Ack-Ack Macaque (29 page)

The Commodore huffed, clearly unconvinced. But he turned back to his men, who were hesitating in the doorway, and said, “Take him to the galley and put him in one of the freezers. Throw the food out if you have to. It is not like we will be needing it.”

Then he began to limp towards the bridge, dragging his bad leg behind him. Merovech followed. As in the lounge, the floor in the connecting corridor leant at an alarming fifteen degrees to starboard, making the slippery metal deck treacherous.

“How much more can she take?”

Bracing himself against the walls of the corridor, the Commodore didn’t look around.“We are still losing gas. The bags are compartmentalised. If only two or three compartments are damaged, we will be fine. If more, then we have real trouble.”

“We’ll still have enough to stay airborne, though?”

“Perhaps.” A shrug. “Who knows?”

They passed the galley. Steel pots swung from ceiling hooks. Shards of smashed crockery covered the floor.

“What are we going to do?”

The Commodore stopped moving. “I won’t abandon her.” His gnarled hand gave the bulkhead an affectionate pat. “I am too old to mourn again. If she goes down, I go with her.”

And then he was off, using his hands to steady himself. They came to the bridge, where the pilot and navigator fought to keep the massive craft on an even keel. The Commodore barked something in his native tongue, and the pilot snarled back; a string of guttural curses.

“We cannot stay up much longer,” the Commodore translated.

“But we’re not crashing?”

“No. Not yet. Although the strain on the hulls is great, and we should land if we can.”

From the other workstation, the navigation officer threw a brisk salute, and spoke at length, with many accompanying hand gestures. The Commodore scowled, then shambled over to peer at the man’s screen. From the inside pocket of his tunic, he produced a pair of reading glasses, which he balanced on the bridge of his nose as he scanned the data. He gave a grunt; and then he straightened up and turned to Merovech.

“We have two RAF fighter jets circling us in the darkness. They say they are reluctant to fire while you remain aboard, but neither will they let us deviate from our present course.”

Merovech frowned. “They actually
want
us to reach the
Maraldi
?”

The Commodore slipped the spectacles back into his pocket, as deftly as any conjuror, and smoothed down the tips of his moustache.

“It seems you have a appointment to keep.”

R
ETURNING TO THE
sickbay, Merovech found Julie Girard looking strained. The painkillers weren’t doing enough to dull the stinging needle wound in her thigh. But when she saw him, her brow furrowed not in pain, but concern.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “You look very pale.”

Merovech came over and sat beside her. He took her hand.

“I’m scared, Jules. I’m angry and I’m scared.”

“What can I do?”

Merovech took a long, ragged breath. “Nothing. That’s the trouble. I’ve got the speech ready to go, but my father’s down there, and he could be dying, and all we can do is wait. It makes me feel so bloody helpless.”

He turned his head to the porthole. The sky was dark, but he sensed the jets all the same: out there in the blackness, circling like sharks.

“When I found out what had been done to me, what my own mother had done to me, I wanted to confront her. I was furious and hurt and all those other things.”

Julie touched his hand. “You had every right to be.”

“I know. But now it’s all unravelled. We’re fighting for our lives, and I don’t know what to do. There’s too much at stake and I can’t see a way out. She’s got the Air Force and the Navy, and what have we got?”

The walls gave a metallic shudder. Julie’s fingers moved up to his cheek. She brushed at his hair, tidying it.

“We have got a monkey.”

Merovech smiled in spite of himself.

“I love you.”

Julie’s hand dropped into her lap. “Do not say that unless you mean it.”

“I do. In fact, if we get out of this alive—”

“Do not say it.”

Merovech cleared his throat. The words were boiling up inside him. “If we make it through this in one piece, I want you to marry me.”

Julie blinked at him, stunned.

“Are you serious?” She slammed her palms onto the blanket. “Are you
really
serious?”

Merovech pulled back.

“But, I thought—”

“We could both be killed in a few hours. Personally, I will be amazed if I am not dead or in jail by the morning. How can you be thinking about marriage at a time like this?”

“What better time is there?”

Julie scraped her lower lip with a purple thumbnail. “What about my father?”

