The Jennifer Morgue l-3

by Charles Stross

  **Fuck it, keep breathing, monkey-boy! What are you doing, shit-for-brains, trying to kill us both?** That's Ramona. She sounds as if she's calling to me from the far end of along corridor.

  Breathe? I'm lying on top of Johanna on the floor. How did we get here? She's still as a corpse, but she's got her teeth embedded in my shoulder and she's hugging me like her one true love. And I feel so heavy. Breathing is a huge effort.

  There's a haze forming around my vision. Breathe?

  A hand — mine? — is fumbling with the lump in my pocket.

  Breathe.

  Everything is going gray. The tunnel is walled in darkness.

  Johanna Todt waits at the end of it, smiling coolly, as inviting and desirable as a glass of liquid helium. But I can also tell somehow that Johanna isn't what's waiting for me if I take that drink: Johanna is like the bioluminescent lure dangling before an angler fish's head, right in front of the sharp jaws of oblivion. She's got me in her arms and if I take the lure, when I get up I'll be as hollow as she is, I won't be me anymore, just a puppet rotting slowly on its feet while her daemon tugs it through the motions of life.

  Breathe?

  BANG.

  Johanna spasms beneath me, shuddering and tensing. Her thighs flex.

  BANG.

  I remember to breathe, then nearly choke on the hot stink of burned powder.

  She's vibrating away, drumming her heels on the floor, and there's a flood of blood and tissue everywhere around her head, like a spray of hair. As I pant for breath I realize there's a hand clutching a pistol inches away from my head, and my arm feels as if it's twisted half out of its socket. A combined wash of fear and revulsion makes me bounce off the floor, muscles screaming. **Ramona?**

  **Still here, monkey-boy.** She's gasping — no, that's wrong — she's struggling for breath. There's a burning sensation in her gills as she fights down the reflex to extend them fully. Stroking towards the slim shadow of the Mabuse outlined against the brightness of the surface, still some 200 meters overhead: **Breathe, dammit! I'm getting cramps! I can't keep this up.** I pant like a dog, then carefully lower the pistol. I've got more pulled muscles and my right arm is screaming at me, plus a savage bite that makes me dizzy when I poke at it with my left hand. I look at my fingertips. Blood. **Shit. How long — **

  **If that bitch was telling the truth, you've got two or three more minutes to get the diorama and make it up on deck.** I look around, trying to make sense out of nonsense, a luxurious lounge aboard a yacht, a dead woman on the floor...

  and a diorama in a large, locked display case. I can't move the case, it's the size of a pool table. I groan. It looks like the proximate effect of my first stab at hatching a Plan B was to spook Billington into ordering the ship sunk — and right now, I seem to be short of options. But. Secure the field generator. That's the core of the geas Billington's set up, and he's now trying to destroy it in the crudest way imaginable — not just by throwing the "off' switch, but by blowing up the ship. (Why? Because I got a little too clever and let slip the yipping Chihuahuas of infowar.) If I can keep it running, then the semantics of the spell demand that James Bond — or a good knockoff — will save us. It's just a matter of figuring out how to keep the thing running while I get it off the sinking ship.

  My Treo is in my back pocket. I nearly scream as I reach for it with my right arm, then shakily switch it on and aim the camera lens at the display. Once I've filled the memory card that'll have to do. I check the display — 72Km/97% Complete — then shove it in a hip pocket.

  Looking around the owner's lounge, I don't see anything obvious, but the dining room was just up the corridor. I duck out and stumble towards it, shove my way through the door, and what I want is waiting for me under a pile of uncollected dirty dishes. I grab the linen tablecloth, wait for the clatter of crockery to stop, and stagger back to the lounge. Then I whack the display case hard with the butt of my pistol, knocking out as much glass as possible.

  Breathe. I catch a glimpse of Ramona, the agony spreading to her lower back. There are burning wires of pain in her shoulders as she scrabbles towards the surface close by the port side of the Mabuse. The air in here is foul, a stench of sewers and decaying, uncooked meat. I shove the pistol in a pocket then take the tablecloth in both hands and drop it across the broken glass and the diorama. I lean forwards — remember to breathe — and gather it all in with both hands.

