Macaque Attack (19 page)

“Two-thirty.”

“Ah, crap.” Ack-Ack Macaque pushed himself up, onto his feet.

“What are you going to do?”

“What do you think I’m going to do?” He scratched at his eye patch. “I’m going to teach the little twat a lesson. Give me five minutes and then go and let them know I’m on my way.”

K8’s brow furrowed with concern. “Are you sure you’re up to it?”

He laughed, but there wasn’t any humour in the sound, only bitterness. “Not really, but what choice do I have?”

“You could arrest him, and throw him in the brig.”

Ack-Ack Macaque opened the drawer containing his spare clothes. He couldn’t go up there in a dressing gown. If he wanted to assert his dominance over the troupe, he’d have to do it looking his best.

“No, I couldn’t,” he said. “His supporters would think that was my way of avoiding a fight. They’d take it as a sign of weakness.”

“Monkey politics?”

“It’s all about being the alpha male, sweetheart.”

K8 rolled her eyes but didn’t protest.

“All right,” she said wearily, “but be careful.”

As she turned to leave, Ack-Ack Macaque pulled a knife from the bottom of his sock drawer.

“Careful isn’t a word I know.” He held the weapon up to the light, checking the edge for nicks and dents. “Oh, and K8?”

She paused in the doorway, one hand gripping the handle to keep her balance.

“Yes, Skip?”

“It’s good to see you.”

She smiled.

“It’s good to see you, too, Skipper.”

L
ATER, UP IN
the hangar, Bali stood at the centre of a helipad, naked save for his necklace of leopard’s teeth. His fingers gripped the hilt of a foot-long machete and his feet straddled the crossbar of the pad’s large, yellow ‘H’. He stood with as much nonchalance as he could muster, with his weight on one hip and his shoulders loose, and an insolent sneer on his face. He wanted the other monkeys to know he wasn’t afraid. They stood around him at a respectful distance, fidgeting and glancing at wristwatches. None dared speak aloud. Bali’s own timepiece showed there were only three minutes remaining until the deadline. Despite what the K8 child had said, it didn’t look as if Ack-Ack Macaque would be making an appearance. Deep inside, Bali snarled to himself. It would be typical of the irresponsible clown to ignore this challenge and risk losing a lot of credibility in the eyes of the monkey army.

“Come on,” he muttered impatiently. He didn’t want to win by default, and he didn’t want to drag this out. A simple, clear victory would be all it took. He’d seen the state of his rival—scratched, filthy and exhausted—and felt confident he could beat him.

And then all this will be mine.
He checked his watch again. The monkeys around him were getting fidgety. They knew that, any moment now, the challenge would be resolved one way or another and, unless Ack-Ack Macaque showed his face, they would have a new leader.

Two minutes.
Bali could feel his palm sweating against the machete’s plastic grip. He tapped the point of the blade against the metal deck. The troupe needed strong leadership. They needed goals, and incentives, and something for which to aim and strive. Now Ack-Ack Macaque had freed them from their various timelines, they needed a
purpose
—and Bali knew he was the one best equipped to provide it.

And what greater purpose could there be than ensuring the survival of the troupe? He would find them mates and a homeland—and not some dreary stockade on an empty world, but a true home, on a timeline with a working infrastructure and plenty of potential slaves. Before being rescued, every monkey here had been the victim of human experimentation. Instead of hiding themselves away in the jungle, they deserved revenge; they deserved the chance to turn the tables on their former oppressors, and use their newfound intelligence for something more satisfying than erecting mud huts and digging latrines.

One minute.
He drew himself up. The nervous chatter stopped, and all eyes turned to him.

“Well,” he said with a fierce grin, “I seem to have been stood up.” He held his arms out to his sides in a theatrical gesture, the machete dangling limply from his right hand. “It seems our erstwhile leader has better things to do than defend his position.”

