"We have a Dragon dialed in on you," the voice adds, conversationally.
"You have five seconds."
"Shit." I see her shoulders droop in despair and disgust.
"It's been nice knowing you — "
"It's not over yet."
I flick the catch and push the door open, wincing, then swing my feet out onto the deck. It's time to face the music.
16: REFLEX DECISION
"SO," SAYS BlLLINBTON, PACING OUT A LAZY CIRCLE on the deck around me, "the rumors of your resourcefulness were not misplaced, Mr. Howard."
He flashes a cold smile at me, then goes back to staring at the deck plates in front of his feet, inspecting the wards around us. After a few seconds he passes out of my field of vision. I can feel Ramona flexing her arms against the straps; a moment later she spots him coming into view. Two more of the dentist's chairs are mounted side by side, feeing in opposite directions, on the same pedestal in the control room: Billington probably gets a bulk discount on them at villain-supply.com. Unfortunately he's also got Ramona and me strapped to them, and an audience of about fifty black berets who are either brandishing MP-5s or leaning over instrument consoles. These particular black berets are still human, not having succumbed to the dubious charms of Johanna Todt, but the freshly painted wards, inked out in human blood, sizzle and glow ominously before my Tillinghast-enhanced vision. "Unfortunately your usefulness appears to have expired,"
says Ellis, walking back into view in front of me. He smiles again, his weird pupils contracting to slits. There's something badly wrong about him, but I can't quite put my ringer on it: he's not a soulless horror like the zombie troops, but he's not quite all there, either. Something is missing in his mind, some sense of self. "Shame about that," he adds conversationally. "What are you going to do to us?" asks Ramona.
**I really wish you hadn't asked that,** I tell her silently, my heart sinking.
**Bite me, monkey-boy. Just keep him talking, okay?
While he's monologuing he isn't torturing us to death ...** "Well, that's an interesting conundrum." Billington glances over his shoulder at a clipboard-toting minion: "Would you mind finding Eileen and asking her why she's late? It doesn't normally take her this long to terminate an employee." The minion nods and hurries away. "Following the logic of the situation that prevailed until I ended the invocation field by sinking the Mabuse, I ought to have you tortured or fed to a pool of hungry piranhas. Fortunately for you, the geas should be fully dissipated by now, I'm short on torturers, and urban legends to the contrary, piranhas don't much like human flesh." He smiles again. "I was inclined to be merciful, earlier: I can always find a niche for a bright, young manager in Quality Assurance, for example — " I shiver, half-wondering if maybe the piranha tank wouldn't be preferable " — or for a presentable young lady with your talents." Then the smile drops away like a camo sheet covering an artillery tube: "But that was before I discovered that you — " he stabs a finger at Ramona " — were sent here to murder me, and that you — " I flinch from his bony digit " — were sent here as a saboteur."
He hisses that last, glaring at me malevolently.
"Saboteur?" I blink and try to look perplexed. When in doubt, lie like a very flat thing indeed. "What are you talking about"
Billington gestures at the huge expanse of glass walling the control room off from the moon pool. "Look." His hand casually takes in the huge skeletal superstructure hanging from the ceiling by steel hawsers, its titanium fingers cradling a blackened cylinder with a tapered end: JENNIFER MORGUE Two, the damaged chthonian weapon. An odd geometric meshwork scarifies its hull: there are whorls and knots like the boles of a tree spaced evenly along it. From this angle it looks more like a huge, fossilized worm than a tunneling machine. It's quiescent, as if dead or sleeping, b u t ... "I'm not sure. The Tillinghast resonator lets me notice things that would otherwise be invisible to merely human eyes, and something about it makes my skin crawl, as if it's neither dead nor alive, or even undead, but something else entirely; something waiting in the shadows that is as uninterested in issues of life and death as a stony asteroid rolling eternally through the icy depths of space, pacing out a long orbit that will end in the lithosphere of a planet wrapped in a fragile blue-green ecosystem. Looking at it makes me feel like the human species is simply collateral damage waiting to happen.