  Then I fumble on the floor for the plastic box containing the tokens that Johanna taunted Ramona with. My hands shake as I finally tie off the corners of the tablecloth in a rough knot. **Got it,** I tell her.

  **Get the hell out!** She doesn't need to tell me twice. I head for the door, grabbing the MP-5 on the way, and cast around the corridor for the door onto the sun deck.

  **That one, Bob — ** The daylight glare nearly brings tears to my eyes after the death-stink below decks. I step out onto the deck and walk to the side of the ship, then look aft. In the distance there's a white trail etched across the wave crests. Breathe. I blink, and see through Ramona's eyes, looking up at the light from beneath the keel of the frigate. From down here it looks enormous, the size of a city. Run. I weave my way aft, back into the access passage to the boat deck. There's a crane and boarding steps descending over the side, ending just above a floating platform at the waterline. I take the steps two at a time, nearly tumbling into the water in my haste.

  **Get yourself overboard! Now!** Breathe. She can see the grid of the platform, the shadows of my feet on the metal grating.

  **Not yet.** I gasp for breath, my vision flickering with the bright sparkles of hyperventilation as I set down the stolen diorama and pull out my phone: 74Km/99% Complete.

  **How do you think we're going to get onto the Explorer? Neither of us is in any condition to swim that far, and anyway — it's moving.** There's white foam at the bow of the huge drilling ship as its positioning thrusters power up. Billington isn't stupid enough to sit too close while his yacht self-destructs: even if he isn't afraid of the backwash from the geas generator he's got to be worried about the fuel tanks. **We've got to get over there!** She's near the surface.

  **I've got a plan.** Breathe. I reach down into the water as — With all her remaining energy she reaches up towards the hand breaking through the silvery mirror-surface above her and — "Ow!" Water splashes over me as Ramona breaks the surface and grabs onto my hand.

  "Plan. What plan? Ow ... " I heave. Something in my back registers a complaint, in triplicate, then locks up and goes on strike.

  Ramona twists round and falls back onto the platform.

  Out of the water, she goes limp. I can feel her muscles. I wish I couldn't. "Look over there." I point. The silvery trail is curving towards us like a bizarre missile running just above the surface of the water. There's something that looks like a glassy black sphere in the middle of it, surrounded by four huge orange balls: "It's my car."

  "You. Have got to be. Kidding."

  "Nope." I grin like a mad thing as the Smart Fortwo whines towards me eagerly, its hub-mounted air bags thrashing the water into submission. "It may not be a BMW or an Aston Martin, but at least it comes when I call it." It slows as it nears the edge of the platform. Ramona sits up wearily and begins to peel off her outer-heated wet suit. Her skin is silvery-gray, the scales clearly visible: even the few hours underwater have been enough to cause the change to set in, and her fingers have begun to web. By the t she's got her top layer unzipped, the car has slowly pulled up to platform edge and driven aboard. The engine stops.

  "Who's that?" she asks, pointing through the windscreen.

  "Oops, I forgot about him." It's Marc, sometime procurer and latterly zombie. He's bloated up against the front windscreen and the driver's side door. "You'll have to help me get him out of there."

  "This is why I never date the same guy twice — avoids raisv ing a stink, you know"

  I get the door open, just in time to be hit by an olfactory experience almost as good as Jo
hanna's buffet. "Ick."

  "You can say that again, monkey-boy. He's leaked all over the seats — you expect me to ride in this"

  "You're the one who told me about the scuttling charges, I'm the one with the biometrics that match the ignition button. Your call."

  I grab hold of one arm. To my great delight, it doesn't come off in my hand. Ramona opens the opposite door and shoves him towards me. I do a two-step with the stiff, twist him round, and shove him onto the platform. I grab the bundled-up geas generator and shove it into the shoe box that passes for a boot in this thing. Ramona winces as she tries to belt herself in, and holds something up: "What's this"

  "Marc's idea of a conversational intro." I pass her the MP-5. "You know how to use one of these, I figure I'll take the pistol." It's another Glock, of course, with a whizzy lasersighting widget and an extended magazine. "Now let's go visit Ellis, huh"

  I push the ignition button, check that the doors and windows are closed, then gently tap the gas pedal. There's a red light blinking on the dash, but the engine starts. We tilt alarmingly as I drive off the edge of the platform, but the car stabilizes fairly fast, leaving us bobbing like a cork in the water. I stroke the accelerator again. That starts a lot of spray flying — this thing isn't the world's most efficient paddle boat — but we begin to move away from the Mabuse, and I start the windscreen wipers so I can see where we're going. The Explorer is a huge, gray bulk about 400 meters away.

