Ramona glances down. Eerie red sparks flicker around the runes on the deck. “It’s lit.”
“Good.” Somewhere disturbingly close to the back of my own mind I can feel her daemon coil uneasily in its sleep, a sensual shudder rippling through us as it senses the proximity of death. The skin of my scrotum crawls; I feel Ramona’s nipples tighten. She shudders. “What’s that?”
Billington leans over me now. “You’re twenty meters off the counter-intrusion field rim, sitting in the middle of a contagion mesh with a defensive ward around you. If my analysis is correct, the field will absorb the sacrifice and let you in. Your entanglement with Bob up here will confuse its proximity sense and should let you survive the experience. You might want to uncap your periscope at this time: from now on, you’re on your own until you dump the ballast load.”
He steps back smartly and the wards inscribed on the floor around my chair light up so bright that the glare reflects off the ceiling of the control room above me, pulling me back into my own head for a moment. “Hey—” I begin to say, and just then . . .
Things.
Get.
Confused.
I’m Ramona: leaning over a narrow, glass letter box in the middle of the console, staring down at a brown expanse of mud as I twitch the thruster control levers, flying the platform and its trailing grapple arms closer towards a cylindrical outcropping in the middle of the featureless plain. I’m in my element, slippery and wet, comfortably oblivious to the thousands of tons of pressure bearing down on me from above.
I’m Bob: limp as a dishrag, passive, lying on a dentist’s chair in the middle of a pentacle with lights flaring in my eyes, a cannula taped into my left forearm, and a saline drip emptying into it through an infusion pump—They’ve drugged me, I realize dizzily—a passenger, along for the ride.
And I’m someone else: frightened half to death, strapped down on a stretcher with cable ties so I can’t move, and the robed figures around me are chanting, and I’d scream if I could but there’s something wrong with my throat and why won’t anyone rescue me? Where are the police? This isn’t supposed to happen! Is it some kind of sorority initiation thing? One of the sisters is holding a big knife. What’s she doing? When I get out of here I’m going to—
I stare down at the muddy expanse unrolling beneath the platform. Rotating the periscope I check the ten grab-arms visually: they all look okay from here, though it won’t really be possible to tell for sure until I fire the hydraulic rams. They cast long shadows across the silt. Something white gleams between two of them, briefly: skeletal remains or something. Something.
Glimpse of silvery strings across the grayness, like the webs of a spider as big as a whale. Conical spires rising from the mud, dark holes in their peaks like the craters of extinct volcanoes. Guardians, sleeping. I can feel their dreams, disturbed thoughts waiting: but I can reassure them, I’m not who you want. Beyond them, more open ground and a sense of prickling fire that ripples across my skin as I float past an invisible frontier left over from a war that ended before humans existed—
She screams silently and the terror gushes inside my head as the knife tears through her throat, blood spurting in thick pulses draining towards zero—
The daemon in my head is awake now, noticing—
The blood vanishing, drained into the fiery frontier on the seafloor—
And we’re inside the charmed circle of death around JENNIFER MORGUE Site Two.
A LONG TIME LATER, MCMURRAY COMES UP TO ME and clears his throat. “Howard, can you hear me?” he asks.
I mumble something like Leave me alone. My head aches like it’s clamped in a vice, and my mouth is a parched desert.
“Can you hear me?” he repeats patiently.
“Feel. Like shit.” I think for a minute, during which time I manage to crowbar my eyes open. “Water?” Something’s missing, but I’m not sure what.
McMurray turns away and lets a medical type approach me with a paper cup. I try to sit up to drink but I’m as weak as a baby. I manage a sip, then I swallow: half the contents of the cup go down my chin. “More.” While the paramedic is busy I get my throat working again. “What happened?”
“Mission accomplished.” McMurray looks self-satisfied. “Ramona’s on her way back up with the goods.”
“But, the—” I stop. Hunt around in my head. “You put the block back,” I accuse.
“Why wouldn’t I?” He steps out of the way to let the nurse or paramedic or whoever pass me another cup of water. This time I manage to lift a hand and take hold of it without making a mess of things. “It’s going to take another twelve hours or so to bring her up, and I don’t want you deepening the entanglement while that’s happening.”
