“What about his soul-catcher?”
The detective rubbed the back of his neck, beneath his collar.
“I’m afraid whoever attacked him took it with them. Ripped it right out, in fact.”
Victoria swallowed back her revulsion. Soul-catchers were cranially-implanted webs, similar to her own implants but much smaller and less invasive. They didn’t penetrate the brain as hers did; they were simply used to record the wearer’s neural activity so that, after death, they could generate a crude, temporary simulation of that individual’s personality, allowing them to say their goodbyes and tie up their affairs. In order to remove his soul-catcher, Paul’s assailant would have needed to crack open his skull—a procedure usually only carried out as part of an autopsy.
Malhotra reached into his coat and pulled out a brown envelope, from which he extracted a photograph. He handed it to her, unable to meet her eyes.
“This is how we found him.”
The photograph had been taken in this room, from almost the exact spot where Victoria now stood. The victim lay in a pool of thick, fresh blood, his head smashed open like an egg, and his skull disturbingly empty. She made a face and looked away.
“Yes, that’s him.”
“Are you sure?”
She closed her eyes.
“I’m sure.” Despite the bruising, and the hair matted to his face, there could be no doubt. The facial recognition software in her neural prosthesis confirmed it.
“I’m afraid it gets worse,” Malhotra said. He tapped the picture with his finger, drawing her attention back to the wet cavity revealed by the smashed skull. “His head’s empty.” The detective took the photo from her and slipped it back into its envelope. “Whoever it was, they took his brain.”
Victoria felt the room lurch around her. “What do you mean, they
took
it?”
“They removed his brain and took it with them.” Malhotra swallowed. “We’ve found no trace of it.”
Giddiness came in a sudden wave. She put a hand to her forehead. Not knowing what else to do, she retreated inside herself, allowing her more rational, artificial side to momentarily take charge. She heard herself say, “I guess that explains all the blood.” Then, disgusted with herself, she walked over to the window and looked out at the river. The tide was low. Gulls fussed and squabbled on the mud. Barges pushed their way up and down stream. To one side, she could see the four white chimneys of Battersea Power Station; to the other, just visible above the trees and other buildings lining the river, the topmost spires of the Palace of Westminster and the Parliament of the United European Commonwealth.
How many times had Paul stood here, looking out at this view? Had it been the last thing he’d ever seen? Had he known his killer? A tear slid down her cheek. She brushed it away with the back of her hand. Without a recording from his soul-catcher, she’d never hear his voice again, never see his face...
When she turned back into the room, she found Malhotra still standing in the doorway, looking uncomfortable. He obviously didn’t know what to say.
“Do you have anything to go on?” she asked him.
He hunched his shoulders. “Whoever this was, they came prepared. There’s a hundred different DNA samples in this room alone. The killer must have swept up hair and skin cells from the back seat of a bus or Tube train, and emptied them here to cover his tracks.”
“You say ‘his’?”
Malhotra shrugged. He didn’t care. “As I said, we’re working on the assumption that the assailant was male, and most likely a sexual partner.”
“But you’re guessing?”
Malhotra took his hands out of his pockets. “Unless we find his soul-catcher, I’m very much afraid we’re grasping at straws.” He gestured at the electronics spread on the table. “We’ve taken his laptop and we’re examining it for clues, but so far we’ve got nothing.”
Victoria opened her mouth, and then closed it again. A thought flashed into her head. She felt herself go cold and prickly. She had remembered what it was that Paul had been doing with the VR games consoles. The memory had been dredged, bright and shiny, from the gel lattice of her brain. Very slowly, she turned on her heel and stepped over to the cluttered coffee table.
“Could you give me a minute, please detective?”
“Are you all right?”
She waved him away. “I’ll be okay. It’s just all been a bit of a shock. I need some time to process. A few minutes alone.”
She heard him sigh.
“I’ll be in the car. Gather what you need, then come on down when you’re ready. Don’t be too long.”
She listened to his footsteps as he walked to the door and went down the stairs to the street. When she was certain he’d gone, she started rooting through the components on the table, looking for a particular unit.
