Authors: Charles Stross
Jennifer Morgue (20 page)
Haw far do I trust her? I wonder, then I remember last night, a moment of vulnerability on a balcony overlooking the sea.
"Okay." I press and hold the power button until the phone chimes and the signal LED winks out. No electronics. "What now"
"Follow me." She picks up the towels, shuts the car trunk, and heads towards the beach. While I wasn't looking she's shed the sarong: I can't keep my eyes from tracking the hypnotic sway of her buttocks.
The sand is fine and white and the vegetation rapidly gives way to open beach. There's a rocky
promontory ahead, and various sunbathers have set up their little patches; offshore, the sailboards are catching the breeze. The sea is a huge, warm presence, sighing as waves break across the reef offshore and subside before they reach us. Ramona stops and bends forwards, rolls her briefs down her legs, and shrugs out of her bikini top. Then she looks at me: "Aren't you going to strip off"
"Hey, this is public — "
There's an impish gleam in her eyes. "Are you?" She straightens up and deliberately turns to face me. "You're cute when you blush!"
I glance at the nearest tourists. Middle-aged spread and a clear lack of concealing fabric drives the message home. "Oh, so it's a nudist beach."
"Naturist, please. C'mon, Bob. People will stare if you don't."
Nobody taught me how to say no when a beautiful naked woman begs me to take my clothes off. I fumble my way out of my trunks and concentrate very hard on not concentrating on her very visible assets. Luckily, she's Ramona. She's strikingly beautiful — with or without the glamour, it doesn't matter — but I also find her intimidating. After a minute or so I figure out I'm not about to sprout a semaphore pole in public, so I begin to relax. When in Rome, et cetera.
Ramona picks her way past the clots of slowly basting sunseekers — I notice with displeasure a scattering of heads turning to track us — and detours around a battered hut selling ice cream and cold drinks. The beach is narrower at this end, and proportionately less populated as she veers towards the waterline. "Okay, this'll do. Mark the spot, Bob." She unrolls her towel and plants it on the sand. Then she holds out a waterproof baggie. "For your phone — sling it around your neck, we're going swimming."
"We're going swimming?" ''Naked?'' She looks at me and sighs. "Yes Bob, we're going swimming in the sea, bare-ass naked. Sometimes I despair of you ..."
Oh boy. My head's spinning. I bag up my phone, make sure it's sealed, and walk into the sea until I'm up to my ankles, looking down at the surf swirling grains of sand between and over my toes. I can't remember when I last went swimming.
It's cool but not cold. Ramona wades into the waves until she's hip-deep then turns round and beckons to me. "What are you waiting for"
I grit my teeth and plod forwards until the water's over my knees. There's an island in the distance, just a nub of trees waving slowly above a thin rind of sand. "Are you planning on wading all the way out there"
"No, just a little farther." She winks at me, then turns and wades out deeper. Soon those remarkable buttocks are just a pale gleam beneath the rippling waves.
I follow her in. She pitches forwards and starts swimming.
Swimming isn't something I've done much of lately, but it's like riding a bicycle — you'll remember how to do it and your muscles will make sure you don't forget the next morning. I splash around after her, trying to relearn my breast stroke by beating the waves into submission. Damn, but this is different from the old Moseley Road Swimming Baths.
''This way,'' she tells me, using our speech-free intercom.
''Not too far. Can you manage ten minutes without a rest?''
''I hope so.'' The waves aren't strong inside the barrier formed by the reef, and in any event they're driving us back onshore, but I hope she's not planning on going outside the protective boundary.
''Okay, follow me.'' She strikes out away from the sunbathers and towards the outer reef, at an angle. Pretty soon I'm gasping for breath as I flail the water, trailing after her. Ramona is a very strong swimmer and I m out of practice, and my arms and thigh muscles are screaming for mercy within minutes. But we're approaching the reef, the waves are breaking over it — and to my surprise, when she stands up the water barely reaches her breasts.
"What the hell?" I flap towards her, then switch to treading water, feeling for the surface beneath my feet. I'm half-expecting to kick razor-sharp coral, but what I find myself standing on is smooth, slippery-slick concrete.
