"Sorry, Bob, try not to move, okay? It's just a precaution."
"Just a — " I reach up with my left hand to give my nose a preemptive scratch while he's busy taping my right arm to the chair. "What's the failure rate on this procedure, and should I have updated my life insurance first"
"Relax. Is no failure rate." Boris finally gets his laptop to admit that its keyboard exists, and spins it round so I can see the screen. The usual security glyph flickers into view (I think that particular effect is called wheel, eight spokes) and bites me on the bridge of my nose. It's visual cortex hackery to seal my lips. "Failure not an option," repeats Boris.
The screen wheels again, and — morphs into a video of Angleton. "Hello, Bob," he begins. He's sitting behind his desk like an outtake from Mission: Impossible, which would be a whole lot more plausible if the desk wasn't a cramped, green metal thing with a contraption on top of it that looks like the bastard offspring of a microfiche reader by way of a 1950s mainframe computer terminal. "Sorry about the video briefing, but I had to be in two places at once, and you lost."
I catch Boris's eye and he pauses the presentation. "How the hell can you call this confidential?" I complain. "It's a video! If it fell into the wrong hands — "
Boris glances at Brains. "Tell him."
Brains pulls a gadget out of his goodie bag. "Andy shot it on one of these," he explains. "Solid-state camcorder, runs on MMC cards. Encrypted, and we stuffed a bunch of footage up front to make it look like amateur dramatics. That and the geas field will make anyone who steals it think they've stumbled over the next Blair Witch Project — cute, huh"
I sigh. If he was a dog he'd be wagging his tail hard enough to dent the furniture. "Okay, roll it." I try to ignore whatever Pinky is doing on the carpet around my feet with a conductive pencil, a ruler, and a breakout box.
Angleton leans alarmingly towards the camera viewpoint, looming to fill the screen. "I'm sure you've heard of TLA Systems Corporation, Bob, if for no other reason than your complaints about their license management server on the departmental network reached the ears of the Audit committee last July, and I was forced to take preemptive action to divert them from mounting a full-scale investigation."
Gulp. The Auditors noticed? That wasn't my idea — no wonder Andy seemed pissed off with me. When I'm not running around pretending to be Secret Agent Man and attending committee meetings in Darmstadt, my job's pretty boring: network management is one component of it, and when I saw that blasted license manager trying to dial out to the public internet to complain about Facilities running too many copies of the TLA monitoring client, I cc'd everyone I could think of on the memo — "TLA, as you know — Bob, pay attention at the back, there — was founded in 1979 by Ellis Billington and his partner Ritchie Martin. Ritchie was the software guy, Ellis the front man, which is why these days Ellis has a net worth of seventeen billion US dollars and Ritchie lives in a hippie commune in Oregon and refuses to deal with any unit of time he can't schedule on a sundial."
Angleton's sallow visage is replaced (no dissolve, this time) by a photograph of Billington, in the usual stuffed-suit pose adopted by CEOs hoping to impress the Wall Street Journal. His smile reveals enough teeth to intimidate a megalodon and he's in such good condition for a sixty-something executive that he's probably got a portrait squirreled away in a high-security facility in New Mexico that gives people nightmares when they look at it.
"TLA originally competed in the relational database market with Ingres, Oracle, and the othet seven dwarves, but rapidly discovered a lucrative sideline in federal systems — specifically the GTO5 market."
Lots of government departments in the '90s tried to save money by ordering their IT folks to buy only commercial, off-the-shelf software, or COTS. Which is to say, they finally got a clue that it's cheaper to buy a word processor off the shelf than to pay a defense contractor to write one. After their initial expressions of shock and horror, the trough-guzzling, platinum-wrench defense contractors responded by making GTO editions — ostensibly commercial versions of their platinum-plated, government-oriented products, available to anyone who wanted to buy them — $500,000 word processors with MILSPEC encryption and a suite of handy document templates for rules of engagement, declarations of war, and issuing COTS contracts to defense conttactors.
"TLA grew rapidly and among other things acquired Moonstone Metatechnology, who you may know of as one of the primary civilian contractors to the Black Chamber."