“Oh, please let it be here,” she muttered. Her fingers scrabbled through piles of old circuit boards and other electronic debris, until finally closing with relief on the object she sought. She pulled it free from the mess: an old Sony games console with a battered casing and broken controller. Paul had unobtrusively inserted the black lens of an infrared port into the console’s rear panel, next to its power cable. The console wouldn’t run games any more, but Paul had used his experience in memory retrieval to modify it for a different, highly illegal, purpose. Victoria turned it over and over in her hands. The tears were running freely now. Inside this scuffed and scratched shell lay her one and only hope of ever seeing him again.
She hardly dared breathe.
One of the side-effects of having half her brain rebuilt was that she had a near-perfect memory. It could be both a blessing and a curse, but right now she was grateful for it. Concentrating, she recalled Paul standing in their Paris apartment, about eight months previously. He’d been wearing cargo pants and a rock band t-shirt; a new gold stud in his right ear, and a pen stuck behind his left.
“You mustn’t tell anyone about this,” he’d said. And then he’d shown her what he’d hidden in the guts of this old console, tucked away in a pair of fat, newly-installed memory chips.
Guided by the recollection of his hands, her fingers slid over the plastic casing. She found the glassy infrared port on the back panel, and pulled back her hair. The ridge of scarring on her right temple enclosed a row of input jacks: USB, drug feed, and infrared. They were tiny windows into her skull, put there by the technicians when they rebuilt her; windows designed to help them monitor the experimental technology they’d crammed into her head, but also windows which, months after the surgery, she’d learned to exploit for her own ends.
She plugged the old console into the wall, and flipped the power switch to the ‘on’ position. The console quivered in her hands like a frightened animal, and a green LED came to life. Hands shaking, she raised the box to her temple and, reaching deep within her own mind, activated her own infrared port. Something clicked. Something connected. The box in her hands purred, downloading data directly from its memory store to the gelware in her head. When it had finished, she dropped the box onto the plastic-wrapped sofa and keyed up the mental commands she needed in order to run the saved file. She blinked once, twice. A cobweb dragged itself across her eyeball.
And Paul appeared.
CHAPTER TWO
HOLES IN THE MOON
T
HE
S
PITFIRE’S COCKPIT
stank of aviation fuel and monkey shit. The long-tailed macaque at the controls had to use all the strength in his hairy arms to keep the wings level. He’d taken a pasting from a pair of Messerschmitts over the Normandy coast. Dirty black smoke streamed back from the engine, almost blinding him, and one of his ailerons had come loose, forcing him to lean hard on the opposite rudder pedal in order to keep the nose up.
To the RAF, the monkey’s codename was Ack-Ack Macaque. He’d had another name once, back in the mists of his pre-sentience, but now he couldn’t remember what it might have been. Nor did he care. Behind him, his assailants lay smashed and tangled in the smoking, splintered wreckage of their aircraft. Behind them, the Allies were caught in a long and bloody battle to reclaim Europe from the Nazi hordes. Steam-driven British tanks ground towards Paris like tracked battleships, their multiple turrets duelling with the fearsome heat rays of the insect-like German tripods which bestrode the French countryside, laying waste to every town and village in their path.
Ahead, through the gun sights and bullet-proof glass of the windshield, the monkey could see the gleam of England’s chalky cliffs. Below his wings, the hard, ceramic-blue waters of the English Channel.
Almost home
.
He saw pill boxes and machine gun nests on the beach at the foot of the cliff. Lines of white surf broke against the sand, and the cliff towered above him: an immovable wall of white rock, at least three hundred feet in height. He glanced down at his dashboard and tapped the altimeter. The dial wasn’t working. He let out an animal screech. His leathery hands hauled back on the stick. The engine spluttered, threatening to stall. The propeller hacked at the sky.
Come on, come on!
The nose rose with aching slowness. For a second, he wasn’t sure if he would make it. For an agonising second, the plane seemed to hang in the air—
Then the cliff’s grassy lip dropped away beneath his wings, and he saw the Kent countryside spread before him like a chequered blanket. He took his right hand off the stick, and scratched at the patch covering his left eye socket.
“Crap.”
That had been
way
too close.
