“Who was she?”
Victoria gave the golden hair a final smooth, then laid the head on the mussed sheets of the bed. She kissed her fingers, and pressed them to the girl’s cheek. Then, with one hand on the bed rail for support, she levered herself into a standing position.
“She was me.”
A headless corpse lay on the floor between the bed and the door.
“And that was?”
“Nguyen. He’s dead, too.”
Ack-Ack Macaque looked at the crushed remains of the man’s head.
“No shit.” Victoria turned away, and Ack-Ack Macaque’s nose wrinkled as he saw the gaping flaps of skin on the back of her head. The flesh from the crown to the back of her neck had been cut to the bone. Dark, glistening blood slathered her collar and soaked the back of her shirt. “I can see that. But how about you?”
She turned back to him.
“I’m okay. I think I’ve lost some blood.”
“Sit back down. We need to get you patched up.”
She waved him away. “I’ll be fine.”
“No, you won’t.”
He pushed her gently back, into a sitting position on the edge of the bed, then rifled the drawers for dressings and surgical tape.
“You need stitches,” he said.
Victoria put a hand to the back of her head. Her fingers came away bloody, and she looked at them curiously.
“You might be right.” Her voice was flat. She was either in shock, or locked into command mode.
Ack-Ack Macaque found some thread, a bottle of anaesthetic, and a pack of syringes. He held them up to show her, and she frowned.
“Have you ever done this before?”
He remembered sewing up the wounded thigh of his co-pilot, after the man had been hit by shrapnel over Dunkirk—but that had been in the game, not reality, and things had been simpler back then.
“Sort of.” He shuffled around behind the bed and laid his haul out on the sheet behind her. Then he fetched the sharpened mop handle, and handed it to her.
“This’ll take a few minutes,” he said. “If anyone comes in, stick them with that.”
He bit open the pack of syringes and filled one from the anaesthetic bottle. He had no idea what a standard dose might be, so he took a guess, filling the syringe a quarter full. If it wasn’t enough, he figured he could always add more later. The last thing he wanted to do now was knock her out cold.
His hands were shaking, and he didn’t know whether it was because of the drugs in his system, or apprehension at what he was about to do.
Come on,
he thought.
Pull yourself together. It’s a flesh wound, not brain surgery.
But the wound, made with precision and a sharp blade, stirred memories in him—memories of warehouse fights and knife cuts on his forearms; of his arm jarring as his blade scraped an opponent’s ribcage, parting fur and sinew from bone; and the intolerable stinging of his torn left eye as its gloopy fluid caked the fur of his cheek and chin. He shivered.
A long time ago, a long way away.
He’d been a different monkey then. Now, he was something else. Something older and wiser.
Gritting his teeth, he placed one hand over Victoria’s left ear to steady himself, and used the other to bring the needle close to the lip of the slash. Beneath the welling blood, he caught the ceramic whiteness of living bone.
“Hold still,” he muttered gruffly, swallowing down his distaste. “Because, from experience, I think this is probably gonna hurt.”
T
EN MINUTES LATER
, they were done. He snapped the thread and threw the needle over his shoulder. The stitches were clumsy and rough, but they would hold. He applied a thick wad of gauze and taped it into place, and then stepped back.
“How’s that feel?”
Victoria reached around so that her fingertips brushed the bandage.
“I can’t feel a thing. Just some tightness, maybe.”
“Good.” He walked around the bed to face her. “Because it’s going to sting like fuck when that anaesthetic wears off. Now, do me a favour, and open the porthole.”
He took the spear from her hands, turned it point-down, and stabbed it into Nguyen’s severed head. The point squelched through the wet brain tissues like a fork through pâté. When he felt it hit the floor, he bent at the knees and raised the head from the ground. Holding it aloft on the end of his spear, he carried it over to where Victoria had un-dogged the circular window. The head was a little too large to fit through the gap, so he jammed it into the frame and used the stick to ram it through. On the third shove, it popped out and disappeared, leaving only a scraped clump of blood and hair on the window hinge.