"Your masters want to stop me from helping him," Billington explains. "He's very annoyed. He's been trapped for thousands of years, stranded on a plateau in the rarefied and chilly dark, unable to move. Unable to heal. Unable even to revive." Huge hoses dangle from the underside of the Explorer's, drilling deck, poking into the skin of the chthonian artifact like intravenous feeding lines. I blink and look back at Billington. He's lost it, I tell myself, with gathering horror. Hasn't he?
**You've only just figured that out?** asks Ramona.
**And here I was thinking you were quick on the uptake.** Despite the sarcasm, she feels very frightened, very cold. I think she knew some of this, but not the full scope of Billington's deviancy.
"I know all about your masters," Billington adds in her direction. He can't hear our silent exchange, feel Ramona testing the strength of her bonds, or recognize me scoping out the parametric strength of the wards he's positioned around us — he just wants to talk, wants someone to listen and understand the demon urges that keep him awake late in the night. "I know how they want to use him. They sent you to me in the hope of trading in a strong tool for a more powerful one. But he's not a tool! He's a cyborg warrior-god, a maker of earthquakes and an eater of souls, birthed for a single purpose by the great powers of the upper mantle. It is his geas to rejoin the holy struggle against the numinous aquatic vermin as soon as his body is sufficiently restored for him to resume residence in it. And it is our nature that the highest expression of our destiny must be to submit to his will and lend our strength to his glorious struggle."
Billington spins round abruptly and jabs a stiff-armed salute at the thing hanging in its titanium cradle outside the window. He raises his voice: "He demands and requires our submission!" Turning back to me, he shouts, "We must obey!
There is glory in obedience! Fitness in purpose!" He raises a clenched fist: "The deep god commands that his body be restored to its shining terror! You will help me! You will be of service!" Spittle lands on my face. I flinch but I can't do anything about it — can't move, don't dare express skepticism, don't piss off the lunatic ... I'm half-convinced, with an icy certainty verging on terror, that he's going to kill one of us in the next couple of minutes.
"How does he talk to you?" Ramona asks, only a faint unevenness in her voice betraying the fact that her palms are clammy and her heart is pounding like a drum.
Billington deflates like a popped balloon, as if overcome with a self-conscious realization of what he must look like.
"Oh, it's not voices in my head, if that's what you're worrying about," he says disparagingly. His lips quirk. "I'm not mad, you know, although it helps in this line of work." A guard is walking along the catwalk outside, followed by a flash of pink. "He doesn't really approve of madness among his minions. Says it makes their souls taste funny. No, we talk on the telephone. Conference calls every Friday morning at 9:00 a.m. EST." He gestures at a console across the room, where an old bakelite handset squats atop an old graypainted circuit box that I recognize as an enclosure for Billington's Gravedust communicator. "It's so much easier to just dial 'D' for Dagon, so to speak, than to bother with the eerie voices and walls softening under your fingertips. And these days we've sorted out a telepresence solution: he's taken up residence in a host body so he can keep an eye on things in person, while we restore his primary core to full functionality.
Of course it's energetically expensive for him to occupy another body, so we have to keep the sacrifice schedule in mind as a critical path element in the restoration project, but there's no shortage of centh-decile underperformers on the sales force ... ah, yes." He glances at his watc
h. "Top of the hour, right on time." The guard and the woman in the pink suit arrive just as Billington gestures at the window. Outside, on the moon pool floor, a structure like an airport baggage-conveyor terminates in a platform just underneath the chthonian's conical head. I squint: there are lines and curves on that pointed end, almost like the helical coils of a drill, or a squid's tightly coiled tentacles. Down on the conveyor, something wriggly is working its way towards the platform. Or rather, something on the conveyor is being fed forwards remorselessly, wriggling and twitching like a worm on a hook.
**What's that — ?** Ramona is in my head, using my eyes.
**Not what — who.** I peer closer, then blink. The hairworm on the conveyor is still alive, but black fire crawls along the edges of the platform at the far end. It twists and rolls, and it's funny how a change of angle changes your entire perspective on things because suddenly I see his face, eyes bugging out with fear, and what I'm looking at snaps into focus. He's been trussed up in gaffer tape and his mouth taped shut to stop him screaming but I recognize McMurray, and I recognize a human sacrifice when I see him.
He's heading towards that platform, and now I realize — "You've got to stop it!" I shout at Billington. "Why are you doing this? It's insane!"
