Black Swan (Pax Britannia: Time's Arrow) Read online

  “I bid you farewell, Monsieur,” the fixer called after him, “and bon voyage!”

  Picking up the pace, Ulysses headed north-west across the concourse. He needed to get back to Montmartre as quickly as possible, and despite what he had told Cadence prior to leaving for his meeting, he didn’t want to stay out on the streets any longer than he had to.

  The screaming started out on the Rue de Rivoli that marked the northern perimeter of the Palais du Louvre. Hearing it, Ulysses kept walking, trying to deny his subconscious, pretending that the threat wasn’t focused on him this time. But it was no good, he knew such foolish notions were nothing but a lie. He was Time’s Arrow. Those who would threaten the balance of the Universe would always be coming for him.

  And then it was there, the screech of car tyres and the trumpeting of omnibus horns heralding its passing.

  Eight feet tall, and almost as broad, every joint and muscle enhanced with augmetic artifice or energising cables, its hide a mixture of thick black fur and surgical scars, it knuckled its way towards him, bounding along on all fours.

  And there would be no escaping it this time.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Fight or Flight

  KNOWING THAT HE didn’t have a hope against the beast one-on-one, Ulysses did the only thing he could. He turned tail and ran.

  Twice he had run into the ape and now the ape had run into him. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Ulysses sprinted back across the Cour Napoleon, past the glass and brass pyramid, momentarily catching sight of the retreating Valerius Leroux again, and the stony expression on his face. When everyone else was staring in horror at the advancing beast, Leroux was calmly striding away towards the north side of the plaza.

  Ulysses wondered at the anger of the ape, as he sprinted across the paved square, dodging panicking bystanders and sending the pitches belonging to purveyors of tourist tat tumbling in his wake. Had it been enhanced, along with the rest of the ape, or was it just the animal’s natural aggression, exacerbated by the situation it now found itself in? After all, Ulysses could well believe that having a dozen electrodes rammed into your brain could put a crick in anyone’s day.

  Screams and the clatter of postcard stands crashing to the ground chased him across the courtyard. Unable to resist a moment longer, Ulysses dared a glance over his shoulder as he raced on.

  Finding the pyramid between it and its designated target, rather than taking a detour around the structure, the gorilla bounded up one angled side, several diamond panes crazing under its weight.

  Reaching up with one long arm, it grasped the top of the pyramid and hurled itself over the pinnacle. It landed with a thud only twenty yards behind Ulysses; paving slabs cracked under it.

  Panting for breath, his pulse pounding like the drumming hoof-beats of a Grand National winner, Ulysses returned to the business of running away.

  At the back of his mind there was an awareness that he needed to lure the cyber-ape as far from the crowds as possible, but then he was in danger of getting himself cornered within the Cour Napoleon with no way of getting out alive. Besides, in the middle of Paris on a sunny day in May, keeping the killer ape away from innocent bystanders seemed like a nigh impossible task.

  And that told him something about the person who had had first Carmine Roussel, then Pierre Courriel Pascal, and lastly Gustav Lumière killed; the same person who must have set the beast to hunt Ulysses down. That person, the true killer, was desperate. They were desperate to eliminate Ulysses and desperate enough to have the assassination carried out in broad daylight, with hundreds of eye-witnesses present, and in doing so expose their secret weapon to the world, thereby exonerating Ulysses of any wrong-doing.

  But that information was only going to be of any use to Ulysses if he could get away from the beast bearing down on him now.

  The arched colonnade of the Pavilion Sully was only a matter of half a dozen bounding strides away. Ulysses legged it under a shaded archway and straight through the doors in front of him, barely registering the colourful banner hanging at the entrance, bearing the words:

  Peau

  La Mode des Animaux

  and adorned with images of lithe woman dressed as zebras and tigers.

  Ulysses skidded across the polished floor of the hallway beyond, sending a tottering young man into a fluster as he pulled open another door and barged his way into–

  –the sudden burst of noise and the dazzling glare of a dozen camera flashes going off in his face, that took him by surprise as much as had the re-appearance of the ape. He pushed on regardless.

