mother without running afoul of either customs officials or her personal security team, he was focusing instead on reaching the coast. He knew that the parents of an old school friend had a yacht at Saint-Malo, and he hoped he’d be able to persuade them to take him across. In the meantime, he had the morale of his troops to consider.
“I could do with a break,” he said. “And a coffee.”
Beside him, Julie stretched like a waking cat.
“Coffee sounds good.”
A
CK-
A
CK
M
ACAQUE STOOD
blinking in the sudden light. He’d asked K8 to spawn him on the edge of one of the British airfields, at dawn, and the transition from the gloom and discomfort of the rattling old van to the warm sun and summer smells of the English countryside had been almost instantaneous. He took a deep breath in through his flattened nose. From his point of view, he was now standing in a meadow adjacent to the airfield’s perimeter fence. Buttercups waved in a light breeze. Bees droned. He drank it all in. Then, as if remembering something, his hands dropped to his hips, and his fingers closed eagerly on the holstered butts of his giant Colts.
“Hello, old friends.”
The guns were familiar and reassuring and, for a moment, everything seemed to be back the way it had been. But he knew in his heart that it wasn’t. Now he’d discovered the truth about himself, the rules had changed. He no longer cared who won the war. He could see the game world for the sham it had always been, and he was here to tear it down. He’d broken out of his prison, and now he’d returned to wreak bloody vengeance on his former jailers. This wasn’t a homecoming, it was a farewell tour.
A bazooka lay in the grass at his feet, like a long section of drainpipe. Beside it, a box of shells and a dozen grenades. K8 had hacked his profile to include the extra items. He wasn’t sure what ‘hacking’ meant, but he appreciated her efforts. For what he had in mind, he’d need all the firepower he could get his hands on.
He pulled a cigar from the inside pocket of his flight jacket and lit up, thinking what a shame it was that K8 couldn’t be there herself, in her guise as Mindy Morris. He’d grown used to having her as his co-pilot, and it seemed wrong for her to miss out on all the fun.
He heard a deep growling thrum from the south-east: a wave of boomerang-shaped flying wings powering in across the rolling fields, their triple propellers shimmering in the morning light. There were maybe a dozen in all, hurried along by six or seven darting, shark-like Messerschmitts.
Behind him, on the aerodrome, he heard the scramble bell ring. Another ninja parachute raid, as predictable as clockwork.
As the planes approached, he stood his ground, watching the funny-looking craft loom larger and larger in the morning sky. When the first parachute canopies blossomed, he drew the Colts and grinned around his cigar. This was going to be a riot.
He put bullets through the two lowest paratroopers. The others jerked around in their harnesses, searching the ground for the source of the shots. He heard them calling to each other in a panicky mixture of German and Japanese. Then they were down, rolling in the grass, their shrouds settling around them in clouds of gently falling silk.
Swords sang from their scabbards. Japanese steel flashed in the English summertime. Colts firing and fangs bared, Ack-Ack Macaque leapt to meet them.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
EXPIRED LEASE
V
ICTORIA
V
ALOIS SAT
on a bar stool, in a lounge on one of the skyliner’s starboard gondolas. She was watching the spirits quiver in the bottles hanging behind the bar. They were rippling in time to the almost subliminal vibrations of the
Tereshkova
’s engines.
The lounge had been decorated in a 1930s ‘Golden Era of Travel’ style, with art deco fixtures, ceiling fans, and plenty of prominent rivets on the bulkheads. A painting hung over the cash register, portraying the Commodore as a young man, in a white dress uniform with a bright scarlet sash.
A row of large circular portholes filled much of the starboard wall. Perched on her stool at the counter, Victoria had her back to them. She didn’t feel much like looking out, or down.
The bar counter itself had a thin copper top which had, over the years, acquired a patina of dents and nicks as unique as a fingerprint. The steward wore white gloves and served the drinks on small cork coasters.
Victoria was on her third gin and tonic. Her flaxen wig lay scrunched on the bar before her. Right now, she didn’t care what she looked like, and her scarred, shaven head kept the other passengers from trying to engage her in conversation. She couldn’t read the labels on the bottles behind the bar because she’d disabled the text recognition on her visual feed. She didn’t want it whispering brand names in her mind every time she glanced at the shelves.
“Two years ago, I was happy,” she said. She could see Paul in the corner of her eye: a peroxide ghost in a white coat and loud shirt, sitting with its head in its hands.
“Two years ago, I had a job. I had a husband. I had my own hair and I could
write
.” Faces turned in her direction. She ignored them. “Now what have I got?”
She picked up her glass. Bubbles clung to the underside of the lime slice floating at the top. What had she got? She’d let the lease expire on the Parisian apartment she’d shared with Paul. Now all she had was a crumpled wig; the clothes she stood up in; the loan of a small cabin on the
Tereshkova
; and Paul.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m talking to you.”
Paul raised his eyes to her. He hadn’t spoken since the Smiling Man fell from the lip of the cargo hold.
“I know, I’m choosing not to listen.”
Victoria swilled the drink around in her glass.
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah.” He clambered to his feet. “Because some of us have real problems, what with being dead and everything.”
She slammed the glass down on its coaster.
“That’s hardly my fault, is it? If you’d come clean in the first place, if you’d told someone about that night with the King, maybe all of this could have been avoided. Maybe you’d still be—”
She stopped herself, and let out a long, tired breath. Paul scowled.
“Hey, I’m the one who got his brains scooped out.”
“Yeah, and I just killed a man. Because of you. So shut the fuck up, okay?”
She drained the gin and tonic, and pushed the glass across the counter.
“Another one,” she said.
The steward came over.
“Madam, I have to ask you to keep your voice—”
“Just fill it up.”
In her eye, she saw Paul shaking his head.
“I’d never have thought you were capable of something like that.”
“Well then, I guess we really didn’t know each other as well as we thought.”
The steward placed a glass of gin and a small bottle of tonic on the bar, and turned away without a word. He knew she was the Commodore’s goddaughter. If she wanted to sit at the bar and talk to herself, it was no business of his.
Victoria emptied the tonic into the glass until the bubbles ran over the rim and down, into a fizzing puddle on the copper counter.
“Besides, he deserved it, and I will not let you make me feel guilty.”
Paul put his arms out.
“I’m not trying to. I know you, Vicky. I know you’re guilty enough already. I can hear it in your voice.”
“Get lost.”
She picked up the wet glass and took a mouthful. The tonic fizzled on her tongue. The ice cubes dabbed her upper lip.
Cassius Berg had been a hired assassin. He’d murdered Paul, and all those others. He was a killer and, given the slightest chance, he would have killed her as well. He’d already tried to once, and only failed by the slimmest of margins. Why should she feel guilty for his death? Her actions had been entirely logical.
In her eye, Paul had his arms crossed, each fist clenched in the opposite armpit.
“You really want me to ‘get lost’?”
“Right now? Yes.”
He dropped his arms. “Well, if that’s how you feel, maybe you should turn me off?”
“What?”
“You heard me.” He turned away from her, shoulders hunched.
Victoria opened her mouth to snap back at him, but the words wouldn’t come. Anger turned to sadness. She put her elbows on the bar and rubbed her temples.
“Ah,
merde.
”
All of a sudden, all she wanted was to make her way back down the narrow gangway to her little cupboard of a cabin, to close the door and shut out the world. Instead, she took a swallow from her glass, wiped her lips on the back of her hand, and drew herself up in her seat.