The Jennifer Morgue

by Charles Stross

  I AM JUST BEGINNING TO GET MY HEAD AROUND the fact that Mo is not only out here, but she’s a player—and she isn’t going to follow Angleton’s instructions—when there’s a pounding on my door. I hammer the boss key and spin round in my chair, slamming one leather-padded arm into my right kidney as I try to stand up; then the door opens and the black beret is pointing his mirrorshades at me, lips set in a disapproving scowl. “Mr. Howard, you’re wanted on deck.”

  I scramble to my feet dizzily, wincing and rubbing my side. It’s probably a good thing I whacked it—I don’t think I could avoid looking disturbed or guilty if I wasn’t actually in physical pain. I don’t know what the hell Mo thinks she’s doing, but it doesn’t look like she’s planning on following orders and going to the mattresses until Alan calls for her. And what’s Alan doing here anyway? I wonder as I follow the two guards up the stairs to the deck.

  Angleton only calls Alan in when there’s some serious head-breaking to be done. He’s OIC for the Territorial SAS squadron tasked with supporting Occult Operations in the field—some of the scariest—not to mention most eccentric—special forces soldiers in the British Army. I’ve been along for the ride when they went right through a rip in space-time to head-butt an ancient evil that was threatening to squirm through; I’ve seen them secure an industrial estate in Milton Keynes with a suspected basilisk on the loose; and I’ve had the dubious pleasure of being rescued by them on exercise at Dunwich. Maybe Angleton’s sent the heavy cavalry, I decide, hopefully: it’s easier to swallow than the alternative, which is that Angleton’s written me off as beyond hope and has called them in for Plan B.

  The guard up front surprises me when we get to deck level, by turning away from the door to the conservatory and instead opening a hatch onto a narrow green-painted corridor leading aft. “This way,” he tells me, while his backup guy hangs behind.

  “Okay, I’m going,” I say, as agreeably as I can manage. “But where are we going to?”

  Mirrorshades man opens a door at the far end of the tunnel and steps through. “HQ,” he says over his shoulder.

  I emerge, blinking, onto a stretch of deck I hadn’t seen before, sandwiched between a big outboard motorboat and a whole bunch of gray cylinders sticking out of the superstructure beneath a rack of masts and antennae. The motorboat hangs from some sort of crane affair. It’s getting crowded here: the space is already occupied by Ramona, in company with McMurray, his designer-clad thugette Miss Todt, and a couple more black berets. “Ah, Mr. Howard.” McMurray nods at me. “Feel up to a little cruise?”

  “Where are you—”

  My guard pokes me in the back with a finger. “Jump in.” The black berets on deck are setting up a control station for the crane. McMurray gestures at the boat: “This won’t take long. We’re nearly there.”

  “Where are we going?

  “To the Explorer.” McMurray seems to be in a hurry. “Go on, it doesn’t do to be late.”

  “Come on.” That’s Todt. She clambers over the motorboat’s side and jumps down inside.

  Ramona follows her, not without a murderous look at McMurray. ★★Can you—?★★ I begin to think, then I realize I can’t hear her inside my head. Shit. I glance round and the guard who led me up here nods significantly at the boat. Double-shit. They must have come up with a portable version of the jammer they used on me and Ramona last night. I climb over the side of the boat and sit down next to Ramona, at the opposite side from Todt and McMurray.

  “Where’s the jammer?” I ask quietly.

  “I think he’s got it.” She doesn’t meet my eyes. “They don’t trust us.”

  “If our positions were reversed, would you?” asks Johanna. I startle. She smiles: it’s not a friendly expression.

  “I’d trust you anywhere, darling,” says Ramona: “I’d trust you to fuck up.”

  “You—” Todt turns a peculiar shade, as if she’s getting ready to explode. McMurray puts a hand on her arm before she can stand up.

  “You’ll both be quiet,” he says in a curiously calm tone, and oddly, they both shut up. I glance sideways and see Ramona’s cheek twitching. She rolls her eyes frantically at me, and the penny drops.

  I lean over towards McMurray. “You’ve made your point. Let them talk. They won’t do it again.”

  “You sure of that, boy?” McMurray looks amused. “I’ve known these hellcats and their type longer than you’ve been alive, and they’ll—”

  “That’s not the point!” I stab one finger at him. “Do you want her willing cooperation, or not?”

