Trying to get a better view, Ack-Ack Macaque pressed his face to the jagged remnants of his cockpit’s canopy. For a moment, he dared to hope he’d been victorious. Then he saw a long-armed figure clambering from the wreck, and his lips peeled back in a snarl.
“You don’t get away that easily, monkey boy!”
With its prop splintered, the stricken Spit juddered violently. The engine, freed from the drag of the blades, threatened to shake itself, and the plane, apart. Ack-Ack Macaque fought to keep the wings level as he tried to reach the runway of the carrier
Brunel
, suspended between the twin dirigibles which bore its weight, an off-centre control tower midway down its length like the funnel of a ship. He side-slipped, bringing the plane’s nose into line with the crash netting at the runway’s end, where his opponent’s plane lay on its belly, smoke billowing from its shot-up engine.
K8 thought he was practically indestructible, and he hoped she was right, because this wasn’t going to be the daintiest landing he’d ever made. The
Brunel
loomed larger and larger in his crosshairs, filling his forward view. He could see deck hands sprinting for cover. Pale faces at the windows of the control tower. At the last moment, he pulled his knees up to his chest and braced his feet against the dashboard. A wild scream filled his throat, and the Spitfire’s prop buried itself in the metal deck at upwards of sixty miles per hour.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
WINGSUIT
M
EROVECH AND
J
ULIE
found themselves alone in one of the first class cabins, behind the dining room in the main gondola. They perched opposite each other, he on the edge of the bed, she on a chair by the nightstand.
The walls of the cabin were currently a blank, gunmetal grey, but the SincPad screens covering them offered a variety of augmented reality options, from the lush greens and plunging cliffs of Big Sur to the lone and level sands of the Egyptian desert, and he watched Julie’s purple fingernail flick through the menu. As she scrolled, she said,
“I am sorry I got you into this.”
Merovech leaned forward.
“You didn’t get me into it. I was in it already, I just didn’t know.”
“But if I had not taken you on that raid—”
“You did me a favour. I had to find out sometime. If I hadn’t gone along with you, I might never have known the truth. I might have gone back into that clinic one day and come back out as somebody else. In fact, I’m pretty sure you’ve saved my life.”
“You say that, and yet you want to risk it all by going back there and confronting her?”
“I have to. Whatever else she is, she’s still my mother.”
The walls were still grey, like the inside of a battleship. Merovech felt a chill pass through him.
“But my father. He’s not really my father at all.”
“I am sorry. I know you loved him.”
“I can hardly believe it.” He shook his head, trying to clear it.
“I
am
sorry.”
“But how could he not have known?”
“Why should he have done? Your mother simply lied to him. With Nguyen’s help, she could have faked the pregnancy easily enough.”
Merovech closed his eyes. His mother and father had always been distant figures, more so than the parents of most of the boys at his boarding school, and even as a young child, he’d come to understand that they were people to be visited rather than lived with. He’d left his nursery at four years old, and had never gone back. The school had been his home. And when he’d left there at eighteen, he’d gone straight into the army for a year’s national service; and then on to university in Paris. School holidays aside, he hadn’t lived under the same roof as his mother in over fifteen years.
He knelt before Julie.
“Okay, she grew me and lied to me and filled my head with gelware.” He put his hands on her knees. “But what does that make
me
, Jules? What am I? Am I even human?”
Her eyes glittered. She reached a hand to cup his chin.
“Oh, Merovech. You are whoever you want to be. You are not to blame for any of this.” She put a hand up to touch the fading bruise at the side of her eye. “Whatever our parents have done to us, it is not our fault. We did not ask for any of it. We have to think of ourselves now. We have to salvage whatever we can.”
“No.” Merovech climbed to his feet. “If I have to live with what she’s done to me, the only way I can do so is by understanding
why
she did it.”
“But you do not have to confront her. You could send her a message. Make a phone call.”
“No. I want to hear her say it in person. I want to look into her eyes.”
“But, the danger—”
He crossed his arms.
“Life’s short, Jules. All we can do is make the best of it. I learned that lesson in the Falklands.”
Julie wiped her face with the sleeve of her cardigan.
“Why don’t you just stay here? The
Tereshkova
is going all the way to Mexico. We could go together, leave all this behind.”
