CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CARBON FIBRE BONES

 

IN THE COLD grey light of a damp false dawn, Victoria stood at the edge of the village, her thin frame wrapped in an old army greatcoat like one of the ones the Commodore used to wear in the winter. Leaves blew around her feet, which were wrapped in rags. Her clothes were drab and tattered and she’d left her head bare to the glowering sky. Only a torn and grimy length of cloth, wrapped around her forehead and tied at the back, hid the input jacks set into her temple. Shambling from their ruined houses, the villagers ignored her. She looked like one of them. Moving like emaciated shadows, their feet dragged through the mud and rubble and their eyes remained lowered and hopeless. As they formed up into ranks at the edge of the main road, she shouldered her way in among them, keeping her head down, hoping her disguise would be enough to fool the guards at the laboratory.

In the corner of her eye, she saw Paul’s image. He hung above the cracked and weed-pocked tarmac of the road like a spectre, invisible to everyone except her.

“I still say this is a bad idea,” he muttered. Victoria said nothing. She hadn’t wanted to leave him behind, so she’d uploaded him into her neural gelware, as she had three years ago after first activating him. Now, he was a ghost overlaid across her vision. She nestled her hands deeper into the pockets of her coat, squeezing them for warmth. Around her, the villagers huddled into themselves. Unkempt, stale and unwashed, they stank. None of them spoke; they simply stood there, swaying slightly, as they waited for the sun to rise and the truck to appear.

Paul looked around at them.

“These people are starving,” he said. “And covered in sores. And I don’t like the way some of them are missing clumps of hair.”

Victoria sidled to the edge of the group.

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know. I’m a surgeon, not a general practitioner.”

“If you had to guess.”

“Radiation poisoning, maybe.”

“Merde. You really think so?”

“I could be wrong.” He considered the drab sky and shivered. “But I wouldn’t recommend staying here a moment longer than absolutely necessary.”

Victoria swallowed. Her mouth felt suddenly dry.

“Oui, d’accord.”

Despite his pessimism, she was glad to have him along for the ride. In this drab and forlorn landscape, it felt good to have a friendly face to offer moral support.

A fat drop of rain fell onto the road, followed by another, and another. From the left came the grunt and rumble of an engine. Belching smoke, the truck came around the corner at the end of the village. It was an eight-wheeled military model painted in autumnal urban camouflage. With a squeak of brakes and a hiss of hydraulics, it pulled to a halt in front of the villagers. They clambered up to join the other workers already huddled on the benches inside. Victoria hauled herself up behind them, and sat on the bench with her back against the canvas wall. Someone banged the side and the vehicle lurched forward, throwing everyone against each other. Then they were under way and, through the flap at the back, she could see the unrepaired road spooling away behind them.

In a field beyond the village, a fairground lay rusting.

“What happened here?” she whispered.

Paul shrugged. “Something bad.” He jerked a thumb at the truck’s other occupants. “Why don’t you ask them?”

Victoria glanced sideways, and gave a tight little shake of her head. She didn’t want to do anything that would make her stand out as being different, or not from around these parts. To do so would be to risk getting turned in for a reward. Instead, she turned up her collar and hunkered lower on her seat. The truck bumped and rattled along the road, jolting her spine.

Eventually, after a seeming eternity of discomfort, they came to a wire fence and a pair of anonymous-looking cyborg guards, who waved them through with scarcely a glance. Through the rear flap, Victoria saw the barrier and its coils of barbed wire receding behind them.

No turning back now.

They were in the grounds of the laboratory. If Célestine were anywhere, she’d be here, overseeing the activities of Nguyen’s cyborg master race. All Victoria had to do was find her, and then get her to lead her to the monkey. Victoria’s fingers curled around the plastic casing of the tracking device in her pocket. Once she got within a few hundred metres of Ack-Ack Macaque, she’d be able to locate him via the microchip she’d hired a vet to implant under his skin.

That’s if he’s still alive.

The truck pulled up in front of a pre-fab industrial unit, and the workers clambered out. Keeping amongst them, Victoria allowed them to lead her to a large canvas marquee, which had been erected at the side of the building, and which housed a couple of rickety trestle tables, from behind which dispirited-looking men and women dispensed cups of water and bowls of thin porridge. Accepting a bowl and a tin mug, Victoria stood on the edge of the group. The other workers ate and drank with listless, automatic movements. They showed no relish or urgency in the slaking of their hunger. They were like machines taking on fuel. Holding the plastic bowl to her chin, Victoria sniffed.

“That looks tasty,” Paul said.

“It smells like wallpaper paste.”

“You’re not going to eat it, then?”

“Shut up.”

The last thing she’d eaten had been a simple egg-white omelette, some hours before, in the commissary of the Sun Wukong. Now, the giant airship lay somewhere out in the Bay of Biscay, out of sight of land, its vast bulk floating half a dozen metres above the water—hopefully beyond the range of any radars Nguyen’s troops might bring to bear, and hidden from the few civilian vessels brave or foolhardy enough to set forth upon the dead, polluted sea.

She swilled the gloopy muck around, and then tipped it into some weeds growing up against the side of the building.

“How did I get here?’

Paul looked confused.

“The truck...?”

She shook her head and sighed. “I mean, how did I get here.” She looked around at the low, functional buildings, the miserable workers, and the dark, sullen sky. How had she made the progression from that apartment in Paris, from a promising career in journalism, to this post-apocalyptic wasteland? She thought of her other self, lying dead in that apartment, and almost envied her.

“Maybe I should have died in the crash,” she murmured, thinking back to her accident in the South Atlantic. Everything that had happened, all the weirdness, had come about as a direct result of that crash. From the moment, four years ago, when she stepped onto the chopper and strapped into the seat next to the then-teenage Prince of Wales, her course had been fixed, her life changed. She’d climbed aboard as an up-and-coming reporter, and then woken four weeks later as a technological freak—a woman kept alive by the artificial neurons that now did most of her thinking.

And here she was on a parallel timeline, in a possibly radioactive dystopia, searching for her best friend—a rude, violent, ungrateful monkey, who smelled like a wet dog and drank like a fish—with only the electronic projection of her dead husband for company.

Why couldn’t they have just let her drown?

She pulled her coat tight, and muttered curses under her breath. After a few minutes, the doors to the laboratory opened, and she followed the thin, shivering villagers to a production line, where industrial robots assembled artificial cyborg bodies in showers of welding sparks, and humans simply fetched and carried, swept and sorted. For an hour, she tried to blend in but had no idea what she was supposed to be doing and kept getting in the way. The sight of the arms and legs that lay, awaiting attachment, in hoppers beside the conveyor belts unnerved and sickened her. Their carbon fibre bones had already been partially covered in cultured skin, giving them the look of severed human limbs. It made her feel like a worker in a death camp. Especially as she knew that, somewhere nearby, real arms and legs were being carved off and discarded as brains and nervous systems were stripped from frail flesh-and-blood bodies and implanted into waiting cyborg shells.

When the two tall, expressionless guards came to arrest her, she felt almost relieved.

“Take me,” she said as bravely as she could, “to your leader.”