The Jennifer Morgue

by Charles Stross

  “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 down 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 fish-white 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.

  She turns round and says something. I can’t hear a single word over the howling reverberation of her violin.

  “I’ve got to stop him!” I yell. I can barely hear myself. She looks blank, so I point at the door onto the catwalk. “He’s out there!”

  She points at one of the inner doors emphatically, as if suggesting I should head that way instead. So I shake my head and stumble towards the catwalk. Behind me, the flickers of light suggest more electrical fires breaking out among the high-voltage bearers. I lean over the railing and look down dizzily. It’s about twenty meters away—a small target at that range. I fumble with the pistol and switch on the laser. My hand’s shaking. If I’m right—

  The red dot dances across the far wall. I trace it down the wall, swearing under my breath, and run it rapidly across the deck towards the drained floor of the moon pool. I keep my finger away from the trigger. If I’m wrong—

  Billington is an expert at soul-sucking abominations. Now he’s in thrall to another, greater evil: one with a damaged body, so he’s provided it with a convenient temporary replacement while he comes up with enough sacrificial victims and spare parts to repair its original one. What entity aboard this ship exhibits all the personality traits of a cold-blooded killing machine, combined with the monstrous, overweening vanity and laziness of a convalescent war god lounging in their personal Valhalla while their minions prepare their armor? There’s only one answer.

  The Persian tomcat sits underneath the alien horror, washing itself without concern. “C’mon, Fluffy,” I tell it. “Show me what you are.” We all know about cats and lasers. Lasers are the best cat toy ever invented: the red-dot machine that comes out for playtime. Used skillfully, you can make a cat chase the dot so slavishly that she’ll run headfirst into a wall. It’s like the sitting-in-cardboard-boxes thing, or the sniffing-an-extended-finger reflex. All cats do it, unless they’re so enervated that they choose to ignore the lure and groom their fur instead.

  Fluffy takes a few seconds to lock on, and when he does, his respon
se is immediate and drastic. He glances down at the deck, sees the red dot dancing around nearby—and dashes away like his tail’s on fire.

  “Bob! We’ve got to get out of here! Ellis has gotten away.” I look round. Mo stands in the doorway, one hand cupped around an ear: “There are scuttling charges due to blow as soon as he’s clear—”

  It’s déjà vu all over again. At least her eyeballs aren’t glowing blue and she isn’t levitating. I shake my head and point down at the moon pool: “Help me! We’ve got to stop him!”

  “Who’s the target?” Mo ducks out and stands beside me.

  “Him!” I pull the trigger. There’s an ear-stinging ricochet a fraction of a second after the shot. I’m nowhere near the target. “Damn, missed.”

  “Bob, we’ve got to get out of here! Can you still feel that Black Chamber bitch? The chromatic disintermediator should have broken your entanglement, but—why are you trying to shoot that cat?”

  “Because—” I squeeze off another shot “—it’s possessed!”

  “Bob.” She looks at me as if I’m mad. There’s a loud bang from inside the control room, and a human figure in a black beret runs out onto the sealed doors flooring the pool: I shoot instinctively and miss, and he dives for cover. “Leave the fucking cat—hey, that’s Billington down there!” She raises her instrument and prepares to let fly.

  The cat squirts out across the floor, a white blur targeting the downed bad guy. I shoot again, and again, and keep missing. “Not Billington! Get the cat!”

  Mo sniffs skeptically. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m goddamn sure!” Billington’s standing in front of the iron maiden, as if steeling himself to jump inside. “It’s the enemy! Get it now, or we’re fucked!”

  Mo raises her violin, squints darkly down at the deck below us, and drops a noise like a million felines being disemboweled down on top of Fluffy. Who opens his fanged maw to howl, then explodes like a gore-filled, white dandelion head. Mo turns and looks at me harshly. “That looked just like a perfectly ordinary cat to me. If you’ve—”

  “It was possessed by the animation nexus behind JENNIFER MORGUE Two!” I gabble. “The clue—he saw a laser dot and dodged—”

  “Bob. Back up a moment.”

  “Yes?”

  “The cat. You said it was the enemy. You didn’t say it was occupied by the mind of that thing?” She points up at the ceiling, where the chthonic warrior is definitely twitching and writhing. I stare.

  “Uh, well, I meant—”

  “And you thought killing it would improve matters?”

  “Yes?”

  One of the bole-like knots in the warrior’s hide is growing larger. Then it opens, revealing an eye the size of a truck tire. It stares right back at me.

  She clouts me on the back of the head: “Run!”

  The huge tentacle slams down onto the deck where Ellis Billington kneels in supplication before his god, landing with a percussive clang that rattles the remaining windows and reduces him to a greasy stain on the bulkhead. Which is probably why Mo and I survive: we stumble back through the control room doorway about two seconds before the tree-trunk-thick limb slams into the wall with the force of a runaway locomotive. Support trusses scream and buckle beneath the blow. I start coughing and my eyes water immediately. The air is gray with smoke and thick with the greasy fish-oil smell of burning insulation. I thump the big red button beside the door and metal shutters begin to drop down behind the broken glass—maybe it’s too little too late, but at least it makes me feel better. “Where’s Ramona? We’ve got to get her out of here!”

  Mo glares at me. “What makes you think rescuing her’s on my list of mission objectives? You’re disentangled, aren’t you?”

  I stare back at her, wondering who the hell she thinks she is, barging in here with her Class A thaumaturgic weapons. Then I blink and remember sharing a slow breakfast with her back before all this started, all those endless weeks ago—Is that all? “I think I know what you’re thinking,” I say slowly, feeling an awful weary emptiness inside me, “but that’s not what’s been going on between us. And if you leave her because you’re jealous, you’ll be making a mistake you can never undo. Plus, you’ll be leaving her to that.”

