Macaque Attack Read Online Free PDF Page B

wrong and it crashed into a populated area, the devastation would be appalling.
    Paul looked at her over the rim of his glasses. “Please?”
    Victoria took a deep breath. She couldn’t refuse him; she never could. He was like a little boy. “Okay, for now. But the second you start to have any doubts, you tell me.”
    “I love you.”
    She felt her cheeks redden. “I know. I love you too.”
    Paul’s nervous smile was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. He jumped to his feet. “In that case, let’s go and cause some trouble.”
    Victoria grinned despite herself. She wiped her eyes on the back of her wrist, and drew herself up to her full height. Further discussion could wait. For now, it was time to focus on the task at hand.
    “Right,” she said, “give me full speed ahead and don’t stop for anything.”
    “There isn’t anything that can stop us, short of a nuclear blast.”
    “Well, let’s hope we don’t run into any of those.”
    “Amen to that. Now, hold on tight. I’m putting us on an...” He clicked his fingers, searching for the right words. “Um...”
    “Attack approach?”
    “Yeah.” He looked sheepish. Victoria rolled her eyes.
    “Oh, mon dieu. ”

 
     
     
    CHAPTER FOUR
    PHOENIX EGGS
     
    F ROM THE WINDOW of his office on the third floor of Buckingham Palace, Merovech watched the rain falling over London. On the mahogany desk behind him, sheaves of paperwork awaited his attention and his inbox bulged with unanswered email. He wasn’t in the mood to pay either more than a cursory glance. He’d rolled up his shirtsleeves and loosened his black tie. A glass of single malt nestled, half forgotten, in his hand.
    At first, he’d intended to remain king only as long as it took to restore national calm following the death of his parents and the revelation of his mother’s complicity in an attempted coup d’état. But that had been three years ago, before the Gestalt invasion and the death of his fiancée. Since then, everything had changed. The world had become stranger and more threatening than anybody could have guessed, and his Commonwealth needed him. They needed a figurehead and a sense of continuity, and he was the most qualified to offer both. Whatever the secret truth of his origins—that he’d been cloned in a lab from one of his mother’s cells—he’d been raised to be monarch, and nobody else had his level of training or preparation. His people needed him and, truth be told, he needed them. With Julie gone, he had nothing else.
    The rain blew across the Mall, shaking the leafless trees lining the road. Car headlights shimmered through the gloom. To the east, a twin-hulled skyliner thrummed its way upriver, following the twists and turns of the Thames. Its navigation lights blinked red and green. As he watched, it passed behind the forest of cranes towering over Westminster, where the government buildings were still being rebuilt, rising like misshapen, blocky phoenix eggs from the craters left by the Gestalt’s bombardment.
    How many times had this city rebuilt itself? The inhabitants seemed used to chaos and ruin; in fact, they seemed to revel in their resilience. From the destruction wrought by Boudicca, and then the Great Fire of 1666, through to bomb attacks by the IRA and Al Qaeda, via the Zeppelin raids of the First World War and the Blitzkrieg pummelling of the Second, Londoners had always been fiercely proud of their ability to keep calm and carry on, even in the most trying of circumstances. And these past two years had been no exception. Faced with a baffling multiverse of potential threats, the capital was doing what it had always done: going about its daily life with scarcely more than a shrug and tut. As long as the Tube ran, the people were happy. Whereas other cities such as Pompeii, Petra, Hashima Island, and Detroit had fallen by the wayside during London’s two thousand years of history, the Mother of All Cities had simply endured, and always