The Solaris team feel your pain. Literally. Mike is convinced that it's actually 1983 and David is hiding under his desk clutching a mince pie and a shotgun, and refusing to come out...
But we nonetheless come with glad tidings, for today marks the day that Gareth L. Powell's HIVE MONKEY hits shelves across the UK. The sequel to his barn-storming critically-acclaimed hit ACK-ACK MACAQUE, HIVE MONKEY sees the return of the gun-toting, cigar-smoking Simia inuus with a penchant for blowing things up.
So we are very pleased to present to you, the primate-passionate public, the first chapter of HIVE MONKEY for your reading pleasure!
PART ONE
BOMBS AND BULLETS
We have met the enemy
and he is us.
(Walt Kelly, Pogo)
CHAPTER ONE
DAZZLE CAMOUFLAGE
It started with a gunshot.
Wrapped
in a woollen coat and scarf, his greying hair blown unkempt and wild, William
Cole leant against the painted railings at the end of the harbour wall. He
looked out over the Severn Estuary. High above the water, against a pale
November sky, an airship forged upriver. From where he stood, he could hear the
bass thrum of the fifteen nuclear-electric engines that powered its vast,
five-hulled bulk, and see the low afternoon sunlight flash against the spinning
blades of its impellers, turning them to coin-like discs of bronze.
Unusually,
the skyliner’s owners had chosen to paint the cigar-shaped hulls with jagged
black and white lines. The lines looked unsightly, but William knew the
patterns were designed to disguise the airship’s exact shape and heading,
hindering attacks from ground-based weapons. Allied warships used the same
trick, known as ‘dazzle camouflage’, in World War Two, to confuse German
U-boats. The crazy stripes hurt his tired eyes, but he could still read the
airship’s name, stencilled on its prow in blocky red letters: Tereshkova. Named after the cosmonaut, he supposed. Valentina Tereshkova had
been the first woman in space, launched into the void two years after Gagarin’s
pioneering flight. Now though, almost a century later, and long after the
collapse of the Soviet Union, how many people remembered her? Humans were still
footling around in low Earth orbit, in tin can space stations. The glittering
future she represented hadn’t come to pass. Some promising early steps had been
made, but now no one had been to the Moon in over eighty years. The dreams of
the twentieth century were long dead, and space had become little more than a
curiosity: a relic of the Cold War, an industrial park on the outskirts of
global politics.
He
ground his clenched hands into his coat pockets, shivering against the cold.
“Where
are you going today, Valentina? And where have you been?” Skyliners like her
hardly ever stopped moving, and they never touched down. They spent their lives
aloft, being serviced by smaller, more agile craft. This one had probably just
crossed the Atlantic from America, en route to London and Europe. Each of its
five cigar-shaped hulls had one large gondola slung beneath it, and two or
three smaller ones dotted along its length. Yellow lights burned in their
windows and portholes. “And why the crazy paint job?”
William
closed his eyes. Five years ago, at the age of thirty-nine, he’d crossed the
Atlantic himself, on a similar vessel. He’d packed his laptop and manuscripts,
and bought a one-way ticket to the European Commonwealth. He’d come to make his
fortune as a writer, and marry the love of his life. Her name had been Marie,
and she’d been a reviewer for The Guardian.
They first met at a book launch in Greenwich Village and dated for a while. It
hadn’t worked out, but a decade after they split up she came to New York for a
conference. They had dinner together and got talking about old times. By that
point, they were both divorced and single. She hadn’t read any of his books,
and he hadn’t seen any of her columns; but somehow, buzzed on wine and, in her
case, jetlag, they hit it off again. When she went back to England, he followed
and, six months later, they were married, at a small registry office in
Kensington, with a reception paid for by his publisher.
Ah,
Marie.
Marie
with the auburn hair and easy smile, snatched away so soon. Had she really been
dead two years now? Had a whole twenty-four months really passed? He’d crossed an ocean for her, given up his life
in America, his friends and family, his ex-wife, only to let her slip away from
him, across another ocean, into that undiscovered country from whose bourn no
traveller returns.
With his hands gripping the railings, he looked down to
the tidal mud at the foot of the harbour wall. He hadn’t slept in four days.
