by Lamb, Robert
He hears the door open and shut behind him. Bomb Tet.
The list drops out of his brain, back into the cognitive depths.
"I've got some new ones," Rondo spits, his lips moving just a little too fast as the drug reverberates through his brain. "Some real mind-bogglers."
He pulls out the sketchpad, but when he turns round he quite uncontrollably crumples its spine in his clinched fist.
The stranger before him wears a red police officer’s uniform.
The face resembles everyone he's ever met. No one he's ever known. Just looking at it makes Rondo feel woozy. Somehow the wooziness shuts down the fear, locks down the impulse to flee.
The only exit is blocked.
Unless he can fit down one of the toilets.
Which alien life from has the largest bowl movements? Could he really do it? Could he flush himself to safety?
He reaches for the fuck gun under his coat, but the red cop lunges with inhuman speed and sends him flailing backwards. The gun fires an orgasmic pulse through the wall, skids across the tiles and underneath the toilet stalls.
Rondo lands hard, right on the bulk of the synesthesope. He feels it break and a sharp pain blasts through his rips. The ear bud crackles and whines. His vision blurs a little. Sounds leak into colors.
He scrambles up onto his side, then to his knees and looks up at the stranger. The uniform is red, the buttons and gloves are all red. The badge shaped like an inverted triangle.
Red. Red. Red.
Rondo screams and raises his arm to shield himself from the advancing cop, just as the damaged synesthesope flashes once more and Hellish moans flood his brain.
Red turns to black and a thing of chitinous plates and whip-like appendages looms over him. At least six arms uncoil, each terminating in cruel snapping beaks.
Rondo's scream bleeds out. Becomes a groan of breathless agony as the police officer in red reaches down to him with a human hand, as if to lay some blessed anointment on his skull.
Then Rondo's torso splits in half, erupting in a fountain of spewing gore, shattered bone and garlands of tattered entrails.
TransGenesis
Joll bowed his skull beneath the showerhead and let the water batter his bald scalp. He felt it cascade down his shoulders, snake paths along sinew and branching vein. As the drug took hold, fear fell away from him like a cloak -- vanished into the unconscious dark beneath him.
He had to be at his best. A goddamn tightrope awaited him, strung between unpleasant truths and mutually beneficial lies.
How had Michael Stewart, his boss at UDEX Oil, put it? Oh yeah: "What's good for the deep is well good for us. They feed you a line of shit; you fucking well swallow it and tell 'em it tastes like neo-fucking-politan. Make sure they believe you believe it too. Then you can swim back home and tell me what those fishy fucks are actually up to."
The prick's final bit of advice was the most telling: "And don't you dare slip your cock into anything on Mariana Station -- I shouldn't even have to fucking mention that part."
Beyond the cylindrical enclosure of frosted glass, Joll could still make out the steady hum of the air vents, the rumble and groan of the sub's carapace adjusting to external pressure.
We're still descending, he thought with a renewed calm. Still sinking with horrible trajectory.
He'd departed the Gorman Spar3 platform roughly 48 hours ago -- the lone passenger aboard a fully automated vessel.
For the most part, it was your standard subsea cargo crawler, except UDEX Oil had fixed up with the one "plush" apartment for human transport. By the looks of things, the cabin hadn't been used in a decade. The linins, the walls -- everything reeked slightly of mold and sour air.
The only redeeming feature was the fully stocked mini bar.
The sub was a leftover from the old days, when UDEX occasionally sent a single VIP down to one of their seafloor drilling and routing facilities. Now they had special vessels for that sort of thing -- goddamn pleasure barges of the deep. A half dozen Big Oil suits could tend to their investments that way, along with all the drugs, free-flowing booze and coke-tempered whores they could stand. They'd blow their descent in style, numbing their shit-streaked souls for what awaited them on the ocean floor.
Joll spat into the space between his feet, watched the whisky-darkened thread of saliva spiral down the drain.
