Part 24 (1/2)
”Now that you mention it, yes, I do see a resemblance. Your father was Felix Lamprey.”
”Little Marie Lamprey?” Carcharodon uttered in disbelief.
”Yes, you doddering old fool.” She hissed. ”All this time, right under your nose. And you never knew. And not so little now, nor so helpless! The cuckoo in the nest.”
”More like the viper in the nest,” Ulysses said quietly to himself.
”Well, I...” Carcharodon bl.u.s.tered.
”What? a.s.sumed that I was dead like my father, left behind for the sea to claim? Didn't give me a second thought? Never wondered what happened to that little girl you all left behind? Didn't care what had happened to her? Is that what you're trying to say?”
Ulysses had never heard the young woman say so much during all time they had spent together.
”It all makes sense now,” Ulysses said.
”Oh, does it?” she snapped. ”I'm so pleased. It took you long enough though, didn't it, Mr Consulting Detective? Had to see it for yourself before you would readily believe it, didn't you? We had to show him, didn't we, Madeleine?” The doll said nothing. ”Well perhaps you can explain how I can make sense of it all, tell me why they killed my father and left an innocent little girl behind to die, a sacrifice to the beast, just like my mother, because I don't understand it!”
Ulysses stared deep into her eyes. If the eyes were the windows to the soul, then the soul he could see reflected in these particular orbs was a damaged, tarnished thing. She was wild now, any semblance of the mousey deference she had managed to maintain for so long entirely gone. They were now seeing her true face. The quiet, patient, ever-tolerant, uncomplaining, subservient Miss Celeste had vanished, to be replaced by the wrathful, vengeful, violent and unpredictable Marie Lamprey. And where Miss Celeste had seemed like a perfectly rational and reasonable individual, her alter ego was utterly mad.
The slightest of movements distracted Ulysses for a split second. In that moment his eyes jerked a fraction of an inch, and refocused on the figure of Selby, but only for a moment. But that was all it took for Ulysses to inadvertently betray the engineer.
Marie Lamprey, her own psychotic stare transfixing Ulysses' eyes, as much as his were locked on hers, saw the miniscule change.
She spun round as Selby heroically moved to stop her. There was the concussive retort of a pistol firing and a spray of red, grey and white splashed the viewing port beyond the pilot's position, as a soup of blood, brains and skull plastered the inside of the reinforced c.o.c.kpit. Selby collapsed, looking like a puppet that had had its strings cut.
Constance gave a m.u.f.fled scream from behind her gag and even Ulysses, who had seen far too much mindless violence in his life, gave an involuntary cry of shock. But despite that, the second Marie Lamprey moved against Selby, Ulysses took a long step forward in the ma.s.sive suit.
And then the gun was back on him.
”Don't come another step closer,” the insane young woman warned him, ”or you know what I'll do.”
”That? Against that suit of armour?” Carcharodon pooh-poohed, unable to stop himself, having got away with treating people like inferior beings all his life. ”Don't be ridic -”
Carcharodon was silenced by Marie bringing the b.u.t.t of the gun down hard on the back of his head. The old man gasped in pain, his head dropping onto his chest.
”Shut up, you senile imbecile!” she snapped. ”I mean it, I'll start the countdown on that bomb you're wearing. And once it's started, there's no stopping it.”
”Why?” Carcharodon slurred, unable to take in everything that had happened in so short a s.p.a.ce of time, desperate for some reason to be given to rationalise the irrational.
”Why?” she shrieked. ”You want to know why? After all this time, only now do you wonder why all this had to happen? Why you all had to die? Isn't it obvious?”
”Revenge,” Ulysses stated bluntly, ”pure and simple. It usually is.”
”And what's that supposed to mean?” Marie railed, turning on Ulysses. ”Don't think for one second that there was anything usual about what happened. Everything happened for a reason, the most important reason of all: for my father's good name! I couldn't have him remembered as a psychopath or worse, forgotten about!”
”Oh no, I can see that. The name of Lamprey is going to be remembered for a very long time,” Ulysses said. ”You've certainly made sure of that. You'll be infamous after what you've done, but it still won't be your father that people remember, not when the name of Marie Lamprey is plastered across the headlines of broadsheets across the Empire.”
”Why, you!” she spluttered, reaching for the timer dial on the hastily-constructed device.
”I understand why you believed Carcharodon here, Lady Denning, the Major and Professor Crichton had to die,” he went on. Marie's hand froze, hovering over the dial.
”You do?” Carcharodon bristled.
