Mexico in “secret talks” to join United States?
Céleste Tech readies “light sail” probe for flight to Mars
New find brings total number of potentially habitable exoplanets to 7
Police play down talk of brain-stealing serial killer after another body discovered in London
CHAPTER SEVEN
STARS LIKE GLITTER
T
HE HELICOPTER’S ENGINE
failed on a routine ship-to-ship transfer. Strapped into a chair beside the Prince, Victoria felt her stomach lurch as the cabin seemed to surge upwards.
She was the only journalist on the flight, and she’d fought hard to be there, to get exclusive coverage of the final days of Merovech’s year-long National Service. Now, warning lights flashed and sirens wailed. The cabin tipped sideways and down, and her stomach flipped again. Beside her, the Prince pressed his face to the window.
“We’re still over the water.” He sounded more startled than scared.
She grabbed his sleeve.
“What do we do?”
He gave her a blank look. He was only eighteen years old, and plainly as scared as she was.
The pilot called: “Crash positions! Brace! Brace!” Then the water came up and slapped them. The impact threw Victoria against her straps so hard she bit her tongue. She heard shouts and screams, and the freight-train roar of seawater gushing into the cabin.
They were sinking.
Her nostrils filled with the smell of brine, and she recalled the safety briefings she’d endured, knowing that even if she managed to escape the stricken craft, she’d be unlikely to survive for more than a few minutes in the freezing waters of the South Atlantic. In a panic, she scrabbled at her harness.
Beside her, the Prince unclipped himself and leant over to help. He pulled her out of her seat. Then other hands grabbed him and bundled him away, towards the open hatch.
The cabin heaved again, caught on the swell. The walls creaked. Victoria lost her footing and fell across the aisle. The fall seemed to take forever. She saw dark water sloshing through the cabin and, in a single instant of freezing clarity, knew her time had come.
And then, pressing up at the window, she saw a face! A mean face with a cruel smile and the flat dead eyes of a shark. The Smiling Man had found her! He’d killed Detective Malhotra, and now he’d come for her. Here, in the South Atlantic, a year ago.
Time unfroze. Limp as a ragdoll, she plunged toward the windows on the opposite wall. Her head smacked the jagged edge of an open equipment locker and—
V
ICTORIA COUGHED HERSELF
awake, spluttering up from the depths of a cold, dark sea. Her lips were dry and cracked, and her tongue lay in her mouth like an old leather bookmark. The air lay heavy with disinfectant and air freshener. Hospital smells.
Non, c’est pas vrai, pas encore
. Not again.
She’d been dreaming about the helicopter crash: her brush with death in the South Atlantic, over a year ago. Either the head injury or the hypothermia would have killed her, had the copter not come down within metres of the aircraft carrier that it had been heading for.
And the Smiling Man. Oh God, the Smiling Man. How had he wormed his way into her dream? And what had he done to her? She remembered his footsteps on the wooden stairs. The scrape of the knife along the wall. Malhotra. All that blood...
Somebody cleared their throat.
“Victoria?”
She opened her eyes and stiffened. A figure stood at the foot of her bed, hands folded, hair white and brows black. Gold braid festooned a long tunic.
“Commodore?”
“I am here, my dear.” He moved closer and took her hand, his fingers rough to the touch, but nevertheless warm and comforting. “How are you feeling?”
She tried to sit up and winced in pain.
“What happened to me?”
“You were attacked.” Still holding her hand, the Commodore perched a hip on the edge of the bed. With his free hand, he adjusted the cutlass hanging from his belt. “But you’re back on the
Tereshkova
now. You’re safe.”
“Attacked?” With her free hand, she reached back and found a thick wad of bandage, and stubble where she’d expected hair.
“Yes. Your implants sent an emergency signal to Céleste. I am listed as your next of kin, so they called me. They told me you were dead, but I sent a chopper anyway. I thought it would be quicker than an ambulance, and it was. We got to you in less than ten minutes.”
He rose and walked over to the window. From where she lay, Victoria could see dark clouds edged with embers of sunset. She moved her hand forward, over her shaven scalp.