"On the contrary." Billington turns away from me and holds his hands behind his back. "I don't like doing this, but it's necessary if we're to meet our third-quarter target for energizing the revivification matrix," he says tightly. "By the way, you ought to relax: you're in the circuit, too."
I jackknife against the straps and nearly choke myself.
"What — "
"Oh shit," swears Ramona, despair and apprehension sweeping over her.
"Considering you appear to have prevented Johanna from returning, it's the least you can do for me," Billington explains. "I need a soul devourer. Otherwise it's just more dead meat, which doesn't help anyone. And while you're so inconveniently entangled I might as well plug both of you into the summoning grid to reduce the side-band leakage."
The platform unfolds shutterlike flaps as McMurray nears it. I can distantly hear his voice screaming in Ramona's head.
**Get me out of this! That's an order!** Billington needs an infovore, I realize. He's feeding the chthonian by destroying souls in its presence. My knees feel like jelly: I've seen this sort of thing before. Which means — Ramona convulses against the straps and begins to choke.
I gag my guts rolling, because I can feel the backwash from McMurray's ill-considered words echoing off the inside of her skull like thunder and lightning. Ramona can't not obey, but she's immobile, unable to respond to her master's voice, and she's capable of choking herself to death and taking me with her.
**Get me out.'** McMurray howls as the conveyor deposits him on the killing platform under the cylinder. Then the platform begins to sink and the shutters close in on top of it and I realize what I'm looking at: a hydraulic iron-maiden, a car crusher built for humans.
Ramona's daemon is rising. I can feel a monstrous pressure in my balls. I can't see properly and I'm choking, I can't move — Ramona can't move — and a hideous heat spreads through my crotch. Her crotch. Proximity to death excites it, whether hers or her victim's. And this is about as close as it gets: the shutters are steel slabs, driven by hydraulic rams.
There's a whine of motors, deepening and slowing, and a muffled noise I can't identify. I can't breathe, or Ramona can't breathe, and her daemon senses the flow of life from the killing box down below. As the flow spurts into us the daemon feeds greedily, and Ramona convulses and falls unconscious.
With the last of my energy I inhale in a ragged breath, and scream.
"Oh dear," says Billington, turning round. "What seems to be the problem"
I draw another breath.
"You really shouldn't have done that," says the woman in the pink suit, standing in the doorway.
"Hurt her — " I gasp. Then I start coughing. I can't sense Ramona's daemon, but Ramona herself is deeply unconscious.
"She needs water. Lots of seawater." I'm breathing for two of us but I can't quite get enough air, because what Ramona needs now is full-body immersion. I can feel it, the changes in her cells, her organs slowly contracting and rearranging inside her frame, the fever of mutation that will only end in her death or complete metamorphosis — "What took you so long, dear?" asks Billington, looking at the doorway.
"I was putting my face on," says the woman in pink. I'm still gasping as a pair of black berets close in on Ramona's chair with buckets in hand, but something about the woman in pink trips my attention. Hang on, that's not Eileen — "Excellent." Billington glances at the black berets bending over Ramona and frowns. "We seem to have a little problem, this one isn't as robust as the last."
I peer at the woman in pink. In one hand, she holds a shiny metal briefcase; the other arm is stretched rigidly down, close to her body, as if she has a ruler up her sleeve. I try to focus on the sparkling around her: class three glamour, at least, I realize. She's taller and younger than Eileen, and if I squint — I look past her at her reflection in the glass — red hair — "What do you expect?" asks the woman everyone but me seems to think is Eileen Billington. "She's not a movie hero, is she? And neither is he, for that matter."
