“I still say this is a bad idea,” he muttered. Victoria said nothing. She hadn’t wanted to leave him behind, so she’d uploaded him into her neural gelware, as she had three years ago after first activating him. Now, he was a ghost overlaid across her vision. She nestled her hands deeper into the pockets of her coat, squeezing them for warmth. Around her, the villagers huddled into themselves. Unkempt, stale and unwashed, they stank. None of them spoke; they simply stood there, swaying slightly, as they waited for the sun to rise and the truck to appear.
Paul looked around at them.
“These people are starving,” he said. “And covered in sores. And I don’t like the way some of them are missing clumps of hair.”
Victoria sidled to the edge of the group.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. I’m a surgeon, not a general practitioner.”
“If you had to guess.”
“Radiation poisoning, maybe.”
“
Merde
. You really think so?”
“I could be wrong.” He considered the drab sky and shivered. “But I wouldn’t recommend staying here a moment longer than absolutely necessary.”
Victoria swallowed. Her mouth felt suddenly dry.
“
Oui, d’accord.
”
Despite his pessimism, she was glad to have him along for the ride. In this drab and forlorn landscape, it felt good to have a friendly face to offer moral support.
A fat drop of rain fell onto the road, followed by another, and another. From the left came the grunt and rumble of an engine. Belching smoke, the truck came around the corner at the end of the village. It was an eight-wheeled military model painted in autumnal urban camouflage. With a squeak of brakes and a hiss of hydraulics, it pulled to a halt in front of the villagers. They clambered up to join the other workers already huddled on the benches inside. Victoria hauled herself up behind them, and sat on the bench with her back against the canvas wall. Someone banged the side and the vehicle lurched forward, throwing everyone against each other. Then they were under way and, through the flap at the back, she could see the unrepaired road spooling away behind them.
In a field beyond the village, a fairground lay rusting.
“What happened here?” she whispered.
Paul shrugged. “Something bad.” He jerked a thumb at the truck’s other occupants. “Why don’t you ask them?”
Victoria glanced sideways, and gave a tight little shake of her head. She didn’t want to do anything that would make her stand out as being different, or not from around these parts. To do so would be to risk getting turned in for a reward. Instead, she turned up her collar and hunkered lower on her seat. The truck bumped and rattled along the road, jolting her spine.
Eventually, after a seeming eternity of discomfort, they came to a wire fence and a pair of anonymous-looking cyborg guards, who waved them through with scarcely a glance. Through the rear flap, Victoria saw the barrier and its coils of barbed wire receding behind them.
No turning back now.
They were in the grounds of the laboratory. If Célestine were anywhere, she’d be here, overseeing the activities of Nguyen’s cyborg master race. All Victoria had to do was find her, and then get her to lead her to the monkey. Victoria’s fingers curled around the plastic casing of the tracking device in her pocket. Once she got within a few hundred metres of Ack-Ack Macaque, she’d be able to locate him via the microchip she’d hired a vet to implant under his skin.
That’s if he’s still alive.
The truck pulled up in front of a pre-fab industrial unit, and the workers clambered out. Keeping amongst them, Victoria allowed them to lead her to a large canvas marquee, which had been erected at the side of the building, and which housed a couple of rickety trestle tables, from behind which dispirited-looking men and women dispensed cups of water and bowls of thin porridge. Accepting a bowl and a tin mug, Victoria stood on the edge of the group. The other workers ate and drank with listless, automatic movements. They showed no relish or urgency in the slaking of their hunger. They were like machines taking on fuel. Holding the plastic bowl to her chin, Victoria sniffed.
“That looks tasty,” Paul said.
“It smells like wallpaper paste.”
“You’re not going to eat it, then?”
“Shut up.”
The last thing she’d eaten had been a simple egg-white omelette, some hours before, in the commissary of the
Sun Wukong
. Now, the giant airship lay somewhere out in the Bay of Biscay, out of sight of land, its vast bulk floating half a dozen metres above the water—hopefully beyond the range of any radars Nguyen’s troops might bring to bear, and hidden from the few civilian vessels brave or foolhardy enough to set forth upon the dead, polluted sea.
