Victoria wanted Nguyen alive. Ack-Ack Macaque drew his guns. He wasn’t so fussy. He’d happily plug the bastard as soon as look at him. And ‘alive’ didn’t necessarily mean ‘intact’.
He was at the corner of the building. The corridor led off in two directions. His team had gone left, towards the stairs, so he set off right. Men and women in white coats manned the offices and laboratories he passed, with pens and surgical instruments sticking from their pockets. They smelled of anesthetic and disinfectant, and cowered back when he snarled at them.
“You!” He waved one of his Colts in the face of a young man carrying a pile of box files. “Where’s Nguyen?”
The files clattered to the floor and the man raised an arm.
“That way,” he stammered. “In the lab. Last door, at the end.”
Ack-Ack Macaque grinned around his cigar.
“Thanks, kid.”
A
S HE STALKED
towards the laboratory, Ack-Ack Macaque took an earpiece from his pocket and thumbed it into his left ear.
“We’re inside,” he said.
The earpiece hissed, and then Victoria’s voice came on the line.
“Understood,” she said. “Deploy the drone.”
“Aye, aye.”
Ack-Ack Macaque fished the drone from the pocket of his flight jacket. The tiny machine looked like a jewelled dragonfly with a lens instead of a head. He held it in the palm of his hand and bent his face in close, focusing on it with his single eye.
“Are you getting this?”
“Urgh!”
“What’s the matter?”
“Don’t get so close to the lens.”
“What? Why not?”
“You’re holding a high definition camera, and I really don’t need to see the inside of your nose in that much detail.”
Ack-Ack Macaque huffed, and tossed the little machine into the air. It whirred away in a clatter of miniature blade-like wings.
“Just keep it out of my way,” he grumbled.
He heard gunshots and screams from the floors above, followed by the shrill of a fire alarm, and he grinned. He’d handpicked his crew for their expertise at making noise and causing chaos—and it seemed they weren’t letting him down.
Ahead, the door to Nguyen’s lab remained closed. He holstered one of his guns and tried the handle. Inside, the lab smelled of disinfectant, fear, and monkey shit, and Ack-Ack Macaque felt the hackles rise at the back of his neck. Until Merovech and Julie had busted him out, he’d lived in a lab just like this one, strapped into a couch with wires plugged into his brain.
How many monkeys had he since rescued from a similar plight? It must be getting on for a hundred and fifty now, and yet the smell, with its overtones of surgery and terror, still bothered him. It was a sharp, chemical reminder that he was an artificial, made thing—a prototype weapon manufactured as a proof of concept, and then plugged into a video game because, hey, waste not, want not.
He stepped through the door, and the drone buzzed past his shoulder. It rose to the ceiling and scanned the room. The lab was a long, narrow and brightly lit room, with an adjoining office. Workbenches lined the walls; medical equipment stood on stainless steel trolleys; and six couches stood in a row down the centre of the room, each with its own simian occupant. Ack-Ack Macaque gripped his guns. At the far end of the lab, two white-coated technicians were bending over the last couch, ministering to the monkey strapped into it. One was a tall, blond man; the other was, unmistakably, Nguyen.
“Hey.”
They looked up. For a second, their mouths hung open and their eyes popped. Then the big guy went for his hip pocket and Ack-Ack Macaque shot him. The Colts were deafening in the narrow laboratory. The blond took two bullets in the chest and crashed backwards against a workbench, scattering scalpels and other instruments.
Ack-Ack Macaque and Doctor Nguyen regarded each other through a blue haze of gun smoke and tobacco.
“Remember,” Victoria buzzed in Ack-Ack Macaque’s ear, “we want him alive.”
Ack-Ack swore under his breath. It would be so easy to waste this fucker. All he had to do was pull the trigger...
But then he’d get Victoria mad at him, and the last thing he felt like was an earful from her. With a snarl, he lowered his guns.
“Get your coat, doc; you’re coming with me.”
Nguyen straightened his back. A bloody catheter dangled, forgotten, from his fingers. With his other hand, he gestured to the sedated primates on their couches.
“You are one of mine?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“And you wish revenge?’
“Me, and the rest of these poor bastards.”
