Authors: Charles Stross
Jennifer Morgue (24 page)
''I'm okay.'' Ramona's inner voice is tense, like she's breathing for two of us.
''Slow down, then.'' There's a great beige wall looming behind us in the gloom, bulging closer to the pillar. In the distance I see the streamlined torpedo silhouettes of hunting fishes. ''Let's get between the pillar and the cliff face.'' Distant plopping, bubbling noises from above. ''Here they come.'' Ramona peers up towards the surface.
''C'mon.'' The cleft between the pillar and the rock face is about a meter wide at this depth. I swim into it then reach out and take her hand. She drifts towards me, still staring up at the distant sky, as I pull her into the shadow of the pillar.
''How long can we hide down here? If they figure we're just skinny-dippers, they may not think to come this deep.''
''No such luck.'' She closes her eyes and leans back against me. '' Have you ever killed anyone, Bob?''
''Have I ever ...?'' It depends what you mean by anyone. ''Only paranormal entities. Does that count?''
''No. Has to be human.'' She tenses. ''I should have asked earlier.''
''What do you mean, has to be human?''
''That's an oversight,'' she says tightly. ''You were supposed to be blooded.''
''What are you — ''
''The geas. You have to kill one of them.'' She turns round slowly, her hair swirling around her head like a dark halo. Here we are under twenty meters of seawater and my mouth's gone as dry as the desert. ''There are steps you have to carry out in sequence in order to adopt your role in the eigenplot. Jeopardy in a distant city, meet the dark anima, kill one of the other side's assassins — at least one, more would be better — and then we have to figure out a way around my — damn, here they come. We'll have to cover this later. Get ready.'' She shoves something hard into my hand. After a moment's confusion I realize it's the handle of a vicious-looking knife with a serrated edge. Then she vanishes into the shadows lining the cliff face. I glance round as a shadow glides overhead: tracking up and over I see a diver in a wetsuit, head down, peering into the depths.
I pass through a moment of acute disbelief and resentment.
I've been in mortal danger before, but I'm not used to being in mortal danger from humans. It feels wrong. Any one of Alan's mad bastards is probably capable of whacking half a dozen al Qaeda irregulars before breakfast and not working up an existential sweat, but I'm not prepared for this. I can shoot at targets, sure, and I'm death on wheels when it comes to terminating cases of demonic possession with extreme prejudice, but the idea of killing a real human being in cold blood, some eating breathing sleeping guy with a job on a rich man's yacht, makes all the alarm bells in my head go tilt.
Trouble is, I also have a deep conviction in my guts that whatever the hell Ramona is on about, she's right. I'm here for a purpose, and I've got to move my feet through the occult dance steps in the right sequence or it'll all be for nothing. And it doesn't matter what I want or don't want if Angleton's right and Billington is gearing up to drop the hammer on us. When you come down to it, if there's a war on, the bombs don't care whether they're falling on pacifists or patriots. And speaking of bombs ...
The diver has seen something. Either that or he's into swimming head down into the depths beside a decaying defense station just for the hell of it. He's heading parallel to the pillar and he's got something in his arms. I glance down and see Ramona below me her skin a silvery flash like moonlight on ice, circling the pillar. My chest tightens. A stab of anger: ''What the hell are you playing at?''
''Hanging my ass out to give you a clear shot.'' She sounds lighthearted, but I can tell she's wound up like a watch spring inside. I taste the overspill of her uncertainty: Is he up to it? And my blood runs cold, because under the uncertainty, she harbors the rock-solid-conviction that, if I'm not up to it, we're both going to die.
Outmaneuvered.
The guy above me is turning in tight circles as he descends, keeping an eye open for signs of an ambush as he heads towards Ramona, who is feigning a false sense of security, her back to the outside of the cliff next to the point where the pillar merges with it in a jagged mass of crumpled volcanic rock. I shelter in the cleft between pillar and cliff as he strokes steadily down, hugging the far side of the pillar from Ramona. In his arms he's clutching something that looks like a shotgun, if shotguns had viciously barbed harpoons jutting from their muzzles. Just great, I think. What was it Harry the Horse tried to beat into my head? Never bring a dagger to a harpoon duel, or something like that.
