The Jennifer Morgue

by Charles Stross

  Ramona follows him through the door and along the catwalk to a dive room where there’s a whole range of esoteric kit laid out for her. She’s done this sort of thing before and finds a kind of comfort in it. It’s very strange to feel her hands working with straps and connectors that feel large to her slim fingers—shrugging out of her clothes and across the chilly steel deck plates, then one leg at a time into a wet suit. There’s more unfamiliar stuff: an outer suit threaded with thin pipes that connect to an external coupling, weight belt, a knife, torches. ★★What’s the plumbing for?★★ I ask. ★★I thought you could breathe down there.★★

  ★★I can, but it’s cold, so they’re giving me a heated suit.★★ I get a picture: hot water is pumped down through the pipe string under high pressure, used to power the grab assembly via a turbine. Some of the water is bled off and cooled by a radiator until it’s at a comfortable temperature for circulating through Ramona’s suit. She’s going to be down there for more than a day—

  ★★You’re taking a bar of chocolate?★★ I ask, boggling slightly as she slides the foil-wrapped packet into a thigh pocket.

  ★★There are fish down there, but you wouldn’t want to eat them raw. Shut up and let me run through this checklist again.★★

  I hang back and wait, trying not to get in the way. A dive error wouldn’t be the lethal disaster for Ramona that it would be for me, but it could still leave her stranded and exposed in the chilly darkness, kilometers below the surface. Even if she’s immune to the predations of the BLUE HADES defense polyps, there are other things down there—things with teeth out of your worst nightmares, things that can see in the dark and burrow through flesh and bone like drill-mouthed worms.

  Ramona finally pulls her helmet on. Open-faced, with no mask or regulator, she turns and faces McMurray. “Ready when you are.”

  “Good, Take her to the pool,” he says to the technicians, and strides back out in the direction of the observation room.

  Down in the moon pool, the waters are warm and still. The drill string has stopped descending, although there are muted clanking and clattering noises from the platform overhead. Around the walls of the pool the sea is dark, but something bulky and flat squats below the water in the middle of the pool. There are technicians in the water, scudding about in a Zodiac with an electric outboard: they seem to be collecting cables that connect the submerged platform to the instrument bay below the observation room windows.

  Ramona walks heavily down the metal steps bolted to the wall of the pool until she’s standing just above the waterline. There are lights on top of the submersible grab, lined up in two rows to either side of an exposed platform with railings and, incongruously, an operator’s chair, its seat submerged beneath two meters of seawater. There are two divers working on a panel in front of the seat; behind it, there’s a bulky arrangement of shock absorbers and rollers clamped around a steel yoke the size of a medium truck, threaded around the drill string. Ramona steels herself, then steps off the platform. Water slaps her in the face, cool after the humid air in the moon pool. She drops below the surface neatly, opens her eyes, and—this fascinates me—blows a stream of silver bubbles towards the surface. Her nasal sinuses burn for a moment as she inhales a deep draught of water, and there’s a moment of panicky amphibian otherness before she relaxes the flaps at the base of her throat, and kicks off towards the submerged control platform, reveling in the sense of freedom and the flow of water through her gills. Nictitating membranes slide down across my—no, her—eyes, adding a faint iridescent haze to the view.

  “Ready to go aboard,” I feel her saying through my throat. “Can you hear me, Billington?” Somewhere a long way away I can hear my body coughing as Ramona swims over the seat and lets the two support divers strap her into it and hook up her warm-water hoses. She’s doing something funny with my larynx and it’s not used to it.

  ★★Hey, careful about that,★★ I nudge her.

  There’s an echoing flash of surprise. ★★Bob? That feels really weird ... ★★

  ★★You’re not doing it right. Try using it like this.★★ I show her, swallowing and clearing my throat. She’s right, it feels really weird. I close my eyes and try to ignore my body, which is lying on the dentist’s chair as Ellis Billington leans close to listen to her.