The old man swallowed visibly, then narrowed his eyes. “I don’t remember you.” His lip curled. “But what does it matter? Stupid monkey. You should be thanking me.”
“For what?”
“I made you a man.”
“Big whoop.” Ack-Ack Macaque chewed his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. Nguyen’s fists were clenched at his side. The elderly doctor drew himself up to his full height.
“I gave you the gift of consciousness. I raised you to sentience.”
“And I’m supposed to be grateful?”
“I don’t care if you are or not. I did what I did for the betterment of mankind, and I have no regrets. Can you say as much, I wonder?”
Ack-Ack Macaque waggled his guns.
“Shut the fuck up. You’re coming with me.”
“You’re insane.”
“Yeah, and whose fault is that?” Pointing the gun in his right hand at the bridge of Nguyen’s nose, Ack-Ack Macaque holstered the one in his left. If he was going to have to drag Nguyen out, that was fine. He might even bounce him off a few walls while he was at it, just for shits and giggles. With a growl, he reached out. But, before his leathery fingers could close around the knot of the old man’s tie, he heard the flat snap of a pistol shot and Nguyen fell, poleaxed by a round to the left temple.
V
ICTORIA SCRAMBLED TO
her feet.
“What the hell was that?” She was on the bridge of the
Sun Wukong
. Paul’s image stood beside her; K8 sat at a console, controlling the dragonfly drone. In front of them, the main screen displayed the feed coming through from the drone’s camera. Doctor Nguyen lay slumped in a splatter of blood. Ack-Ack Macaque crouched behind one of the couches, Colts in hand.
“Get the rest of the boys down here,” he snarled.
“What’s happening?” Victoria shouted. “Who’s shooting?”
The monkey didn’t reply. He stood upright and fired both guns through the open office door, then ducked back as his shots were answered.
“Fuck and blast,” he muttered, crouching.
“Can you see who it is?”
“No, they’re behind something. See if you can get the drone in there.”
Victoria glanced at K8.
“Do it.”
“Aye.” The young woman’s fingernails tick-tacked the keys of her console, and the view on the screen trembled. Slowly, the drone advanced, keeping close to the ceiling and out of the line of fire.
“What sensors do you have on that thing?”
“We have everything. Microphones, thermometers, spectrometers, the works.”
“Turn them all on.”
Another click of the keyboard, and a dozen sub-windows opened around the edges of the display, showing the same view filtered through the drone’s various onboard instruments. Victoria leant forwards, squinting at them. Some were dark and fuzzy, others simply readouts of temperature or humidity. When she reached the infrared view, she stopped.
“
Merde.
”
Something in the office glowed like a miniature sun, swamping all other heat signatures.
“Some sort of machinery?” Paul ventured.
Victoria shrugged. Whatever it was, it seemed to be getting steadily hotter.
“We are picking up some noise,” K8 said.
“Let’s hear it.”
A rising whine filled the bridge.
“That’s coming from the office?”
“As far as we can tell.”
Victoria touched the headset attached to her ear. “Hey, monkey-man. Are you hearing this?’
“Yeah.” He had to raise his voice. “Sounds like they’re firing up a jet engine in there.”
Paul put a hand to his bristled chin. “I don’t like this at all. You should get him out of there.”
A sickly white glow shone from the office door, casting a beam across the laboratory floor.
“Yes,” Victoria said, “I think you’re right. I’ll—”
Ack-Ack Macaque leapt to his feet. In one fluid move he vaulted the row of couches and, firing both Colts, charged the light.
“
Merde!
” Victoria turned and barked at K8. “Get the drone in there, now!”
The picture on the screen tipped forward as the dragonfly dived at the open door. For a second, everything disintegrated into a whirling medley of gunshots and bright light. Then she caught a glimpse of an armed figure silhouetted against the threshold of a bright, circular portal. It was a woman. Whoever she was, she looked up as the drone clattered into the room, taking her eyes from the door. As she did so, Ack-Ack Macaque barrelled into the room at full pelt, and shoulder-charged her. He hit like a rugby player, knocking them both into the gaping portal. Victoria had an instant to see their bodies puff apart in bursts of dust, and then the screen flashed white, and died.
She cried out in frustration.