Below him, the low tide had fallen back to reveal the rounded teeth of a
collapsed jetty, its splintered planks protruding from the rippled mudflats
like the fossilised remnants of some prehistoric lake village. Gulls bobbed on
the sluggish swell; scraps of black seaweed lay strewn and tangled at the high
water mark; and a late afternoon breeze ran a comb through the wiry grass. The
pain of Marie’s loss, so abrupt and unfair, had terrified him. He couldn’t face
up to it. Not knowing what else to do, and fearing he wasn’t strong enough to
bear the grief, he’d taken all his hurt and packed it down inside, where he
thought it couldn’t harm him. He couldn’t cope with it, so he buried it. He put
it off. Over the following months, he wrapped his grief in protective layers of
drug and alcohol abuse. Now, when he tried to remember her, he had difficulty
picturing her face with any clarity, or remembering her smell, or the sound of
her voice. He’d tried so hard to block out the pain that now he could hardly
recall anything about her, and his attempts to spare himself the weight of her
loss had only brought him closer to losing her.
The wind blew through him, leaving him empty. For a long
time, he simply stood and stared at the water.
Then his SincPhone rang. On the fourth ring, he answered
it.
“Hello?”
“Will, it’s Max. How are you doing? I’m not interrupting
anything, am I?”
“Not really.”
William looked back to the black and white airship, and
the rippling reflection it cast over the muddy waters of the Severn. He felt
set adrift, alone, and left behind. Now Marie was dead, there was nothing
permanent in his life. Perhaps, if she’d lived, they might have had a family,
maybe put down roots somewhere; but no. Home for him had been a succession of rented
rooms, usually above shops of one sort or another; the walls an endless parade
of peeling, painted magnolia; the utilitarian furniture pocked with the dents
of a thousand small impacts, and pitted with the tiny smallpox circles of
ancient cigarette burns.
“Great. Because we need to talk.”
William moved the phone from one ear to the other. Max
was just about the last person he wanted to hear from.
“This is about the Mendelblatt book, isn’t it?” Lincoln
Mendelblatt, the Jewish private eye, had been the hero of three of his previous
novels.
“I’ve had Stella on the phone again this afternoon,” Max
said. “She’s very unhappy. You’re almost a month overdue.”
William groaned inwardly. “Tell her it’s coming.”
“I did, and I think she bought it, for now. But listen,
Will, I need those pages. And I need them, like, yesterday.”
A pair of gulls scuffled on the mud, their cries sharp
and desolate.
“It’s nearly finished,” William lied. “I’m on the last
chapter.”
“Really? You’re that close?”
“Sure. Look, it’s Friday afternoon. Give me the weekend,
and I’ll get something over to you by the beginning of next week. Maybe
Wednesday.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
There was a silence on the other end. Then, “You sound
terrible, Will. Are you using again?”
The sun went behind a cloud.
“No.” William sniffed and wiped his nose on the back of
his hand. It was a nervous reflex. “Not at all. Not for ages. I’m just a bit
groggy today. A cold, that’s all.”
He heard Max sigh. “Just make sure that first draft hits
my inbox by Wednesday morning, or we’re going to have words, you understand?
Harsh words. You’re in the last chance saloon, buddy, and it’s high time to
shit, or get off the—”
William opened his hand, and let the phone fall. It
tumbled end-over-end and hit the water. A small splash, some ripples, and it
was gone.
“Goodbye,
Max.” Whisper your
clichés to the drowned sailors and scuttling crabs at the bottom of the sea.
William
turned up the collar of his coat. The wool felt scratchy against his beard.
Hands in pockets, he walked back, past the lock gates, and along the
apartment-lined edge of the marina, heading home to where his laptop waited,
the cursor blinking hopelessly on the first blank white page of his unwritten
book.
Portishead
was a coastal dormitory town in South West England, twenty minutes drive from
the city of Bristol. It had a high street, shops, and a drive-through
McDonald’s. The town’s marina had once been an industrial dockyard serving a
coal-fired power station. Now, only the stone quay remained. The rest had been
transformed in the early decades of the century. The bustling railway sidings
had given way to cafés and a leisure centre, the cranes to waterfront
apartments and a primary school. The dock itself had been retrofitted as a
marina and, instead of the rusty cargo ships of old, now housed a flotilla of
private yachts and pleasure boats. The rigging on their masts rattled in the
wind; little turbine blades spun on their cabin roofs; and Union Jacks and
French Tricolours flapped from their sterns.
William
walked to the end of the quayside and out onto the road. Yellow leaves swirled
from the trees and skittered around his feet. His latest apartment, which felt
dank, lifeless and suffocating even on the sunniest of days, lay on the other
side of the road, in a block overlooking a supermarket car park. In the summer,
with the windows open, all he could hear was the rattle and crash of shopping
trolleys and the slam of car doors.