  Despite the retina-searing bulb flashes and some very bright lights above his head, much of the room was in darkness, or rather was actually decorated in black, the shadows exacerbated by the brilliance of the lights focused on the stage on the far side of the room. The stage and its décor were a minimalistic white where near-naked models paraded up and down the catwalk to the polite applause of the surprisingly severe audience.

  “Bugger!” he exclaimed.

  In his efforts to escape the maniac gorilla and, at the same time, lead it away from members of the public, he had led the monster right into the middle of a crowded fashion show.

  He glanced back at the door as he excused his way between the fashionistas of Paris, pursued by cries of “Monsieur!” and “Sacre bleu!” His heart was racing even faster now; he knew what was coming.

  With a crash the door flew off its hinges, flattening the two security men standing closest to it as the ape burst into the room.

  Inevitably there were more screams, which were reciprocated by the savage beast with a bellowing primate roar.

  The animal wasted no time in clearing a way across the room in its pursuit of the fleeing dandy. Chairs, and those seated upon them, went flying as the great ape pushed its way further into the room.

  Ulysses made it to the stage, pulling himself up onto the catwalk and into the path of the tottering models. The chaos consuming the other side of the room was only just beginning to register in the models’ minds.

  For a moment, Ulysses found himself faced with joggling breasts and what felt like acres of smooth, supple flesh painted with all manner of wonderful animal print patterns.

  “Sorry, Mademoiselle,” he gasped as he brushed past one of the hysterical girls. He glanced down at his arm, sure that he must have just smudged the marvellous make-up that had been applied to every part of her supple body. But there was nothing.

  And then he found himself looking into the face of a woman whose skin had been tattooed or textured to look like snake skin. In fact it must have been a very cunning prosthesis, because he could see every individual raised scale.

  As the catwalk parade began to dissolve around him, he made it through to the back of the stage – with its huge photographic reproduction of a tiger-striped woman snarling at him – and bumped into another elfin woman, this one dusted pink with exotic plumes curving up from the base of her spine. The feathers must have been attached to the waistband of the tiny thong she was wearing, although there didn’t seem to be enough material to secure them to. Perhaps they had been glued on, but if that was the case, it had been done by someone with the skill of an expert special effects artist.

  And there was another model, her skin mottled like that of a cheetah, the paint job so convincing that it looked like her naked body was covered with a pelt of downy fur. Orange-gold eyes flashed in his direction and for a moment he felt he could hear the growl of the big cat they belonged to echoing across continents from the baking jungles of its savannah home.

  Unaware of what was happening at the front of stage, the piped music and the general hubbub masking the screams and animal roars, the models backstage were carrying on as if everything was running normally.

  That was, until the great ape tore through the image of the tiger-woman and burst through into the space behind, trailing shreds of chipboard, splintered wooden battens and torn cardboard-mounted photographs.

  Ulysses p
icked up the pace again, throwing everything he could in the way of the charging ape as it continued its relentless pursuit – costume racks, make-up tables and lighting rigs – anything he could lay his hands on as he dashed past.

  Only he couldn’t help noticing that there weren’t many clothes on the clothing racks.

  Now the roars of the massive silverback were drowning out the music backstage. A screaming model – with skin mottled like a giraffe’s hide – suddenly found herself face to face with the ape. Hands pressed to the sides of her head in abject horror she howled at the brute, eyes wide and staring, rouged lips open even wider.

  A growl of aggravation rumbled up from within the beast’s enormous ribcage. With a swipe of one huge hand, the ape picked the girl up and threw her across the room. She landed with a crash amidst a stack of folded chairs, her screams silenced in an instant.

  Ulysses stumbled over a trailing cable and instinctively grabbed at the nearest thing to him to stop himself falling. One hand grabbed hold of something soft and feathery. There was a scream – more like a cry of pain this time rather than a wail of fear – and whatever he was clutching onto came free.

