Macaque Attack (29 page)

“Oh, relax,” it said. “I’m not going to kill you.”

K8 felt her jaw clench. The golden woman stepped towards her, moving on thin, graceful legs.

“Jeez,” the cyborg said, “you look so short.”

K8 worked her lips. It took her three attempts to make her voice work.

“Stay back.”

The woman smiled.

“I’m not going to hurt you, K8.” With a sound like scraping cutlery, her stained blades retracted into her sleeves.

“How do you know my name?”

“How do you think?” A shining hand reached out, plucked the wrench from her grip, and tossed it away. “I’m you, you dumbass.”

“M-me?” In her head, K8 could feel the other members of the Gestalt recoiling from her.

“Yeah, girl. I’m the version of you from the other world. You know how this works.”

“But I would never, never—”

“Never can be a long time when you don’t have a choice.”

With her back to the wall, K8 looked around for a way out. Her eyes fell on Oing and Boing, still lying where they fell.

“Why did you have to kill them?” she demanded, cheeks burning.

“They were in my way.”

“And me?”

“You can be saved.” The gold woman shook her red Mohican, which shimmered in the light like strands of fibre optic thread. “You can come with us, and have a body like mine.”

“But, I—” K8 stopped, surprised to hear herself using a singular pronoun. “I...” the Gestalt were still there at the back of her mind, but their voices were quieter now, less intrusive—and where once there had been ‘we’ and ‘us’, now there was only ‘me’ and ‘I’.

“Are you listening?” The golden woman reached for her. “I’m trying to save you.”

“Well, I don’t need saving.” Still distracted by the changes taking place in her head, K8 slapped the cyborg’s hand away. “I don’t need you, or anybody else.”

The gold woman cocked her head in amusement. “But you’re so lonely.”

“No, I’m not.” K8 bunched her fists. “I thought I was, but I’m not.”

“Because of the monkey?”

K8 felt her heart rattling against her ribs.

“Yes, the monkey.”

The golden woman straightened up and made a show of looking around the room.

“Then where is he, eh?” She bent forwards, putting her face level with K8’s, and K8 could see her own distress reflected in the polished mask. “Everybody let me down; why should you be any different? Where’s this hairy ‘friend’ of yours when you need him?
And
w
here was he when I needed him?
”

A cough came from the door. They both looked around to see Cuddles standing on the threshold. The big gorilla filled the entranceway with his muscular bulk, the Gatling gun cradled like a toy in his massive hands.

“Ack-Ack sends his regards.”

A fat, leathery finger squeezed the trigger and the gun’s barrels spun. The cyborg tried to leap aside but, fast as she was, she couldn’t outpace a weapon capable of firing fifty rounds per second. The room flickered as fire danced from the gun. K8 let her knees give out and collapsed to the deck, landing on her hip. Above her, her golden counterpart jerked and danced like a marionette as bullets punched through her metal skin, into the flesh and wiring beneath. Stray shots riddled the rear wall. Used shell cases showered around the gorilla’s feet. The chattering roar of the gun filled the room.

And then all was quiet.

The minigun’s spinning barrels whined into silence and the last spent case jangled on the iron deck. The room stank of hot metal, spilled oil and gun smoke. K8 uncovered her ears and looked up. The perforated cyborg stood swaying. It put a hand up to the smoking holes peppering its chest, and then dropped heavily to its knees.

“You idiots,” it wheezed.

Cuddles pushed up his sunglasses and fixed the woman with a sharp-toothed sneer. His feet straddled the end of a long, grey, coffin-shaped box. He dropped the minigun and pulled out a large silver pistol, which he levelled at her head.

“Fuck you, lady.”

After the whining din of the Gatling gun, the pistol’s shot was a flat crack. The bullet hit the cyborg in the forehead and her head tipped back on her neck. Something snapped in her chest, metal parted and, as if in slow motion, her head and shoulders broke from the ruins of her trunk. They fell backwards with a heavy thud. The rest of her body—sparking wires projecting from the shards of her chest—tottered for a second on buckling legs, and then collapsed in the opposite direction.