  There's the beginning of a trail of foam at her stern, but I'm pretty sure I can catch her — even a Smart car can outrun a 60,000-ton, deep-ocean drilling ship, I figure. Ramona leans against my sore shoulder and I feel her bone-deep exhaustion, along with something else, a creeping smugness. "We make a pretty good team," she murmurs.

  I'm about to say something intended to take the place of a witty reply when the rearview mirror lights up like a flash bulb. I goose the accelerator and we lurch wildly, nearly nosing over as a spray of water goes everywhere. Then there's a sound like the door of Hell slamming shut behind me, and another huge lurch sets us bobbing side to side. A water spout almost as high as the topmost radar mast hangs over the ship, then comes crashing back down "Fuck fuck fuck ... " We're less than a ship-length away from the Mabuse, on the opposite side to the scuttling charge, and that's probably what saves us: most of the blast is heading in the opposite direction. On the other hand, the ship is rolling, heeling over almost sixty degrees, and there's a gash below the waterline that's raised so high above the surface I can see it in my rearview mirror. It looks large enough to take on a hundred tons of water a second. Johanna opened the bulkhead doors below the waterline, and as if it isn't enough that the charge has ripped the yacht's skin open, cavitation from the explosion has broken her keel. I suppose Billington doesn't much care about money at this point — when he's Planetary Overlord he can have as many yachts as he likes — but right now / care because we're less than 200 meters away from something as massive as a ten-story office block that's just begun to disintegrate. As a way of ensuring that annoying witnesses are silenced and the geas generator stops working, it's overkill, but if it succeeds I suppose Lloyds of London are the only people who're going to complain.

  The ship's superstructure hangs in the air like a hallucination heeled over through almost ninety degrees. Loose life rafts and stores tumble across the deck and fall into the sea.

  With majestic slowness it begins to roll back upright — warships aren't designed to capsize easily — and I steel myself for the inevitable backwash when four or five thousand tons of ship go under I floor the accelerator pedal to open up some distance behind us which is, of course, the cue for the engine to die.

  There's an embarrassed beep from the dashboard. I mash my thumb on the START button, but nothing happens, and I realize that the blinking red light on the dash has turned solid. There's a little LCD display for status messages and as I stare at it in disbelief a message scrolls across: MANDATORY SERVICE INTERVAL REACHED RETURN TO MAIN DEALER FOR ENGINE MANAGEMENT RESET.

  Behind me, there's a sinking frigate, while ahead of me, the Explorer has begun to make way. I start swearing: not my usual "shirfuckpisscuntbugger" litany, but really rude words.

  Ramona sinks her fingers into my left arm. "This can't be happening!" she says, and I feel a wash of despair rising off her.

  "It's not. Brace yourself." I flip open the lid on top of the gear-stick and punch the eject button. And the car ejects.

  The car. Ejects. Three words that don't belong in the same sentence or at any rate in a sentence that's anywhere within a couple hundred meters of sanity street. In real life, cars do not come with ejector seats, for good reason. An ejector seat is basically a seat with a bomb under it. The traditional way they're used is, you pull the black-and-yellow striped handle, say goodbye to the airplane, and say hello to six weeks in traction, recovering in hospital — if you're lucky. The survival statistics make Russian roulette look safe. Very recent models buck the trend — they've got computers and gyroscopes and rocket motors to stabilize and steer them in flight, they've probably even got cup holders and cigarette lighters — but the basic point is, when you pull that handle, Elvis has left the cockpit, pulling fifteen gees and angling fifteen degrees astern. Now, the ejector system Pinky and Brains have bolted to the engine block of this car is not the kind you get in a fifthgeneration jet fighter. Instead, its closest relative is the insane gadget they use to eject from a helicopter in flight. Helicopters are nicknamed "choppers" for a reason. In order to avoid delivering a pilot-sized stack of salami slices, helicopter ejection systems come with a mechanism for getting those annoying rotor blades out of the way first. They started out by attaching explosive bolts to the rotor hub, but for entirely understandable reasons this proved unpopular with the flight crew. Then they got smart.