“He can’t stop us.”

She shook her head. “You do not know him. You do not know what he can be like.”

Merovech huffed air through his cheeks. He thought he had a pretty good idea of exactly what the old bastard could be like.

“Forget about him.”

In a tight, irritated gesture, Julie wiped her hair back with the fingertips of one hand. “That might be easy for you to say. I cannot forget about him, Merovech, he is my
father
.”

Where she’d pulled the purple strands back, he caught sight of the faded shadow on her cheek: the yellowed remains of the bruise that had so angered him in the café.

“Well,” he snapped, “he doesn’t deserve to be.”

“
What?
”

“You heard me. You can keep denying it, but we both know what he is, and what he’s done to you.”

She waved a hand in front of her face, trying to ward off his words.

“No!
Non!
”

Far beyond the gondola’s walls, Merovech heard the distant roar of the circling planes: a rumble in the dark, like artificial thunder.

“I can keep you safe,” he said.

“Safe?” Julie looked around the listing cabin. “You call
this
‘safe’?”

“You know what I mean.”

She shook her head, eyes flashing, and he drew back, expecting her to shout. She didn’t. Instead, she dropped her chin to her chest and took a series of deep, calming breaths. When she finally looked up and spoke, it was with a firmness that surprised him.

“I know you think you are doing the right thing, but you are going about it all wrong. I love you, Merovech, I really do. I would not be here if I did not. But that does not mean I need you to
rescue
me. I don’t need a big handsome prince to come riding in and fight all my battles for me.”

“I didn’t—”

She put a finger to his lips. “I am not a princess, I am tougher than that, and I solve my problems myself, in my own way and in my own time. And if you really, truly want to be with me, then that is something you will have to learn to accept, okay?”

She pulled her finger back.

“And yes, Merovech.”

Merovech blinked foolishly, his composure in tatters. “Yes what?”

Julie smiled, and spoke slowly, as if addressing an idiot.

“Yes, if we make it through this alive, I will marry you.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

PERSONAL FRANKENSTEIN

“A
H, YOU’RE AWAKE
,” the man said. “Welcome back.”

Victoria blinked up at him from the bed.

“Who are you?” She tried to move, but her arms and legs wouldn’t respond. She smelled antiseptic and cold steel. The ceiling was low, white and curved. “What’s happening, where are we?”

“You are on board the
Maraldi
, in the infirmary. You have been unconscious for some time.”

Victoria’s vision swam. She creased her eyes, trying to focus.

“And you are?”

“Come, come, Victoria. Surely someone with your background can figure that one out?”

Victoria ran her tongue over her lower lip. She’d never seen this man before, but there was something familiar about the condescension in his tone. She took a guess.

“Doctor Nguyen?”

The man gave a small smile. “Very good.”

“Why can’t I move?”

“When I installed your gel-based processors, I also installed an override command. A simple word that renders you immobile.”

“Why would you do that?”

He moved over to the sink and turned on the taps. “I was designing the perfect slave army,” he said over his shoulder. “I wanted to make sure they couldn’t revolt.”

As he washed and dried his hands, Victoria ran over what she knew about him.

Doctor Kenta Nguyen had been born in Osaka in the late nineteen eighties, and was now over seventy years old. He was a graduate of the Human Genome Project and, until leaving Japan to take up a research position with Céleste, he had been one of the leading innovators in the ongoing Japanese biotech revolution. She remembered him as a small, cantankerous man in a tweed suit. Now, he stood tall and limber in a dinner jacket and bow tie. He looked around thirty years old, and in amazing physical shape.

“You’re an android,” she said with a hammer-blow of realisation, “just like Berg.”

Nguyen shook water from his hands and turned back to her.

“Ah, poor Berg. He was one of our earliest successes, and quite unhinged. I was terribly sad to lose him.”

“He was a murdering psychopath.”

Nguyen gave a small, pitying shake of his head.

“He was a loyal soldier.” He reached for a packet of surgical gloves, and extracted two. “And all his so-called ‘victims’
will
live again.”

Victoria let herself sneer.

“Bullshit.”

