The Jennifer Morgue l-3

by Charles Stross

  "But we're only picking up the trash — "

  "They may not see it that way."

  Fine fronds, a darker shade against the gray, are rising from the muddy haze not far from the last resting place of the K-129. The fronds ripple and waver like giant kelp, but are thicker and more purposeful. They bring to mind the blind, questing trunk of an elephant exploring the interior of a puzzle box. There's something disturbing about the way they squirt from vents in the sea floor, rising in pulses, as if they're more liquid than solid.

  "Damn," Cooper says softly. He punches his open left hand. "Damn!"

  "Language," chides Duke. "Barry, how fast can we crank this rig? Steve, see if you can get a fix on those things. I want to peg their ascent rate."

  Barry shakes his head emphatically. "The drill platform can't take any more, boss. We're up to force four outside already, and we're carrying too much weight. We can maybe go up to ten feet per minute, but if we try to go much above that we risk shearing the string and losing Clementine."

  Cooper shudders. The grab will still surface if the drill string breaks, but it could broach just about anywhere. And anywhere includes right under the ship's keel, which is not built to survive being rammed by 3,000 tons of metal hurtling out of the depths at twenty knots.

  "We can't risk it," Duke decides. "Keep hauling at current ascent rate."

  They watch in silence for the next hour as the grab rises toward the surface, its precious, stolen cargo still intact in its arms.

  The questing fronds surge up from the depths, growing toward the lens of the under-slung camera as the engineers and spooks watch anxiously. The grab is already 400 feet above the sea floor, but instead of a flat muddy desert below, the abyssal plain has sprouted an angry forest of grasping tentacles. They're extending fast, reaching toward the stolen submarine above them.

  "Hold steady," says Duke. "Damn, I said hold steady!"

  The ship shudders, and the vibration in the deck has risen to a tooth-rattling grumble and a shriek of over-stressed metal. The air in the control room stinks of hot oil. Up on the drilling deck the wildcats are shearing bolt-heads and throwing sixty-foot pipe segments on the stack rather than taking time to position them — a sure sign of desperation, for the pipe segments are machined from a special alloy at a cost of $60,000 apiece. They're hauling in the drill string almost twice as fast as they paid it out, and the moon pool is foaming and bubbling, a steady cascade of water dropping from the chilly metal tubes to rain back down onto its surface. But it's anyone's guess whether they'll get the grab up to the surface before the questing tentacles catch it.

  "Article Four," the Brit says tensely.

  "Bastard." Cooper glares at the screen. "It's ours."

  "They appear to disagree. Want to argue with them"

  "A couple of depth charges ..." Cooper stares at the drill string longingly.

  "They'd fuck you, boy," the other man says harshly. "Don't think it hasn't been thought of. There are enough methane hydrates down in that mud to burp the granddaddy of all gas bubbles under our keel and drag us down like a gnat in a toad's mouth."

  "I know that." Cooper shakes his head. So much work! It's outrageous, an insult to the senses, like watching a moon shot explode on the launch pad. "But. Those bastards." He punches his palm again. "It should be ours!"

  "We've had dealings with them before that didn't go so badly. Witch's Hole, the treaty zone at Dunwich. You could have asked us." The British agent crosses his arms tensely.

  "You could have asked your Office of Naval Intelligence, too.

  But no, you had to go and get creative."

  "The fuck. You'd just have told us not to bother. This way — "

  "This way you learn your own lesson."

  "The fuck."

  The grab was 3,000 feet below sea level and still rising when the tentacles finally caught up with it.

  The rest, as they say, is history.

  1: RANDOM RAMONA

  IF YOU WORK FOR THE LAUNDRY LONG ENOUGH, eventually you get used to the petty insults, the paper clip audits, the disgusting canteen coffee, and the endless, unavoidable bureaucracy. Your aesthetic senses become dulled, and you go blind to the decaying pea-green paint and the vomit-beige fabric partitions between office cubicles. But the big indignities never fail to surprise, and they're the ones that can get you killed.

  I've been working for the Laundry for about five years now, and periodically I become blase in my cynicism, sure that I've seen it all — which is usually the signal for them to throw something at me that's degrading, humiliating, or dangerous — if not all three at once.