He threw the stick out after it, and turned to Victoria.
“I just want to be sure.”
He looked at the blonde girl on the bed, her dead eyes still staring sightlessly into space. “What about her?”
Victoria stepped between them. “You leave her alone.”
“I wasn’t suggesting—”
“I don’t care. Just leave her alone.”
He held up his palms in a placatory gesture. “Fine. I was only going to ask what you wanted to do with her. I wasn’t going to shove her out the window.”
He went back to the drawers lining the walls, looking for knives and scalpels—anything he could use as a weapon. An open doorway led into an adjoining room, filled with medical equipment: monitors, respirators, things whose function he couldn’t even begin to guess. And there, resting on top of Doctor Nguyun’s briefcase, he recognised the gun he’d brought with him from the
Tereshkova
. He let out a screech of triumph and scooped it up. He’d emptied it against the sentry robots on the yacht, but still had plenty more bullets on his leather belt. He pulled out six and pushed them into place.
When he’d finished reloading, he walked back into the main infirmary. Victoria was waiting for him, wearing the white coat she’d stripped from the dead girl on the bed. She’d also retrieved her quarterstaff, and now held it at her side, ready for use. Her eyes were clear and hard.
“All right, monkey man, we’ve got business to finish.” She tapped her chest with her free thumb. “I’m going in search of Célestine’s cabin. Do you know what you have to do?”
Ack-Ack Macaque grinned, exposing his teeth.
“Same as I always do, right?” He snapped the reloaded Colt back together and spun the barrel. “Blow shit up, and hurt people.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
GENERAL SNEAKINESS
V
ICTORIA LEFT THE
monkey in the corridor outside the infirmary. They went in opposite directions: him aft, towards the sounds of merriment and partying; her deeper into the luxury suites towards the bow. As she walked, she slipped the retracted quarterstaff into the front pocket of her borrowed white coat. Then she reached beneath the coat and pulled the SincPhone from her jacket’s shoulder pocket. Although it was supposedly watertight, a few drops of seawater had worked their way into the casing behind the touch screen, and the inside of the glass had turned misty with condensation. She tapped at the speed dial that would connect her with the
Tereshkova
’s bridge, and held her breath. Could the elderly airship still be airborne? She very much hoped so, because without Merovech’s speech, this whole exercise might still count for nothing.
“
Slushayu?
”
“Commodore. It’s Victoria. I’m on the
Maraldi
. How are things at your end?”
The old man took his face away from the microphone and yelled something at one of his crew in Russian. When he came back on the line, he sounded tired.
“We are still losing gas, but we will be with you shortly.”
“You’re coming here? They’re letting you through?”
“I’m afraid they are insisting upon it. You see, they are very keen to get their hands on our young guest.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Our orders are to put down on the water a few hundred metres from the
Maraldi
. Boats will take us aboard before the
Tereshkova
deflates and sinks.”
“Are you going to do it?” With Merovech and the Commodore detained, what chance would she and the monkey have?
“I have no other choice.” The old man’s voice dropped. “Although, I strongly suspect the Prince will be the only one of us to make it to the liner alive.”
“You think they’ll leave you to sink?”
“If we are lucky. That way some of us stand a chance. But I do not think they will do so, and there are warships in these waters.”
“Can’t you call for help? What about the other skyliners?”
“This is not their fight. And what can they do, anyway, save threaten to boycott London and Paris?”
“You need to get a message to Merovech. Tell him to get in touch with the British fleet off Hong Kong. I don’t care how he does it, but get them to turn around. The Undying are deliberately trying to provoke war with China.” The Duchess might not be able to order an attack herself, but Berg had told her that the Undying had allies in the armed forces and, with tensions in the region at breaking point, a single shot might be enough to trigger a catastrophe.
In the background of the call, she heard voices and the grinding sound of stressed metal. The Commodore swore. “I will tell him. Until then, we await your signal.”
The line went dead. Victoria slipped the phone back into her jacket. With the Unification Day celebrations in full swing, the lower decks were quiet. She passed a couple of dazed-looking revellers, but they were more intent on finding their way back to their room than questioning her, and spared her only a cursory glance.