Merovech sighed.
“I’ve got one of the planet’s most recognisable faces. Wherever I go, there’ll always be somebody trying to dig up a story or take a picture. I can’t run from this. And besides, I need to know why she’s done what she’s done.”
Julie pushed up the sleeves of her grey wool cardigan, and then pulled them back down again.
“Please, Merovech.”
He reached down and picked her hand from her lap.
“I need to do this, Jules. I need answers. And the only way I’ll get them is by facing up to her.”
Julie’s fingers pulled at his.
“Or you could just, you know, stay here, with me.”
“I can’t.”
“But why not? If we go to South America, we can find a little place and start again, somewhere away from your mother. It will just be the two of us. No parents at all.”
Merovech pursed his lips, enticing visions of white sand, grass huts and palm trees momentarily flickering, and then dying, behind his eyes.
“My mother owns one of the biggest technology companies on the planet. She’s one of the world’s richest women, and she has at her disposal the combined resources of the British and French secret services. Do you seriously think there’s
anywhere
in this world she couldn’t find us?” He pointed to his face. “And as I said, it’s not like I can easily hide, is it?”
Julie pouted. She tapped the touch screen menu, and the grey walls flickered away, replaced by a view across Hong Kong harbour, taken from the hundredth floor of a hotel at dawn, with low red mist over the water and the skyscrapers shining like bronze spears. She looked at the view for a long time and then said:
“So, how are you planning to do it?”
At first, Merovech assumed the wall image to be a still photograph. The city and its surroundings seemed motionless, like a held breath at sunrise. Then his eye caught a small boat cutting through the water.
“I’m not sure. I need time to think.”
He pulled off his hoodie. He’d been wearing the t-shirt beneath for three days now, and it stank. The Commodore’s staff had left clean towels on the bed, and white robes hanging on a hook on the back of the cabin door. He picked up a towel.
“I’m going to take a shower.” He reached for the door handle but, as he did so, a knock came from the other side. He pulled it aside to find Victoria Valois standing in the gangway with a large kit bag slung over her shoulder. She’d shed the heavy coat she’d been wearing when they met earlier, and was clad from toe to chin in black. She’d replaced her fleece hat with a long silk headscarf.
“We need to talk.”
V
ICTORIA LED HIM
up the metal steps and along the wire-supported walkways of the airship’s interior, back up to the helipad at the top of the vessel. As he climbed out onto the springy black surface, the wind snatched at him like a thousand frozen fingers, and he rubbed his arms, wishing for his discarded hoodie.
“What can I do for you, Miss Valois?”
She gave a flick of her hand. “Please, call me Victoria.” She walked to the rail at the forward edge and looked out, across the bows. The silk scarf streamed back from her head like a mare’s mane.
“As we were in the hospital together,” she said. “I just wanted to ask: now you know about Céleste, and what they did to you while you were in there, what are you planning to do about it?”
Beyond the curve of the airship’s bow, Merovech could see the coast of Hampshire, with its submerged beaches and flooded harbours. He took a long breath in through his nose.
“I’m going to find a way to confront my mother. After that, I’m not sure.”
“Would you like some help?”
He slid his fingers into the pockets of his jeans.
“No, thank you. This is about me. It’s my problem, and it’s up to me to fix it.”
She turned to him, scarf whipping.
“What if it can’t be fixed? This affects us both, Merovech. My husband worked for your mother’s company, and they killed him for it. If there’s a reckoning to be had, I want to be in on the action.” She leant her hip on the rail and crossed her arms. “You’re a smart kid, and you’ve done well to get this far. But what are you going to do, arrest her?”
Merovech shrugged. The thought had crossed his mind.
Victoria clicked her tongue.
“Forget it. She’s surrounded by her own security people. Berg said she had members of the army supporting her. You wouldn’t last five minutes. Remember, she tried to kill your father, and she’s planning to kill you. Your personality, at least. If you try to tackle her alone, you’ll be giving her exactly what she wants.”
Merovech shivered. The cold air seemed to slice right through him.