“My hair?” She was afraid to ask. She could feel the memory of the attack in her neural processor, waiting to be accessed, but couldn’t bring herself to open it. The flashes that leaked through were bad enough; she didn’t need to relive the whole thing in high definition.
The Commodore cleared his throat.
“They took your soul-catcher. We had to operate quickly to stem the bleeding.” He gestured at his own thinning white hair. “We didn’t have time to spare, so we just shaved it all off, I’m afraid. The surgeon patched you up as best he could, but you’re going to be weak for a while.” He lowered his hand. “And you’re going to have to wear a collar to support your head, until the muscles heal. That means plenty of rest, and no stick fighting.”
Victoria touched the bandage at the back of her head.
“Why aren’t I dead?”
The old man smoothed his moustache with finger and thumb, moved his weight from one polished boot to the other.
“Whoever did this, they must have been in a hurry. They went for the catcher and tore it out by the root. They left you for dead.” His fists clenched and unclenched. She could see he was upset. If her soul-catcher had been attached to living, organic tissue, its removal would have been fatal. The haemorrhages alone would have killed her. For the second time in a year, it seemed her life had been saved by the gelware in her cranium.
“How bad is it?”
The Commodore shook his head regretfully.
“He punched a hole in the base of your skull with a knife. Luckily for you, it’s slightly off-centre, just behind and below your left ear, so your spinal column’s intact. The surgeon replaced the missing bone fragments and stapled the wound. It should heal, eventually.”
Victoria’s lips were dry. She ran her tongue over them.
“This isn’t the first time I’ve had my head cut open.”
The Commodore checked his wristwatch, a large antique timepiece covered in studs and dials. Standing by the window, with his white hair and crisply ironed uniform, the old rogue still cut quite a dash. For the umpteenth time, she tried to guess his age, and failed, settling for somewhere between sixty and seventy years old.
Although he was her godfather, she knew little of him, aside from the fact that in his time he’d been both a Russian air force officer and a cosmonaut, and that he’d been asked to be her godfather because he’d once saved her mother from a charging rhinoceros. There were many rumours about him—that he used to work for the KGB; that he’d won the
Tereshkova
in a card game in St. Petersburg—but few hard facts.
“The police want a statement, when you’re ready.”
“The police?”
He made shushing motions with his hands.
“There’s no hurry. They can wait.” The skyliner was autonomous under international law, and the Metropolitan Police had no jurisdiction.
Victoria closed her eyes. She didn’t have the energy to keep them open. She thought of the poor, dead detective in the stairwell, and the room seemed to spin around her.
“I don’t feel so good.”
The Commodore pulled the sheet up to her chin.
“Try to rest. The anaesthetic will make you groggy. You have been slipping in and out for half an hour or so. We have already had this conversation twice.”
She smiled despite herself.
“What do the police think happened?”
She heard the Commodore shuffle his boots on the deck.
“They think the detective’s killer took your soul-catcher in order to cover his tracks.”
Victoria twitched her head. The movement brought a fresh flare of pain.
“No, that’s not what happened.” The drugs were pulling at her again. Her arms and legs felt heavy, as if weighed down by sodden clothes, and she felt herself slipping back beneath the waves, sucked down by the groaning silhouette of the sinking chopper.
The Commodore gave her a gentle pat on the shoulder.
“Shhh.” His voice seemed to come from a great distance. “Rest now. Tell me all about it when you are feeling stronger.”
V
ICTORIA SLEPT FOR
a time. She didn’t know how long. When she woke again, the lights in the sickbay were low. Outside, the sky had darkened and the clouds cleared. She could see a few stars and, on the underside of the skyliner’s hull, the warm red smoulder of a navigation light.
She tried to assess her internal damage. According to the clock readout in the corner of her vision, two days had passed since the attack. She hadn’t felt it. Her biological clock had been disrupted by anaesthetic and shock. In addition to the pain at the back of her head, her throat felt bruised and swollen, and there were tender spots on her back and chest.