  There’s a panel with about six dozen levers and eight mechanical indicator dials on it, all crude-looking industrial titanium castings with rough edges. Ramona settles in her seat and waves a hand signal at the nearest diver. There’s a lurch, and the seat drops under her. A loud metallic grating sound follows, felt as much as heard, and she glances round to watch the huge metal harness grip the pipe string. I feel a pressure in her ears and I swallow for her. The pipe is rising through the docking collar—no, the platform I’m sitting on is sinking, about as fast as an elevator car. The great wheels grip the pipe, held in place to either side by hydraulic clamps. I manage to prod her into looking up: the moon pool and the ship merge into a dark fish-shaped silhouette against a deep blue sky, already darkening towards a stygian night broken only by the spotlights that ridge the spine of the huge grab we’re riding on.

  It’s odd how Ramona’s senses differ from my own. I can feel the pressure around me, but it’s different from the way it feels to me in my own skin. Waves of sound move across me, sounds too low- or too high-pitched to hear with my own ears. Ramona can sense them in the small bones of her skull, though. There are distant clicking hunting noises from marine mammals, strange sizzling and clattering noises—krill, tiny crustaceans floating in the high waters like a swarm of locusts grazing on the green phytoplankton. And then there are the deep bass whoops and groans of the whales, growing abruptly louder as we drop below a thermocline. The water on my exposed face is suddenly cold, and there’s a sense of pressure on my skull, but a few deep gulps of water flushing through my gills clears it. Ramona swallows seawater as well as breathing it, letting it flood her stomach and feeling the chill as it infiltrates her gut. Rarely used muscles twitch painfully into life, forcing strange structures to realign themselves. ★★How are you taking this?★★ she asks me.

  ★★I’ll cope,★★ I tell her. The light outside our charmed circle of lamps has dimmed to a faint twilight. In the distant murk I spot a gray belly nudging past, possibly a deep-ranging tiger shark or something less well-known. The pipe rolls endlessly up through the docking harness.

  “Dive stable at one meter per second,” Ramona tells Billington. I lie back, do the math: it’s going to take us a little over an hour to reach the abyssal plain where JENNIFER MORGUE Two lies broken and desolate beneath 400 atmospheres of pressure, on a bed of gray ooze that’s been accreting since before hairless apes slouched across the plains of Africa.

  There’s something soothing about the motion of the pipe string. Once every few minutes Ramona opens my mouth and murmurs something technical: some of the time Billington turns and relays an instruction or two to the ever-present flunky waiting at his shoulder. I lapse into a dreamy, near-hypnotized state. I know something’s wrong, that I shouldn’t be this relaxed under the circumstances—but a great sense of lassitude has come over me as our entanglement nears completion. Lie back and think of England. Where the hell did that come from? I blink and try to throw back the sense of disengagement.

  ★★Ramona—★★

  ★★Shut up and let me concentrate here.★★ She’s working two of the levers and there’s a loud clank-bump that I feel more than hear. ★★Okay, that’s it.★★ We resume our descent, passing an odd bulge where the pipe triples in diameter for about three meters, like a python that’s just swallowed a small pig. ★★What is it?★★

  ★★What do we do after you raise the artifact?★★

  ★★What do—★★ She stops. ★★We get disentangled, right?★★

  ★★Yes, but what then?★★ I persist. For some reason I feel dizzy when I try to follow this line of reasoning. I can almost sense my own body again, see Billington le
aning over me expectantly like an eager cultist inspecting his dead leader for signs of imminent resurrection. ★★Aren’t we supposed to do ... something?★★

  ★★Oh, you mean kill Ellis, massacre his guards, and set the ship on fire before making our escape on Jet Skis?★★ she says brightly.

  ★★Something like that.★★ A thought bubbles up to the surface of my mind and pops, halfheartedly: ★★You gave that a lot of thought, huh?★★

  ★★The Jet Skis are on C deck, and there are only two of them. I’ve got to get Pat out of here—I’m afraid you’ll have to make your own arrangements,★★ she says briskly. ★★But yeah, I can definitely nail Billington.★★

  The penny drops—icy and cold, right down the back of my metaphorical net. ★★You’ve been planning this as a hit on Billington right from the start!★★

  ★★Well, that’s the whole point of my being here, isn’t it? Why else would they send an assassin? I mean, d’oh!★★

  I ought to be more shocked; maybe it’s had time to sink in, what she really is. (And there’s the whole escape thing, of course. Am I imagining things or did she feel a twinge of guilt when she told me I’d have to swim for myself?) ★★Your people used me to get close to Billington,★★ I accuse.