A couple of miles inland, through the engine smoke, he caught sight of the aerodrome, and his heart surged.
“Ack-Ack Macaque to Home Tower. Ack-Ack Macaque to Home Tower. I’m coming in hot. Better have the fire crews standing by. Over.”
He let the nose drop again, trading his hard-won altitude for a little additional speed, until his wheels almost brushed the tops of the hedgerows lining the fields.
“Roger that, Ack-Ack Macaque. Standing by. Good luck and we’ll see you on the ground.”
He cleared the first hedge, scattering a herd of dairy cows; and then the second. A skeletal tree snatched at the tip of his starboard wing. The aerodrome’s perimeter fence appeared. He pulled back just enough to clear it, and the airfield yawned open like the arms of an anxious parent, ready to catch him.
The Spitfire’s wheels squeaked as they hit the concrete. The stick juddered in his hand.
Somehow, he kept the nose straight.
T
HE DYING
S
PIT
finally bumped to a halt at the far end of the field and the engine burst into flames. By the time the fire crews reached it, the plane wasn’t worth saving. Ammunition popped and sputtered in the flames. Paint blistered.
They found Ack-Ack Macaque sitting on the grass at the edge of the runway, with his flying goggles loose around his neck.
“I need a drink,” he said, so they gave him a ride back to the Officers’ Mess.
The Mess was housed in a canvas marquee at the end of a row of semi-cylindrical steel Nissen huts. When he pushed through the khaki flap that served as its door, the crowd inside fell silent. People stopped talking and playing cards. Everyone turned to look at him: a monkey in a greasy flight suit, with a leather patch over one eye and a chromium-plated revolver on each hip. Pipe smoke curled above their heads. Their faces were amused and curious, and he didn’t recognise any of them. They were all new recruits. They had moustaches and slicked-back hair, and they wore brand new flying jackets over crisp RAF uniforms. Ignoring them, he loped over to a corner table and climbed onto a chair. After a moment, the Mess Officer shuffled over.
“Tea or coffee, squire?”
Ack-Ack Macaque fixed the man with his one good eye and spoke around the remains of the cigar still clamped between his yellowed teeth.
“Bring me a daiquiri.” He undid his belt and slapped his holsters onto the table. “And see if you can scare up a banana or two, will you?”
“Right-o, sir. You sit tight, I’ll be right back.”
As the N.C.O. scurried away, Ack-Ack Macaque unzipped his flight jacket. Around him, heads turned away and discussions resumed. In the corner of the tent, someone started bashing out a Glen Miller tune on the old upright piano.
Ack-Ack Macaque settled back in his chair and closed his eye. The cigar had helped clear the reek of aviation fuel from his nostrils, and now all he wanted was a rest. He used a dirty fingernail to worry a strand of loose tobacco from his oversized incisors, and yawned. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept. He seemed to have been awake forever, flying one sortie after another in an endless string of confused dogfights, fuelled only by nicotine and sheer bloody-mindedness.
Of course, it didn’t help that the front line kept shifting, and nobody knew for sure where anything was. Planes defected from one side to the other, and then back again, on an almost daily basis. People who were your most trusted comrades on one mission might become your deadliest opponents on the next, and vice versa. He glared around the Mess, wondering which of these young upstarts would be the first to betray him.
He used to find it easier. In the early days, he’d capered around like one of those cartoon characters from those shorts they sometimes screened in the ready room. A smile and a cheeky quip, and somehow the war hadn’t seemed so bad. But then his quips had dried as the death toll rose. The shrinks called it ‘battle fatigue’. He’d seen it happen before, to other pilots. They lived too long, lost too many comrades, and withdrew into themselves. They stopped taking care of themselves and then, one day, they stopped caring altogether. They took crazy chances; pushed their luck out beyond the ragged limit; and died.
Was that what he was doing? He’d gone up against that pair of ’schmitts this morning, even though they’d had the height advantage. He should have turned and fled. If one of his squad had been so reckless, he’d have boxed their ears. He’d been fortunate to make it home in one piece, and he knew it. Was he pushing his luck? With a sigh, he dropped the soggy butt of his cigar and ground it with his boot.