Whoops. Now he's definitely got my attention. The presentation cuts back to Angleton's drawn-to-the-point-ofmummification face. He looks serious.
"Billington is from California. His parents are known to have been involved in the Order of the Silver Star at one point, although Billington himself claims to be Methodist.
Whatever the truth, he has a stratospheric security clearance and his corporation designs scary things for an assortment of spooky departments. I'd teference CRYSTAL CENTURY if you were in London, but you can look it up later. For now, you can take it from me that Billington is a player."
Gran Turismo Omologato Now he throws in a fancy fade-to-right to show a rather old, grainy photograph of a ship ... an oil-drilling ship? A tanker? Something like that. Whatever it is, it's big and there's something that looks like an oil rig amidships. (I like that word, "amidships." It makes me sound as if I know what I'm talking about. I am to seagoing vessels pretty much what your grandmother is to Windows Vista.) "This ship is the Hughes Glomar Explorer. Built for Summa Corporation — owned by Howard Hughes — for the CIA in the early 1970s, its official mission was to recover a sunken Soviet nuclear missile submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean. It was mated with this — " another screen dissolve, to something that looks like a stainless steel woodlouse adrift at sea — "the HMB-1, Hughes Mining Barge, built by, you'll be interested to know, Lockheed Missiles and Space."
I lean forwards, barely noticing the duct tape holding my wrists and ankles against the chair. "That's really neat," I say admiringly. "Didn't I see it in a Discovery Channel documentary"
Angleton clears his throat. "If you've quite finished"
(How does be do that? I ask myself.) "Operation JENNIFER, the first attempt at recovering the submarine, was a partial success. I was there as a junior liaison under the reciprocal monitoring provisions of the Benthic Treaty. The CIA staff was ... overly optimistic. To their credit, the Black Chamber refused to be drawn in, and to their credit, the other Signatory Party didn't use more than the minimum force necessary to prevent the recovery. When Seymour Hersh and Jack Anderson broke the story in the Los Angeles Times several months later, the CIA gave up, the Glomar Explorer was formally designated property of the US government and mothballed, a discreet veil was drawn over the fate of the HMB-1 — it was officially 'scrapped' — and we thought that was that."
Pinky has finished drawing a pentacle around my chair, and he finally signals that he's got it wired up to the isochronous signal generator — two thumbs up at Boris. Boris shuts the laptop lid with a click and sticks it under his arm. "Is time for entanglement," he tells me, "briefing will continue after."
"Whoa! What has she — " I nod at the far wall, beyond which the sleeping beauty lies " — got to do with this?" I glance at the laptop.
Boris harrumphs. "If had spend your time on briefing, would understand," he grumbles. "Brains, Pinky, stations."
'Yo. Good luck, Bob." Pinky pats me on the shoulder as he scuttles past the end of the beds to a small ward he's already set up on the carpet in front of the TV set. "It'll be all right — you'll see." Brains and Boris are already in their safety cells.
"What if someone's in the hall outside?" I call.
"The door's locked. And I put the DO NOT DISTURB sign out," Brains replies. "Stations, everyone?" He pulls out a black control box and twists a knob set on its face. I force myself to settle back in the chair; and in the other room, beyond the two spy-holes drilled through the back of the wardrobe, a very special light come
s on and washes over the trapped entity in the pentacle.
When you go summoning extra-dimensional entities, there are certain precautions you should be sure to take.
For starters, you can forget garlic, bibles, and candles: they don't work. Instead, you need to start with serious electrical insulation to stop them from blowing your brains out through your ears. Once you've got yourself grounded you also need to pay attention to the existence of special optical high-bandwidth channels that demons may attempt to use to download themselves into your nervous system — they're called "eyeballs." Timesharing your hypothalamus with alien brain-eaters is not recommended if you wish to live long enough to claim your index-linked, state-earningsrelated pension; it's about on a par with tap dancing on the London Underground's third rail in terms of health and safety. So you need to ensure you're optically isolated as well.