"Not now that I've terminated the reel," Billington says briskly. "You, you, and you, go chuck the piranhas overboard, fill the fish tank with seawater, and get it over here — "
"Really?" asks the woman. "Are you sure it's all over"
Billington glances at her. "Pretty much, apart from a few little details — mass human sacrifices, invocations of chthonic demigods, Richter-ten earthquakes, harrowing of the Deep Ones, rains of meteors, and the creation of a thousand-year world empire, that sort of thing. Trivial, really. Yes, it's all nailed down, dear. Why do you ask"
"I was curious: Does it mean we're safe from any risk that the Hero-designate playing the archetypical role is going to leap out of the shadows, armed to the teeth with specialized lethal hardware, and wreck all our plans"
Billington begins to turn. "Yes, of course. Why are you worrying about — "
To my necromancy-stunned eyes it all seems to happen in very slow motion. Her clenched fist unclenches: a bone-colored bow drops down her sleeve like a concealed cosh until she grips it by one end and brings her hand up to unlatch the briefcase. Both sides of the case eject, leaving her clutching a handle and a sling attached to a pale violin that she raises to her chin in a smooth motion that speaks of long practice. The halves of the case contain compact amplified speakers, and there's a stark black-on-yellow sticker on the underside of the violin: THIS MACHINE KILLS DEMONS. I start to shout a warning as Ramona begins to stir, her gills flexing limply against the base of her throat and her mouth pouting, and Billington begins to inscribe a sigil in the air in front of his face — "This is a song of unbinding," says Mo, and the bow slides across the faintly pulsing things-that-aren't-strings, glowing like gashes in my retinas and trailing a ghostly haze when she moves. The first note sounds, wavering eerily on the air and building like the first breezy harbinger of a hurricane. "It unlocks — everything."
Across the room, a particularly alert black beret shouts a warning and raises his MP-5. The second note wavers and screams from the body of the instrument, resonating painfully with my back teeth. Every hair on my body is trying to stand on end simultaneously. These aren't sounds the human ear is supposed to be able to hear the psychoacoustic model is all wrong: I feel like I'm suddenly listening to bat song, the noises that drive dogs wild, the raw and bloody notes of silence. The brief hammering of gunfire drives nails into my eardrums then stops in a shattering of glass and a brief scream as Mo squeezes the fingerboard. The bow string is glowing red. A third note quavers weirdly out of the instrument, somehow building simultaneously with the first and second, which haven't stopped — they've taken root in the air of the room, thickening and turning it blue — and there's a popping noise as the buckles of the straps holding me d
own spring open.
More screams. Billington, being non-stupid, dashes for the door onto the catwalk outside. The bow reaches the end of its arc and begins to slice back across the bridge of the violin as lockers burst apart, spilling paper and supplies across the floor: zippers break belts unfasten, doors fly open.
The noise is so loud now that it feels like a god is ripping the two halves of reality apart: the sound of tearing inside my head is deafening. I can't hear or feel Ramona anymore, and the lack of her presence is a huge vacuum in my soul, trying to split me in two. The noise of another shot slams in my ears as I sit up and see Mo advancing across the room towards the guards, still playing one hideous note after another. Her skin crackles with static discharge and her hair stands on end as the black beret with the pistol takes aim again and I gulp air, about to shout a warning: but she notices him and anything I could say would be redundant because she merely points the fingerboard of her instrument at him and there's a spray of blood, unlocked from the skin that binds it. Across the room, there's a sudden flash of light and smoke begins to pour out of one of the equipment racks.
An alarm klaxon begins to blare on and off mournfully, then a speaker crackles into life: "Alert! Incoming helicopters!
All hands to point defense!"
Where's Billington gotten to? I shake my head, trying to dislodge the dreadful keening sound of strings. The straps are gone. I sit up and lean over the side of the chair, then stumble to my feet and stagger round to the other side. Ramona's out for the count, and she looks really ill — breathing fast, the livid, bruised stripes of her gill slits pulsing against the fishwhite scales around the base of her neck. She's too dry, I realize. Too dry? A stab of guilt: I glance across at Mo, who is single-mindedly driving the surviving black berets out of the room. They're panicking, running for safety. Where's their master?
I glance through the shattered window overlooking the moon pool and my blood runs cold. The thing in the cradle dangling from the drilling rig is twitching fitfully. Down below it a familiar figure hunkers down on the deck, staring up at the chthonic killing machine. Shit, so that's where he's gotten to. Then I notice the second, smaller creature standing in front of him. And that's the host body. He's going to try to reactivate it! Which means — I shuffle painfully away from the chairs, and nearly trip over a pistol. Bending down, I pick it up: it's either the futuristic-looking P99 with laser scope that Marc had, or its identical twin. "Mo?" I call.
The Jennifer Morgue l-3 Page 32