Merovech huffed air through his cheeks. He still held a commission in the Royal Navy, and his time in the South Atlantic had given him a keen sense of what it meant to be part of the crew of a warship, thousands of miles from home and family. If it came to war, it would be the men and women with whom he’d served who’d bear the brunt.
“Let’s hope it won’t come to that.”
Jerry raised his eyebrows. “Amen to that.”
They stood in pensive silence for a couple of minutes, enjoying the way the twin hulls cut through the grey waters.
Finally, Jerry said, “Do you think it will go nuclear?”
Merovech looked out to sea, at the container ships looming towards them, each as big as a small town, boxed-up and set adrift.
“I hope not.”
Julie stood near the stern, gazing back at the shore. Jerry nodded towards her.
“I thought you might know something. Maybe they’d warned you it might happen, and that’s why you were running away to get married, before it did.”
Merovech smiled. “No, that’s not the reason.”
Jerry seemed relieved, although still not entirely convinced. They were riding a stiff south-westerly blowing up from the Bay of Biscay, and Merovech filled his lungs. He could feel the sea air clear the fatigue and cobwebs from his mind. He’d spent far too long cramped up in that van, driving at night. Being out here in the sunlight, surrounded by the ocean, the blustery wind chipping sprays of white from the wave crests, felt like being reborn.
“What happens to you,” Jerry asked, “if the balloon does go up?”
Merovech didn’t want to think about it. As heir to the throne, he knew he’d be protected. He’d been briefed by his security people. By the time the sirens sounded, he’d be safe and secure, half a mile underground.
“It won’t come to that.”
Jerry raised an eyebrow.
“I hope you’re right, my boy. I really do.” He straightened and fastened his grip on the catamaran’s helm. “Still, I can’t help wondering if we would be in this situation if the whole Unification thing had never happened.”
Looking down at the water grazing the hull, Merovech frowned.
“What do you mean?”
Behind him, Jerry gave a grunt.
“Just that if the UK hadn’t expanded so quickly, and if we hadn’t had France on our side, maybe we wouldn’t have clung so hard to Hong Kong in the first place? Perhaps we’ve been a little overconfident?”
Merovech shrugged. He didn’t have any answers. Julie came to the rail. She tucked a straggle of fluttering hair behind her ear and looked up at him.
“How are you doing?” he asked her.
She turned to glance back at the receding shore. Gulls flapped in their wake.
“I don’t know. I guess when this is all over, I am going to be in trouble, aren’t I? I don’t even have a passport with me.” She shivered. “My father will be
furieux
.”
Merovech put his arm around her.
“Don’t you worry about your father. You’re going to be okay.” He gave her a squeeze. “I’m going to look after you.”
She leant into his embrace, snuggling up against him for warmth.
“Well,” she mused, “if I am going to run off with anyone, I suppose I could not do much better than the heir to the throne, now could I?”
Merovech smiled into the wind. They were crossing the world’s busiest shipping lanes—a major artery of global commerce—and he could see six or seven large vessels at various distances, including container ships, car transporters, and oil tankers. No ferries, though. Few passengers crossed the Channel by boat these days. Most chose the high-speed rail link through the Channel Tunnel. The rest took berths on skyliners.
Merovech scanned the horizon ahead, searching for a particular cigar-shaped silhouette.
“Don’t worry,” he said. He looked back at Jerry, but the older man seemed absorbed with his compass and SatNav. “I’ve got a plan.”
Julie turned to him.
“You do?”
Merovech gave her a smile.
“I think so.”
He would have said more, but a scream cut the air. Patricia clacked up from the galley, heels wobbling, empty wineglass in hand. She glared at Julie, chest heaving.
“You!”
“What’s the matter, Mrs Renfrew?”
The older woman’s eyes were narrow slits.
“Don’t you ‘Mrs Renfrew’ me, young lady.” Her hand swung around to point back down the steps. “Your so-called ‘dog’ just told me to go and fuck myself!”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
SLOTTING INTO PLACE
I
N THE SIX
months that Victoria had been aboard the
Tereshkova
, she’d only once had occasion to visit the old airship’s bridge, at the front of the main gondola. Normally, the room was out of bounds to all but the crew, and protected by armed guards but, a few days after she’d arrived on board and thrown herself on her godfather’s hospitality, he’d invited her to take the tour.
