Macaque Attack (12 page)

“Either way, there’s fuck all I can do about it now.”

He crawled along the branch he was on, and jumped into the waiting arms of the next tree. He was going to give the crash site a wide berth; and, unless he dropped dead of radiation poisoning in the next couple of hours, he’d just have to go on assuming there
was
no contamination—or, at least, not enough to hurt him in the short term. He had to assume he’d go on living.

After all, what choice did he have?

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THAT VILE PRIMATE

T
HE TWO GUARDS
marched Victoria across the windswept campus, past row after row of workshops and assembly lines; past racks of artificial torsos, crates filled with disembodied heads, and, at the back of one particular building, a conveyor belt leading to a row of dumpsters filled with discarded human remains. Arms and legs stuck out at uncomfortable, unnatural angles. The bodies had been cored like apples, their brains and spinal cords having been cut out and pasted into new cyborg bodies. Flies swarmed over the cooling meat. The workers tending the conveyor belt turned to watch her pass with dull, frightened eyes.

At the end of the row of structures, they came to an exposed area that had once been a car park but which was now empty, save for a couple of rusting Citroëns and a large military transport helicopter. The helicopter’s twin rotors turned lazily. The craft had been painted the same dull, oppressive grey as the sky. Warm yellow light spilled from the ramp gaping open at its rear. The guards led Victoria to the base of the ramp and pushed her forward. She took a couple of steps, and then looked back.

“You’re not coming?” she asked.

They regarded her with blank, impassive expressions, their faces betraying all the verve and personality of shop window mannequins.

“You go on,” one of them said. “We’ll be here when you’re finished.”

The breeze whipping across the car park smelled smoky and autumnal, laced with the scents of wet earth and rotting leaves. In Victoria’s head, Paul said: “I don’t like this.” The helicopter’s tail rotor towered above them. The ramp was wide enough to accommodate a tank.

“I don’t blame you.” She hadn’t been a fan of helicopters since that crash in the South Atlantic, a lifetime ago.

She walked up the ramp and paused at the top, where she used her arm to shield her eyes, blinking as they adjusted to the contrast between the twilit gloom outside and the brightness within.

The helicopter’s cargo hold had been outfitted as an art gallery. There were expensive-looking carpets on the deck, and tapestries hanging from the bulkheads. She recognised a number of famous paintings and carvings. In the centre of the space, a long metal box had been covered in candles, each of which was lit. There were votive candles, tea lights, lanterns, and gothic candelabra. Their glow gave the place the feel of a church, and their flames flickered brightly in the cold air swirling in from the open ramp. At the back of the room, near the hatch that led through to the cockpit, Alyssa Célestine sat behind a desk, face like a scowling cat. Back on Victoria’s timeline, the woman had been the Duchess of Brittany, companion to the King of the United Kingdoms, and mother to Merovech, the Prince of Wales. Goodness only knew what rank or title she held on this world.

“Come in.” Célestine had unbuttoned her tunic. A squat black pistol lay on the desk in front of her. Victoria glanced back, at the guards at the bottom of the ramp. They were watching her. How could they stand to live in those metal shells? For a second or two, she pitied them. Then a wave of nausea splashed over her as she remembered her own situation. However artificial they might be on the outside, at least they still had their own brains. They weren’t running on slippery, lab-grown gelware. Their limbs and organs may have been replaced but their minds were still their own, still the product of greasy human neurons. For all their physical alteration, they remained human in a way she never could. And it was all Célestine’s fault. Célestine and Nguyen. Victoria should have died of her injuries, but they’d saved her. Nguyen had used her to test his techniques and theories. She had been an early prototype for his cyborg soldiers, her brain a testing ground for the gelware that allowed human consciousness to be copied and transferred into a metal body. They’d turned her into a guinea pig, and she’d been pathetically grateful—at least, until she’d realised the full scope of their plans. Then she’d killed Nguyen and helped Ack-Ack and Merovech finish off Célestine.

Yes, back on her timeline, the Duchess was dead. On this one, she wasn’t. Victoria swallowed. Mouth dry and heart twitching like a caged animal, she turned to face the woman.

Lady Célestine glared at her.

“Do you speak English?”