S
TILL FEELING NUMB,
K8 helped the gorilla lug the stolen shield device across the deck to the cradle she’d built. At first glance, it appeared to be a sealed container with no obvious controls or openings, save for a power coupling at the narrow end. As Cuddles kicked the remains of the golden cyborg out of the way, she ran her hands over the edges of the box, searching for seams or hidden catches.

“Any idea how it works?” the gorilla rumbled. Grease and dirt streaked his white vest, and his sunglasses perched on top of his head. The dog tags around his neck clanked quietly when he moved.

K8 sighed and shook her head. Her pulse still roared in her ears and she felt sick. She couldn’t believe she’d been talking to another iteration of herself; that the brain in that precious metal physique had once belonged to a girl almost identical to her—a kind of twin sister, but a shadow sister that had turned to the Dark Side, renouncing her humanity and morals in exchange for a shot at immortality. K8 shook herself and decided she’d worry about the philosophical implications later. When all this was over—assuming they lived through the next few hours—she’d have time to freak the hell out. Right now, she had a job to do, and the Skipper was counting on her to get it done. Hell, the whole future of the
world
depended on it.

She coughed and cracked her knuckles. Then she gave the grey box a prod with her toe.

“I guess we just plug it in and see what happens.”

She helped Cuddles guide it into the makeshift cradle and was gratified to see it was an almost perfect fit.

Let us help, child.
The Founder’s voice echoed in the spaces behind her conscious thoughts.

Get lost.

Our minds, working together...

K8 screwed her eyes shut and tapped her knuckles against her temples. She’d yearned to rejoin the hive, craved its comfort the way a raindrop craves the ocean; yet now, a crack had appeared. She could still hear them, still feel them, but they’d let her down in a moment of need. They’d left her hanging, high and dry. A rift had opened and now she wasn’t sure it could ever be repaired. She wasn’t part of their collective any more. In facing death, she’d found herself.

Shut up and get out of my head.

All that mattered now was the task at hand, and the Skipper’s plan.

You can’t shut us out.

Leave me alone.

You hate being alone, all by yourself. Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember how hard it was, how lonely?

She picked up the power cable and rammed it into the waiting socket, twisting and jiggling it until it slid home. The number of voices in her head rose to a chorus, a multitude. A whole congregation of true believers called to her, beseeching her.

Come back to us. Be one with us again.

Tears rolling down her face, she crammed her fingers into her ears. They sounded like disappointed primary school teachers and she tried to drown them out the only way she knew how.

La la la la,
she sang to herself, inner voice almost shrieking the words she remembered from a childhood spent as the only ginger kid in her class, the words she’d used to block out the schoolyard taunts.

La la la,
I’m not listening.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

MARY SHELLEY

A
CK-
A
CK
M
ACAQUE LEAPT
from the rear of the crippled Leviathan, leaving it straddling the road, and ran on all fours across the field. The fighting had intensified, with the tanks and airships exchanging fusillades in an almost continuous bombardment, and he hoped everybody’s attention would be fixed on their opponents rather than scanning the grass for scampering primates.

He didn’t know for sure which tank Célestine was in, but he had a fair idea. So far, the Leviathans had arranged themselves in an arrowhead formation, with one at the rear, close to the portal—and that was the one he was running towards. The Duchess might be a deranged and evil bitch, but she was also very keen on self-preservation. She wanted to live forever, which meant she wouldn’t be riding in the vanguard with the rest of the grunts; she’d be at the back, close enough to command the battle but sheltered behind the first wave of tanks. And, now he was on the inside of the ‘V’, he made straight for her.