  ★★Yup.★★ It’s funny how these little misunderstandings only come clear when you’re 800 meters below sea level and dropping like an express elevator towards Davy Jones’s tentacle-enhanced locker. ★★As soon as Billington shuts down the geas field I’ll be free to act on my own agency.★★ I can feel a funny tight smirk tugging at the sides of her mouth. It’s not humor. ★★He doesn’t realize it yet, but he’s so screwed you could plug him into the mains and call him Albert Fish.★★

  ★★But you can’t do that unless we’re disentangled, surely? And for that you need—★★

  The other shoe drops, or rather, she kicks me between the eyes with it in her next comment: ★★Yes, that’s why Pat is here. You didn’t think supervisors from Department D routinely defect, did you? He’s under even tighter control than I am.★★ And at that moment I can see the geas that’s binding her to the Black Chamber, tying her to the daemon they’ve imposed on her will: bright as chromed steel, thick as girders, compelling obedience. The Laundry warrant card is bad enough—if you try to spill our secrets you’ll die, not to put too fine a point on it—but this is even worse. We do it for security. This is nothing short of vindictive. If she thinks a disloyal thought too far, the Other will be let loose—and the first thing it will do is feed on her soul. No wonder she’s terrified of falling in love.

  I’m fully awake now, mind spinning like a hamster on a wheel in a cage on a conveyor belt heading for the maw of an industrial-scale wood chipper: there are thoughts I really desperately don’t want to think while I’m inside her skull and vice versa. On the other hand, something does occur to me . . .

  ★★If McMurray’s working with you, do you think you can convince him to give me back my mobile phone?★★

  ★★Huh?★★

  ★★It’s no big deal,★★ I explain, ★★it’s just, if I’ve got my phone I can escape. You want that to happen, right? Once we get back to the surface, you and McMurray want me out of the picture as soon as possible. I can get a ride home just about any time, as long as I’ve got my phone.★★

  ★★But we’re out of range of land,★★ she points out logically.

  ★★What makes you think I was going to use it to make a phone call?★★

  ★★Oh.★★ We watch the pipe string unreel for a minute or two in silence. Then I feel her acquiesce: ★★Yeah, I don’t think that’ll be a problem. In fact, why don’t you just ask him for it? I mean, it’s not as if you can phone home, so you can probably use some of your super-agent mojo while you’ve got it.★★

  I am conflicted between wanting to hug Ramona, and kick her in the shins for being a smart-arse. But I guess that’s her job, I mean, she really is a glamorous, high-flying superspy and assassin and I’m just an office nerd who’s along for the ride. It doesn’t matter what Angleton thinks of me, all I can really do here is lie back and think of—England—not to mention the . . . game of Tetris . . . on my phone—

  ★★Stop trying to think, monkey-boy, you’re making my head hurt and I’ve got to drive this thing.★★

  Monkey-boy? That does it. I send her a picture of a goldfish gasping in a puddle of water beside a broken bowl. Then I clam up.

  14.

  JENNIFER MORGUE

  WE RIDE DOWN TO THE ABYSSAL PLAIN IN SILENCE, doing our best to barricade each other out of our minds.

  The journey down actually takes nearer to three hours than one. There’s a lengthy pause in the darkness of the bathypelagic zone, a kilometer down, while Ramona stretches and twists in strange exercises she’s learned for adapting to the pressure. Her joints make cryptic popping noises as she moves, accompanied by brief stabbing pains. It’s almost pitch-black outside our ring of lights, and at one point she unstraps herself from the seat and swims over to the edge of the platform to relieve herself, still tethered by the umbilical hose that pumps warm water through her suit. Looking out into the depths, her eyes adjust slowly: I can see a cluster of faint reddish pinpricks swimming at the edge of visibility. There’s something odd about her eyes down here, as if their lenses are bulging and she can see further into the red end of the spectrum; by rights she ought to be as blind as a bat. From the sounds these sea creatures are making they’re some sort of shrimp, luminescent and torpid as they feed on the tiny scraps of biomass raining down from the illuminated surface like oceanic dandruff.