She swilled the gloopy muck around, and then tipped it into some weeds growing up against the side of the building.
“How did I get here?’
Paul looked confused.
“The truck...?”
She shook her head and sighed. “I mean, how did I get
here
.” She looked around at the low, functional buildings, the miserable workers, and the dark, sullen sky. How had she made the progression from that apartment in Paris, from a promising career in journalism, to this post-apocalyptic wasteland? She thought of her other self, lying dead in that apartment, and almost envied her.
“Maybe I should have died in the crash,” she murmured, thinking back to her accident in the South Atlantic. Everything that had happened, all the weirdness, had come about as a direct result of that crash. From the moment, four years ago, when she stepped onto the chopper and strapped into the seat next to the then-teenage Prince of Wales, her course had been fixed, her life changed. She’d climbed aboard as an up-and-coming reporter, and then woken four weeks later as a technological freak—a woman kept alive by the artificial neurons that now did most of her thinking.
And here she was on a parallel timeline, in a possibly radioactive dystopia, searching for her best friend—a rude, violent, ungrateful monkey, who smelled like a wet dog and drank like a fish—with only the electronic projection of her dead husband for company.
Why couldn’t they have just let her drown?
She pulled her coat tight, and muttered curses under her breath. After a few minutes, the doors to the laboratory opened, and she followed the thin, shivering villagers to a production line, where industrial robots assembled artificial cyborg bodies in showers of welding sparks, and humans simply fetched and carried, swept and sorted. For an hour, she tried to blend in but had no idea what she was supposed to be doing and kept getting in the way. The sight of the arms and legs that lay, awaiting attachment, in hoppers beside the conveyor belts unnerved and sickened her. Their carbon fibre bones had already been partially covered in cultured skin, giving them the look of severed human limbs. It made her feel like a worker in a death camp. Especially as she knew that, somewhere nearby, real arms and legs were being carved off and discarded as brains and nervous systems were stripped from frail flesh-and-blood bodies and implanted into waiting cyborg shells.
When the two tall, expressionless guards came to arrest her, she felt almost relieved.
“Take me,” she said as bravely as she could, “to your leader.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WRATH AND MALICE
A
CK-
A
CK
M
ACAQUE KEPT
moving. His stomach grumbled and tiredness clawed at him. He’d been on the run for hours now and was, frankly, knackered. But, even though he’d made it to the forest, he didn’t dare stay still for more than a few minutes at a time—just long enough to catch his breath, drink some water from a stream, or take a shit. After all, who knew what kind of heat-seeking tech those metal bastards packed? For all he knew they’d be able to pick him out at a hundred yards, and he had no intention of sitting around waiting for them to find him. Better to keep low and stay nimble, scampering through the undergrowth on his hands and feet. His plan, such as it was, involved finding a police station or army base, or maybe even a country sports store—anywhere that might have a stock of guns and ammunition. He only had four bullets left in his Colts, and there was no way in hell he’d be able to force his way back into Célestine’s facility without some serious firepower.
And when I get inside, I’m going to shoot her ladyship in the kneecaps,
he vowed to himself,
and then keep shooting bits off her until she agrees to send me home.
He paused for a moment to catch his breath, and leant against a tree, chest heaving. All he’d wanted was to save the world—and it hadn’t even been his world. How had he ended up here, in this cold and windy hellhole? Still wheezing, he spat into the grass, regretting each and every cigar he’d ever smoked.
From behind, he heard the thud of clawed feet on mossy ground, and the rustle of lithe bodies crashing through bracken and underbrush.
Dogs!
They were close, and their cyborg masters wouldn’t be far behind.
“Shitballs.”
The trees in this part of the forest were mostly young saplings, with thin springy branches that wouldn’t bear his weight. Even if he managed to swarm up one, he’d be trapped in it, treed like a cat—unable to swing to the next because it’d snap beneath him.
The sounds of pursuit grew closer, and he looked back. From the undergrowth, a pair of Dobermans flew at him like slavering suede missiles. His hands dropped to his holsters; but he knew that if he fired, he’d be giving away his position to his pursuers
and
using the last of his ammo. Instead, with no other choice, he dropped into a fighting crouch and let his lips peel back from his teeth.
