Hive Monkey Read Free Page B

been inlaid various input jacks, USB ports, and infrared sensors. The victim of a severe head trauma a few years back, half her brain had been replaced with experimental gelware processors, making her as much of an artificial creature as he was.
    “Hey, boss.” His voice was gruff. “How are we doing?”
    She looked up from her glass. Her eyes were the same pale colour as the dawn sky. She wore a black t-shirt and blue jeans, and had a white military dress tunic draped over her shoulders. Her fighting stick lay on the table before her: a twelve-inch cylinder of metal that would, at a shake, spring out to almost six feet in length.
    “We’re about ten minutes from the airport, still running on autopilot.” She picked the cocktail stick from the glass, and waved an impaled olive in his direction. “Do you want to bring us in, or are you still on leave?”
    The tunic she wore came from the wardrobe of the Tereshkova ’s former owner, the Commodore. An eccentric Russian millionaire with a proud military history, the Commodore had been killed in action while boarding the royal yacht during last November’s shenanigans, and had bequeathed his elderly skyliner to Victoria, his goddaughter and only living relative.
    “I might as well.” Ack-Ack Macaque scowled around his cigar. “The evening’s pretty much ruined now, anyway.”
    “How so?”
    “That journalist who came on board in New York.”
    “Has he been pestering you?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Have you hurt him?”
    Ack-Ack Macaque shook his head. “He’s fine. I just told him to sling his hook.”
    Victoria raised an eyebrow.
    “Is that all?”
    “Well, I may have squashed his bug.”
    She rolled her eyes.
    “How commendably restrained of you.” She dropped the cocktail stick back into her glass.
    Ack-Ack Macaque grinned.
    “Well,” he said, “I’d better get to work.” He threw her a floppy-armed salute and loped through the lounge, pausing only to snake an unguarded cheese and pickle sandwich from the buffet.
    By the time he reached the bridge at the front of the gondola, brushing crumbs from the hairs on his chin and chest, the landing field had come into sight. Not that they would be landing, of course. Through the curved glass windscreen that comprised the entire front wall of the gondola, he could see helicopters and smaller blimps awaiting their arrival, ready to lift cargo and passengers to the helipads fixed onto the upper surfaces of the Tereshkova ’s five hull sections.
    He reached the pilot’s station and settled himself behind the instrument console, in the familiar scuffed and worn leather chair. The controls of the Tereshkova , like those of all modern aircraft, were computerised. There was no joystick like there had been in his Spitfire, and no old-fashioned nautical steering wheel like there had been in the early Zeppelins—only a glass SincPad screen that displayed an array of virtual instruments and readouts. He could adjust the craft’s heading and pitch by running his leathery fingertips over illuminated symbols, and control the vessel’s speed and height using animated slide bars. It looked deceptively simple—so simple, in fact, that a child could grasp it—but he knew from experience that there was a lot more to piloting something this large. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. For a start, the big, old airship would only turn sluggishly, and you had to finely balance the thrust to compensate for crosswinds and turbulence. If you wanted to bring it to a dead stop, you had to start slowing five miles in advance. Right now, as they approached the airfield’s perimeter, they were crawling forward at walking pace. Each of the airship’s engine nacelles could be controlled individually. Some were providing forward momentum, others reverse thrust, while the rest were pushing edge-on to the prevailing south-westerly, holding the big craft steady against the wind.
    Looking forward through the big, curved windshield, Ack-Ack Macaque