For a second, awed silence reigned. Then the pad lurched beneath their feet. With a mechanical squeal, it began to rise. Overhead, part of the upper deck slid aside, revealing the open sky, and a lone figure silhouetted against it. It was, of course, Ack-Ack Macaque. Bali felt his heart skip. The older monkey stood with his arms crossed and his back to the sun. A cigar smouldered between his fingers and he wore a brand new flying jacket, leather cap and goggles. A pair of chrome-plated Colts gleamed at his hips and he had a pristine white silk scarf knotted around his neck. As the lift drew level with the airship’s upper surface, he fixed Bali with a baleful eye, and cleared his throat.

“
Au contraire, mon frère.
”

PART TWO

EMBERS ON THE WIND

Gliding o’er all, through all,

Through Nature, Time, and Space,

As a ship on the waters advancing,

The voyage of the soul—not life alone,

Death, many deaths I’ll sing.

(Walt Whitman,
Gliding O’er All
)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

NAPOLEON JONES

V
ILCA’S MEN WERE
going to kill him. He tried to lose himself in the improvised warrens of the vertical favelas, but knew it was only a matter of time before they found him. He’d been away too long; his memories of the rat runs and back ways were out of date by at least a couple of decades. In the end, two of his pursuers cornered him on one of the innumerable wire footbridges stretched between the barrios that clung coral-like to both walls of the steep, narrow canyon.

“Stay where you are, Jones.” The short one’s name was Faro. He was a tough young street kid. His elder brother Emilio blocked the other end of the bridge. They would have both been small boys the last time Napoleon Jones had been here; but now they were in their mid-twenties and armed with machetes. Caught between them, he realised he had nowhere left to run. The springy bridge was less than two metres in width and fifty in length. Half a kilometre below, corrugated metal rooftops patchworked the canyon’s rocky floor. Other bridges crisscrossed the gap at various heights. Flyers and cargo Zeppelins nosed like cautious fish between them. Shanties crusted both the canyon’s cliff faces, layer upon layer. Lines of laundry drooped from window to window. Cooking fires filled the air with the bitter tang of smouldering wood and plastic. He could hear shouts and screams and children’s voices. Somewhere a young woman sang.

“What do you want?” he said, buying time.

The two kids each took a step onto the wire bridge. Napoleon took hold of the handrails to steady himself.

“We got something for you, from Vilca,” Emilio said.

Napoleon tipped back the brim of his Stetson. “Maybe I don’t want it.”

Faro laughed cruelly. He slapped the flat blade of his machete against the palm of his hand. “Maybe you’re going to get it, whether you want it or not.”

Napoleon risked a peep over the handrail. This canyon was just one of hundreds arranged in a vast, sprawling delta, carved out over millennia by the patient action of wind and water. Like the tentacles of an enormous squid, the canyons stretched from the mountains at one end of the planet’s solitary supercontinent to the sea at the other, providing the only shade in what was otherwise a pitiless, UV-drenched desert.

Looking down, he saw a cargo Zeppelin about to pass beneath the bridge, its broad back like the smooth hump of a browsing whale, and felt the walkway shudder beneath his feet as the street kids advanced, weapons raised.

He should never have come back to Nuevo Cordoba. He should have known better. He looked longingly down the canyon, in the direction of the distant ocean. The wind tugged at his lizard-skin coat. If he could only get back to his starship, the
Bobcat
, floating tethered at the offshore spaceport, he’d be free. He could finally shake this planet’s dust from his boots. As things stood, though, it looked as if he’d be lucky to make it off this bridge alive; or at least in one piece.

He glanced at the approaching thugs. They were closer now. Emilio swung his machete from side to side.

“Nowhere to hide?”

Napoleon glanced from one brother to the other. They were almost within striking distance.

“I don’t want any trouble.”

“Shut it,” Faro said.