  JENNIFER MORGUE thumps against the outside of the security shutters, sending a shower of glass daggers crackling and clinking across the floor. The shutters bend but they hold: something’s clearly wrong with the beast, or it should have been out of the moon pool by now, leaving a twisted trail of titanium structural members behind it. Dumping the controlling intelligence out of its temporary host body must have awakened the chthonian prematurely, still deathly weak and hungry. Mo doesn’t look away from my face. She’s searching me for something, some sign. I stare at her, wondering which way she’s going to jump, whether the geas has gone to her head: if it has conferred not only the power that goes with her role, but also the callousness.

  After a few seconds Mo looks away. “We’ll sort this out later.”

  I stumble back towards the sacrifice chairs. Ramona is still out. I rest a palm on her forehead, then snatch it back fast: she’s fever-hot. “Give me a hand . . .” I manage to get one arm over my shoulder and begin to lift her off the chair, but in my present state I’m too weak. Just as my knees begin to give out under me someone takes her other arm. “Thanks—” I glance round her lolling head.

  “This way, mate.” The apparition grins at me around its regulator. “Sharpish!”

  “If you say so.” More black-clad figures appear—this time, wearing wet suits and body armor. “Is Alan here?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Because—” there’s a crashing noise from the far wall, and I wince “—there’s an alien horror on the other side of that wall and it wants in bad. Make sure somebody tells him.” I start coughing: the air in here becoming unbreathable.

  “Ah, Bob, exactly the man! Don’t worry about the eldritch horror, we’ve got a plan for this contingency—as soon as we’ve evac’d we’ll just pop a brace of Storm Shadows on his ass and send him right back down where he came from. But you’re exactly the man I was hoping to see. How are you doing, old chap? Got a Sitrep on the opposition for me?”

  I blink, bleary-eyed. It’s Alan all right: wearing scuba gear and a communications headset only the Borg could love, he still manages to look like an excitable schoolteacher. “I’ve had better days. Look, the primary opposition movers are dead, and I think Charlie Victor might be amenable to an offer of political asylum if the rite of unbinding did what I think it did to her, but about the Smart car on the drilling deck—”

  “Yes, yes, I know it’s a bit scorched around the edges and there are some bullet holes, but you don’t have to worry: the Auditors won’t mind normal wear and tear—”

  “No, that’s not it.” I try to focus. “In the boot. There’s a tablecloth with a diorama wrapped up in it. Would you mind having one of your lads blow it up? Otherwise all the Bond mojo zapping around in here is going to follow us home and wreck any chance of me and Mo getting back together again for anything but a one-night stand.”

  “Ah! Good thinking.” Alan pushes a button and mutters into his mike. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah.” Either there’s a lot of gray smoke in here, or—“I’m feeling dizzy. Just let me sit down, for a moment . . .”

  Epilogue

  THREE’S COMPANY

  IT’S AUGUST IN ENGLAND, AND I’M ALMOST FUNCTIONING on British Summer Time again. We’re having another heat wave, but up here on the Norfolk coast it’s not so bad: there’s an onshore breeze coming in from the Wash, and while it isn’t exactly cold, it feels that way after the Caribbean.

  We call this place the Village: it’s an old in-joke. Once upon a time it was a hamlet, a village in all respects save its lack of a parish church. It was one of three churchless hamlets that had clustered in this area, and the last of them still standing, for the others slid under the waves a long time ago. There was only the one
meandering road in the vicinity, and it was potholed and poorly maintained. Go back sixty or seventy years and you’d find it was home to a small community of winkle-pickers and fishermen who braved the sea in small boats. They were a curious, pale, inbred lot, not well liked by the neighbors up and down the coast, and they kept to themselves. Some of them, it’s said, kept to themselves so efficiently that they never left the company of their own kind from birth unto death.

  But then the Second World War intervened. And someone remembered the peculiar paper the village doctor had tried to publish in the Lancet, back in the ’20s, and someone else noticed its proximity to several interesting underwater obstructions, and, with the stroke of a pen, the War Ministry relocated everyone who lived next to the waterline. And the men from MI6 Department 66 came and installed electricity and telephones and concrete coastal defense bunkers, and they rerouted the road so that it doubled back on itself and missed the village completely before merging with the road to the next hamlet up the coast. And they systematically erased the Village from the Ordinance Survey’s public maps, and from the post office, and from the discourse of national life. In a very real sense, the Village is as far away from England as Saint Martin, or the Moon. But in another sense, it’s still too close for comfort.

  Today, the Village has the patina of neglect common to building developments that subsist on the largess of government agencies, and rely for their maintenance on duct tape and the extensive use of the power of Crown Immunity to avoid planning requirements. It’s not a white-painted picturesque Italianate paradise like Portmeirion, and we inmates aren’t issued numbers instead of names. But there’s a certain resemblance to that other Village—and there is, overlooking the harbor mole, a row of buildings that includes an old-fashioned pub with paint peeling from the wooden decking outside, worn linoleum floors, and hand-pumps that dispense a passable if somewhat briny brew.

  I came up from London yesterday, after the board of enquiry met to hear the report on the outcome of the JENNIFER MORGUE business. It’s over now, buried deep in the secret files in the Laundry stacks below Mornington Crescent tube station. If you’ve got a high enough clearance you can get to read them—just go ask the librarians for CASE BROCCOLI GOLDENEYE. (Who says the classification office doesn’t have a sick sense of humor?)