  The water down here is frigid—if Ramona didn’t have the heated suit she’d likely freeze to death before she could surface again. She messes with a pair of vents near her chin, and a tepid veil of warm water flows across her face, smelling faintly of sulfur and machine oil. “Let’s get this over with,” she mutters as a weird itching around her gills peaks and begins to subside: “If I stay down here much longer I’ll begin to change.” She says it with a little shudder.

  She fastens herself back into the control chair and throws the lever to resume our descent. After an interminable wait, there’s a loud clang that rattles through the platform. “Aha!” She glances round. The descent rollers have just passed a football-shaped bulge in the pipe painted with the white numerals “100.” “Okay, time to slow down.” Ramona hits the brakes and we slide over another football, numbered “90,” then “80.” They’re counting down meters, I realize, indicating the distance to go until we hit something.

  I feel Ramona working my jaws remotely; it’s most unpleasant—my mouth tastes as if something died in it. “Nearly there,” she tells the technician who’s taken Billington’s place during the boring part of the descent. “Should be seated on the docking cone in a couple of minutes.” She squeezes the brake lever some more. “Thirty meters. What’s our altitude?”

  The technician checks a screen that’s out of my line of sight: “Forty meters above ground zero, one-seventy degrees out by two-two-five meters.”

  “Okay . . .” We’ve slowed to a crawl. Ramona squeezes the brake lever again as the “10” meter football creeps past, climbing the pipe string. The brakes are hydraulically boosted—the grab she’s sitting on weighs as much as a jumbo jet—and the big rollers overhead groan and squeal against the pipe string, scraping away the paint to reveal the gleam of titanium-graphite composite segments. (No expense is spared: that stuff is usually used for building satellites and space launchers, not drilling pipes that are going to be cut apart once they’ve been hauled back up to the surface.) I watch as Ramona frowns over a direction indicator and carefully uses another lever to release water to the directional control jets, shoving the platform round until it’s lined up correctly with the docking cone below. Then she releases the brake again, just enough to set us gliding down the final stretch.

  The pipe flares out to three times its previous diameter, then stops being a pipe: there’s
an enormous conical plug dangling from the drill string, point uppermost, with flanges that lock into a tunnel on the underside of the platform’s harness, like Satan’s own butt-plug. We drop steadily, and the rollers are pushed outwards by the cone until the harness locks into place around the cone. “Okay, securing the grab now,” Ramona comments, and throws the final lever. There’s an uneven series of bangs from below the deck as hydraulic bolts slide into place, nailing us to the end of the pipe. “You want to begin steering us over to the target zone?”

  “Make sure you’re secured in your seat,” the tech advises her, whispering in my ear. “Visual check. Are your wards contiguous?”

  Ramona switches on her hand torch, casts the beam around the metal panels at her feet. Pale green light picks out the non-Euclidian circuitry of a Vulpis exclusion array etched into the deck with a welding torch. It extends all the way around her chair. “Check. Wards clear and unobstructed. How are they powered?”

  “Don’t worry, we took care of that.” Oh great, I realize, they’re going to drop Ramona into the field around JENNIFER MORGUE Site Two—a field that tends to kill electronics and, quite possibly, people—with only a ward for protection, one that needs blood to power it. “It’s full of Pale Grace™ Number Three®13, and we’ve got a sacrifice waiting in cell four to energize it. Should be commencing exsanguination in two minutes.”

  “Um, okay.” Ramona checks her compass, suppressing a stab of anger so strong it nearly shocks me into a languorous yawn. “What did the subject do to rate a starring role?”

  “Don’t ask me—underperforming sales rep or something. There’s plenty more where she came from.” The technician steps back for a while, at Billington’s command, then nods, and steps forwards into view again. “Right. You’re about to see the wards light up. Tell me immediately if they stay dark.”