"No electronics, because someone might have tapped into it. No clothing because you might be bugged. Seawater because it's conductive; if they'd tattooed a capacitive chart on your scalp while you were asleep it'd be shorted out by now. No bugs because we've got a high-volume white noise source all around us." She frowns at me, deadly serious.
"You're clean, monkey-boy, except for whatever compulsion filters they've dropped on you, and any supernatural monitors."
"Shit." Enlightenment dawns: Ramona has dragged me out here because she thinks I'm bugged. "What's down below us ..."
"It's a defensive emplacement. The French got serious about that in the early '60s, before the treaty arrangements got nailed down. You're standing on a discordance node, one of a belt of sixteen big ones designed to protect the east coast of Saint Martin against necromantic incursions. If you swim through it, any thaumaturgic bugs they've planted on you will be wiped — it's a huge occult degaussing rig. Which is one of the reasons I brought you here."
"But if it's a defensive emplacement, how come the zombies up at — " I bite my tongue.
"Exactly." She looks grave. "That's part of what's wrong here, which is the other thing I want to check out. About four months ago one of our routine geomantic surveillance flights noticed that the defensive belt was — not broken, exactly, but showed signs of tampering. One of Billington's subsidiaries, a construction company, landed the contract to maintain the concrete ballast units. Do I need to draw you a diagram"
Here we are surrounded by ocean, and my mouth is dry as a bone. "No. You think somebody's running a little import/export business, right"
"Yes."
I take a deep breath. "Anything else"
"I wanted to get you alone, with no bugs."
"Hey, you only had to ask!" I grin, my heart pounding inappropriately.
"Don't take this the wrong way." She smiles ruefully. "You know what would happen if — "
"Only kidding," I say, abruptly nervous. The conversation is veering dangerously close to territory I'm uncomfortable with. I look at her — correction: I force my eyes to track about thirty degrees up until I'm looking at her face. She's watching me right back, and I find I can't help wondering what it would be like to ... well. Sure she's attached to a level three glamour so tight you'd need a scalpel to peel it off her, but I can probably cope with whatever's underneath it, I think.
Her daemon is something else again, but there are things we could do, without intercourse ... but what about Mo? My conscience finally catches up with my freewheeling speculation.
Well, what indeed? But the thought drags me back down to Earth after a fashion. I manage to get my worst instincts under control then ask: "Okay, so why did you really bring me out here"
First, I need to know: Why the fuck did you go rushing off to Anse Marcel "
The question hits me like a bucket of cold water in the face. "I, I, I wanted to check something out," I stutter. It sounds lame. "Last night, I was inside Marc's head. He was going to — " I trail off.
'You were inside his head"
"Yes, and it wasn't a nice place to be," I snap "You were inside — " She blinks rapidly. "Tell me what you picked up"
"But I thought you knew — "
"No," she says tightly. "I didn't know it went that far.
This is as new to me as it is to you. What did you learn?" I lick my lips. "Marc had an arrangement. Every couple of weeks he'd pick up a single female who wouldn't be missed and he'd — let's not go into that. Afterwards he'd drop a geas on her, a control ring he'd learned from the customer, and he'd drive her up to Anse Marcel where a couple of guys would come in on a boat to pick the victim up. They paid in coke, plus extras."
"Ri-ight." Rarnona pauses. "That makes sense." I can feel it snapping into place in her mind, another part of a lethal booby-trapped jigsaw puzzle she's trying to solve. I realize in the silence between heartbeats that we've stopped pretending.
It feels as if some huge external force is pushing us together, squeezing us towards intimacy. She gave me an opening to pretend that I wasn't involved, and I didn't take it. But why?
I wouldn't normally do this kind of thing; maybe the tropical clime's addled me.
"What part of the picture does it fit?" I meet her gaze. I have the most peculiar feeling that I'm watching myself watching her through two pairs of eyes.
"Billington's diversified into a variety of fields. You shouldn't think of him as simply a computer industry mogul.
He's got his tentacles into a lot more pies than Silicon Valley."
"But kidnapping? That's ridiculous! It can't possibly be cost-effective, even if he's selling them off for spare parts." I swallow and shut up: she's broadcasting a horrible sense of claustrophobic dread, fear rising off her like a heat haze. I shuffle, grounding my feet against the concrete defense platform, and for a moment her skin acquires a silvery sheen.
