Hive Monkey (20 page)

Lila turned to face her, leaning her back against the door.

“You haven’t a clue, have you?” She shook her head pityingly. “You don’t know what you’re fighting.”

“Why don’t you enlighten me?”

“Those people out there aren’t the local Gestalt. They intercepted me when I tried to contact Cole. They were waiting for me, and they knew who I was.”

“So?”

“So, I don’t exist on this timeline. The only way they could know who I was would be if they came here from somewhere else. These aren’t your local converts, these are the Gestalt’s advance guard, its elite troops.”

“And they followed you here?”

“No, they came here to kill Cole, and a number of others. They’re laying the groundwork for a full-scale incursion.”

K8 rubbed her forehead, trying to massage some life back into her slothful synapses.

“They’re preparing an
invasion
?”

“I told you, these are the advance guard. They even have their Leader with them.”

“The Gestalt has a leader?”

Lila shivered, and wrapped her arms tightly across her chest. “They took me to see him.”

“I thought the Gestalt were all supposed to be the same?”

“They are. But the Leader’s something else. He’s... different. Not hooked into the web like the rest of them.”

“And he’s here? I mean, right here in this house?”

“He was yesterday, when they took me to him.” She shuddered and looked at the black mould dappling the cellar’s back wall.

K8 clenched and unclenched her fingers and toes. She had pins and needles in her feet, but her legs were feeling less and less unsteady with every minute that passed. She wouldn’t be sprinting anywhere for a while, but felt confident that, if she had to, she’d soon be able to get up and walk—at least, as far as the door.

“But how are they going to invade the whole world?” She said. “The idea’s daft.”

Lila didn’t turn her head. “They’ll do it the same way they invaded my world. And we’ve been fighting them ever since.”

“But if we can warn people, if we can get the word out, we can be ready for them.”

“You don’t understand. They’re relentless. If you shoot one, another one takes his or her place. And they just keep coming. You can’t outthink them, because they all think as one. You can’t surprise them, because if you kill one of them, all the others immediately know about it—unless you can do it so quickly they don’t have time to register the attack, but even then, the others know
something’s
wrong.”

“So, what do you do?”

“You stay quiet. You hide. And when you strike, you do it quickly, and then you run.” She took a long, shuddering breath. “And we’ve been running for five years. Until—”

“Until what?”

Lila swallowed. “They developed this plague. It’s like a virus. It gets into your soul-catcher and changes it. Makes you one of them.”

K8 rubbed the back of her neck, where her own device had been implanted on her sixteenth birthday—a present from her employers at the time, Céleste Tech.

“What if you don’t have a soul-catcher?”

“It builds one.” Lila rubbed her eyes. “It converts flesh and bone into gelware, and burrows into your head.”

K8 swirled the water around in the canteen. Her thoughts felt heavy and tired.

“So, why didn’t it infect you?”

“We saw what was happening, and we left. We crept into one of their machines and used it to get away while they were still in the process of spreading the infection. We didn’t know where we’d end up, but anything seemed better than staying. But now, they’re going to use their plague against this world, too.”

“Unless we can stop them.”

A sigh. “We can’t stop them.”

“If we could get to the Leader somehow, and make him—”

“Forget it.” Lila waved a hand. “You’d never get past his bodyguards. And if you did, you still wouldn’t stand a chance. He’d never surrender.”

K8 said, “Tough, is he?”

Lila took a long, raggedy breath.

“You have no idea.”

From above, they heard footfalls echoing on stone steps, descending in their direction. Keys jangled, and Lila backed away from the door.

“They’re coming!”

K8 tried to push herself up, but her knees were still unsteady.

“Help me.”

“I can’t.” Lila shook her head and backed away further. “I think they’re coming for you this time. I think they’re coming to take you to
him
.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

STINGER

T
HE
T
ERESHKOVA
THUNDERED
across the city at full power, startling pedestrians and shaking windows in their frames. From his seat on the bridge, Ack-Ack Macaque saw the shadow thrown by its five hulls—a great rectangular eclipse darkening office blocks and church spires. He made a few final adjustments and then, satisfied the airship was headed in the right direction, unclipped himself from the pilot’s chair and turned to Victoria.