Do not stare into laser cavity with remaining eye, as the safety notice puts it. Most demons are as dumb as a sack full of hammers. This does not mean they're safe to mess with, any more than a C++ compiler is "safe" in the hands of an enthusiastic computer science undergrad. Some people can mess up anything, and computational demonology adds a new and unwelcome meaning to terms like "memory leak" and "debugger."
Now, I have severe misgivings about what Boris, Pinky, and Brains propose to do to me. (And I am really pissed at Angleton for telling them to do it.) However, they're more than passingly competent and they've certainly not skimped on the safety aspects. The entity that calls itself Ramona Random — hell, that might even be her real name, back when she was human, before the Black Chamber rebuilt her into occult equivalent of a guided missile — is properly secured in the next room. Sitting in the bedroom closet — in front of the two holes Brains has drilled in the wall — is a tripod with a laser, a beam splitter, and a thermostatically controlled box containing a tissue culture grown from something that really ought not to exist, all wired up to a circuit board that looks like M. C. Escher designed it after taking too much LSD.
"Everyone clear?" calls Brains.
"Clear." Boris.
"Clear." Pinky.
"Totally unclear!" Me.
"Thank you, Bob. Pinky, how's our remote terminal"
Pinky looks at a small, cheap television screen hooked up to a short-range receiver. "Drooling slightly. I think she's asleep."
"Okay. Lights." A diode on the back of the circuit board begins to flash, and I notice out of the corner of my eye that Brains is controlling it with a television remote. That's smart of him, I think, right before he punches the next button.
"Blood."
Something begins to drip from the box, sizzling where it touches a wired junction on the circuit, which suddenly flares with silver light. I try to look away but it sucks my eyes in, like a bubble of boiling mercury that expands to fill the entire world. Then it's like my blind spot is expanding, creeping up on the back of my head.
"Symbolic link established."
There's an incredibly strong stink of violets, and a horde of ants crawl the length of my spine before holing up in the pit of my stomach to build a nest.
**Hello, Bob.** The voice caresses my ears like the velvet fuzz on a week-dead aubergine, sultry and somehow rotten to the core. It's Ramona's voice. My stomach heaves. I can't see anything but the swirling pit of light, and the violets are decaying into something unspeakable. **Can you hear me?**
**I hear you.** I bite my tongue, tasting the sound of steel guitars. Synesthesia, I note distantly. I've read about this sort of thing: if the situation wasn't so dangerous it would be fascinating. Meanwhile my right arm is straining against the duct tape without me willing it to move. I try to make it stop and it won't. **Leave my arm alone, damn you!**
**I'm already damned,** she says flippantly, but the muscles in my arm stop twitching and jumping.
Then I realize I haven't been moving my lips, and more importantly, Ramona hasn't been speaking aloud. **How do we control this?** I ask.
**The will becomes the act: if you want me to hear, I hear you.**
**Oh.** The light show is beginning to slow down, with reality bleeding back in through the edges, and my head feels like someone's rammed a railroad spike through my skull right behind my left eye. **I feel sick.**
**Don't do that, Bob!** She sounds — feels? — disturbed.
**Okay.** Try not to think of invisible pink elephants, I think grimly, my skin crawling as the implications set in. I've just been rendered uncontrollably telepathic with a woman — or something woman-shaped — from the Black Chamber, and I'm such a dork my first reaction wasn't to run like fuck.
Why'd Angleton do a thing like that? Hey, isn't this asking for a really gigantic security breach — at least, if both of us survive the experience? How am I going to keep Ramona out of my head — ?
**Hey, stop blaming me!** Somehow I can tell she's irritated by my line of thought. **My head hurts, too.**
**So why didn't you run away?** I let slip before I manage to clamp a lid down on the thought.
**They didn't give me the option.** A metallic, bitter taste fills my mouth. **I'm not entirely human.
Constitutional rights don't apply to non-humans. All I can say is, those bastards better hope I never get loose from this geas ...** I feel like spitting, then I realize the glands full of warmth at the back of her throat aren't salivary ducts.
"Bob."