I stare into his pale blue eyes and think, Got you, you bastard. Even though it’s treachery against Billington, who thinks he owns McMurray body and soul, I get the picture. “Did she get the, the thing?” I ask. Because that’s when I blacked out, right after we entered the zone of the death spell or curse or force field or whatever it is around the wrecked chthonian war machine on the seabed. Right when Ramona recognized what she was looking for, bang in the middle of the periscope, and opened my mouth to announce, “I’ve got it. Give me three more meters, and stand by for contact.”
“Yes, she got it.”
“When, when are you going to unhook us?”
“When Ramona’s back up and decompressed—tomorrow. She has to be physically present, you know.” His expression turns sour. “So it’s back to your room for the duration.”
“Agh.” I try to sit up and nearly fall off the chair. He puts one hand on my shoulder to steady me. I glance around, my vision still blurry. Billington’s across the room conversing with his wife and the ship’s officers; I’m all on my own over here with McMurray and the medic. Icy fear clamps around my stomach. “How long have I been under?”
McMurray glances at his watch, then chuckles. “About six hours.” He raises one eyebrow. “Are you going to come quietly or am I going to have to have you sedated?”
I shake my head. Quietly I say, “I know about Charlie Victor.” His fingers dig into my shoulder like claws. “You want to settle with Billington, that’s none of my business,” I add hastily. “But give me back my phone first.”
“Why?” he asks sharply. Heads turn, halfway across the control room floor: his face slides into an effortless smile and he waves at them then turns back to me. “Blow my cover and I’ll take you down with me,” he hisses.
“No fear.” I swallow. How much can I safely reveal . . . ? At least Ramona isn’t listening in; I don’t need to doublethink around McMurray right now. “She told me about the Jet Skis, I know how we’re getting out of here.” I know that there’s a seat reserved for you, but no room for me. It’s time to lie like a rug: “The phone isn’t official issue, it’s mine. I bought it unlocked, not on contract. Cost me close to a month’s wages, I really can’t afford to lose it when the shit hits the fan.” I put a whine in my voice: “They’ll take that expenses packet you made me gamble away out of my pay for the next year and I am going to be so screwed—”
“We’re out of range of land,” he says absentmindedly, and his grip relaxes. I swing my legs over the floor and steady myself until the world stops spinning around my head.
“Doesn’t matter: I’m not planning on phoning home. But can I have it back anyway?” I get one foot on the deck outside the ward.
McMurray cocks his head to one side and stares at me. “Okay,” he says, after a moment, during which I feel none of the weirdly otherworldly sense of strangeness that came over me while I was putting one across Eileen in the monitoring center. “You can have your damned phone back tomorrow, before Ramona surfaces. Now stand up—you’re going back to the Mabuse.”
MCMURRAY DETAILS FOUR BLACK BERETS TO ESCORT me back to my room aboard the Mabuse, and it takes all of their combined efforts to get me there. I’m limp as a dishcloth, hungover from whatever drugs Billington’s ta
me Mengele pumped into me. I can barely walk, much less climb into a Zodiac.
It’s dark outside—past sunset, anyway—and the sky is black but for a faint red haze on the western horizon. As we bump up against the side of the Mabuse, where they’ve lowered a boarding platform, I notice the guards are still wearing their trademark items: “Hey, what’s with the mirrorshades?” I ask, slurring my words so that I sound half-drunk. “ ’S nighttime, y’know?”
The goon who’s climbing the steps ahead of me stops and looks round at me. “It’s the eyeliner,” he says finally. “You think wearing mirrorshades at night looks stupid, you should try carrying an MP-5 with a black jumpsuit and a beret while wearing eye shadow.”
“Cosmetics don’t go / with GI Joe,” chants the goon behind me, a semitone out of tune with himself.
“Eye shadow?” I shake my head and manage to climb another step.
