Macaque Attack (37 page)

“Why not?”

“Because that’s the sort of thing she would do.”

Ack-Ack Macaque growled in his throat. Then he looked down at his arm. The fur stood on end. Static sparked from teaspoons. He felt his hackles bristle.

And there was Célestine, standing in the centre of the room. A few final blue flickers of static danced down her metal legs. The air smelled of ozone.

Ack-Ack Macaque went for his holsters. He had both guns pointing at her head before she’d fully finished materialising—but when he pulled the triggers, nothing happened. Célestine held up a hand and the metal grew hot. With a screech of pain and annoyance, he dropped them both.

“I’m tired,” Célestine’s voice boomed. “Tired of being interfered with. Tired of playing by the rules. Tired of playing these stupid games.”

She clicked her fingers, and they were elsewhere.

S
UNLIGHT DAZZLED HIM
. A cold wind tugged at his jacket.

“What the fuck?” Ack-Ack Macaque put up a hand to shade his eye and squinted into the early morning light. He was back on Earth, on top of a building. A city stretched beneath him, all glass and stone. Vapour steamed from rooftop vents. The sound of traffic drifted up from street level.

“Where are we?”

“New York.” Célestine stood ten metres away, beside a telescope mounted on a metal pole. “At the top of the Empire State Building.”

He blinked, eye still adjusting. The Founder was here too, standing away to the side like a referee in a boxing match.

“How?”

“I told you.” Célestine’s voice was loud and dangerous. “I’m sick of playing by the rules. We built this world. If we have to, we can change whatever we want.”

“Then why have you waited this long?”

She glared at him. “Because I was trying to do it properly. I was trying to build an empire that would last a hundred thousand years.”

“But you’ve fucked it up now, yeah?”

“Because of you, you loathsome fleabag.”

His Colts were gone. He had nothing except the knife in his boot, and he didn’t think that would do much good against her titanium skeleton—especially if she could change the laws of physics at a whim. He looked desperately around the viewing gallery.

“But why bring me here?” he said, playing for time, hunting for a weapon.

Célestine laughed, and it wasn’t a pleasant sound.

“Have you ever seen
King Kong
?”

Ack-Ack Macaque shrugged. “I’ve never been to China.”

“She means,” the Founder said, interjecting at last, voice sour with exasperation, “that she’s going to kill you.”

Ack-Ack huffed. He didn’t like the look of this at all. In the space of an hour, he’d gone from glorying in the power of the alien weapon to standing helpless and unarmed in front of his greatest enemy. The turnaround seemed far too fast, and tipped in favour of the wrong party.

“She can try.” He took up a fighting stance. He knew he was outgunned and outclassed, but that wouldn’t stop him. If the metal bitch wanted to end him, she’d have a fight on her hands. He wasn’t about to go gently into any goodnight, no sir, and he’d rather go down fighting than give her the satisfaction of admitting defeat.

In fact, screw her. Screw the lot of them.

With a yell, he flung himself forward. Célestine didn’t even try to dodge. She stood her ground as his fingers clawed for her, and slapped him away at the last minute with a backhand that felt like a blow from an aluminium baseball bat.

He tumbled over and over, fetching up against the wall at the foot of the rail.

“Ouch, fuck.” Stunned, he shook his head, trying to clear the red mist that interfered with his vision. Dimly, he saw the cyborg striding towards him. He grabbed a railing and pulled himself unsteadily to his feet.

“Had enough?” he asked her, and hawked a wedge of bloody phlegm into the dust. “Because I can do this all day.”

Her lip curled. With a gesture, she parted the railings behind him. Off-balance, he teetered on the edge of a drop that seemed to fall away beneath his heels forever. The cars four hundred metres below looked like ants; the people like bacteria.

Hey, that’s cheating!

He windmilled his arms to keep his balance, and had a sudden flash of another time and place, of a metal bridge over a deep canyon, and an airship passing beneath.

Célestine stepped forward. She had her hand pulled back, ready to shove him over the edge. As she lunged towards him, he grabbed her wrist and heaved backwards. If he was going over, he was going to take her with him. He heard the Founder yell, “No!” But it was too late. He was already falling, and Célestine’s body toppled after him. He kept a death grip on her arm. If she tried to teleport, he’d go with her. If not, well...