  Your basic helicopter ejector system is a tube like a recoilless antitank missile launcher, pointing straight up, and bolted to the pilot's seat. There's a rocket in it, attached to the seat by a steel cable. The rocket goes up, the cable slices through the rotor blades on the way, and only then does it yank the seat out of the helicopter, which by this time is approximately as airworthy as a grand piano.

  What this means to me: There's a very loud noise in my ear, not unlike a cat sneezing, if the cat is the size of the Great Sphinx of Giza and it's just inhaled three tons of snuff. About a quarter of a second later there's a bang, almost as loud as the scuttling charge that broke the Mabuse, and an elephant sits down on my lap.

  My vision blurs and my neck pops, and I try to blink. A second later, the elephant gets up and wanders off. When I can see again — or breathe — the view has changed: the horizon is in the wrong place, swinging around wildly below us like a fairground ride gone wrong. My stomach flip-flops — look ma, no gravity! — and I hear a faint moan from the passenger seat. Then there's a solid jerk and a baby hippopotamus tries me for a sofa before giving up on it as a bad deal — that's the parachute opening.

  And we're into injury time.

  Most of the time when someone uses an ejector seat, the pilot sitting in it has a pressing reason for pulling the handle — for example he's about to fly into the type of cloud known as cumulo-granite — and the question of where the seat — and pilot — lands is a bit less important than the issue of what will happen if it doesn't go off. And this much is true: if you eject over open water, you probably expect to land on the water, because there's a hell of a lot more water down there than ships, or whales, or desert islands stocked with palm trees and welcoming tribeswomen.

  However, this isn't your normal ejection scenario. I've got Billington's Bond-field generator stuffed in the trunk, a glamorous female assassin with blood in her eye clutching a submachine gun in the passenger seat, and a date with a vodka martini in my very near future — just as soon as I make landfall alive. Which is why, as we swing wildly back and forth beneath the rectangular, steerable parachute (the control lines of which are fastened to handles dangling just above
the sunroof), I realize that we're drifting on a collision course with the forward deck of the Explorer. If we're not lucky we're going to wrap ourselves around the forward docking tower.

  "Can you work the parachute?" I ask. "Yes — " Ramona unfastens her seat belt, yanks at the sun-roof release latch: "Come on! Help me!" We slide the roof back and she stands up, makes a grab for the handles, catches them, and does something that makes my eyes water and bile rise in the back of my throat. "Come on, baby," she pleads, spilling air from one side of the parachute so that it side-slips away from the docking tower, "you can make it, can't you"

  We swing back and forth like a plumb bob held by a drunken surveyor. I look down, trying to find a reference point to still my stomach: there's a tiny boat down there beside the Explorer — it's a speedboat, and from here it looks alarmingly similar to the boat I saw Mo loading stuff into. It can't be, I think, then hastily suppress the thought. It's best not to notice that kind of thing around Ramona.

  We swing round and the deck rushes up towards us terrifyingly fast. "Brace!" calls Ramona, and grabs me. There's a long-drawn-out metallic scraping crunching noise and the elephant makes a last baby-sized appearance in my lap, then we're down on the foredeck. Not that I can see much of it — it's shrouded beneath several dozen meters of collapsing nylon parachute fabric — but what I saw of it right before we landed wasn't looking particularly hospitable. Something about the dozens of black berets racing towards us, guns at the ready, suggests that Billington isn't too keen on the local skydiving club dropping in for tea.

  "Get ready to run," Ramona says breathily, just as there's a metallic racking noise outside the parachute fabric that's blocking our view. "Come out with your hands up!" someone calls through a megaphone that distorts their voice so horribly that I can't hope to identify them.

  I glance at Ramona. She looks spooked.