“And this is where the magic happens,” he’d said, ushering her inside with a flourish.
But when she’d stepped through the hatch, Victoria had been surprised: the room seemed far too small, considering the size of the five-hulled airship that it controlled: barely large enough for three workstations, one each for the navigator, helmsman and commanding officer. The front wall was mostly glass: a grid of rectangular windows that curved down into the floor, offering a panoramic view of the sky and ground ahead. The window frames were titanium, decorated with brass flourishes.
The Commodore had tapped his workstation’s screen, bringing up a schematic of the airship.
“We control the whole thing from here. Airspeed, pitch and altitude. We can even operate each engine individually, for really complex manoeuvres.”
Uninterested in the computer, Victoria had looked around in disappointment.
“No big steering wheel?”
The Commodore had a braying laugh.
“Goodness no, child. What do you think this is, the
Graf Zeppelin
?”
“I thought that was the effect you were going for.”
The Commodore stopped laughing.
“She may look old, but the old girl has life in her yet.” His moustache drooped. “More perhaps than I.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I speak only the truth. I am an old man. When I am gone, she will still be here.” His eyes regarded her from half-closed lids. “And
someone
will need to fly her.”
S
HE THOUGHT OF
that visit now, as she made her way forward, along the gangway to the Commodore’s cabin, which sat directly behind the bridge. It was less utilitarian and considerably more spacious than the control room, with a case of books, a couple of potted plants, and a thick Persian rug. She knocked on the door and let herself in.
Her godfather sat behind his wide aluminium desk, the top buttons of his dress tunic undone. He’d left his cutlass in an elephant’s foot umbrella stand by the window.
“Come in and have a seat.” He reached into his desk drawer and she heard the clink of glass. “Would you like a drink?”
Victoria declined. She still had all that gin in her system.
“You wanted to see me?”
The old man swept his hand across the desk, activating the SincPad display built into its top.
“I have had one of my people finding out all they can about the Undying. I thought I would summarise it for you, rather than forward it. I know you have trouble reading.”
“Oh.”
He looked up. “Is there a problem?”
Victoria felt her cheeks colour.
“I assumed you’d called me here to talk about what happened to Cassius Berg.”
“What is there to say?”
Victoria got to her feet. “I killed him.”
“He fell.”
“Only because I closed the doors.” She could barely bring herself to look her godfather in the eye.
The Commodore sighed. He clasped his gnarly hands on the desktop and regarded her from under his shaggy brows.
“And what do you want me to do, my dear? Arrest you? Throw you in the brig?”
“I killed him.”
The Commodore leaned back.
“Yes, you did. And that’s something you’re going to have to work out how to live with. But for what it’s worth, I think you did the right thing. He was a murdering psychopath. A rabid dog. You did the world a favour by putting him to sleep. And after what he did to you, I would have thrown that
govniuk
off this ship myself.” He reached back into the desk drawer and pulled out the bottle of vodka that he kept there.
“Truth be told, I have been impressed by the way you are handling yourself over the past few days. What would you say to a permanent job on my security team?”
“Security?”
“Yes. An airship this size, we get all sorts. Terrorists. Smugglers. Spies. You would be surprised.”
Victoria bit her lip. This wasn’t the direction she’d expected this meeting to take; yet she found herself tempted and strangely flattered by the old man’s offer.
“And I would live here, on the
Tereshkova
, permanently?”
The Commodore threw his arms wide in a gesture of welcome.
“You would be one of my crew.”
She’d been aboard the airship for nearly six months now, since the breakup of her marriage, when she’d walked out on Paul with nowhere else to go. And now, thinking about it, she realised that the creaking bulkheads and narrow gangways of the gondolas felt more like home than any place she could think of, London and Paris included.
“Thank you,” she said, truly grateful. The Commodore smiled his toothy smile. He twisted the cap off the bottle.