  "You want me to drive a what?" I squeak at the woman behind the car rental desk.

  "Sir, your ticket has been issued by your employer, it says here und here — " She's a brunette: tall, thin, helpful, and very German in that schoolmarmish way that makes you instinctively check to see if your fly's undone. "The, ah, Smart For two coupe. With the, the kompressor. It is a perfectly good car. Unless you would like for the upgrade to pay"

  Upgrade. To a Mercedes SI90, for, oh, about two hundred euros a day. An absolute no-brainer — if it wasn't at my own expense.

  "How do I get to Darmstadt from here?" I ask, trying to salvage the situation. "Preferably alive?" (Bloody Facilities.

  Bloody budget airlines that never fly where you want to go.

  Bloody weather. Bloody liaison meetings in Germany.

  Bloody "cheapest hire" policy.) She menaces me with her perfect dentistry again. "If it was me I'd take the ICE train. But your ticket — " she points at it helpfully " — is non-refundable. Now please to face the camera for the biometrics"

  Fifteen minutes later I'm hunched over the steering wheel of a two-seater that looks like something you'd find in your corn flakes packet. The Smart is insanely cute and compact, does about seventy miles to a gallon, and is the ideal second car for nipping about town but I'm not nipping about town. I'm going flat out at maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour on the autobahn while some joker is shooting at me from behind with a cannon that fires Porsches and Mercedes. Meanwhile, I'm stuck driving something that handles like a turbocharged baby buggy. I've got my fog lights on in a vain attempt to deter the other road users from turning me into a hood ornament, but the jet wash every time another executive panzer overtakes me keeps threatening to roll me right over onto my roof. And that's before you factor in the deranged Serbian truck drivers driven mad with joy by exposure to a motorway that hasn't been cluster-bombed and then resurfaced by the lowest bidder.

  In between moments of blood-curdling terror I spend my time swearing under my breath. This is all Angleton's fault.

  He's the one who sent me to this stupid joint-liaison committee meeting, so he bears the brunt of it. His hypothetical and distinctly mythological ancestry is followed in descending order by the stupid weather, Mo's stupid training schedule, and then anything else that I can think of to curse. It keeps the tiny corner of my mind that isn't focused on my immediate survival occupied — and that's a very tiny corner, because when you're sentenced to drive a Smart car on a road where everything else has a speed best described by its mach number, you tend to pay attention.

  There's an unexpected lull in the traffic about two-thirds of the way to Darmstadt, and I make the mistake of breathing a sigh of relief. The respite is short-lived. One moment I'm driving along a seemingly empty road, bouncing from side to side on the Smart's town-car suspension as the hairdryer-sized engine howls its guts out beneath my buttocks, and the next instant the dashboard in front of me lights up like a flashbulb.

  I twitch spasmodically, jerking my head up so hard I nearly dent the thin plastic roof. Behind me the eyes of Hell are open, two blinding beacons like the landing lights on an off-course 747. Whoever they are, they're standing on their brakes so hard they must be smoking. There's a roar, and then a squat, red Audi sports coupe pulls out and squeezes past my flank close enough to touch, its blonde female driver gesticulating angr
ily at me. At least I think she's blonde and female. It's hard to tell because everything is gray, my heart is trying to exit through my rib cage, and I'm frantically wrestling with the steering wheel to keep the roller skate from toppling over. A fraction of a second later she's gone, pulling back into the slow lane ahead of me to light off her afterburners. I swear I see red sparks shooting out of her two huge exhaust tubes as she vanishes into the distance, taking about ten years of my life with her.

  "You stupid fucking bitch!" I yell, thumping the steering wheel until the Smart wobbles alarmingly and, heart in mouth, I tentatively lift off the accelerator and let my speed drift back down to a mere 140 or so. "Stupid rucking Audi driving Barbie girl, brains of a chocolate mousse — "

  I spot a road sign saying DARMSTADT 20KM just as something — a low-flying Luftwaffe Starfighter, maybe — makes a strafing run on my left. Ten infinitely long minutes later I arrive at the slip road for Darmstadt sandwiched between two eighteen-wheelers, my buttocks soaking in a puddle of cold sweat and all my hair standing on end. Next time, I resolve, I'm going to take the train and damn the expense.