Let’s see how her metal head survives when it hits the pavement from this height.

The observation deck fell away behind them. The wind roared in his ears.

Oh crap, this is it...

He stared at death, in the form of an onrushing sidewalk.

Then the view blurred. A mirage shimmered beneath him. He felt himself buffeted up, banging his head against Célestine’s metal chest. With a bang of displaced air and a flash of white light, the
Ameline
levered itself into existence, hanging in the sky metres from the wall of the skyscraper, jet thrusters whining.

Ack-Ack Macaque and Célestine hit its upper surface and rolled apart.

> HELLO!

Ack-Ack lay gasping for breath.

“What?” The voice had been speaking to him in his mind.

> I’M THE SHIP. I’M CONNECTED TO YOUR GELWARE BRAIN.

He shook his head. Close to the vessel’s nose, Célestine clambered awkwardly to her feet and looked around, seemingly dazed.

“Shut up.” He glanced around for a weapon, but found none. The alien pod lay beneath the bows, and he couldn’t get to it from here.

> I’M THE
AMELINE
, MONKEY. I’M TRYING TO HELP YOU.

“Then kill this metal bitch.”

> CAN DO. BUT YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO HELP.

Célestine fixed on him and started walking forward, hands grasping like claws. Ack-Ack Macaque danced backwards, staying out of reach.

“How?”

> MY WEAPONS ARE UNDERNEATH. I NEED YOU TO THROW HER OFF SO I CAN GET A CLEAR SHOT.

“I can’t, she’s too strong.”

> THEN FIND SOMETHING TO HANG ON TO.

Without further warning, the old ship rolled. Ack-Ack Macaque lunged for one of the handholds he’d used earlier. He wrapped his fingers around it and clung. Less nimble, Célestine toppled. She lost her footing and fell, over and over, towards the ground. Ack-Ack Macaque felt his arm being torn from its socket. He snaked his tail through the next handhold along, using it to help support his weight.

The
Ameline
was still at ninety degrees to the ground when the weapon at its tip fired. A burning shaft of starfire speared the falling cyborg and, as she tumbled, diced her into glowing chunks. Still dangling precariously, Ack-Ack Macaque watched the burning debris rain onto Fifth Avenue.

“Yeah!” he yelled into the wind. “Take that! You see what you get when you mess with my friends?” He sent a gob of spit sailing earthwards. “Try teleporting your way out of
that
!”

EPILOGUE

GONE

Farewell dear mate, dear love!

I’m going away, I know not where,

Or to what fortune, or whether I may ever see you again.

(Walt Whitman,
Good-Bye My Fancy!
)

EPILOGUE

GONE

A
CK-
A
CK
M
ACAQUE CLAWED
his way around to the airlock. When he got there, he found Victoria and K8 waiting for him. They pulled him inside and helped him to a chair, then let him catch his breath as the old ship powered up, away from the city.

“Thanks,” he gasped when he could finally speak.

“Don’t thank us,” Victoria said. “We had nothing to do with it. One moment we were standing on the
Sun Wukong
, the next we were here, on the ship.”

“But I thought—”

> AND DON’T LOOK AT ME, EITHER. I WAS MINDING MY OWN BUSINESS BEFORE SOMETHING ZAPPED ME INTO
THAT
HORRORSHOW.

Ack-Ack Macaque frowned. He scratched his eye patch.

“The Founder,” he said quietly. She must have used her powers—her knowledge of the simulation—to teleport the ship and his friends here, the same way Célestine had brought him. “I guess she wasn’t as bad as everybody said, huh?”

K8 gave him a skeptical look, one eyebrow raised.

“You really have lousy taste in women,” she said.

Ack-Ack Macaque gave a snort. “You’re talking about the mother of my babies.”

“That’s as may be, but I’ll bet you that’s the last we’ll ever see of her.”

The ship gave a couple of final bumps, and then steadied. Katherine Abdulov appeared from the hatch leading to the bridge.

