Jennifer Morgue (38 page)
Authors: Charles Stross
Looking out into the depths, her eyes ad just slowly: I can see a cluster of faint reddish pinpricks swimming at the edge of visibility. There's something odd about her eyes down here, as if their lenses are bulging and she can see further into the red end of the spectrum; by rights she ought to be as blind as a bat. From the sounds these sea creatures are making they're some sort of shrimp, luminescent and torpid as they feed on the tiny scraps of biomass raining down from the illuminated surface like oceanic dandruff.
The water down here is frigid — if Ramona didn't have the heated suit she'd likely freeze to death before she could surface again. She messes with a pair of vents near her chin, and a tepid veil of warm water flows across her face, smelling faintly of sulfur and machine oil. "Let's get this over with,"
she mutters as a weird itching around her gills peaks and begins to subside: "If I stay down here much longer I'll begin to change." She says it with a little shudder.
She fastens herself back into the control chair and throws the lever to resume our descent. After an interminable wait, there's a loud clang that rattles through the platform. "Aha!" She glances round. The descent rollers have just passed a football-shaped bulge in the pipe painted with the white numerals "100."
"Okay, time to slow down." Ramona hits the brakes and we slide over another football, numbered "90," then "80." They're counting down meters, I realize, indicating the distance to go until we hit something.
I feel Ramona working my jaws remotely; it's most unpleasant — my mouth tastes as if something died in it.
"Nearly there," she tells the technician who's taken Billington's place during the boring part of the descent.
"Should be seated on the docking cone in a couple of minutes."
She squeezes the brake lever some more. "Thirty meters. What's our altitude"
The technician checks a screen that's out of my line of sight: "Forty meters above ground zero, one-seventy degrees out by two-two-five meters."
"Okay ..." We've slowed to a crawl. Ramona squeezes the brake lever again as the "10" meter football creeps past, climbing the pipe string. The brakes are hydraulically boosted — the grab she's sitting on weighs as much as a jumbo jet — and the big rollers overhead groan and squeal against the pipe string, scraping away the paint to reveal the gleam of titanium-graphite composite segments. (No expense is spared: that stuff is usually used for building satellites and space launchers, not drilling pipes that are going to be cut apart once they've been hauled back up to the surface.) I watch as Ramona frowns over a direction indicator and carefully uses another lever to release water to the directional control jets, shoving the platform round until it's lined up correctly with the docking cone below. Then she releases the brake again, just enough to set us gliding down the final stretch.
The pipe flares out to three times its previous diameter, then stops being a pipe: there's an enormous conical plug dangling from the drill string, point uppermost, with flanges that lock into a tunnel on the underside of the platform's harness, like Satan's own butt-plug. We drop steadily, and the rollers are pushed outwards by the cone until the harness locks into place around the cone. "Okay securing the grab now," Ramona comments, and throws the final lever. There's an uneven series of bangs from below the deck as hydraulic bolts slide into place, nailing us to the end of the pipe. "You want to begin steering us over to the target zone"
"Make sure you're secured in your seat," the tech advises her whispering in my ear. "Visual check. Are your wards contiguous?" Ramona switches on her hand torch, casts the beam around the metal panels at her feet. Pale green light picks out the non-Euclidian circuitry of a Vulpis exclusion array etched into the deck with a welding torch. It extends all the way around her chair. "Check. Wards clear and unobstructed. How are they powered"
"Don't worry, we took care of that." Oh great, I realize, they're going to drop Ramona into the field around JENNIFER MORGUE Site Two — a field that tends to kill electronics and, quite possibly people — with only a ward for protection, one that needs blood to power it. "It's full of Pale Grace(TM) Number Three(R)[13 The word "Three" and the digit "3" (and non-English localizations thereof) are patented intellectual property of TLA Systems Corporation and denote the entity that, in the set of integers, is the ordinal successor of 2 and predecessor of 4. Used by kind permission.], and we've got a sacrifice waiting in cell four to energize it. Should be commencing exsanguination in two minutes."