  Darmstadt is one of those German towns that, having been landscaped by Allied heavy bombers, rezoned by the Red Army, and rebuilt by the Marshall Plan, demonstrates perfectly that (a) sometimes it's better to lose a war than to win one, and (b) some of the worst crimes against humanity are committed by architecture students. These days what's left of the '50s austerity concrete has a rusticated air and a patina of moss, and the worst excesses of '60s Neo-Brutalism have been replaced by glass and brightly painted steel that clashes horribly with what's left of the old Rhenish gingerbread.

  It could be Anytown EU, more modern and less decrepit than its US equivalent, but somehow it looks bashful and self-effacing. The one luxury Facilities did pay for is an in-car navigation system (the better to stop me wasting Laundry time by getting lost en route), so once I get off the Death Race track I drive on autopilot, sweaty and limp with animalistic relief at having survived. And then I find myself in a hotel parking bay between a Toyota and a bright red Audi TT.

  "The fuck." I thump the steering wheel again, more angry than terrified now that I'm not in imminent danger of death.

  I peer at it — yup, it's the same model car, and the same color.

  I can't be certain it's the same one (my nemesis was going so fast I couldn't read her number plate because of the Doppler shift) but I wouldn't bet against it: it's a small world. I shake my head and squeeze out of the Smart, pick up my bags, and slouch towards reception.

  Once you've seen one international hotel, you've seen them all. The romance of travel tends to fade fast after the first time you find yourself stranded at an airport with a suitcase full of dirty underwear two hours after the last train left.

  Ditto the luxury of the business hotel experience on your fourth overseas meeting of the month. I check in as fast and as painlessly as possible (aided by another of those frighteningly helpful German babes, albeit this time with slightly worse English) then beam myself up to the sixth floor of the Ramada Treff Page Hotel. Then I hunt through the endless and slightly claustrophobic maze of air-conditioned corridors until I find my room.

  I dump my duffle bag, grab my toilet kit and a change of clothes, and duck into the bathroom to wash away the stink of terror. In the mirror, my reflection winks at me and points at a new white hair until I menace him with a tube of toothpaste.

  I'm only twenty-eight: I'm too young to die and too old to drive fast.

  I blame Angleton. This is all his fault. He set me on this path exactly two days after the board approved my promotion to SSO, which is about the lowest grade to carry any significant managerial responsibilities. "Bob," he said, fixing me with a terrifyingly avuncular smile, "I think it's about time you got out of the office a bit more. Saw the world, got to grips with the more mundane aspects of the business, that sort of thing. So you can start by standing in for Andy Newstrom on a couple of low-priority, joint-liaison meetings.

  What do you say"

  "Great," I said enthusiastically. "Where do I start"

  Well okay, I should really blame myself, but Angleton's a more convenient target — he's very hard to say "no" to, and more importantly, he's eight hundred miles away. It's easier to blame him than to kick the back of my own head.

  Back in the bedroom I pull my tablet PC out of my luggage and plug it in, jack it into the broadband socket, poke my way through the tedious pay-to-register website, and bring up the VPN connection back to the office. Then I download an active ward and leave it running as a screen saver. It looks like a weird geometric pattern endlessly morphing and cycling through a color palette until it ends up in a retina-eating stereoisogram, and it's perfectly safe to sneak a brief glance at it, but if an intruder looks at it for too long it'll PwnzOr their brain. I drape a pair of sweaty boxer shorts across it before I go out, just in case room service calls. When it comes to detecting burglars, hairs glued to door frames are passe.

  Down at the concierge desk I check for messages. "Letter for Herr Howard? Please to sign here." I spot the inevitable Starbucks stand in a corner so I amble over to it, inspecting the envelope as I go. It's made of expensive cream paper, very thick and heavy, and when I stare at it closely I see fine gold threads woven into it. They've used an italic font and a laser printer to address it, which cheapens the effect. I slit it open with my Swiss Army cybertool as I wait for one of the overworked Turkish baristas to get round to serving me. The card inside is equally heavy, but hand-written: Bob, Meet me in the Liaguna Bar at 6 p.m. or as soon as you arrive, if later.