His thoughts began to wander back to the "training regimen" as Stewart called it, his last two weeks spent in an underground Tokyo brothel. Two weeks, and he remembered only fragments of it.
Then he heard it again: a creak of hinges in the cabin beyond the frosted glass.
He strained to hear past the sounds of water and machinery, caught the slightest hint of something else.
A whisper?
He waited five seconds, then cut the water and opened the glass door. He stepped out onto the hardwoods, immersed in steam and a chemical calm. He shot a quick glance at the mirror and glimpsed his reflection.
He was six feet of sinuous muscle, scars and tattoos. A few of the tats were old punk logos form his youth: a dancing Christ on his left forearm, a ceremonial dagger on the right. But the main event these days was the swastikas.
The swirling symbols capped each of his seven chakras: one atop his skull like some sort of permanent fucking kippah, another marking the third eye on his forehead. Five more trailed down his neck and torso, marking throat, solar plexus, stomach, lower abdomen and the shaved void just above the base of his cock.
Of course they were a special sort of swastika: fucking Elder signs. That counted for something in the deep.
The calm wavered through him as he toweled off. He strolled over toward the mini bar and snatched up the glass of Jack Daniels, never taking his eyes off his surroundings.
Where are you?
Wetting his lips, he moved to the dresser. He lay the glass down next to his wallet and keys.
Are you watching me?
The ice cubes had barely clinked before he'd grabbed up one of his slender, black throwing knives and tucked it against his inner wrist. You couldn't buy a better blade. Anyone else palmed one and you'd be hard pressed to cut a sandwich in half with it.
The two implants in Joll's thumb and ring finger, however, triggered just the right signal, sending the microscopic nanoids along the edges scurrying into a new position: a razor-sharp edge.
Yeah, he liked to shave with 'em too.
"Best come on out," he announced, his voice thick with lazy hostility. "If you're look'n to get the drop on me, now's the best chance you'll get."
He glanced over at the hatch, which lead to the rest of the cargo hold. The wheel was slightly askew from its original position.
Why hadn't he heard that?
Stay sharp…
"Or are you look'n to make introductions?" he asked. "I'm about as approachable now as I'm likely to get."
He walked toward the king-sized bed, not quite willing to stoop and look underneath it.
The closet, perhaps? The hinges looked the part.
He flipped the throwing knife over into a striking grip.
A very light blade: his specialty.
"I'm gonna count to three," he said.
He eyed the two possible hiding places, uncertain where to strike. He smelled nothing out of the ordinary, heard no labored breathing.
"One."
Closet or bed?
"Two."
Gotta choose, man…
"Wait!"
The high, feminine shriek hung suspended in the air.
The closet, then.
"Step out where I can see ya," he said. "Right fucking now."
He flipped the knife around into a throwing grip, raised it high. One flick and he could sink the goddamn handle into even the thickest subhuman skull.
The door creaked open.
Two large, glassy eyes stared out at him from beside a cluster of wire clothes hangers -- a pale, skinny blond dressed in a blue UDEX jumpsuit. She held a handful o
f white towels in a death grip.
Trembling, she locked eyes with him for just a second before her timid gaze dropped, perhaps to the swastika marking his Svadhisthana chakra -- or maybe the flaccid length of meat dangling just beneath it.
He smelled the bitter stench of urine in the air, watched her eyes shoot up to his raised throwing knife.
Bingo…
There it was, then: The rape fears of a frightened girl, the appraisal of a desperate woman wondering what indignity awaited her next. But she wasn't screaming and cowering at the sight of the tats, wasn't babbling in some guttural fish tongue. While her large eyes hinted at a touch of tainted blood, but she didn't have much of the "Innsmouth look" as most English-speaking folks still called it.
Still, even if she wasn't a smouthie…
"Please, I was just… I mean, you're not--"
He turned and, with perfect fluidity, brought his throwing arm down in a blurred arch.
The black blade seemed to vanish and reappear instantly in the wood paneling with a hollow thunk.