  He makes a sound halfway between a laugh and a snigger, just as there’s a loud grinding noise from the crane and the boat lurches. “All right, have it your way,” he says indulgently as we lift off the deck with a bump that throws Ramona against me.

  “Bastard,” she says indistinctly. Then the mist clears and I can suddenly feel her presence in my mind again, as warm and vibrant as my own pulse. ★★Not you, him,★★ she adds internally. ★★Thanks. It’s not like Pat to make a mistake like that, lifting both blocks at the same time.★★

  ★★Think it’s intentional?★★ I ask, wondering how long we’ve got to talk.

  ★★Not really.★★

  McMurray is saying something to Todt, who’s slumped against the railing away from him. I try to make the most of his lapse: ★★I’ve noticed them making other mistakes. Listen, I got into Eileen’s surveillance network. Mo’s arrived, and there’s a backup team on the way to rescue us.★★ The crane swings us over the edge of the Mabuse and the boat drops like a lift towards the sea below, leaving my stomach somewhere above my head. ★★Griffin’s on the spot, looks like he’s been playing an inside game. Ramona, if you run into Mo, don’t get her pissed-off, she’s brought her—★★

  I suddenly realize that my head’s full of cotton-wool and Ramona isn’t listening. She looks at me and blinks, then stares at McMurray, who smiles faintly in response. “What’s that about?” she asks, aggrieved.

  “No talking out of class.” He looks at me speculatively. A porthole winds past the back of his head, embedded like a zit in the flank of a behemoth. “Orders from the boss. Once you’re aboard the TMB-2, then you get to talk among yourselves.”

  “Enjoy the peace and quiet while you can,” Todt sneers.

  We hit the water with a neck-jarring thump, and everything gets very busy for a minute or two. The two black berets who’ve been riding down with us fire up the engine and cast off the cables securing us to the crane, which in turn throws us variously into one another and across the bottom of the boat. It’s a bouncy, jarring ride, and I get a lungful of spray as I try to sit up. It ends with me coughing over the side, wishing I had Ramona’s gills. By the time I’m half-recovered we’re turning away from the Mabuse and accelerating across open water. I finally get some air back and look around to see that we’ve circled the former destroyer. In the distance, there’s land on the horizon, but much closer to home a monstrous cliff-like bulk looms over us—the former Glomar Explorer.

  My sense of scale fails me when I try to take it in. I find myself looking up, and up, and up—the thing’s as big as a skyscraper, nearly a fifth of a kilometer long. After the Explorer was retired and mothballed in the 1970s they cut the superstructure away, but Billington’s people have rebuilt the huge derrick that towers ten stories above the deck, the two huge docking legs and the big cranes at each end of the moon pool, and the entire drilling platform and pipe management system. It looks like an oil rig humping a supertanker. There are loud pumps or engines running up on the deck, and a hammering noise overhead; looking up I see a chopper closing in on the helipad at the stern of the ship. “Who’s that?” I ask.

  “That’ll be the boss arriving,” says McMurray. To the driver: “Take us in.”

  We motor steadily towards a platform hanging near the waterline, halfway along one flank of the giant ship. The ship sits eerily still in the water, as if it’s embedded in the top of a granite pillar anchor
ed to the seafloor. As we get closer, the noise from the drilling platform up top gets louder, a percussion of rhythmic clanking and clattering sounds adding to the bass line of the motors and the squeal of drill segments grating across each other as the pipe-feeding mechanism winches them off the huge pile under the superstructure and passes them to the automatic roughneck mechanism. When we tie up alongside the metal staircase I feel the deep humming vibration of the bow and stern thrusters holding the ship on position against the waves.

  “Up and out!” The black berets are waving us onto the platform. While Todt and the guards are busy down below, Ramona and I follow McMurray up the ladder towards a door two decks up. He leads us on a bewildering tour of the colossal drilling ship, up and down narrow corridors and cramped stairwells and finally along a catwalk overlooking a giant room with no floor—the moon pool. A black beret on duty at the door passes us ear defenders as we step out onto the catwalk. The noise is deafening and the air feels like I’ve walked into a cross between a sauna and a machine shop: greasy and humid with a stink of overheated metal parts. A sickly sweet undertone hints of fishy things that have died and not gone to heaven, embedded in the machinery that moves the underwater doors at the bottom of the moon pool. It’s not like this in the movies: presumably James Bond’s enemies all employ crack task-forces of janitors spritzing everything with pine-scented disinfectant at fifteen-minute intervals to keep down the rotten shellfish stink.