Standing
at the kerb, trying to summon the energy to cross the road and climb the
stairs, he saw one of his neighbours emerge from the building. She was on her
way to work, car keys in one hand and briefcase in the other, a triangle of
toast clamped between her teeth. He didn’t know her name, but gathered she was
a nurse, working shifts at one of the local hospitals. They’d passed in the
corridor a couple of times, but only ever exchanged superficial pleasantries.
Maybe
I should go into town,
he thought. I
could call in on Sparky, and pick up a couple of wraps to see me through the
weekend. Sparky was his
dealer, and William had been buying cheap amphetamines, or ‘cooking speed’,
from him for over a year now. For a moment he wondered if a few hits of the
powder would get him going, fire up the old synapses and get the words
crackling out onto the page.
He
slipped a hand into his trouser pocket and pulled out his door key.
No, he told himself. Sparky’s the last person you need to be around. You’ve spent the
last four days wired out of your damn mind, and you’ve produced nothing, not
one word. The sooner you straighten up and start writing, the sooner you’ll
have something to give to Max. And if you don’t get started soon, you’ll have
to pay back the advance. And you can’t, because you’ve spent it already. You’ve
frittered it away on takeaways and whiskey, and drugs and cigarettes.
His
neighbour crossed the street, and smiled around the toast as she passed him.
The sun emerged again, and he blinked up at it, shading his sleep-deprived eyes
from its golden light.
And that’s when the first shot rang out.
He
heard a noise like a car backfiring, and something smacked into the wall of the
leisure centre. At first, he didn’t know what had happened—a spark of metal on
brick, a puff of dust. Stupidly, he thought somebody had thrown a stone. Then
he saw the car parked against the opposite kerb. The driver’s window was down,
and an inhuman face snarled at him from beneath a white fedora. He saw an
ape-like creature with a wide mouth and a bulbous nose, and a gun held in its
fist. Half man and half beast, it looked like some sort of caveman, and he
frowned at it, sure his eyes deceived him. Then the gun barrel puffed, and a
bullet whined past his face. Instinctively, he cowered back, covering his chest
and stomach with his hands. His body felt huge, exposed and vulnerable. He
turned his shoulder away from the car. Every muscle cringed in anticipation,
braced for the impact of the next shot.
But the next shot never came. Instead, the car exploded.
For an instant, William’s world turned to light and noise.
He felt the heat of the blast on his hands and face. His ears popped as he was
thrown off his feet.
He hit the ground hard enough to drive all the breath from
his body, and lay gasping, looking up at the trees. Leaves whirled down around
him like snow. Car alarms shrilled. The air stank of the napalm tang of burning
petrol. Across the street, the force of the explosion had shattered all the
windows on the front of the apartment block. Pedestrians shouted and screamed.
The girl with the briefcase crouched next to him. Her hair was a mess, and her
jacket was ripped. She had a gash across one cheek like a ragged fingernail
scratch. She asked him something, but he couldn’t hear what she said. His ears
were still recovering.
“Are you okay?” she repeated.
He swallowed. His throat and mouth were dry. “I don’t
know.” His hands and face stung where shrapnel had nicked and scratched them.
He eased an inch-long splinter of glass from the back of his hand, and let it
fall onto the pavement.
“That man in the car.” She spoke fast, gabbling with
shock. “He had a gun. He was shooting at you.”
William closed his eyes.
“Yes.”
“But why? Why was he doing that?”
He tried to move, and winced at the pain in his back. He’d
played football in high school, back in Ohio, and knew what it felt like to be
flattened by a quarterback twice his size.
“I don’t know. Is he—?”
She glanced at the tangled wreck.
“How did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“How did you make his car blow up like that?”
“Me?” William felt the world roll giddily around his head.
His brain hadn’t caught up yet,
hadn’t fully processed what had happened. He elbowed himself up into a sitting
position. “I didn’t do anything. How could I?”
The
girl turned wide eyes to the black, greasy smoke belching up from the car’s
gutted shell.
“Well,
somebody certainly did.”
“It
wasn’t me.”
Something
popped in the wreckage, and they both flinched.
“Come
on,” his neighbour said. “I think we’d better move.”
You can pick up the ebook of HIVE MONKEY through the Rebellion webstore, or physical and ebook copies through Amazon UK and Amazon US.
And don't forget that you can hear Ack-Ack's pronouncements on the world (albeit delivered with a heavy dose of NSFW WTF) at his official Twitter feed.
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