“Nobody touches that throttle,” he said. “We’ll get there faster if we accelerate all the way. When we get close, I’ll jump out, and I’ll take the woman with me. When we’re gone, I’ve set the autopilot to bring the ship around in a wide loop. By the time you get back to the target, you’ll be at rest, and it should all be over on the ground, one way or another.”

Victoria watched him carefully.

“You missed a part.”

“Which part?”

“The part where I’m the captain and you’re the pilot, and I give the orders.”

He glowered at her. He was still furious that they’d lost his plane—which now lay smashed and concertinaed in a supermarket car park—and this wasn’t the time for her to be playing hierarchy games.

“Would you do anything differently?”

She stroked her chin with finger and thumb, considering.

“Well,” she said after a moment, “no.”

“Then please, get out of my way,
Captain
.”

Victoria narrowed her eyes, and there was a glimmer in them that told him her objections weren’t entirely serious, that she was just making a point.

“Make sure you get them both back, okay?”

“Yes, boss.”

“And
that’s
an order.”

“Yes, boss.” He threw a floppy, long-armed salute and scampered aft, to where Marie Cole awaited him. She looked bulky with the bulletproof jacket that Victoria had given her, and bug-eyed with the goggles she’d put on over her face; but nevertheless, she exuded a fierce, furious determination that matched his own, and he had no doubt she’d do okay when the fighting got dirty and personal.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Lead on, monkey.”

He led her up through the
Tereshkova
’s corridors and companionways to the helipad on top of the airship, and one of the sleeker passenger choppers. The pilot was already on board, warming the engine, and Ack-Ack Macaque hopped in beside him.

“Have you got the box stowed?”

“In the back, sir.”

“Then take us up, as soon as you’re ready.”

“Aye, sir.”

As the five-pronged shadow of the
Tereshkova
’s nose cleared the final suburb of Bristol, the helicopter rose from the flight deck. It hovered in the air for a moment, allowing the behemoth to move away ahead of it, and then dropped, coming down in a swooping curve that brought it down past the giant fins and rudders at the stern, and forward, under the speeding airship.

“Keep low,” Ack-Ack Macaque told the pilot, “and follow the river. Watch out for bridges.”

He scrambled into the back, where Marie sat strapped into her seat, coil gun resting across her knees. A large metal case sat on the deck by her feet, held in place by bungee cords. He crouched beside it, bracing himself against the seat in the cramped space, and began to unfasten it.

“What’s that?” Marie leant forward for a better look.

Ack-Ack Macaque gave her a grin.

“This is our way in.”

From the front, the pilot called, “Two minutes to target.”

They were winding along the course of the River Avon. Ahead, they could see hills and main roads, Georgian terraces and the tower of Bath Cathedral.

The London mainline lay to their left, and they drew level with an eastbound train.

“Keep pace with the train,” Ack-Ack Macaque ordered. The land was opening out into a wide river valley, down the middle of which the track ran, side-by-side with the river. Larkin House stood on a hill to the north, and he hoped that by staying low, concealed visually and audibly by the train, they might be able to approach without raising an alarm.

Looking out of the side window, he saw faces looking back at him from the train’s carriages, and gave them the finger.

When they drew level with their target, the pilot pulled up and over the train.

“Thirty seconds,” he reported.

Ack-Ack Macaque exchanged looks with Marie. Then he flipped the fastening on the box and opened it, revealing a long, fat tube with a gun sight and a pistol grip. It had been painted olive green, with bright red, black and yellow warning decals. It was one of the Commodore’s hidden treasures, but there was no time to sit and admire the thing. He pulled it from the case and slung its strap over his shoulder, kicked his boots off, stuck a cigar into his mouth, and shuffled to the side hatch.

“Sit tight,” he told Marie. He slid the door open and climbed through, onto the helicopter’s landing strut. Cold winds tore at him but he gripped the strut with his toes. Ahead, the hillside came at them like a rising green wave and he could see the pale sandstone frontage of Larkin House in the centre of a tidy arrangement of fir trees, gravel paths and ornamental hedges.