  About ten meters in front of me, a metal pipe as thick as my thigh descends from the underside of the drilling deck, hypnotically spearing into the pool below. I stare at it, following it down to the bubbling point of white water where it plunges into the moon pool and the deep ocean below. Somewhere far down there a drowned alien artifact awaits its arrival. Presumably Billington, with his expertise in Gravedust interrogations, knows what to expect. Above us the drilling platform shudders and roars, hellishly loud as it feeds infinite numbers of pipe segments to the sea god.

  McMurray walks along the catwalk until he reaches a row of incongruous office windows and a door, just as you’d expect to find overlooking the shop floor of a factory or a workshop. We follow him inside.

  It’s a big room, and as befits the villain’s working headquarters, one wall is occupied by a gratuitously large projection screen showing a map of the seafloor below the Explorer. There are lots of consoles with blinking lights, and half a dozen black berets sitting at desks where they mouse around schematics on a computer-controlled engineering interface. So far so good. It would look a lot like the control room of a power station, if not for the fact that there’s something that resembles a dentist’s chair in the middle of the floor. The ankle and wrist straps and the pentacles around its base suggest that it’s not designed for root canal jobs. To top it all off there’s a gloating villain standing front and center, wearing a Nehru suit and cradling an excessively somnolent Tiddles in his arms.

  “Ah, Ms. Random, Mr. Howard! So glad you could make the show!” I twitch at Billington’s victorious smirk. Somehow or other I’m having difficulty controlling the urge to punch him out, sap two or three black-uniformed guards, steal an MP5K, and let fly.

  “You need to turn down the gain on that geas: it’s overpowering,” I suggest.

  “All in due course.” Billington looks amused, then mildly concerned. “Are you feeling up to the job, Ms. Random? You look a bit peaked.”

  Ramona snorts. “If you want me to do this thing, you really ought to tell Pat to drop the interference. I can’t hear myself think, much less Bob.”

  “Thinking is not what I’m paying you for. However, no purpose is served by separating you at this time.” Billington nods to McMurray: “Allow them full intercourse.”

  McMurray looks alarmed: “But the suppressor’s all that’s keeping their entanglement from proceeding to completion! If I stop it now they’ll only have about two days’ individuality left, then we’ll have to cut them loose or deal!”

  Shit. I glance at Ramona. She stares at me, wide-eyed. “I understand,” Billington says affably, “but as it will take less than twenty-four hours to accomplish the retrieval, I fail to see what the objection is?” He thinks for a moment then comes to a decision. “Drop the suppressor field now. When Ms. Random returns, you will immediately end their state of entanglement, as we discussed earlier.” He turns to me, and gestures at the dentist’s chair arrangement: “Please take a seat, Mr. Howard.”

  I stare at him. “What is that thing?”

  Billington’s pupils narrow, lizardlike: “It’s a comfy chair, Mr. Howard. Don’t make me ask twice.”

  “Uh-huh.” Behind me I sense more than see McMurray adjust some sort of compact ward he keeps strapped to his left wrist: the fuzzy fogbank in my head fades away and I can feel Ramona’s unease, the cold, hard deck beneath her feet, and the churning emptiness in her stomach.

  ★★Bob, do as he says!★★ Ramona’s sense of urgency carries over, leaving a nasty metallic taste in my mouth. I edge towards the chair nervously.

  “What are the straps for?” I ask.

  “They’re just in case of convulsions,” Billington says soothingly, “nothing you need to worry about.”

