The Jennifer Morgue

by Charles Stross

  Now, the ejector system Pinky and Brains have bolted to the engine block of this car is not the kind you get in a fifth-generation 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 sunroof 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.

  “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 BILLINGTON, 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, facing 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 finger 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 an
d 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, but . . . 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 gray-painted 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 tenth-decile under-performers on the sales force . . . ah, yes.” He glances at his watch. “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 baitworm 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 press
ure 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—