“
Oui.
”

“Why have you come here?”

“To find my friend.”

“The monkey?”

“Yes.”

“He tried to kill me.”

Victoria drew herself up. “As I recall,
you
opened fire on
him
.”

The woman’s gnarled fingers brushed the stock of the pistol on the desk.

“He broke into my lab.”

“Is it your lab or is it Nguyen’s?” Victoria narrowed her eyes. “And, talking of Nguyen, why did you shoot him, anyway?”

Célestine pursed her lips. She wrapped her fingers around the gun.

“He allowed himself to be captured. His death was necessary.”

“In case he talked?”

“Because he disappointed me.” She raised the weapon. “But now it’s your turn to talk. Where are you from?”

“Paris, originally.”

“Which Paris?”

“How the hell would I know?”

“Your name?”

“Victoria Valois.”

“Valois...” Célestine’s lip curled. “Of course. You’re the woman from the helicopter crash.”

“You know me?”

“I remember Nguyen operating on you.”

Victoria blinked in surprise. “You were there?”

“I have made contact with alternate versions of myself and the good doctor on a dozen parallels,” she said, “and on each, I have given them the tools to create new bodies, new societies.” Keeping the gun’s narrow barrel trained on Victoria, she rose stiffly to her feet. “The iteration you killed two years ago was one of my most promising students. We had never been so close to success. But then you ruined everything. You and that vile primate.”

“You were trying to start a nuclear war.”

“We were trying to save humanity. To improve it.”

“By killing most of it.”

“So what? Your world was dangerously overpopulated. You could have stood to lose some of the dross, the deadwood.” Célestine gestured to the open ramp behind Victoria. “As we have done here.”

Victoria’s mouth felt dry.

“There was a nuclear war
here
?” A droplet of sweat tickled as it ran into the small of her back.

Célestine waved a dismissive hand. “A small one. Inconsequential, really.”

“Somebody stopped you again?’

The woman smiled. “We just developed more subtle methods. Biological methods. Diseases genetically tailored to target certain subsets of the population, leaving only a percentage of the adults.”

Victoria had to stop herself from turning away in disgust, appalled by the implied slaughter. “Enough to create your brave new world?” she asked, almost spitting the words.

“Enough to provide the slave labour to build it.”

Victoria felt her cheeks growing hot. Rage bubbled up like stomach acid. “Who elected you ruler of the world?”

Behind her, she heard the ramp closing. The deck trembled underfoot as the helicopter wobbled into the air. Braced against the desk, the Duchess straightened her arm, and aimed the gun directly at Victoria’s face.

“And who elected you its saviour?”

Beneath the anger, Célestine looked tired. The fingers holding the weapon were starting to gnarl, the backs of the hands blotchy with liver spots and ancient scars.

“Do you think this has been easy?” she asked, regarding Victoria with glittering eyes. “All these years, all these worlds? This has been my life’s work.”

“Turning people into robots?”

“Trying to save the human race!” She shook the gun and Victoria cringed. If she could keep the Duchess talking, she might have time to access her internal menus and dial up her speed and strength.

“You could just stop now, and walk away,” she suggested, stalling for time.

Célestine shook her head. “No, not now. I’ve spent too long at this. I’ve invested too much time, too much of myself—too much of all my selves.”

“Perhaps we could help you?”

“No.” She motioned Victoria over to a porthole. They were climbing slowly, rising over the campus of workshops and warehouses that made up the laboratory. Victoria braced herself against the inside of the hull and bent to the window. Below, in the fields beyond the barbed wire fences, immense armoured vehicles sat in ranks.

“Are they tanks?” They were bigger than any kind of tank she’d ever seen.

Lady Alyssa buttoned her black tunic. Her close-cropped hair and bright eyes gave her the look of a Siamese cat.

“They are my Land Leviathans.”

Victoria cupped a hand around her eyes and pressed her face to the glass. Bristling with guns, and with sparks shooting from their smoke stacks, the Leviathans resembled armoured locomotives, or battleships plucked from the sea and given caterpillar tracks. In the corner of her vision, she saw Paul’s image superimposed across the scene.

“There are
hundreds
of them,” he said.