“Really, Miss Valois? Look at me.” He flattened a palm against his chest. “I left my body in Paris, and yet here I am, as alive as you.”

“I don’t call that life.”

Nguyen sighed like a disappointed schoolmaster.

“And what about you, Victoria? May I remind you that the brain in your head is more than fifty per cent synthetic. And yet you claim to be alive, do you not?”

“That’s different.”

“Is it?” He examined his hand. “I’ll grant you that these bodies are far from perfect. I’m still having trouble integrating some of the finer senses, for example. But they will suffice, for now. Bodies like this will keep us all alive when the bombs fall, and we can improve them later. After all, we will have hundreds, maybe thousands, of years.”

“Speak for yourself.”

Nguyen gave a small, tight smile.

“I haven’t introduced you to my assistant, have I?”

He clapped his hands twice, and a girl tottered into the room on six-inch heels. She looked to be somewhere in her early twenties. She wore a white lab coat over a tight cocktail dress. Long, blonde hair fell around her shoulders, curling down to an ample cleavage. In her hands, she held a silver tray of surgical implements.

“Victoria,” Nguyen said with a flourish, “meet Vic.”

Victoria frowned. Beneath the girl’s make-up and fake tan, the skin held the stiff, waxy sheen that identified her as another of Nguyen’s androids.

“What is this?”

Nguyen smiled. “This is you. This is what I did when Berg brought me your soul-catcher.” He reached out and curled his fingers in the girl’s hair. “I call her ‘Vic’.”

Watching him, Victoria felt her skin prickle. Bats flapped their wings in her chest cavity.

“Three days ago,” Nguyen said, “I took your back-up and I loaded it into this body. This is you, Victoria. Your memories, your personality, your ‘soul’.”

The girl stood, inert as a waxwork, her blue eyes fixed on the middle distance.

Victoria’s mouth was dry.

“I don’t believe you. I would never have let you do that. I would have fought—”

Nguyen waved her to silence.

“Oh, I am more than aware of that.” He untangled his fingers from the girl’s hair. “And believe me, until I installed the behavioural safeguards, this one fought like the devil herself. Now, though, she is incapable of violence.” He reached out and cupped one of the girl’s heavy breasts in his palm. “But why worry about violence when she and I have so many better things we could be doing? Isn’t that right, Vic?”

The girl blinked. She looked down at the hand holding her breast.

“Yes, Doctor Nguyen.”

He smiled. “You see, Miss Valois, even you can be tamed.”

Immobile on the bed, Victoria felt her cheeks burn.

“You sack of shit.”

Nguyen gave a disapproving click of his tongue.

“Such language.” He let go of the girl and pulled the surgical gloves on over his artificial fingers: first one hand, and then the other. “You have to see the big picture, Miss Valois. These bodies, these hands, are simply tools. With them, we will save the world.”

“By destroying it?”

Nguyen shook his head. “I am a doctor. My job is to make people better. To make the human race
better
.” He snapped the elastic cuff of the last glove into place, and selected a shiny silver scalpel from the tray in his assistant’s hands. As he picked it up, the blade caught the light: cold, and thinner than paper.

“You’ve caused us considerable trouble,” he said. “We should have had Merovech by now. Without him, the Duchess cannot order a strike against the Chinese. She does not have the authority.”

“Too bad.”

Nguyen’s lips thinned. “No matter. He will be here soon enough. The RAF are bringing him to us.” He looked at his watch. “And as soon as the Mars probe’s safely away, he’ll order the launch of a cruise missile at Shenzhen City. The war will start on schedule.”

He took up position at the head of the bed. “We’ve been preparing for this for years. With the industrial resources of Céleste at our disposal, we’ve constructed legions of android bodies, and converted as many of our followers as we can.” He showed her the scalpel. “And now, I’m afraid, it’s your turn.”

Victoria’s vision swam. Her pulse hammered in her throat until she could hardly draw breath.

“What are you doing?”

Nguyen leant over the bed. She felt his palm enfolding the back of her head in much the same way he’d just enfolded the blonde girl’s breast.

“Now,” he said, “Let’s get that gelware out of there, and into a new body.”