"Um, okay." Ramona checks her compass, suppressing a stab of anger so strong it nearly shocks me into a languorous yawn. "What did the subject do to rate a starring role"
"Don't ask me — underperforming sales rep or something.
There's plenty more where she came from." The technician steps back for a while, at Billington's command, then nods, and steps forwards into view again. "Right. You're about to see the wards light up. Tell me immediately if they stay dark."
Ramona glances down. Eerie red sparks flicker around the runes on the deck. "It's lit."
"Good." Somewhere disturbingly close to the back of my own mind I can feel her daemon coil uneasily in its sleep, a sensual shudder rippling through us as it senses the proximity of death. The skin of my scrotum crawls; I feel Ramona's nipples tighten. She shudders. "What's that"
Billington leans over me now. "You're twenty meters off the counter-intrusion field rim, sitting in the middle of a contagion mesh with a defensive ward around you. If my analysis is correct, the field will absorb the sacrifice and let you in. Your entanglement with Bob up here will confuse its proximity sense and should let you survive the experience.
You might want to uncap your periscope at this time: from now on, you're on your own until you dump the ballast load."
He steps back smartly and the wards inscribed on the floor around my chair light up so bright that the glare reflects off the ceiling of the control room above me, pulling me back into my own head for a moment. "Hey — " I begin to say, and just then ...
Things.
Get.
Confused.
I'm Ramona: leaning over a narrow, glass letter box in the & middle of the console, staring down at a brown expanse of mud as I twitch the thruster control levers, flying the platform and its trailing grapple arms closer towards a cylindrical outcropping in the middle of the featureless plain. I'm in my element, slippery and wet, comfortably oblivious to the thousands of tons of pressure bearing down on me from above.
I'm Bob: limp as a dishrag, passive, lying on a dentist's chair in the middle of a pentacle with lights flaring in my eyes, a cannula taped into my left forearm, and a saline drip emptying into it through an infusion pump — They've drugged me, I realize dizzily — a passenger, along for the ride.
And I'm someone else: frightened half to death, strapped down on a stretcher with cable ties so I can't move, and the robed figures around me are chanting, and I'd scream if I could but there's something wrong with my throat and why won't anyone rescue me? Where are the police? This isn't supposed to happen! Is it some kind of sorority initiation thing? One of the sisters is holding a big knife. What's she doing? When I get out of here I'm going to — I stare down at the muddy expanse unrolling beneath the platform. Rotating the periscope I check the ten grab-arms visually: they all look okay from here, though it won't really be possible to tell for sure until I fire the hydraulic rams.
They cast long shadows across the silt. Something white gleams between two of them, briefly: skeletal remains or something. Something.
Glimpse of silvery strings across the grayness, like the webs of a spider as big as a whale. Conical spires rising from the mud, dark holes in their peaks like the craters of extinct volcanoes. Guardians sleeping. I can feel their dreams, disturbed thoughts waiting: but I can reassure them, I'm not who you want. Beyond them, more open ground and a sense of prickling fire that ripples across my skin as I float past an invisible frontier left over from a war that ended before humans existed — She screams silently and the terror gushes inside my head as the knife tears through her throat, blood spurting in thick pulses draining towards zero — The daemon in my head is awake now, noticing — The blood vanishing, drained into the fiery frontier on the sea floor — And we're inside the charmed circle of death around JENNIFER MORGUE Site Two.
A long time later, McMurray comes up to me and clears his throat. "Howard, can you hear me?" he asks I mumble something like leave me alone. My head aches like it's clamped in a vice, and my mouth is a parched desert.
"Can you hear me?" he repeats patiently.
"Feel. Like shit." I think for a minute, during which time I manage to crowbar my eyes open. "Water?" Something's missing, but I'm not sure what.
McMurray turns away and lets a medical type approach me with a paper cup. I try to sit up to drink but I'm as weak as a baby. I manage a sip, then I swallow: half the contents of the cup go down my chin. "More." While the paramedic is busy I get my throat working again. "What happened"
"Mission accomplished." McMurray looks self-satisfied.
"Ramona's on her way back up with the goods."