“Power spike,” K8 said, voice flat. “Drone’s dead.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
A NECKLACE OF LEOPARD’S TEETH
T
HE
S
UN
W
UKONG
loomed over the jungle, its armoured glass bow moored to a mast on the summit of the island’s volcano. In its briefing room, Victoria Valois stood with her arms crossed. Her tunic hung open and her scabbard hung crooked. K8, Cuddles and Erik sat in the front row of the theatre-style seats. Paul’s image hovered at the back, glowing gently in the low light. Wrapped in an animal pelt, Bali leant against the door, a twine necklace of leopard’s teeth draped around his neck.
Nobody wanted to be the first to speak.
Finally, Victoria walked over to the brass porthole and considered the blue ocean stretching away to the horizon. Below, between the trees, she could see the thatched roofs of the log cabins in the monkeys’ stockade.
“So,” she said, hugging her upper arms, “did we salvage
anything
?” She looked questioningly at them all, one after another—all except Cuddles. One thing she’d learned about male gorillas was that, no matter what, you never looked them in the eye. Not unless you wanted your arms ripped off and your head stomped into paste.
Erik coughed and squirmed in his seat. “Not much. By the time we got into the lab, there was no trace of the Skipper, and the machine had pretty much melted. It must’ve had a destruct setting.” From his shoulder bag he pulled something sticky and covered in dried black crusts of flaky blood. He held it pinched between thumb and forefinger in much the same way Victoria imagined he’d have held the tail of a dead, plague-sodden rat.
“We did get this, though.” He stretched his lower lip over his upper. “It’s the doctor’s soul-catcher.”
Victoria glanced at the dangled fronds of hair-fine wire, and then at the bayonet sheathed in the orangutan’s belt. She didn’t need to ask how they’d extracted the device from Nguyen’s skull.
“Is it intact?”
Erik dropped it onto the empty seat beside his, and wiped his long, hairy orange fingers on the bare plastic arm.
“We pulled it out by the root, Captain.”
“Anything else?’ She addressed the room. “Anything that can tell us what the hell happened back there?”
After a moment, K8 raised a hand.
“We’ve been analysing the drone’s telemetry.”
“And?”
The teenager stood and walked over to the wall screen. She tapped the upper right hand corner, and it flashed into life.
“These graphs represent readings taken from the machine immediately prior to its self-destruction.” Her index finger traced a sharp upward curve. “As you can see, there’s a spike here, indicating an energy profile similar to that of the
Sun Wukong
’s jump engines.”
Victoria raised an eyebrow. The lines and words on the screen were squiggles to her.
“You think it might work the same way?”
“Almost definitely.”
Victoria blinked away a mental image of Ack-Ack Macaque’s body apparently exploding into dust. “Then he could still be alive?”
K8 gave a small, tight smile. “We think so.”
“How do we find him?”
The young woman returned her attention to the screen. “There’s a clue in the visual footage.” She tapped a few commands and the graphs disappeared, replaced by a blurred close-up of the black-clad figure in the office, caught in the instant she glanced up at the dragonfly. Victoria walked up to the screen, screwing her eyes into slits in an attempt to glean as much detail as she could.
“She looks familiar, but...”
Behind the figure, the portal presented as a disc of shimmering light.
K8 said, “We can enhance the image.”
She pressed a control and a line moved across the screen from left to right. As it tightened the pixels and sharpened the picture, Victoria felt her eyes widen with surprise. She put a hand to her chest. Behind her, everybody started talking and shouting and gibbering at once. She waved an arm to shush them. Even though the woman’s hair had been closely cropped, and she now wore a coal-black military uniform, the face on the screen was undoubtedly and unmistakably that of Lady Alyssa Célestine.
K8 said, “It must be another version of her, another iteration, from another parallel.”
“Can we follow them?”
“We don’t know where they went. They could be on any one of a billion possible timelines.”
“So, we’ve lost him?”
K8 blanked the screen and looked down at her white shoes. “In all likelihood, yes. We’re afraid so.”
The temperature seemed to drop a couple of degrees. Victoria rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I hate this parallel world shit.”
Across the room, Bali straightened up. With a shrug of his leopardskin-covered shoulders, he pushed himself away from the doorframe against which he’d been leaning.