A metallic whine lingered in the air. The girl whimpered.
She backed herself farther into the cramped closet, spilling wire hangers to the floor all around her.
He raised his palms and forced his smile into the least threatening variation he was capable of.
"Look," he said, "You ain't exactly pushing my rape-buttons, sweetie, so calm down. I am a bit curious, however, why you stowed away aboard a Mariana Trench cargo sub."
She shivered and didn't answer.
"You care for a drink?"
***
He managed to talk her out of the closet after that, even got her to gulp down a little vodka and clean up in the shower.
While the water was running, Joll slipped into a black gi and poured himself another whiskey, adding a single drop of inky-black liquid from the little bottle he'd purchased in Yokohama.
The booze masked most of the taste -- undertones of licorice and bile. "Onii Kuro," the withered old apothecary had called it, but they had a different name for it in every port.
Fear, apprehension, anxiety -- all of it just dissipated into nothing with a drop of the stuff. A renewed sense of focus rose up in its place.
He wondered everyday how he'd ever lived without it. Sometimes he'd find himself twisting the weird glass bottle back and forth in the light to watch it move.
What was it even made from?
When the girl finally finished her shower, she emerged in a ridiculous bustle of towels to hide her waxy little body.
He directed her toward one of two reading chairs in the cabin. After a little introductory prodding, he got another drink in her -- and got her talking.
She told him her name was Mara and that she'd managed to get herself aboard Gorman Spar3 platform with a galley job -- one of the few whites among a mostly Indonesian and Pilipino staff. Then she'd arranged to get herself smuggled aboard a cargo sub bound for Mariana Trench Station. She said they did that sort of thing "on the reg." She didn't have to tell him what they asked for in return.
The whole plan was for her to take up inside the insulated and heated cabin once they'd departed -- only it wasn't empty like they'd said. The deeper the sub went, the chillier it got. When she'd heard Joll in the shower, she'd decided to risk stealing something to bundle up in.
"All right, I buy that," he said. "But why the trench?"
"Same reason as anybody. For work."
He practically snorted his drink.
"Work? On the edge of the fucking Mariana?"
"I don't--."
"Show me your forearm."
She knew there was no fooling him. She turned her head with a face full of disgust, and then pulled one of the white towels back to reveal the unmistakable letters just below her wrist: TGO.
"Well that explains it," he said.
She jerked the towel back over the mark. He didn't need to look to know she had the same etched above her groin and over the crack of her ass.
TGO.
Transgenic Organism.
The message was simple: Do not fuck this.
He sighed.
"Explain," he said. "You don't have but a touch of the look and you're nowhere near ready to take to the deep. Hell, you pass for human well enough to get yerself halfway around the world to the Gorman platform, so what gives?"
She didn't answer.
"You running from something? Is that it?"
Nothing
"Look at me!"
She did -- met his eyes. She looked into all three of the visible chakras and didn’t flinch. It was enough to make a full-blooded Deep One piss blood and die.
Old magic, that.
Long before the Nazis appropriated it, the sign already littered ruins older than names. Hell, there were whole islands out there in the South Seas where the Deep Ones wouldn't venture for feat of it. The shit was hardwired into their genes.
Of course, when it came to transgenics, the Elder Sign only worked on those that were pretty far gone. Ones like Mara, a decade or more away from even the first telltale signs of alopecia, just knew what the sign meant.
He asked again.
"Why there?"
Her glassy stare began to boil with indignation.
Good. Let it flow.
"You ever been to the shanty towns, mister?" she asked. "You ever walk through the Ghettos of New Orleans or Mobile, where they'll call ya a gigger right to yer face? Where the drunks throw bottles of piss or worse at any smouthie they catch walk'n out by themselves?"
"No," he said evenly, "Can't say that I have."
But of course he had.