"But, the — " I stop. Hunt around in my head. "You put the block back," I accuse.
"Why wouldn't I?" He steps out of the way to let the nurse or paramedic or whoever pass me another cup of water.
This time I manage to lift a hand and take hold of it without making a mess of things. "It's going to take another twelve hours or so to bring her up, and I don't want you deepening the entanglement while that's happening." I stare into his pale blue eyes and think, Got you, you bastard. Even though it's treachery against Billington, who thinks he owns McMurray body and soul, I get the picture.
"Did she get the, the thing?" I ask. Because that's when I blacked out, right after we entered the zone of the death spell or curse or force field or whatever it is around the wrecked chthonian war machine on the seabed. Right when Ramona recognized what she was looking for, bang in the middle of the periscope, and opened my mouth to announce, "I've got it. Give me three more meters, and stand by for contact."
"Yes, she got it."
"When, when are you going to unhook us"
"When Ramona's back up and decompressed — tomorrow.
She has to be physically present, you know." His expression turns sour. "So it's back to your room for the duration."
"Agh." I try to sit up and nearly fall off the chair. He puts one hand on my shoulder to steady me. I glance around, my vision still blurry. Billington's across the room conversing with his wife and the ship's officers; I'm all on my own over here with McMurray and the medic. Icy fear clamps around my stomach. "How long have I been under"
McMurray glances at his watch, then chuckles. "About six hours." He raises one eyebrow. "Are you
going to come quietly or am I going to have to have you sedated"
I shake my head. Quietly I say, "I know about Charlie Victor." His fingers dig into my shoulder like claws. "You want to settle with Billington, that's none of my business," I add hastily. "But give me back my phone first."
"Why?" he asks sharply. Heads turn, halfway across the control room floor: his face slides into an effortless smile and he waves at them then turns back to me. "Blow my cover and I'll take you down with me," he hisses.
"No fear." I swallow. How much can I safely reveal...? At least Ramona isn't listening in; I don't need to doublethink around McMurray right now. "She told me about the jet skis, I know how we're getting out of here." / know that there's a seat reserved for you, but no room for me. It's time to lie like a rug: "The phone isn't official issue, it's mine. I bought it unlocked, not on contract. Cost me close to a month's wages, I really can't afford to lose it when the shit hits the fan." I put a whine in my voice: "They'll take that expenses packet you made me gamble away out of my pay for the next year and I am going to be so screwed — "
"We're out of range of land," he says absent-mindedly, and his grip relaxes. I swing my legs over the floor and steady myself until the world stops spinning around my head.
"Doesn't matter: I'm not planning on phoning home. But can I have it back anyway?" I get one foot on the deck outside the ward.
McMurray cocks his head to one side and stares at me.
"Okay," he says, after a moment, during which I feel none of the weirdly other-worldly sense of strangeness that came over me while I was putting one across Eileen in the monitoring center. "You can have your damned phone back tomorrow, before Ramona surfaces. Now stand up — you're going back to the Mabuse."
McMurray details four black berets to escort me back to my room aboard the Mabuse, and it takes all of their combined efforts to get me there. I'm limp as a dishcloth, hung-over from whatever drugs Billington's tame Mengele pumped into me. I can barely walk, much less climb into a Zodiac.
It's dark outside — past sunset, anyway — and the sky is black but for a faint red haze on the western horizon. As we bump up against the side of the Mabuse, where they've lowered a boarding platform, I notice the guards are still wearing their trademark items: "Hey what's with the mirrorshades" I ask, slurring my words so that I sound half-drunk. " 'S nighttime, y'know"
The goon who's climbing the steps ah'ead of me stops and looks round at me. "It's the eyeliner," he says finally. "You think wearing mirrorshades at night looks stupid, you should try carrying an MP-5 with a black jumpsuit and a beret m while wearing eye shadow."
"Cosmetics don't go/with GI Joe," chants the goon behind me, a semitone out of tune with himself.
"Eye shadow?" I shake my head and manage to climb another step.
"It's the downside of our terms and conditions of employment,"
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