CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

SPACE MONKEY

 

VICTORIA SAGGED FORWARDS against her straps, gasping.

“Is it always like that?”

Beside her in the cockpit, Kat smiled. “You get used to it.”

“I don’t know if I want to.”

Ahead, the screens pictured a grey rock, rounded and scarred like an old potato. Reflected sunlight lit one side of it. Its craters were little wells of impenetrable shadow.

“There it is,” Kat said.

Victoria leaned forward, staring. “That’s it? That’s the ‘missile’?” She narrowed her eyes. “It looks tiny, like a pebble.”

“Don’t let the visuals fool you.” Kat was busily tapping away at controls and readouts. “Everything looks sharper in a vacuum. There’s no dust or haze to indicate distance, so it all looks closer than it is.”

“How big is it?”

“About the size of the Isle of Man.”

“Putain.”

“And I know it doesn’t look as if it’s moving, but trust me, it’s coming on like God’s own freight train.” She tapped a communication panel. “Hey, Ed, how are you doing?”

Ed Rico’s voice burbled from the speaker. He sounded like a bad ventriloquist choking on a glass of water.

“Ready when you are, Captain. Only—”

“Only what?” Kat asked.

“Only, maybe we should let the monkey take the shot?”

“Any particular reason?”

Rico gurgled. “It’s his world we’re saving. Also, I’d like to see how he handles it.”

There was a moment’s pause. Kat had a rapid, silent conversation with the ship, and then shrugged. “Fine, whatever.” She broke the connection and turned to Victoria. “You’d better tell your hairy friend to get suited up.”

 

 

AS THE AIRLOCK door swung open, Ack-Ack Macaque found himself face-to-face with eternity. Beyond the curve of the fishbowl helmet, the sky fell away in all directions, receding to infinity wherever he looked. His panting sounded loud in his ears, and he felt his toes contract as if trying to tighten their grip on a branch—an automatic primate response to vertigo.

“Holy buggering shit,” he muttered. Every instinct he had screamed at him that he was falling—falling between trees forever—but he tried to ignore them. Heights had never bothered him all that much. He wouldn’t have made a very good pilot if they had, but this boundless infinity was something else again. With an effort of will, he tore his eyes from the sky and tried to concentrate on spying out the handholds inlaid into the ship’s skin. Designed to facilitate extravehicular maintenance, the little recesses were spaced evenly around the hull, allowing an astronaut to ‘walk’ around the outside of the ship with their hands. Every fourth one had a clip for tethering a safety line. Using them felt similar to rock climbing, only without any sense of weight or appreciable notion of either up or down.

Moving one hand at a time, keeping the other firmly gripped, Ack-Ack Macaque worked his way forwards, towards the Ameline’s blunt prow.

When he got there, he saw the alien weapon was a pod grafted beneath the bows. It looked like a cocoon made of melted candle wax. As he drew near to it, one end of it peeled apart like a banana and a helmeted head emerged. Behind the faceplate, sunlight flashed on Ed Rico’s roguish grin.

“Come and have a go,” he said, his voice sounding distant and scratchy in Ack-Ack Macaque’s headphones.

Ack-Ack watched the man drag himself from the weapon’s embrace like a butterfly pulling itself from a ruptured chrysalis. Then, holding the lip of the opening with one gauntleted hand, he beckoned.

“Just slide your feet in,” Rico said.

Moving slowly, Ack-Ack pushed himself forward. Ed took hold of one of his boots and guided him into the pod’s sticky-looking maw.

“I’m not sure about this,” Ack-Ack grumbled. The thing resembled a hungry maggot trying to latch onto his feet.

“Relax,” Ed said. “It’s not nearly as gross as it looks.”

“Yeah?” Ack-Ack Macaque made a face. “Because it looks pretty fucking disgusting from here.”

He allowed Ed to feed him into the hole, until his head sank beneath the lip and he was looking up at the sky through his helmet.

“What now?” he asked.

Ed maneuvered himself so that he was looking down at Ack-Ack. His head obscured the stars.

“Wait until the top closes, and then take off your helmet.”

Ack-Ack Macaque eyed the walls around him. They reminded him unpleasantly of pictures from a colonoscopy. “And what then?”

“Breathe in the liquid. Stay calm.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Ah, you’ll be fine.” Ed backed away as the edges of the opening began to pucker. Slowly and silently, they crinkled shut, leaving Ack-Ack Macaque swaddled in darkness. Huffing and muttering, he reached up and un-dogged the neck of his helmet. Raising his arms was tricky in the confined space—kind of like getting undressed in a coffin made of slime—but he managed to prise the glass bowl off his head.

Now that his eye was adjusting, he could see that the walls of his prison shone with a faint green luminosity. They glistened with white, gloopy sweat. His nose wrinkled in revulsion.