  Ramona "Um," I mutter. What the fuck?

  I'm here to take part in the monthly joint-liaison meeting with our EU partner agencies. It's held under the auspices of the EU Joint Intergovernmental Framework on Cosmological Incursions which is governed by the Common Defense provisions of the Second Treaty of Nice. (You haven't heard of this particular EU treaty because it's secret by mutual agreement, none of the signatories wanting to start a mass panic.) Despite the classified nature of the event it's really pretty boring: we're here to swap departmental gossip about our mutual areas of interest and what's been going on lately update each other on new procedural measures and paperwork hoops we need to jump through to requisition useful information from our respective front-desk operations, and generally make nice. With only a decade to go until the omega conjunction — the period of greatest risk during NIGHTMARE GREEN, when the stars are right — everyone in Europe is busy oiling the gears and wheels of our occult defense machinery. Nobody wants their neighbors to succumb to a flux of green, gibbering brain-eaters, after all: it tends to lower real estate values. After the meeting I'm supposed to take the minutes home and brief Angleton, Boris, Rutherford, and anyone else in my reporting chain, then circulate the minutes to other departments. Sic transit gloria spook.

  Anyway, I'm expecting an agenda and directions to a meeting room, not a bar invite from a mysterious Ramona. I rack my brains: Who do I know who's called Ramona? Wasn't there a song ...? Joey Ramone ... no. I fold the envelope and stuff it in my back pocket. Sounds like a porn spammer's alias.

  I break out of the slowly shuffling coffee queue just in time to annoy the furiously mustachioed counter dude. Where the hell is the Laguna Bar?

  I spot a number of dark, glass-partitioned areas clustered around the atrium in front of the check-in desk. They're the usual hotel squeeze joints, overpriced restaurants, and 24-hour shops selling whatever you forgot to pack yesterday morning at four o'dark. I hunt around until I spot the word LAGUNA picked out in teensy gold Fraktur Gothic to one side of a darkened doorway, in an evident attempt to confuse the unwary.

  I peek round the partition. It's a bar, expensively tricked out in that retro-seventies style with too much polished Italian marble and sub-Bauhaus chrome furniture. At this time of evening it's nearly empty (although maybe the fact that they charge six euros for a beer has something to do with it). I check my phone: it's 6
:15. Damn. I head for the bar, glancing around hopefully in case the mysterious Ramona's wearing a cardboard sign saying: I'M RAMONA — TRY ME.

  So much for subtle spy-work.

  "Ein Weissbier, bitte," I ask, exhausting about sixty percent of my total German vocabulary.

  "Sure thing, man." The bartender turns to grab a bottle.

  "I'm Ramona," a female voice with a vaguely East Coast accent murmurs quietly in my left ear. "Don't turn around." And something hard pokes me in the ribs.

  "Is that the aerial of your mobile phone, or are you displeased to see me?" It probably is a phone, but I do as she says: in this kind of situation it doesn't do to take chances.

  "Shut up, wise guy." A slim hand reaches discreetly under my left arm and paws at my chest. The bartender is taking an awfully long time to find that bottle. "Hey, what is this Scheiss"

  "You found the shoulder holster? Careful, that's my Bluetooth GPS receiver in there. And that pocket's where I keep the noise-canceling headphones for my iPod — hey, watch out, they're expensive! — and the spare batteries for my PDA, and — "

  Ramona lets go of my fishing jacket and a moment later the stubby object disappears from the small of my back. The bartender swings round, beaming and clutching a weirdlooking glass in one hand and a bottle with a culturally stereotyped label in the other. "Dude, will this do? It's a really good Weizenbock ..."

  "Bob!" trills Ramona, stepping sideways until I can finally see her. "Make mine a dry gin and tonic, ice, but hold the fruit," she tells the barman, smiling like sunrise over the Swiss Alps. I glance at her sidelong and try not to gape.

  We're in supermodel territory here — or maybe she's Uma Thurman's stunt double. She's almost five centimeters taller than me, blonde, and she's got cheekbones Mo would kill for.