CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES
AS A COOL and watery sun rose beyond the portholes, Ack-Ack Macaque stood at the foot of another infirmary bed.
“We seem to be collecting bodies,” he said. The room smelled of antiseptic and disinfectant. In front of him lay the guy he’d shot and dumped in the car. Somehow, despite the blood loss, the man had survived. Monitors and drips had been plugged into him, to keep him alive.
Paul’s hologram stood to one side of the bed, stroking his chin.
“How are you doing?” Ack-Ack Macaque asked.
Paul’s face fell. He scratched at the wispy suggestion of a beard around his chin.
“You’ve never been killed, have you? Not even in the game, I mean.”
“Not so far.”
“Then you don’t know what it’s like, being a ghost, always on the outside of everything.”
Ack-Ack Macaque thought of the hat and coat he had to wear in public. “Maybe I got some idea.”
Paul wasn’t listening. He held his palms out in front of him, and turned them over as if inspecting them for dirt. “I have hands, but I can’t touch anything.” He looked up. “I have a tongue, but I can’t taste.”
Ack-Ack Macaque rolled the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “You can complain though, can’t you?”
Paul blinked at him. “I beg your pardon?”
Ack-Ack Macaque made his hand into a puppet’s flapping mouth. “Yap, yap, yap.” He laughed, and the tips of Paul’s ears reddened. “So, you don’t like being a ghost? Don’t be a f*cking ghost. Be something else.”
“Like what?”
Ack-Ack Macaque waved his arms in an impatient gesture that took in the gondola and the five hulls above it. “Hell, you’re practically running this ship. Why not plug yourself right in? Stop p-ssyfooting around. Stop being a ghost, start being an airship.”
Paul ‘s forehead grew lined in thought. He removed his glasses, blew on the lenses, and polished them on the hem of his long white coat. As a hologram, Paul had no need to clean them, and the action achieved nothing; but Ack-Ack Macaque knew he clung to these old habitual gestures. They were part of who he was, part of what made him Paul.
“You know, you could be on to something.”
Ack-Ack Macaque clacked his teeth together. “Hey, you know the old saying: If life gives you lemons, pull a gun on it and say, ‘F*ck your lemons, where are the goddamn bananas?’”
Paul smiled, and tapped an index finger against his chin. “If I could hook myself into the navigation software,” he said slowly. “If I could somehow wire into the telemetry, and maybe co-opt the main bridge computers...” He looked up. “Yes, it could be done. I could totally run this whole ship.” His eyes were shining. “Ack-ster, you’re a genius.”
Ack-Ack Macaque waved a hand. “Yeah, yeah.” He looked down at the unconscious ape-man on the infirmary bunk. “Back to business. You were about to tell me about good-looking here.”
“Yes, sorry.” Paul hooked his glasses over his ears. In life, he had been a medical researcher, specialising in brain implants. “Well, the thing is, I’ve never seen anything quite like him before. I don’t even think he’s human. At least, not in the strictest sense.”
“If he ain’t human, what is he?”
“I’m not sure.” Paul reached out a hand to indicate the figure’s upper arm. “His bones are shorter and thicker than most people’s. And take a look at the shape of the skull. The shape of his nose, and that ridge above his eyes.”
Ack-Ack Macaque chomped the cigar between his molars, but didn’t light it. “He’s certainly one ugly motherf*cker.”
“He’s more than that.” Paul straightened up. Somehow he’d edited his appearance. The Hawaiian shirt and cargo pants were gone, replaced by blue jeans and a faded red sweatshirt, which he wore beneath a pristine white doctor’s coat, complete with pens in the breast pocket and a stethoscope slung around his neck. “At least, he might be.”
“Might be what?” Ack-Ack Macaque spoke around the cigar.
Paul pushed his glasses more firmly onto the bridge of his nose.
“Do you know what a Neanderthal is?”
“A type of cocktail?”
“Neanderthals were a type of intelligent hominid.”
Ack-Ack Macaque frowned. “A what?”
“Like a cave man.”
“Gotcha.”
Paul pointed to the man’s arms. “They had thicker bones than modern people, bigger jaws; and they lived in Europe around the time of the last ice age.”