”The Professor practically gave the game away himself. He actually told us what your motivation for committing this series of cold-blooded crimes was. You wanted revenge on all those you saw as being responsible for your father's death, for driving him to do what he did, once they had turned their backs on him. The other leading figures of the Leviathan project. You even planned to ensnare Josiah Umbridge, the industrialist, in your little trap; only he didn't take the bait. He sent that wretch Sylvester in his stead.
”And it was thanks to you that all the right people just happened to be on board s.h.i.+p for the Neptune's maiden voyage, wasn't it?”
Marie Lamprey said nothing but continued to fix Ulysses with her disturbing wild-eyed stare.
”Your own employer's confession should have given you away long ago.”
”What confession?” Carcharodon groused, one hand clamped to the rising b.u.mp on the back of his head.
”It was over dinner, that first time at the captain's table. You said yourself, Jonah, it hadn't been down to you that any of us had been invited on board for the inaugural round-the-world cruise. You told me that your PA had sent out all the personal invitations. You said that she did everything for you. That way she could make sure that she had everybody here who she needed, or at least that's what you had hoped for,” he said, turning back to Marie. ”But as we've already established, Umbridge escaped the end you doubtless had cooked up for him, by dint of being at death's door already and being too unwell to travel.
”You must have been plotting this for years,” Ulysses went on, only now, as he reasoned through all the salient points, realising the scale of Miss Celeste's - or rather Marie Lamprey's - audaciously planned act of vengeance. ”What probably started out as a backlash against the injustice of a world that had taken both your parents from you, fuelled by grief and a dozen other childish insecurities gradually - perhaps inevitably - became an obsession until the desire for revenge was your whole raison d'etre. There was nothing left but the desire to be revenged on those you saw as being responsible for Felix Lamprey's death. Quite simply, your obsession drove you mad.
”It must have taken you years to work yourself into a position from where you could put your plan into action, to satisfy your sick irrational need for retribution.”
”Don't say that!” Marie screeched.
”What? That you're sick, Marie?” Ulysses reasoned calmly. ”But it's the truth. You are: terribly sick.”
”They were the ones who were sick, weren't they, Madeleine,” she sobbed, tears suddenly streaming down her face, ”leaving a child to die having already done away with her father?”
”Ruthless, yes, but sick? I would like to be able to agree with you, but I'm not so sure. Whereas you, my dear, are one hundred per cent certifiably a fruitcake!”
”Stop it!” she screamed. ”Stop saying that!” She pushed the muzzle of the gun hard against Carcharodon's head.
”So I suppose it was you who sabotaged the s.h.i.+p as well,” Ulysses went on, managing to stay sounding calm, although he didn't feel in anyway calm on the inside. ”But how did you manage that, I wonder?”
”You mean you haven't worked that out yet?”
”I thought I had,” Ulysses confessed. ”But I'm afraid I had this wretch Carcharodon here down as the culprit of our little morality play.”
Carcharodon looked up at Ulysses, indignation blazing in his bleary unfocused eyes.
”I saw the log,” Ulysses explained. ”I know that the person who initiated the sabotage routine buried within the AI's memory core used the ident 'Father' to access the system, and I'm afraid I took that to be you, Jonah. I thought it was an insurance job.” He paused as realisation struck. ”Oh, yes. Oh, of course. If only I had seen it before. Lady Denning told us all we needed to know about the ident.i.ty of the one the AI referred to as 'Father'.”
”Then I take it I'm exonerated, cleared of all charges?” Carcharodon asked. ”For all the good it will do me.”
”Lady Denning told us that Lamprey - Felix Lamprey I mean - designed the difference engines that maintained the life support systems for Marianas Base. She also said that these more rudimentary systems were the forerunners of the significantly more complex artificial intelligence created for the Neptune. Its father, as far as the AI was concerned, wasn't you, Carcharodon, but Lamprey, the creator of the original AI template. Oh yes, very clever.”
Still the quivering woman returned his stare, fire in her eyes, like the h.e.l.lfire surely crisping her soul even now, in light of what she had done.
”And I'm guessing you used a combination of your cogitator skills and the privileged information you had access to as Carcharodon's personal a.s.sistant to sneak into the AI chamber at a time that suited you, access Neptune and activate the programme you must have implanted inside its memory core probably months before.”
”Very good, Mr Quicksilver. He thinks he's so clever, doesn't he, Madeleine? But it doesn't matter now, does it? He's still too late to stop us, isn't he?”
”All right Miss Celeste, or Miss Lamprey, or however it is you like to be known nowadays, I understand why, by your twisted logic, Carcharodon and all his cronies from Project Leviathan were doomed to die. But tell me, why did the others have to die? Why did you kill Glenda Finch?