She found it galling to be back in a hospital bed, and humiliating to have been taken down so easily, especially after all her quarterstaff training. The hallway had been too narrow for her to swing her stick properly, and the Smiling Man had possessed a strength that belied his thin frame.
But it wasn’t his strength or his speed that bothered her most. The thought making her skin crawl was that he’d known her
name
. This hadn’t been a random attack; he’d known who she was, and he’d been there specifically to kill her.
But why?
She didn’t know him. As far as she knew, she’d never seen him before. The only thought she had that made any sense was that the attack was linked to Paul’s murder. But how?
Thinking of Paul, she screwed her eyes tight and pictured her internal file index. Had he survived? She scanned down the list of folders until she found the one she’d created to house his digital back-up. With relief, she saw that it was intact, and still active.
Thank God.
Holding her breath, she accessed the icon, and Paul’s image swam into view before her, Hawaiian shirt, white coat and all. From this angle, he seemed to be pasted onto the sickbay’s ceiling, from which vantage he scowled down at her.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“Excuse me?”
He hugged himself, hands on bare elbows, and she saw the fear underlying his anger.
“I thought you were dead.” He put his head on one side and looked around, absently fingering his beard. “Why are we in hospital? What happened?”
Victoria clenched her fists, resisting the urge to touch her scalp.
“I lost my soul-catcher.”
“Shit.” He put a comforting hand out to her, then seemed to realise what he was doing, and dropped it. “Where are we?”
“Back on the skyliner.”
“Are you going to be okay?”
“I don’t know.” She tried to shift position in the bed. The sheets were lank and coarse around her. “I think so. Probably.”
Paul rubbed his chin.
“When that smiling guy burst in, I thought we were toast.”
Victoria didn’t reply. She’d been terrified. Even now, she shied away from the memory. Of course, she’d been beaten up before, in pursuit of stories. It was a professional hazard of journalism. But this time it was different. Nobody had ever tried to kill her before. Things had never been that personal.
True, she’d almost died when that Navy helicopter fell into the Atlantic; but that had been a malfunction, an accident. It was quite another thing to feel a man’s hands around your windpipe, deliberately choking the life out of you; to have a knife driven into the skin at the back of your neck.
And yet...
Her investigative instincts clamoured for attention. There was a bigger story here, she could feel it.
Paul frowned at her expression.
“What is it?”
With her head still resting on her pillow, Victoria laced her fingers together and looked up at the ceiling.
“Paul, I need to ask you about your sex life.”
“My
what
?”
“Your sex life. The police think you may have known your killer.”
“And just because I’m bi, that means it has to be someone I’m sleeping with?”
“Were you bringing men back to the flat?”
“No.”
“But since the separation—”
“No.”
“You mean you’ve never—”
“No!”
A silence grew between them. Finally, Victoria said, “You were looking through my eyes when I got attacked. Did you get a good look at the man who did it? Did you recognise him?”
Paul gave his head an angry shake.
“Not my type, sweetheart.” He wagged a finger at her. “But I’ll tell you this for nothing. Whoever he is, he’s got your soul.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
CAFFEINE
P
RINCE
M
EROVECH, HEIR
to the British throne, sat hunched on bare floorboards in the downstairs back room of a farmhouse somewhere south of Louviers, out where the fields were endlessly flat and the roads ran straight for miles on end; where metal water towers bestrode the landscape like Martian war machines, and bare trees stood in lines against the horizon. He still wore the same jeans, trainers and faded red hoodie that he’d worn to meet Julie in the café, although now his trainers and the cuffs of his jeans were spattered with mud, and the hoodie held the lingering whiff of Frank’s cigarettes. His elbows were resting on his knees and he held the baseball cap in his hands, turning it absently, worrying the rim with his fingers. A manila folder lay on the floor beside him.
The room was bare, it’s only concession to furniture being an old mattress, which the monkey lay on, curled in the folds of an unzipped sleeping bag. From where he sat by the door, Merovech watched the animal twitch and moan in its sleep.