I blink in confusion. It's Brains. He looms over me, out of his grounded pentacle. "Can you hear me"
"Yuh, yeah." I try to swallow, feeling the sensation of venom sacs throbbing urgently inside my cheeks begin to fade. I shudder. There's a trailing wisp of wistfulness from Ramona, and a malicious giggle: she doesn't have fangs, she just has a really good somatic imagination. **Let me get my head together,** I tell her, and then try to do the invisible v pink elephant thing in her general direction.
"How do you feel?" asks Brains. He sounds curious.
"How the fuck do you think you'd feel?" I snarl. "Jesus fuck, give me ibuprofen or give me a straight razor. My head is killing me." Then I realize something else. "And cut me loose from here. Someone's got to go next door and release Ramona, and I don't think any of you guys want to get within spitting range of her without a chair, a whip, and a can of pepper spray."
I remember the shape of her anger at her employers and shiver again. Working with Ramona is going to be like riding sidesaddle on a black mamba. And that's before I get to tell Mo, "Honey, they partnered me with a demon."
3: TANGLED UP IN GRUE
THEY WAIT FOR THE IBUPROFEN TO START WORKING before they untie me from the chair, which is extremely prudent of them.
"Right," I say, leaning against the back of the chair and breathing deeply. "Boris, what the fuck is this about"
"It is to be stopping her from killing you." Boris glowers at me. He's annoyed about something, which makes two of us. "And to be creating an untappable communication, for mission which you have not be briefed on because — " He gestures at the laptop and I realize why he's so irritated: they weren't joking when they said the briefing would selfdestruct.
"Here are your ticket for flight, is open for next available seat. Will continue the briefing in Saint Martin."
He shoves a booklet of flight vouchers at me.
"Where?" I nearly drop them.
"They're sending us to the Caribbean!" It's Pinky. He's almost turning handstands. "Sun! Sand! And skullduggery!
And we've got great toys to play with!" Brains is methodically packing up the entanglement rig, which breaks down into a big rolling suitcase. He seems amused by something.
I try to catch Boris's eye: Boris is staring at Pinky in either deep fascination, pity, or something in between. "Where in the Caribbean?" I ask.
Boris shakes himself. "Is joint operation," he explains. "Is European territory, joint Franco-Dutch government — they ask us to operate in there. But Caribbean is American sea. So L Black Chamber send Ramona to be working with you."
I wince. "Tell me you're joking."
Another voice interrupts, inaudible to everyone else: **Hey, Bob! I'm still stuck here. A girl could get bored waiting.** I have a feeling that a bored Ramona would be a very bad girl indeed, in a your-life-insurance-policy-just-expired kind of way.
"Am not joking. This is joint operation. Lots of shit to spread all round." He carefully picks up his dead laptop and drops it into an open briefcase. "Go to committee meeting tomorrow, take memos, then go to airport and fly out. Can file liaison report later, after save the universe."
"Uh-huh. First I better go unlock Ramona from that containment you stuck her in." **I'm coming,** I send her way.
"How trustworthy is she, really"
Boris smiles thinly. "How trustworthy is rattlesnake"
I excuse myself and stagger out into the corridor, my head still throbbing and the world crinkling slightly at the edges. I guess I now know what that spike of entropy change was. I pause at the door to my room but the handle is no longer dewed with liquid nitrogen, and is merely cold to the touch.
Ramona is sitting in an armchair opposite the wall with the holes in it. She smiles at me, but the expression doesn't reach her eyes. **Bob. Get me out of this.** This is the pentacle someone has stenciled on the carpet around her chair and plugged into a compact, blue, noise generator. It's still running — Brains didn't hook it up to his remote. **Give me a moment.** I sit down on the bed opposite her, kick off my trainers, and rub my head. **If I let you go, what are you going to do?** Her smile broadens. **Well, personally — ** she glances at the door ** — nothing much.** I get a momentary flicker of unpleasantness involving extremely sharp knives and gouts of arterial blood, then she clamps down on it, with an almost regretful edge, and I realize she's just daydreaming about someone else, someone a very long way away. **Honest.**
**Second question. Who's your real target?**
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