“Great, so now we know what he is.”
“Yes, but that’s left us with a much bigger question.”
“Why does he smell so bad?”
“No.” Paul put his hands in the pockets of his white coat. “It’s that the last Neanderthals disappeared thirty thousand years ago. He shouldn’t even be here.”
“They’re extinct?”
“They died out, or interbred with modern humans.” He shrugged his shoulders. “The point is, there hasn’t been a Neanderthal on the Earth for thirty thousand years, and suddenly you run into three of them, all on the same night, in Bristol.”
Ack-Ack Macaque patted the Colts at his sides. “And I made two of the bastards extinct, all over again.”
Paul didn’t hear him. “It just doesn’t make any sense.” The skin between his eyebrows furrowed. He started to pace back and forth beside the bed, talking to himself. “Unless somebody’s breeding them from fossil remains. But that’s ludicrous. This one here’s at least twenty-five years old. How could you keep it a secret that long; and, assuming you could, why would you risk exposure now?”
“Beats me, I only work here.” Ack-Ack Macaque pulled the damp, oily-tasting cigar from his mouth. “Did you try going through his pockets?”
“One of the stewards did. He found a wallet. It’s on that table in the corner.” Paul held up his holographic hands. “I can’t touch it.”
Ack-Ack Macaque replaced his cigar and shuffled over to the table. The wallet lay on a shiny steel tray, along with a few coins, a flick knife, and a black plastic comb. The knife had a yellowish ivory handle. The comb had seen better days. He picked up the wallet and opened it.
“Not much here.” He pulled out a dog-eared business card. “Only this.”
A tiny electric motor whined as Paul’s image ‘walked’ over to him.
“What does it say?”
“It’s from a company called Legion Haulage. There’s a number, but no address.” Ack-Ack Macaque turned the card over. “The back’s blank.”
“Legion Haulage?” Paul tapped his chin. “They’re not in my database. Maybe K8 can find them?”
Ack-Ack Macaque slipped the card into his gun belt. “She’s asleep right now. I’ll ask her when she wakes up.” He looked down at the bed and wrinkled his nose. “In the meantime, what are we going to do with smelly here?”
“Victoria wants him kept alive, to see if he can tell us who he is, and where he came from.”
The monkey cracked his knuckles. “Wake him up, and I’ll slap it out of him.”
Paul shook his head. “He’s sedated at the moment. And she strictly forbade torture.”
Ack-Ack Macaque huffed. “She can talk.” He leant over the bed towards Paul. “Wasn’t it her that dropped an assassin off this ship?”
Paul looked uncomfortable, and Ack-Ack Macaque knew he’d been present at the time, existing as a virtual ghost inside Victoria’s neural gelware. “He was more robot than man.”
“Yes, but she didn’t know that at the time, though, did she?” While interrogating the prisoner in one of the Tereshkova’s cargo bays, Victoria had allowed the man to fall to his death, from several thousand feet above Windsor Castle.
“Those were... special circumstances.” Paul looked away. “That man was Cassius Berg. He killed me. He cut my brain out, and tried to do the same to Vicky. And he was threatening the safety of everyone on this airship.”
Ack-Ack Macaque grinned around his cigar. “Hey, I’m not criticising, I would’ve dumped the f*cker myself.”
Paul ‘s hands moved jerkily. He rubbed the back of his neck. “You don’t understand. It really cut her up inside to do it. She doesn’t want anything like that happening again. It nearly destroyed her.”
“Even with a scumbag like that?”
Paul sighed. “Perhaps you don’t know her as well as I do.”
Ack-Ack Macaque bridled. He’d been flying for Victoria Valois for over a year. “I know she’s a hell of a lot tougher than she thinks she is.” He spared the caveman a final glance, and turned for the door. “Where are you going?”
He didn’t turn around. “Up and out.”
“Taking the Spitfire up for a jaunt?”
In the doorway, Ack-Ack Macaque pulled out his lighter. “You’d better believe it, my friend.” He struck a flame and puffed the cigar to life. “It’s been a long night, and I’ve got a lot of aggression left to work off.”