“This place smells like feet.”

Pressure on his boots and legs told him the gloop had begun to collect in the bottom of the cavity, gradually rising to fill the cramped space.

“Fuck.” He wanted to get out. As the rising liquid reached his waist, he began to struggle, instinctively trying to claw his way upwards to avoid drowning. As it reached his chest, he took a deep breath.

Come on, monkey. If a scrawny tosspot like Rico can do this, so can you.

He screwed up his eye and his courage, and clamped his lips together. The gunk came up over the neck of his suit and over his chin. Then it was exploring his face. Involuntarily, he jerked backwards, trying to reach clear air, but the stuff had already found its way into his nose. It seemed to flow with purpose. Within seconds, it had pushed its way into his lungs, invaded every opening, from ears to pores to arsehole. And he could breathe. Somehow, miraculously, the muck was feeding him air. Even as he choked on the obstruction in his throat, his lungs were drawing oxygen from the liquid.

Slowly, chest heaving, he began to calm down.

I’m not dying, I’m not dying...

He opened his eyes, cringing at the touch of the peculiar gel against his eyeballs.

Oh, holy fuck, this is disgusting.

Then he saw the hair-fine filaments extruding from the walls like the tentacles of albino sea anemones. He tried to flinch away but the walls of the fissure contracted like a sphincter, squeezing against him and holding him in place. He tried to snarl, but the filaments pushed their way into his mouth and nose and he gagged as he felt them slither into his throat. Another insinuated itself into his left ear, and another two drilled into his eyelids. For a second, every nerve in his body flared with intolerable pain.

And then he saw everything.

The walls of the chamber were replaced with a three-dimensional tactical view of the surrounding volume. He saw the rock ahead, his target, outlined in red. He felt the caress of the solar wind, the touch of its warmth against his cheek, and he felt the weapon like a Spitfire beneath him—responsive, keen, and ready to do as he bade. He felt its power like an electrical shock to his spine. He’d seen what it had done to Célestine’s Leviathans and now, as the weapon integrated itself with his frontal lobes, came the knowledge of how it worked. Suddenly he knew, as if he’d always known, that the weapon displaced plasma from the heart of the nearest star and squirted it in a tight beam at its target. That pencil-thin line of brilliant white, crackling energy he’d seen in France had been raw fire from the core of the Sun. Thirteen million degrees centigrade. No wonder it had carved metal like butter and eaten through the bedrock beneath.

And now that insane destructive beam was his to control!

Heart beating, he opened himself to the weapon’s interface. All he had to do was think of the target and the gun would do the rest. Like a god, his will would be made manifest; a single thought would be enough to unleash a lightning bolt of pure, sizzling energy.

“Oh baby,” he muttered to the system swaddling him, “where have you been all my life?”

 

 

ON THE AMELINE’S bridge, Victoria watched as the white line stabbed out, spearing the oncoming asteroid. Where it hit, the surface turned a livid molten yellow. If the ship’s cameras hadn’t automatically polarised, she would have been blinded. As it was, the line was reduced to a dull grey laceration in the fabric of reality. On the asteroid’s surface, dust and loose rock blew away from the boiling incision. Then the beam moved. Slowly, it tracked upwards, slicing though the stone like a hot wire through a block of cheese. Then it blinked off. When it reappeared, it moved laterally, cutting from left to right. Then it jumped again, and now it moved from right to left. Faster and faster it slashed, hacking back and forth, up and down, until it became a flickering blur.

Under its assault, the asteroid seemed to fall apart. Glowing chunks broke away into space, only to be skewered and reduced still further. Within a couple of minutes, the potato had become a mass of cooling, tumbling fragments, each no bigger than a basketball.

Kat said, “Your monkey did well.”

Victoria let herself smile. “He likes blowing things up.” She felt a strange kind of pride. “It’s kind of what he does.”

“I can see that.” Kat tapped the screen. “But those fragments will still do a lot of damage if they hit the Earth like that. Let’s hope your airship can mop them up. They’re small enough that a nuclear blast should vaporise most of them. The rest can burn in the atmosphere.”

“So, that’s it?’

“If the plan works, yes. Actual surface hits should be minimal. All we have to do now is track this cloud of debris and wait until the airship gets in range.”

“Where is the Sun Wukong?” Victoria asked, looking at the inscrutable instruments above her. “How’s it doing?”

Kat consulted the ship. “Almost in orbit. It’s had a bit of a shaky ride, apparently, but the thing’s more or less intact. They should be firing up the ion engines at any minute.”

Victoria let out a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding. Something eased inside her.

“Well, fingers-crossed they work.”

Kat’s face remained grim. “We’ll soon find out. I’m plotting in a course to jump back there now.” She jerked her head towards the hatch at the back of the bridge. “Why don’t you go below and share the good news?”