  Staggering forwards he regained his footing, and as the ape crashed through the improvised barricades he had thrown down behind him, he glanced at what he was now holding in his left hand. It was an exquisite peacock’s feather. There was blood at the tip of the quill.

  And then he was leaving the pavilion that had been especially erected to house the ‘Skin’ fashion show, within the Cour Carrée of the Louvre Palace. Barrelling through another door, he skidded across a polished floor past dusty, glass-cased Egyptian antiquities, before stumbling out of the building and into brilliant sunlight.

  Blinking at the sudden sunshine, his eye having to adjust after the backstage gloom, Ulysses looked left and right. Automobiles and omnibuses sped past on the Rue de l’Amiral de Coligny and in that split second he assessed the best way to go to continue his flight from the enraged puppet animal.

  The cough of a steam engine had him looking into the sun, shielding his eye with a hand.

  It was coming out of the sun, and it was heading right for him.

  And then it swung about overhead and Ulysses was able to discern the shape of it quite clearly.

  It looked like a velocipede, but one that had sprouted a complex steam-powered propulsion system, not to mention a pair of glider wings and two stabilising tail fins.

  The aerial steam-powered velocipede had begun its descent and was coming in at a steep angle – too steep, surely. And just when Ulysses thought the bike and its pilot were going to have a rather unpleasant, not to say painful, encounter with the pavement, its steam engine revved, the front wheel jerked upwards and the flying machine landed.

  Bracing her legs to balance the velocipede, flicking the machine into neutral and setting the engine into a purring idle, Cadence Bettencourt sat back on the padded leather saddle, as the articulated wings retracted behind her. Lifting her flying goggles from her face she turned her eyes on Ulysses.

  “So this is the little run-around you didn’t want to tell me about,” he said.

  “Well,” she said, “what are you waiting for?”

  The dandy didn’t need telling twice and jumped onto the padded leather seat behind Cadence. As he did so he saw the parrot’s head protruding from a pannier behind him.

  “You brought the automaton with you?”

  “His name is Archimedes,” she said, gunning the throttle. “Now hold on.”

  Ulysses barely had time to put his arms round the girl’s waist and pick his feet up off the ground before the steam velocipede was haring off along the pavement.

  Behind them a gaggle of leopard-spotted and zebra-striped models spilled out of the Musée Louvre and onto the pavement, screaming in abject terror.

  “What’s all that about?” Ulysses said, hoiking a thumb at the feline and zebrine models pouring out through the gallery doors behind them.

  The parrot whistled. “Who’s a pretty girl then?”

  Cadence glanced in a rear-view mirror.

  “Oh, that. It’s all the rage. Animal body modification.”

  “Incredible,” Ulysses muttered. It was unbelievable what people were willing to do to themselves in the name of fashion and some warped concept of beauty.

  Cadence gunned the throttle again, and swung the purring velocipede off the pavement and into the horn-honking traffic.

  Accompanied by the crash of breaking glass and a bellow of animal rage, the ape hurtled out of the museum after the models, sending a number of confused passers-by flying too.

  It only took the beast a moment to relocate its target and then it was bounding after them.

  “I take it you discovered the truth about Leroux at the eleventh hour,” she called back over the roar of the wind.

  “Leroux?” he shouted back.

  “Beware Leroux!” the automaton squawked.

  “You mean it wasn’t Leroux you were running from?”

  “Why would I be running from him? I was running from that.”

  Cadence glanced in the mirror again and saw the ape.

  “This thing flies, right?” Ulysses said. “So why aren’t we flying now?”

  His arms tight around the girl’s waist, he dared another glance backwards. As he had feared, the ape was gaining on them.

  “It needs a long enough runway to get up to speed.”

  “How fast do you need to be travelling?” Ulysses screeched, sounding more desperate than he had intended.

  “Forty-four miles an hour.”

  “Forty-four miles an hour?”