For a moment, Victoria regretted her decision to allow Paul to ride in her head. If she got herself killed—and it seemed increasingly likely that she would—he’d also die. If her heart stopped pumping the oxygen her gelware ran on, he’d fade away like a computer program in a power cut. She could have left a copy of him running on the
Sun Wukong
’s processors, but that would have run contrary to their pact. In the aftermath of the Gestalt invasion, they’d made each other a promise. She wasn’t backed-up, and Paul didn’t want to live without her, haunting the memory banks of a captured airship. If she died, he would follow. On this trip, they were sharing the risk, and there would be no second chances.

Victoria stepped back from the window. Célestine let her pistol drop demurely to waist-height, but kept it aimed. “What do you think?”

“Does it matter what I think?”

“Perhaps not, but I wanted you to see them.” She walked around the heavy metal box occupying the centre of the hold, putting it between them. In the candlelight, her eyes seemed to smoulder.

“You say I kill people? Before I came to this world, it was a totalitarian dictatorship, a fascist nightmare. There were death camps, torture houses. Now, because of me, many of the formerly downtrodden are free, and equipped with bodies that may serve them for a thousand years. I killed all the generals.”

“And most of the people.”

“They would have died anyway.” Célestine’s jaw clenched. “What do a few casualties mean in the grand scheme of things? Everybody dies sooner or later; nobody survives. The point is that I achieved my objective: I made it possible for a few to transcend the limitations of the flesh.”

Victoria tasted sourness. “But all those deaths—”

“Think how many have died throughout history. Millions upon millions of bright, sparkling intelligences doomed to rot in a prison of meat. And only I can stop it all. I can make their lives worthwhile, because I have it in my power to halt death.”

Victoria stepped back, away from the candles. “You’re insane.”

“Insane?” The gun waved above the flames. “Of course I’m insane. You would be too, if you’d had to do and see the things I have.”

“Then why not stop? Why not put an end to it all?”

“Because humanity needs me. It needs what only I can do.” Célestine drew herself up to her full height. “I invented the soul-catcher, you know. Thanks to me, a hundred timelines use it. The people on them record their personalities as electronic back-ups, little realising the true purpose of the thing, its true potential.”

As she spoke, Victoria called up the menu that enabled her self-defence routines—routines she’d been practising and refining for the past three years.

“Which is?”

“When the time comes,” the Duchess said, “most of its users—at least, most of those worth saving—will already have a copy of themselves digitised and ready to load into one of my cyborg bodies.”

In her mind’s eye, Victoria triggered a threat evaluation subroutine. Slowly, the gelware in her head began to accelerate its processing rate from the speed of thought to the speed of light.

“So, you’ve built an army?” She tried to keep her voice steady, her tone neutral.

“Indeed.” With the end of the pistol, Célestine pointed through the window. The helicopter had turned, bringing into sight something that looked like the sort of giant lighting rig you saw at open air music festivals: an arc of metal forming an archway big enough to easily accommodate one of the Leviathans. The centre glowed and rippled like a luminous heat haze. Its edges sparkled with rainbow light.

“Oh no,” said Paul.

Victoria frowned, trying to make sense of the skeletal structure. Then realisation hit her, and she gaped at Lady Alyssa.

“That’s a portal.”

The woman’s expression hardened.

“I have unfinished business on your world, Miss Valois.” She motioned Victoria back to the desk and into a chair, then took up position across from her. “My spies tell me that, back on your timeline, the Céleste probe reached Mars. It was a success. Even as we speak, it will be busily constructing its own army of enhanced humans.”

“You mean cyborgs.”

Uniform fastened, Célestine raised the gun. Her eyes went to the scar tissue at Victoria’s temple.

“You are in no position to make such distinctions.”

Victoria focused on the barrel of the pistol, which was about a metre from her face. Her neural prosthesis tagged the weapon as a threat and dialled her adrenal glands up to maximum. At the same time, her mental clock completed its acceleration, and the world around her slowed to a glacial pace. She felt her chest rise like an old set of bellows, and the indrawn breath pass across her tongue into her throat. Her heart thumped and the blood roared in her ears. Her thoughts, which had been racing, hardened and clarified.