What he’d do when he found her was another matter. He hadn’t given it much thought, beyond the vague idea that he’d rip her arms off and use them to beat the rest of her to death. After all, this was the woman who’d started it all: the spider in the web, pulling the strings. She was the one who’d contacted the various Doctor Nguyens on their respective worlds, and encouraged them in their experiments. If it hadn’t been for her, he might never have been uplifted. He might have stayed a semi-conscious monkey, living out his days in ignorance. He and all the other sentient monkeys and apes might have gone on with their lives as nature intended, without being strapped to tables and shaped into aberrant, gaudy monstrosities. If Nguyen had been his personal Frankenstein, Célestine was his Mary Shelley. She was the author of all that had transpired, the mad genius behind his story, and he
really
wanted to kill her. Because who knew what insanity she intended to unleash this time? Three years ago, she’d egged on her counterpart on this world—Merovech’s mother—to engineer a nuclear confrontation with China, all in order to further her own desires for cybernetic immortality, and, if Apynja was to be believed, she’d already killed most of the population of her own timeline, sentencing billions to sickness and lingering death for her own foul ends.

Well, fuck that with a long, greasy pole.
It was time for a reckoning, and it seemed only fit and proper that he—one of her discarded prototypes—should be the one to dish out the justice.

A stray shell hit the ground a couple of dozen metres to his right, with a force that bowled him over and showered him with earth and stones. He rolled with the impact, taking it on his shoulder, and came back up onto his hands and feet, still running.

It’s going to take more than that to stop me today.
All his aches and pains seemed to have fallen away, having sloughed off like a dead skin. Adrenaline burned through him like good rum. He felt young again.

Ahead, his target lumbered forward at less than walking pace, the vast tracks barely turning.

She doesn’t want to get too far from the portal,
he thought. And who could blame her? The last thing she would have been expecting was to have her lead tanks savaged by armour-plated aerial behemoths. She would have been anticipating a world still recovering from the nuclear standoff between China and the West, a world devoted to peace and disarmament; she would have had no idea she wasn’t the first to try invading from another parallel, and therefore she couldn’t have foreseen the presence of the Gestalt dreadnoughts.

Attacks from other worlds—so far, the Earth had suffered two, and now there was the threat of the asteroid from Mars. Was this the way reality was going to work from now on? Would there be other aggressors, an endless procession of belligerent invaders from an infinite number of parallel worlds, unending strife and conflict?

Fuck, no. Not if I’ve got anything to say about it.

Veering to the left, he started to circle the great machine. Even in his wild state, he wasn’t reckless enough to try a frontal assault. His Colts had been refilled and he’d retrieved his chainsaw, but neither would be much use if the forward machine guns drew a bead on him.

A missile whistled overhead, coming in at a steep angle from one of the dreadnoughts on the edge of the pack, and exploded against the Leviathan’s invisible shield.

“I’ve got to time this right,” Ack-Ack Macaque muttered. He needed to be in position when the tank retaliated; ready to leap through when it dropped its force field in order to fire.

And there it was! The cannons at the Leviathan’s snout let loose a volley that rocked the beast on its tracks and shook the earth beneath his feet. Without waiting for the echoes to die away, he hurled himself between its caterpillar tracks. He rolled and kept rolling, until he was right under the main body of the tank and away from the danger of being crushed by its treads. Then he climbed to his feet and brushed himself down. Having already infiltrated one tank, he knew exactly where to find the hatch on the underside of this one. Without hesitation, he marched over and, standing directly beneath, used the butt of his Colt to hammer on the steel.

“Knock, knock, motherfuckers. Guess who.”

V
ICTORIA
V
ALOIS USED
the blunt end of her fighting stick to give the green cyborg’s head a final series of whacks. When its emerald skull finally caved and she was quite sure it was dead, she turned to look around the
Sun Wukong
’s bridge.

“Everybody okay?”

Three camouflage-painted cyborgs had tried to force their way onto the bridge, but all had been felled. The two Marines were down, one dead and the other injured. Merovech stood by the front window, his arm around Amy Llewellyn’s shoulders. He held a French-made FAMAS assault rifle in his free hand, taken from one of the fallen soldiers.

“Are we safe now?”

Victoria walked to her command chair and pressed a control. A loud clunk came from the back of the room, followed by more slams and thumps from further back in the gondola.

“I’ve locked down the airship. All the fire doors and bulkheads are now sealed. I don’t know how many of those metal bastards are still aboard, but that should slow them down.”