What was it about white coats? To wrap yourself in one was to cloak yourself in an aura of authority. People no longer saw your face, only the coat, and assumed you were supposed to be there, that you knew what you were doing, and were best left alone to do it. Whatever it was, donning one had been a smart move, and Victoria was cheered to see her old journalistic instincts for infiltration and general sneakiness were still as alive and alert as ever. After all, this wasn’t the first time she’d crept into an office suite searching for evidence to back up a story. Although, she reminded herself, it was the first time she’d done so on a boat, with the digital ghost of her dead husband haunting her peripheral vision and the threat of imminent nuclear war hanging over everything like an oncoming tempest.
Célestine and her cohorts must be planning to ride out the first strikes here, she thought, in the middle of the Bay of Biscay, far enough from any major targets to avoid immediate blast effects, and secure in the knowledge that the new synthetic bodies they had waiting for them would protect them from the radiation and subsequent fallout.
Well, screw them. She wasn’t going down without a fight. This world might be doomed but, until she saw the first mushroom clouds, she wouldn’t quit trying to save it.
She came to a smoked glass door leading to a foyer, off which she saw a series of breakout rooms, each with its own boardroom-style table and wall-mounted rank of SincPad flatscreens. At the far end of the foyer, she could see a wooden door with a brass plaque bearing the name Duchess Alyssa Célestine, and the legend: Chief Executive Officer, Céleste Group LLC.
Paul spoke in her mind.
“Security cameras,” he said.
Victoria’s gaze flickered to the corner of the room’s ceiling, where a marble-sized black globe nestled like a spider.
“There’s not much I can do about that.” She checked the time. Less than an hour remained until the scheduled launch of the Mars rocket. Up in the main ballroom, the party would be in full swing. “Maybe no-one’s watching?”
“And what if they are?”
“We’ll have to risk it.”
Trying to look confident, she pushed her way through the glass doors, into the foyer area. Inside, the air felt drier, and held the rubbery aftertaste of freshly-laid carpet. With luck, any security personnel not enjoying the festivities would be preoccupied searching for threats coming from outside the vessel, rather than from within. Even so, she could feel her heart knocking in her chest.
She marched across to the office at the far end of the foyer and opened the door. The lights were on inside, but the room was deserted, and smaller than she’d been expecting, with much of the space being taken up by a solid wooden desk.
“Clock’s ticking,” Paul said. Victoria ignored him. As planned, she stepped around behind the desk and activated its touch screen. A security screen shimmered into being, with boxes for username and password. She pulled out her SincPhone and dialled K8.
“Are you ready to do your stuff?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Right, I’m connecting you.” Victoria took a USB cable from her other jacket pocket and connected the phone to a port on the desk, giving K8 access to the processors within. Then, as she waited for K8 to hack her way back into the Céleste servers, she took another cable from her pocket and inserted the end into one of the sockets on her temple. With the jack in place and the cable dangling like a loose braid, she picked up the phone and held it to her ear.
“How are we doing?”
“Almost there.”
Victoria heard keystrokes. Then the screen on the desk in front of her cleared to reveal a file directory.
“Gotcha,” K8 muttered.
A cursor appeared on the screen in front of Victoria, scrolling down the menu. She watched it click down a couple of levels, opening sub-directories, until it found the group of files it wanted.
“Okay,” K8 said. “That’s what we need. Over to you.”
“Thanks. Be seeing you.” Victoria broke the connection and disconnected the phone, replacing its cable with the one attached to her head. She visualised her internal menu. With the hardwire connection in place, it was the work of moments to copy the files K8 had selected from the desk to the gelware in her skull. They were far too large to have been sent over a mobile connection, and this seemed the next best option: once they were in her head, nobody could take them from her by force, short of drilling their way in and physically removing the gel.
Transfer complete, she pulled the cable from her head, spooled it, and put it back in her jacket. Job done. Now, all she had to do was save a king, expose a coup, and possibly prevent a nuclear war.