“All right, mutts, let’s play.”
The dogs were almost upon him. He could see breath steaming from their mouths and powerful muscles rippling like pistons under their hides. He curled his hands into claws and thrashed his tail. Then he let out the deepest, most guttural snarl he could muster—an outpouring of rage and frustration that welled up from the soles of his boots. It was the cry of a challenged alpha male, an expression of wrath and malice so potent it could have stopped a charging gorilla.
The two Dobermans slithered to a halt, their paws scrabbling at wet leaves and moss. It was a fair bet that, living in France, they’d never seen a monkey before—especially an enraged male almost the size of a human being. They took one look at the creature in the clearing—at its yellow incisors and baleful eye—and, whimpering in terror, fled back the way they had come.
Ack-Ack Macaque scowled after them.
“Yeah, you’d better run.” He put a hand to the small of his back and straightened his spine. Something clicked and he groaned. “Goddammit.” The roar had taken much of his strength. He felt emptied out. Much of the fear and anger that had been driving him had vanished, having vented away into the damp autumn air like steam from a safety valve. Now, he felt overwhelmingly tired.
What I wouldn’t give for a coffee right now.
He scratched his stomach. He couldn’t afford to linger. With a sigh, he turned and loped deeper into the forest, heading away from the distant sounds of pursuit.
Soon, he came to an older part of the wood, where he scaled the first tree that seemed capable of holding him. Once up in the tangle of bare branches, he started swinging from tree to tree. The going was slower than running on the forest floor, but at least he wasn’t leaving a scent trail for the dogs to follow. They wouldn’t be able to track him through the air.
H
ALF AN HOUR
later, as the light of the afternoon began to fade and his arms started to feel like overstretched rubber bands, he came to an area where the trees were blackened and charred. An airliner had crashed into the heart of the forest. Parts of the wings and fuselage were clearly visible at the centre of the burned-out area. Cautiously, he crept closer. There hadn’t been many jet airliners on Victoria’s world, where skyliners accommodated the vast majority of aerial passengers. Neither had there been any in the game world he’d once inhabited, based as it had been on a fictionalised version of World War II.
Stupid way to travel,
he thought, regarding the wreck. Blasting through the air at half the speed of sound, crammed into a thin metal tube, more payload than passenger. Why go through all that when you could have the comfort and relative spaciousness of a skyliner cabin? Sure, the journey would take longer, but if your only concern was time, why not simply strap yourself onto a missile and have done with it?
Something white caught his eye. A thighbone. Now that he’d seen one, other bones seemed to leap out at him. They lay strewn around the wreck like the leftovers of some hideous feast, some half-buried and sticking up from the earth, others piled in heaps where they’d fallen. He frowned. The plane had fallen here, and nobody had come to collect the bodies.
What the hell?
This wasn’t the Amazon rainforest; the wreck lay less than ten kilometres from the centre of Paris. Why hadn’t anybody come? They must have been able to see the smoke and flames. He thought back to the ruined village, the collapsed bridge. Whatever had happened here must have happened everywhere else as well. Some calamity had hit the whole country—maybe the whole world—and nobody had come to investigate this plane crash because they were all too busy dealing with their own dead and injured.
He shivered.
A couple of years ago, he’d fought Célestine and her plan to provoke a nuclear war. The crazy old cow had wanted to cleanse the world, leaving it free for her cyborg armies to inherit. Eventually, she’d been defeated and killed; but this was a whole different timeline, with a whole different Célestine. What if, in this reality, the Duchess had succeeded? Ack-Ack Macaque cast his eye at the darkened clouds and leafless trees.
“Ah, crap.” He felt his skin crawl at the thought of radioactive fallout. The hairs on his neck and arms prickled. What was safe? Was he breathing the stuff now? Then he remembered Célestine. When they’d fallen through the portal, she hadn’t been wearing a protective suit. She hadn’t taken any precautions. Maybe things weren’t so bad.