“Are you sure you don’t want one?”
“Quite sure.”
“Good, because you stink of gin. Now, sit down, be quiet and listen to what I have found.” He poured himself a drink, then reactivated the desktop, pulling up a text file.
“According to this, the Undying are a relatively new cult. At least, it is only recently that they have become widely known. There is some evidence that they have been working in secret for some time.” He brushed the screen again, bringing up another document, this one containing false colour Hubble photos of gas clouds and galaxies. “They preach a doctrine of transhumanism and digital immortality, and they have some powerful supporters.”
He made a circle on the table with his finger, spinning one of the displayed documents to face her. She peered at it, seeing only black marks on a white page.
So far, Paul had been silently watching the meeting through her eyes, and now he spoke.
“It’s a list of names,” he said. “Celebrities, politicians, business people. Half the board of directors at Céleste—”
“Céleste
again
?” Victoria got to her feet and began to pace, ticking off points on her fingers as she spoke.
“Paul and Lois both worked for Céleste, under a man named Nguyen. Cassius Berg killed Paul and tried to kill Lois. But Berg was one of the Undying, which means he had links to the Board of Directors at Céleste.”
The Commodore frowned. “Céleste are killing their own people?”
“Last year, according to both Paul and Lois, Doctor Nguyen performed an unnecessary removal of the King’s soul-catcher.”
The old man stroked his moustache. “And the King’s been in a coma ever since.”
Victoria stopped moving. She found herself looking at an old framed photograph of the Commodore as a youth, clad in the orange pressure suit of a Russian cosmonaut, helmet tucked proudly under his arm.
“You put it all together, and it seems the management at Céleste used Berg to try to silence everyone on Nguyen’s team.”
The Commodore reached for his vodka glass.
“A cover-up, you mean? But what exactly are they covering, and where do you fit in?”
Victoria pursed her lips.
“I’m not sure. Nguyen operated on me as well, around the same time. Perhaps that has something to do with it?”
In her head, Paul said, “Or maybe they figured that once they’d killed me, it would be a good idea to whack my nosy, former journalist ex-wife, before she started digging around?”
Victoria shrugged.
“Whatever. The thing is, Berg implied that the assassination attempt and the removal of the King’s soul-catcher were both part of a conspiracy to seize the throne, and that Duchess Célestine was behind it.”
The Commodore tapped the smooth surface of his desk.
“Her name
is
on this list, as a member of the Undying.”
Victoria felt the pieces slotting into place, the way they used to do when she’d been closing in on a really good story.
“She owns Céleste. It’s her company. She’s the founder and CEO. And since that night, she’s also been acting as Regent.”
“
Okhuyet!
” The Commodore drained his glass. He turned in his chair, to look out of the window at the English countryside passing beneath the
Tereshkova
. They were running along the South Coast, heading for the Atlantic and labouring against a brisk south-westerly.
Victoria began to walk back and forth again, across the thick Persian rug, her heavy boots leaving criss-cross grip patterns.
“So the Duchess deposed her own husband and took his place. But to what ends? When Merovech finishes his studies, he’ll be ready to assume the throne and she’ll be out on her ear.”
“Unless he’s part of the plot,” The Commodore said. “From what you’ve told me, Berg implied as much, and the Duchess
is
his mother, after all.”
Victoria tapped her fingertips against her chin. She had a glimmering, but that wasn’t it.
“But then why go to all this trouble?” she asked. “The King was never in the best of health. The throne would have been Merovech’s in a few years, anyway.”
The old man studied her.
“You sound as if you have a theory.”
She leant her knuckles on the desk.
“Paul says the team at Céleste were working on a way to transfer stored personalities into living bodies, and when they rebuilt my brain, they were using me as a guinea pig for some of their techniques.” She saw Paul nodding his spiky, platinum head in agreement. “And Lois Lapointe mentioned something about the Prince receiving additional gelware implants. What if those two things are somehow connected?” She straightened up again. Her mouth had gone dry. “What if Merovech takes the throne, but isn’t Merovech inside? What if they’re planning to load a different personality into him?”