“We’re going to expose her,” he said. “We’re going to make the whole plot public. That’s why we’ve hooked the monkey back into the game. We’re going to use it to get the word out. These plots rely on power and secrecy. Once enough people know, we’ll have the weight of numbers on our side. She can’t run from the Internet.”
Victoria let the kit bag slip from her shoulder, onto the deck. She said, “That won’t be enough, I’m afraid. Not without concrete proof.”
“Then what do you suggest?”
“Tomorrow’s Unification Day. From what I can gather from the news channels, the Duchess will be celebrating it onboard her liner, the
Maraldi
, where she’ll be supervising the launch of the Martian probe. The invited guests will include most of the people on the Commodore’s list of the Undying. The King will be there too, moved by private ambulance, and, if what Berg implied is true, I don’t give much for his chances of surviving the night.”
At the mention of his father, Merovech let out a long breath.
“But why? She’s been with him since the assassination attempt. Why hasn’t she killed him already?”
“The timing has to be right. The death of a king isn’t something you can easily cover up. She has to be sure her plan will work.”
“But if I’m not there, she can’t go ahead, can she?”
“Of course she can. She’ll be worried about you going public, so she’ll have to act now, and act fast. But my guess is that she’ll stick to her original plan as far as possible. She’ll declare you king, but tell everyone you’re suffering from nervous exhaustion, or something like that. That way, when you do eventually surface, no-one’s going to believe what you’re saying, and she’ll have an excuse to get you into the Céleste facility.”
“So, we confront her there, in front of the television cameras?”
“Absolutely not. You stay here, your highness. We need you alive. If the King dies, you’re the only one with a credible claim to the throne, and the gelware in your head’s the only real evidence we have.”
“So, what do you suggest?”
“I’ll go in.”
“By yourself?”
“I’ll take the monkey. From what I hear, he’s an expert at breaking into places and causing havoc.”
“But how will you get in? That place will be locked down tight. You’d never get near it.”
Victoria smiled. She crouched beside the kit bag and pulled out a suit made of black material. She shook it out and it flapped in the wind.
“Have you ever seen one of these before?” The suit had parachute-like flaps of material between the legs and under the arms. “It’s called a ‘wingsuit’. It’s an extreme sport thing.” She began folding it back up, wrapping it up in her arms. “We’ll be at our closest approach to the ship tomorrow, around 6pm. This time of year, it will be dark. We can jump from here and glide in, silent and undetected.”
“Then what?”
“I’m a journalist. I’ll infiltrate the offices, look for as much proof as possible.” She smiled. “And if all else fails, I’ll let the monkey loose.”
Merovech waved his hands.
“No, it’s too dangerous. I can’t let you do it.”
Victoria’s lips whitened. “I don’t need your permission, Merovech. This is personal, for me and Paul. The only reason I’m talking to you at all is because we’ll need your support if everything turns to shit.” She stuffed the wingsuit back into its bag and pulled the heavy zipper closed. Then she stood, wiped her hands together, and put them on her hips.
“Find a camera when your father dies,” she said. “Video, webcam, whatever, and make a speech. Claim the throne, expose your mother, and upload the files from K8’s SincPad to the news channels. It’s the only way to stop her.”
Merovech swallowed something hot and sour.
“But I’m not the King’s son. I’m not really in line.”
Victoria stopped in her tracks. She looked him up and down, and her lips kinked in a half-smile.
“Well, you won’t be the first bastard to seize power. But if I were you, I’d probably think twice before mentioning that on air, okay?”
T
HE
C
OMMODORE INVITED
her to join him on the
Tereshkova
’s bridge as he turned the old airship to the south-west, driving its five linked hulls into the teeth of the prevailing wind.
Honoured to be allowed back into this most inner of sanctums, Victoria leant up against the curved array of rectangular windows that formed the room’s front wall. The grid of glass wrapped around to the sides, and swept down into the floor, providing maximum visibility for the three crew stations. Leaning up against its outward curve felt like leaning over the abyss; like flying. As the bows nosed around, she watched the beaches of Dorset’s Jurassic Coast slide away to her right and, for the first time in days, felt her spirits rise, if only momentarily. Far to the left, the edge of Europe presented as a dark blue line against the horizon; and, straight ahead, she could see the hazy indigo waters of the Bay of Biscay.