“Célestine’s dead,” she said. “We scanned the wreckage. There wasn’t a piece of her left that was bigger than an orange.”

“So it’s over?” K8 asked.

Victoria shook her head. “There are still the cyborgs on Mars. If we don’t deal with them now, who knows what they’ll throw our way next time.”

The young Scot pouted. “And how long’s it going to take us to get
there
?”

“Six months.”

From the ladder that led from the ship’s bridge, Katherine Abdulov cleared her throat. “Perhaps I can help?”

They all looked at her.

“I’ve been doing some calculations with the ship,” she said. “We think we can tow you.”

“Would that be faster?” Ack-Ack Macaque asked.

Kat grinned. “I reckon we could get you there in six weeks.”

Ack-Ack Macaque sat bolt upright. “Hot damn! That’s more like it. I’d go nuts rattling around that airship for half a year.”

“And then, after that,” Kat continued, “maybe you could help us?”

“In what way?” Victoria’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.

Kat’s smile turned serious. “Napoleon and I go back a long way,” she said. “And it’s good to have him back, even if he is a monkey now. Besides, there are other builders out there. What say we go and throw a wrench in their plans?”

K8 laughed. “A monkey wrench?”

Ack-Ack Macaque fixed her with his most withering scowl.

“Not funny.”

He turned his stare on Katherine. “Do you think we can track down the Founder?”

“Possibly.” Abdulov stuck out her bottom lip. “I mean, we’ve done it before. She’ll know we’re looking but, in theory, yes.”

“Good.” He shifted himself on the seat, getting comfortable. “Because I want my babies back.”

His arms and legs felt as if they were made of wood. The accumulated aches and pains of the last few days—the barks, bruises and grazed knees; the multiple punches, kicks and bites—had taken their toll. As Victoria and Kat continued to plan their next move, he let his solitary eye fall closed.

With the
Ameline
’s help, they could be on Mars in a matter of weeks. And then the real fighting would start: monkey versus machine in a battle to the death, on the red sands of a dying world, with all the other worlds of creation at stake and an infinite playground stretching out all around them.

All they had to do was seize it.

S
IX MILES ABOVE
New York City, the
Ameline
readied her engines. Her course was set: first, a jump to rendezvous with the
Sun Wukong
, and then onwards, ever onwards, through all the billions of possible worlds.

Her fusion reactor came online, generating power for the jump engines. Deep in her belly, the engines began to spin up until the old ship felt she could leap the length of the universe in a single orgasmic bound.

> HOLD ONTO YOUR HATS, she warned her passengers. Her scanners took a final, almost lingering sweep over the blue and green marble that was the Earth. Then all the readouts on her bridge spiked at once. The
Ameline
’s engines tore a hole in the walls of the multiverse. There was a blinding flash of pure white light, and then they were all gone and elsewhere—humans, monkeys and spaceship alike.

THE END

ACK-ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

H
ERE, AT THE
end of the ‘
Macaque Trilogy
’, I’d like to take the opportunity to thank the following people for accompanying me on the journey:

Jon Oliver, Ben Smith, Mike Molcher, Lydia Gittins, and the rest of the team at Solaris Books, for giving me the chance to write these novels in the first place. My agent, John Jarrold, for all his advice and support. My wife, Becky, for giving me the time and space in which to write, for reading and editing the first drafts, and for keeping me going when all I wanted to do was crawl into a hole and never come out again. Jake Murray, for his excellent and inspiring covers. Jetse de Vries and Andrew Cox, for publishing the first ‘Ack-Ack Macaque’ short story in
Interzone
, way back in 2007. Matt Smith and Tharg The Mighty, for allowing me to fulfill a boyhood dream by writing an ‘Ack-Ack Macaque’ comic strip for
2000 AD
. My sister, Rebecca, for her excellent and incisive critiques. The rest of my family, for their constant and unflagging belief. Su Hadrell, for useful feedback on early drafts of
Hive Monkey
and
Macaque Attack
. Neil Beynon, for his insights on the first draft of
Hive Monkey
. And Danie Ware, Desiree Fischer and the team at Forbidden Planet, for book launches, signings and other events.