“It’s the downside of our terms and conditions of employment,” says Goon Number One. “Some folks have to piss in a cup to pass federally mandated antidrug provisions; we have to wear make-up.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Why would I do a thing like that? I’ve got stock options that’re going to be worth millions after we IPO. If someone offered you stock options worth a hundred million and said you had to wear eyeliner to qualify . . .”
I shake my head again. “Hang on a moment, isn’t TLA Corporation already publicly traded? How can you IPO if it’s already listed on NASDAQ?”
Goon Number Two behind me chuckles. “You got the wrong end of the stick. That’s Install Planetary Overlord, not Initial Public Offering.”
We climb the rest of the steps in silence and I reflect that it makes a horrible kind of sense: if you’re running a ubiquitous surveillance web mediated by make-up, wouldn’t it make sense to plug all your guards into it? Still, it’s going to make breaking out of here a real pain in the neck—much harder than it looked before—if the guards are also nodes in the surveillance system. As we trudge through the corridors of the ship, I speculate wildly. Maybe I can use my link into Eileen’s surveillance network to install an invisibility geas on the server, and use the sympathetic link to their eyes as a contagion tunnel so that they don’t see me. On the other hand, that sort of intricate scheme tends to be prone to bugs—get a single step wrong in the invocation and you might as well be donning a blinking neon halo labeled ESCAPING PRISONER. Right now I’m so tired that I can barely put one foot in front of another, much less plan an intricate act of electronic sabotage: so when we get to my room I stagger over to the bed and lie down before they even have time to close the door.
Lights out.
It’s still dark when I wake up shuddering in the after-shock of a nightmare. I can’t remember exactly what it was about but something has filled my soul to overflowing with a sense of profound horror. I jerk into wakefulness and lie there with my teeth chattering for a minute. It feels like an entire convention of bogeymen has slithered over my grave. The shadows in my room are full of threatening shapes: I reach out and flick the bedside light switch, banishing them. My heart pounds like a diesel engine. I glance at the bedside clock. It’s just turned five in the morning.
“Shit.” I sit up and hold my head in my hands. I’m not making a good showing for myself, I can tell that much: frankly, I’ve been crap. After a moment I stand up and walk over to the door, but it’s locked. No moonlight excursions tonight, I guess. Somewhere a kilometer below the surface, Ramona will be dozing in that chair, slowly decompressing as a nightmare dreams on in the ancient war machine tucked between the ten mechanical grabs on the underside of the retrieval platform. Aboard the Explorer, Billington paces the command center of his operation, those weirdly catlike eyes slitted before the prospect of world domination. Somewhere else on board the Explorer, the treacherous McMurray is waiting for Billington to terminate the Bond geas, so that he can release Ramona’s daemon and then she can assassinate the crazed entrepreneur, delivering JENNIFER MORGUE Site Two into the hands of the Black Chamber.
It’s pretty damn clear now, isn’t it? And what am I doing about it? I’m sitting on my ass in a gilded cage, looking pretty while acting pretty ineffectual. And I keep finding myself mumbling Lie back and think of England, which is just plain humiliating. It’s almost as if Billington has already terminated the invocation that’s binding me to the heroic role—
“Shit,” I say again, startling myself. That’s it! That’s what I should have noticed earlier. The heroic pressure of the geas is no longer bearing down on me, skewing my perspective. I’m back to being myself again, the nerdy guy in the corner. In fact, it feels like I’m being squeezed into a state of fatalistic passivity, waiting for a rescuer to come get me out of this situation. The reason I feel so indecisive and like crap is, I’m going through cold turkey for heroism. Either that or the focus of the Hero trap has shifted—
I check the alarm clock again. It’s now ten past five. What did McMurray say? Sometime today. I pull out the chair and sit down in front of the Media Center PC. Jet Skis on C deck. They’re going to give me my phone back soon. What was the speed dial code? As soon as we’re untangled Charlie Victor is going to kill Billington. Gravedust systems. JENNIFER MORGUE isn’t as dead as McMurray seems to think. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for Billington’s behavior.
“Oh Jesus, we are so fucked,” I groan, and hit the boss key so I can see whether Mo, at least, is safe.