Crouching, he wrapped his tail around the strut, and let go with his hands. Gripping hard with his toes, he swung around until he hung upside down by his feet. The helicopter rocked at this, but stayed on course. Below, white-suited figures emerged from the house and pointed guns at him. He saw muzzle flashes but, if any of the bullets hit the chopper, he didn’t see or feel them. Instead, he concentrated on getting the tube—which now swung from his arm on the end of its strap—onto his shoulder, where he was forced to hold it in position with both hands.

Come on,
he thought,
this isn’t any harder than hanging from a tree branch. Travelling at a hundred miles an hour. Through a cyclone.

The tube housed one of the Commodore’s most prized souvenirs, taken from a cupboard in his cabin. It was a portable ground-to-air missile picked up off a battlefield somewhere in the Middle East thirty years ago.

Steadying the launcher, Ack-Ack Macaque lined the sight up on the eaves of the old house

“Okay,” he muttered to himself around the cigar, “time to blow shit up.”

He pulled the trigger. There was a sharp
whoosh
, and the tube bucked in his hands so hard he almost lost his grip on the strut. The missile leapt forward on a candle of flame, and the helicopter dipped its nose to follow.

Squirming around, Ack-Ack Macaque managed to pull himself back up to the helicopter’s open hatch. He let the empty launcher fall away into the fields below, and drew one of his big, shiny Colts. Marie looked at him, and he gave her a big thumbs-up.

“Everything’s okay!” he hollered above the engine noise. Ahead, the missile hit the roof and blew apart in a huge fireball. Tiles and bits of wooden joist flew into the air, and black smoke mushroomed over the house. “Okay, as long as they weren’t keeping your kid in the attic.”

They passed over the front gates of the house, and he dropped a grenade, to make the clowns with guns keep their heads down. Then the helicopter was over the hole in the roof, its downdraught whipping the smoke and flames. The drop was somewhere between fifteen to twenty feet.

“Okay, lets go.” Cigar clamped securely in his teeth, he leaned out of the helicopter, and dropped.

The wind tore at him. His jacket flapped. He fell into the fire, and through, into the space beneath the roof. His bare feet hit wooden planks hard enough to jar his spine, and he rolled onto his shoulder, just getting out of the way in time before Marie crashed through the smoke and hit the deck beside him.

By the time she’d picked herself up, he was on his feet, both Colts at the ready, as the helicopter peeled away, heading back towards the
Tereshkova
, which was hammering past a couple of kilometres to the south.

Black smoke filled the attic. He coughed and pulled his scarf up to cover his nose and mouth. There wasn’t time to waste looking for a hatch leading down, so he yanked the pin from a grenade, sang, “Have a banana,” and rolled it as far along the floorboards as it would go.

A second explosion rocked the house. When it had cleared, the floor had a ragged, burning hole in it.

Marie brushed dust and splinters from her clothes. She looked at him with an expression of respect, astonishment, and irritation.

“Please,” she said, “warn me the next time you’re going to do that.”

He grinned at her, scooped up a smouldering stick of wood, and lit his cigar.

“There’s something you need to know about me, lady—”

“That you’re dangerously irresponsible with explosives?”

He frowned, pulled out his cigar, and exhaled smoke.

“Uh, yeah,” he said. “That’s near enough.”

D
ROPPING DOWN THROUGH
the hole in the floorboards, they found themselves in a dormitory. The room had probably once been a grand bedroom; now it contained three rows of triple bunk beds. Chunks of shattered plaster lay on the blankets and floor, and the bunk closest to the hole was alight.

“Well,” Ack-Ack Macaque said, “I told you I’d get us into the house, didn’t I?”

Marie cradled the coil gun, keeping its barrel pointed at the door.

“You certainly did. I can’t fault you on that. But it’s lucky the girls weren’t in this room.”

Ack-Ack Macaque gave a shrug.

“Ah, they’d have been okay. I needed a grenade to get through those ceiling beams.”

From the landing beyond, they heard the sound of shoes running on a polished wooden floor. Holding his Colts at arm’s length, Ack-Ack Macaque drew a bead on the door. Marie waved him away.