  “Forty-four miles an hour!” the bird parroted.

  “Then what are you waiting for?”

  Cadence laughed at him then. “At midday, in the middle of Paris? Might as well be eighty-eight miles an hour!”

  Ulysses’ eye was still on the beast.

  “Then what do you suggest? You do know there’s half a ton of cybernetic gorilla pursuing us, don’t you? Do you know any good shortcuts?”

  A car horn parped behind them and the Doppler scream of an omnibus horn wailed past.

  “Don’t worry,” Cadence said, “I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve, as you English would say,” and promptly swung the contraption left onto the Quai du Louvre.

  There was the screech of brakes behind them, and the sound of something big and heavy colliding with a truck.

  Something that had been niggling at Ulysses’ subconscious since the girl had picked him up finally worked its way through to his surface thoughts.

  “Why did you think I’d be running from Leroux...” And then realisation dawned.

  “Beware Leroux!” the parrot squawked again.

  “Oh, so it was him!” he exclaimed in excitement. “He was the one who had your uncle killed, along with the other two men.”

  “Exactly!”

  “Well, that puts a whole new colour on things. Now we know who’s responsible all we have to do is–”

  A symphony of hooting drowned out what Ulysses said next, as Cadence dodged and weaved, throwing the velocipede left and right between chugging steam-trucks, horse-drawn carriages, charabancs, and fresh-out-of-the-factory automobiles.

  Ulysses could hardly take his one eye off the street behind. The gorilla had vanished amidst the hurly-burly of the traffic for a moment, but the dandy knew it could only be a matter of time before it made a reappearance.

  And then he saw it, swinging through the trees that lined the road, as if they were in the cloud forests of the Congo rather than one of the busiest metropolitan centres in Europe.

  “It’s above us!” Ulysses shouted over the roar of the traffic and the velocipede’s chugging steam-engine.

  “Let’s see how it copes when there aren’t any trees then,” Cadence threw back and took a sharp right.

  Bouncing over the pavement, missing several rigid cast iron bollards, they turned onto the Pont Neuf, heading for the Île d
e la Cité.

  Ulysses tried to get a good look over Cadence’s shoulder at the speedometer, praying that it was somewhere close to the magical forty-four miles an hour. It wasn’t that he particularly fancied taking to the skies on what was little more than a souped-up bicycle with wings, but that option was far preferable to being beaten to a pulp by eight hundred pounds of crazed cyborg gorilla.

  “You know you were wondering how the ape would cope without trees?” Ulysses said. “Turns out it’s doing pretty well, actually.”

  The velocipede hurtled over the bridge, the lane they were in clear ahead of them, its velocity increasing all the while, the needle creeping past the thirty mark now.

  Thirty.

  Thirty-five.

  Forty.

  A battered old truck suddenly pulled out in front of them, into their lane of traffic.

  Cadence pulled hard on the brakes, almost losing control of the velocipede as the back wheel locked and slewed round behind them.

  The truck was piled high with pumpkins, its backboard clattering, the worn bolts holding it in place rattling noisily as the vehicle bumped and jolted around the road.

  “Overtake that truck!” he shouted at Cadence.

  “Raawk! Overtake the truck!” shrieked the automaton.

  “Look, will you just shut up!” Ulysses snarled at the bird.

  “What do you think I was going to do?” she asked grumpily, gunning the bike’s throttle again, and pulling in between the truck and the pavement.

  “Shut up! Shut up!” repeated the parrot.

  A gentleman was walking the other way across the bridge, clearly enjoying the sunshine, cane in hand, and completely oblivious to their presence. That was until Ulysses leant over and snatched the cane from him. Leaning the other way across the bike now, deftly spinning the cane from one hand to the other, he hooked the looped end around one of the rattling bolts on the backboard of the truck and tugged hard as the velocipede powered past.

  The back of the truck flipped open, dispensing the vehicle’s cargo of pumpkins across the road in a smear of orange, slippery flesh.