“IT’S LIKE THIS,” SAYS MO, CHECKING THE SEALS on her instrument case once more, “I can do it without attracting attention. Whereas, if you guys do it, you’re not exactly inconspicuous. So leave the job to me.”
She’s sitting on a gray metal platform slung over the side of a gray metal ship. A flashy-looking cigarette boat is tied up next to it, all white fiberglass and chromed trim until you get back to the enclosed cockpit and the two gigantic Mercury outboards in the tail. The man she’s talking to is wearing a wet suit, a bulletproof vest, and horn-rimmed spectacles. “What makes you think you can do it?” he asks, with barely concealed impatience.
“Because it’s what I’ve spent the past four bloody months training for, thank you very much.” She squints at the lock, then nods minutely and puts the case down. “And before you say it’s what you’ve spent the last twenty years specializing in, I’d like to remind you that there are any number of reasons why you shouldn’t go in first, starting with their occult defenses, which are my specialty. Then there’s the small matter of their point defense systems, starting with an Indian Navy sensor suite that Billington’s spent roughly fifty million on, upgrading to NATO current standards. The bigger the initial insertion the greater the risk that it’ll be spotted, and I don’t think you want them to realize they’re being stalked by a Royal Navy task group, do you?”
Barnes nods thoughtfully. “I think you underestimate how fast and hard we can hit them, but yes, it’s a calculated risk. But what makes you think you can do it alone?”
Mo shrugs. “I’m not going in without backup—that would be stupid.” She grins momentarily. “On the other hand, you know how this setup works. If I stay back at HQ it all goes pear-shaped. I think the smart money is riding on them already having retrieved JENNIFER MORGUE: the worst-case operational contingency is that, with Billington’s expertise in necro-cognitive decoding, he also knows how to make it work. I expect any first attempt we make to fail—unless I’m along for the ride and in a position to act out my assigned role in accordance with the geas he’s got running. I’m not trying to be sticky here, I’m just reading the rules.”
“Shit.” Barnes is silent for a moment, evidently running some sort of scenario through his mind’s eye. Then he nods briskly. “All right, you convinced me. One reservation: you’ve got a ten-minute lead, maximum, and not a second longer. If there’s even a hint of instability in the geas field, all bets are off and I’m taking both teams in immediately. Now, one last time—can you enumerate your priorities?”
Captain Barnes clears his throat. “Yes. Which I’m afraid means you just passed Angleton’s cricket test. But you need this, first.” He hands Mo a red-striped document wallet. “Read it, then sign here.”
“Oh dear,” Mo says mildly, running one finger down a series of closely typed paragraphs of legalese drafted by a bunch of Home Office lawyers with too much time on their hands: “Do I have to?”
“Yes,” Barnes says grimly. “You must. That’s also in the rules. They don’t hand these out every day. In fact, they’re so rare I think they probably had to invent it just for you . . .”
“Well, pass me the pen.” Mo scrawls a hasty signature then hands the document back to him. “That all square?”
“Well, there’s one other thing I’d like to add,” Barnes says as he seals the document into a waterproof baggie and passes it to a sailor waiting on the bottom steps of the ladder. “Just between you and me, just because you’ve got the license, it doesn’t mean you’ve got to use it. Remember, you’re going to have to live with yourself afterwards.”
Mo smiles, her lips drawn razor-thin. “It’s not me you should be worrying about.” She picks up a waterproof fiberglass black case and checks the latches on it carefully. “If this goes to pieces, I’m going to have words with Angleton.”
“Really? I’d never have guessed.” Barnes’s tone is withering, but he follows it by sitting down next to Mo and leaning close: “Listen, this is not going to go pear-shaped. One way or another, we’ve got to make it work, even if none of us end up going home. But more importantly—you listen—this isn’t about you, or me, or about Bob, or about Angleton. If the Black Chamber gets their hands on JENNIFER MORGUE it’s going to destabilize everything. But that’s just the start. We don’t know why Billington wants it but the worst-case analyses—well, use your imagination. Watch out for any signs—anything, however small—that suggests Billington isn’t in the driving seat, if you follow my drift. Got that?”
The Jennifer Morgue Page 30