Below, the Zeppelin slid its blunt nose into the shadow of the bridge. Napoleon took the antique flying goggles that hung around his neck and pulled them up over his eyes. Seeing the movement, Emilio stepped forward with a grunt. He scythed his machete around in a powerful swing aimed at Napoleon’s head. Napoleon ducked the blade and came up hard, grasping for the big lad’s arm while the force of the swing still had him off balance. He slammed Emilio’s wrist against the rail of the bridge, trying to get him to drop the knife. Emilio roared in annoyance and pushed back. The machete came up in a vicious backhand swipe. Napoleon tried to twist out of the way but the tip of the blade caught him across the right forearm, biting through lizard skin, cotton and flesh.

“Ah!” He staggered back, clutching the stinging wound. He saw more of Vilca’s men arrive. They began to advance across the bridge, and Napoleon knew this was a fight he couldn’t win. As the brothers dropped into fighting crouches on either side of him, ready to hack him to pieces, he braced himself against the handrail.

“Sorry, boys,” he said.

Using his boot heel to push off, he crossed the width of the walkway in two quick steps and launched himself over the opposite rail, into empty air.

T
HE WIND TORE
at him. His coat flapped. The fall seemed to take forever.

Then his boots hit the fabric upper surface of the Zeppelin hard enough to jar his spine. He bounced, sprawling forward in an ungainly tangle of limbs and coattails. For a second, he thought he was going to roll right off the side and fall to his death at the bottom of the canyon. Then his hands and feet found purchase against the fabric and he clung spread-eagled, sucking in great raw lungfuls of cold canyon air.

If he raised his head, he could see, over the curve of the hull, one of the engine nacelles, with the blurred, hissing circle of its black carbon impeller blades. Beyond that, nothing but air and rooftops.

Heart hammering in his chest, he clawed his way back up to the relatively flat surface at the top of the Zeppelin. Once there, he rolled onto his back and sat up. He’d skinned his knees and palms. His right arm hurt and his hand and sleeve were slathered and sticky with blood. Worst of all, he’d lost his hat. Still, he was alive. Behind him, Faro and Emilio boggled open-mouthed from the footbridge. He pushed his goggles up onto his forehead and raised a bloody, one-fingered salute.

“So long, fuckers.”

The wind straggled his hair. Staying low to avoid being blown off the airship altogether, he crawled back towards the tail fin and found a maintenance hatch set into the fabric at its base. He pulled it open and climbed down an aluminium ladder, into the shadowy interior.

The outer envelope of the airship housed a number of helium gas bags, with walkways and cargo spaces wedged between them. The air was dark and cold in there, like a cave. Moving as quickly as his protesting limbs would allow, Napoleon made his way shakily across a catwalk and down another ladder to the access panel that led to the control gondola slung beneath the main hull. As he dropped into the cabin, the pilot—a scruffy young technician sipping coffee at a cup-strewn computer console—turned to him in amazement.

“Where did you come from?”

Clutching the torn sleeve of his snakeskin coat, blood seeping through his fingers, Napoleon glowered. He pointed forward, through the windshield, at a docking mast protruding from a cluster of warehouses near the base of the canyon’s right-hand wall.

“Take us down, boy,” he said.

A
S SOON AS
the Zeppelin’s nose nudged the mast, Napoleon Jones was off and running again. He pushed through the narrow stairwells and crowded walkways that formed the streets of the vertical town. His boots splashed through water and over broken glass floors of shattered tiles. Down here at the base of the favela, water dripped constantly from the upper levels. Strip lights flickered and sizzled; power cables hung in improvised loops. He passed dirty kitchens; tattoo parlours; street dentists. Blanket-wrapped figures slept in alcoves behind steam pipes. He smelled hot, sour plastic from the corner kiosks, where fabbers made shoes and toys from discarded bottles and cans. He turned right, then left, trying to put as much distance as he could between himself and Vilca’s men. He moved awkwardly, cradling his hurt arm, trying to keep pressure on the wound.