  ★★It’s a high-bandwidth sympathetic resonator,★★ Ramona tells me. Snowflakes of half-remembered knowledge slide into place in my head. Control cables suffer weird anomalies when you stick them under kilometers of water; Billington wants a better way of tracking his submersible grab, of staying in control over the retrieval process. Unlike its seventies predecessor, the new grab that Billington’s had built is designed to be manually operated by one of Ramona’s people, the Deep One/human hybrids. And it doesn’t use fiber optics or electrical cables for monitoring the process via TV—it uses two entangled occult operatives. This chair will plug me right into Eileen’s surveillance grid, far more efficiently than a swipe of mascara across the eyelashes. ★★Look, if you don’t do it, we’re screwed so hard it’s not funny.★★

  I weigh my chances, then swallow. “The straps go,” I say. Then I sit down tensely before I can change my mind.

  “Jolly good.” Billington smiles. “Pat, if you’d be so good as to escort Ms. Random to the pool, I believe her watery chariot is ready to depart.”

  That’s about the last thing I hear, because as my butt hits the padding on the chair I almost black out. I’ve been strongly aware of Ramona’s presence ever since McMurray dropped his blocking ward, like having a mild case of double vision. But that was before I plugged myself into the chair. It’s an amplifier. I’m not sure how they’ve managed to make it work, but Ramona’s perceptions almost overwhelm my awareness of my own body. She’s got a sharper sense of smell than me, and I can appreciate her mild disgust with Billington’s aftershave—there’s a bilious undernote of ketosis to it, as if it’s covering up something rotten—and the tang of ozone and leaking hydraulic fluid as she moves towards the doorway. Her dislike and fear of McMurray is gnawing away in the background, and there’s her concern for—I shy away. It takes a real effort of will to move my arms, even to realize that they’re still there; I manage to lie down, or rather to flop bonelessly, then close my eyes.

  ★★Ramona?★★ I ask.

  ★★Bob?★★ She’s curious, worried, and anxious.

  ★★This chair, it’s an amplifier—★★

  ★★You really didn’t know? You weren’t being sarcastic? ★★ She pauses with her hand on the doorknob. McMurray looks round.

  ★★No shit, what am I meant to do here? What’s it for?★★

  ★★If you’re asking, they haven’t switched it on yet.★★ She looks round and now I can see myself lying in the chair, with a couple black berets leaning over me—

  ★★Hey! What are they doing—★★

  ★★Relax, it’s in case you start convulsing.★★ McMurray starts to say something, and Ramona speaks aloud: “It’s Bob. You didn’t tell him what to expect.”

  “I see,” says McMurray. “Ramona, channel. Bob
, can you hear me?”

  I swallow—no, I swallow with Ramona’s throat muscles. “What’s happening?” My voice sounds oddly high. Not surprising, considering whose throat it’s coming out of.

  McMurray looks pleased. He glances at the guards bending over my body, and I turn my head to follow, feeling the unaccustomed weight of her hair, the faint pull of tension on the gills at the base of her throat: I see myself—Bob—lying flat out, strapped down while they hook up bits of bleeping biotelemetry. A medic stands by, holding a ventilator mask. “Amplification to level six, please,” says McMurray, then he looks back at me—at Ramona, that is. “Your entanglement lets you see through Ramona’s eyes, Bob. It also lets her speak through your mouth, when you’re at depth. The defense field around the chthonic artifact plays hell with electronics and scrambles ordinary scalar similarity fields, but the deep entanglement between you and Ramona is proof against just about any interference short of the death of one of the participants. When she’s at depth, Ramona will operate the controls of the retrieval grab by hand—they’re simple hydraulic actuators—to lock onto the artifact, then signal through you to commence the lift process.”

  “But I thought, uh, doesn’t it take days to ride the grab down?”

  McMurray shakes his head. “Not using this model.” He looks insufferably smug. “Back in the sixties they designed the grab to be fixed to the end of the pipe string. We’ve updated it a little; the grab clamps to the outside of the string and drops down it on rollers, then locks into place when it reaches the end. If we were going to unbolt and store the pipe sections when we retrieved it, we’d take two days to suck it all back up, it’s true—but to speed things up we’ve got a plasma cutter up top that can slice them apart for recycling instead of unbolting each joint. This baby is nearly four times faster than the original.”

  “Doesn’t Ramona need to decompress or something, on the way up?”

  “That’s taken care of: her kind have different needs from us land-dwellers. It’ll still take us a whole day to bring the string up; she’ll be all right.” He turns away, dismissively. “Dive stations, please.”