He'd seen the sea-side sprawls of Nhava Sheva, where slack-faced children wrestled for scraps in third-world squalor, while their dull-eyed parents stumbled around lean-tos and candlelit temples in the rusted bellies of tankers and where the worst gazed out with drooling idiot grins at the broken promise of the Indian Ocean. He'd seen much the same in the seaside slums of Rotterdam, Shanghai and Jersey, where transgenics, hybrids, TGOs, giggers or whatever you chose to call them lined the shit-strewn beaches in grim, malnourished, glassy-eyed misery like something washed up from an oil spill in hell.
Every port -- damn near every beach, moving inward with the rising ocean levels. Thus was the world.
The second oil age.
She dropped her eyes.
"It's no life worth living,” she said. “Behind wire fences, harassed by drunks and pervs. A couple of them got a hold of my cousin, raped her and slashed her up with them Elder marks. I couldn't stick around after that…"
"So, you think you'll have it easier down there?"
"Couldn't be much worse, could they?" she asked with a sneer. "Besides, ma's bedridden with her mutations, just like my gram. The change comes slow with some, comes on all wrong with others. Women in my family seem to get the worst of both. I don't intend to spend my final years bloated in some government care ward, beg'n for a sea that won't have me. Besides, they say the change comes easier down there…"
Joll nodded, the details of the dossier weaving through his brain.
Mariana Station…
It all sounded plausible. The treaty between most non-Muslim governments and the Deep Ones provided a certain degree of protection for half-breeds, but it was hardly a separate-but-equal arrangement. Thus, the slums. Thus, the widespread abuses. For the most part, transgenics avoided the indignity of public, state-sanctioned persecution (to say nothing of the genocides in Innsmouth, Dubai and Guam) but that didn't mean anyone was bending over backwards to establish a fucking smouthie wellness policy.
Still, there were places transgenics enjoyed more freedom, or even considerable power. On Mariana Station smouthies and humans worked side-by-side and conferred with the Deep Ones to plunder the richest oil reserves on Earth.
Complicated issue, that.
The stakes had been high towards the end of the energy crisis, with alternative ventures floundering to keep up with demands. Humanit
y had built a world dependent on the blood of its host, and it seemed they'd finally sucked the bastard dry.
There was still plenty of oil down there, of course -- you just had to reach down miles to trench-floor drilling locations, and then drill down miles deeper into the very bones of the planet. At those depths, frigid temperatures gave way to boiling magma.
Simply put, that put unrealistic demands on conventional technology. The pressure alone could crush a sub like a snail shell -- but not a Deep One. And there were ever worse things waiting in the black cracks of the world.
The Deep Ones had a special resource, one that ensured the new oil boom.
Shoggoth.
For most, the word meant nothing. Few had ever even heard stories, much less seen one. Yet without the shoggoth, the industrialized world would grind to a halt. The Deep Ones used the amorphous things as slave labor, toiling in depths far beyond the grasp of man.
The world was already two decades into the treaty now, with both sides' reaping the benefits. The humans got their precious oil and the Deep Ones got to maintain their "breeding programs," for whatever that was worth.
And there was one more thing, of course. The suits from Big Oil had to make their regular trips down to powwow – trips that seemed at first glance a corporate extravagance. But Joll knew the truth.
Those VIP subs were more sacrificial altar than pleasure barge. Yeah, they'd leave port loaded with the finest whores money could buy: the destitute granddaughters of ruined oil sultans, Brazilian models and she-male beauties financed by heads of state. They'd roll out with chefs, servants, fine wines and pharmaceutical treasure troves. But where was all that when the subs finally returned home to their surface ports?
It was always the same story: An empty vessel save the oilmen themselves and their haunted silence.
Perhaps this woman really did think Mariana Station offered some degree of solace to a lost and abuse-shattered life. Maybe the change did come easier down there.
For Joll, the station offered a single sit-down interview and the hope for few simple answers to prevent any more shit rolling downhill. In another 12 hours they'd reach their destination and, on behalf of UDEX Oil, he'd find out just why the last VIP sub had returned home with board member Andrew Stewart Varney missing.