"What is it? Is he — "
"You know better than to say it aloud, Bob."
"I was afraid that was what you were trying to tell me." I look away, towards the breakers foaming across the reef and the open seas beyond. And it's not just her sense of dread anymore.
Some types of invocation need blood, and some require entire bodies. Whatever lives in the back of Ramona's head is a trivial, weak example; the creature I ran across in Santa Cruz and Amsterdam three years ago was a much more powerful one. Ramona is afraid that we're dealing with a life-eating horror that lives off the entropy burst that comes from draining a human soul: I'm pretty sure she's right. Which means the next question to ask is, who on Earth would summon such a thing, and why? And as I'm pretty sure we know the answer to who ...
"What's Billington trying to do? What is he summoning up"
"We don't know."
"Any guesses?" I ask sarcastically. "The Deep Ones, maybe"
Ramona shakes her head angrily. "Not them! Never them." The sense of dread is choking, oppressive: she feels it personally, I realize.
I stare at her. That flash of silver again, the water lapping around her chest, drawing my eyes back towards those amazingly perfect breasts — I fight to filter out the distraction.
This isn't me, is it? It's hard work, fighting the glamour. I want to see her as she really is. Taking a deep breath I force myself back to the matter in hand: "What makes you so sure the Deep Ones aren't behind him? You're holding out on me.
Why"
"Because they don't think that way. And yes, I am fucking holding out on you." She glares at me, and I can feel her wounded pride and defensive anger fighting against something else: Concern? Worry? "This is all going wrong. I brought you out here so I could tell you why you're being kept in the dark, not to pick a fight — "
"And here I was thinking you wanted me for my body." I hold my hands up before she has time to swear at me: "I'm sorry, but have you got any idea just how bloody distracting that glamour is?" It's amazing and frightening and beautiful, and it makes it a real bitch to try to concentrate on a conversation about subterfuge and lies without wondering what horrors she's concealing from me.
Ramona stares at me, until I can feel her inside my head, watching herself through my glamour-ensnared eyes. "Okay, monkey-boy: you want it, you got it." Her voice is flat and hard. "Just remember, you asked for it."
She lets go of the anchor of the glamour she's been clinging on to. The constant repulsive force emanating from the concrete countermeasure emplacement we're standing on blows it away, like a hat in a hurricane — and I see Ramona as she truly is. Which gives me two very big surprises.
I gasp. I can't help myself. "You're one of them!" I meet her clear emerald gaze. And, quietly: "Wow."
Ramona says nothing, but one perfect nostril flares minutely. Her skin has a faint silvery iridescent sheen to it, like the scales of a fish; her hair is long and green as glass, framing a face with higher cheekbones and a wider mouth, rising from an inhumanly perfect long neck, the skin broken by two rows of slits above her clavicle. Her breasts are smaller, not much larger than her nipples, and two tinier ones adorn her rib cage beneath them. She raises her right hand and spreads her fingers, revealing the delicate tracery of webbing. "So what do you think of me now, monkey-boy"
I swallow. She's like a sculpture in quicksilver, created by inhuman sea-dwelling aliens who have taken the essence of human female beauty and customized it to meet their need for an artificial go-between who can walk among the lumpen savages of the arid continental surfaces. "I've met half — sorry, the sea-born — before. At Dunwich. But not like, uh, you.
Uh. You're different." I goggle at her, my mouth open like a fish. Different is an understatement and a half. The glamour she customarily wears doesn't make her look unnaturally beautiful to human eves; rather, it conceals the more exotic aspects of her physiognomy. Strip it away and she's devastating, as unlike the weak-chinned followers of St. Monkfish as it's possible to imagine.
"So you've met the country cousins." Her cheek twitches.
"Yes, I can understand your surprise." She stares at me, and I'm not sure whether she's disappointed or surprised. "So do you still think I'm a monster"
"I think you're a — " I grind to a stop, before I can push my foot any further down my throat. "Um." An inkling comes to me. "Let me guess. Your people. Go-betweens, like the colony at Dunwich. And you were given to the BC and they dropped the, your daemon on you to control you. Am I right"
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