My luck runs out while he's still about three meters above me, ten meters above Ramona. He slows his corkscrew, peering into the shadowy cleft, and I see a change in his posture.
Shit. Everything happens in nightmarish slow-mo. I've got my feet braced against the pillar and I let go
like a spring, kicking straight up towards him, knife-first. Something sizzles past my shoulder, drawing a hot line across my chest, then I ram him with my shoulder. He's already tumbling out of the way of my knife and I try and bring it back round towards him. I can't breathe — I'm out of range of Ramona's gills — and in a bleak flash of clarity I realize I'm going to die here. The pressure in my chest eases as he takes a swing at me with a knife I sense rather than see, but I'm inside his reach and I grab his forearm and we go tumbling. He's strong but I'm desperate and disoriented and I somehow manage to get my other arm around his neck and something snags my knife. I yank on it as hard as I can, as he tenses his knife arm — we're arm-wrestling at this point — and something gives way. He thrashes spasmodically and lets go, kicks towards the surface, and there's a silvery stream of bubbles rising above him that's much too big and bright to be normal.
Ramona's right below me. ''Let's go,'' she gasps, tugging at my ankle. ''Deeper!''
''But I just — ''
''I know what you just did! Come on before they do it right back to us! Nobody in their right mind dives alone.'' She lets go for a moment, kicks out, and moves her grip to my arm. ''Let's move it.'' She rolls us round and pulls me away from the pillar, back up towards the murky gloom beneath the defense platform. I feel her fear and let it pull me along behind her, but my mind's not home: I'm not feeling queasy, exactly, but I've got a lot to think about. ''We've got to get back to the tunnel,'' she says urgently.
''The tunnel? Why?''
''They'll have searched it first. And most divers don't like confined spaces, caves. I figure they'll concentrate on the open waters outside the reef, now they've got the sighting.
We just wait them out.''
''In the tunnel.'' What are we doing here? I shake my head. What's it all for?
I keep rerunning the video stream captured in my mind's eye, the silvery parabola of bubbles rising above the drowning diver — ''We're missing something important,'' Ramona muses darkly.
''How did they find us?''
''Not sure. They've opened a channel to let them bring their minions in, but the core defensive wards are still working, you're cleaner than — '' She blinks at me. ''Oh. That's how.'' The ceiling is right above our heads now, the dome set into it framing the deeper blackness of the tunnel. ''What is it?''
''I was wrong about them planting a tracker on you.
They don't need to bug you,'' she says tersely. ''They can find you anywhere. All they have to do is zero in on the eigenplot. Except here, right where you're shielded by the defense platform's wards, even if they have hacked a tunnel right through them to let their associates in ...
''What is this eigenplot you keep talking about?'' I ask.
I'm dangerously close to whining. I really hate it when everyone else around me seems to know more about what's going on than I do.
''The geas Billington's running. It's the occult equivalent of a stateful firewall. It keeps out intruders, unless they run through the approach states in a permitted sequence. The sequence is determined by the laws of similarity and contagion, drawing on a particularly powerful source archetype. When you run through them, that's called 'walking the eigenplot,' and you're doing it real well so far. Only a few people can do it at all — you can but I can't, for example — and there's an added catch: You can't do it if you know what the requirements are beforehand, it doesn't permit recursive attacks.
That's why you're just going to have to be brave and ...'' she trails off''... shit. Forget I said that bit. I mean forget it.
You'll just have to see for yourself.'' She centers herself under the pitch-black rectangle of the tunnel mouth. ''C'mon.''
''But you said — ''
''lf we're outside the tunnel we're not shielded. You want to learn how to breathe with a harpoon through you?''
''No way.'' I swim closer to her, until we're both right under the mouth. ''I nearly drowned last time we went through here.''
''The effect's attenuated only a couple of meters in.
Closer. Hug me. Not like that, like this.'' She wraps her arms and legs around me. ''Think you can swim? Straight up, until you don't feel like you're drowning?''
''Like I'm going to say no?'' I look into her eyes from so close that we're almost touching noses. ''Okay. Just this once. For you.'' Then I kick off straight up, into the black heart of the drowning zone.
Bands of steel around my chest. A pounding in my ears.
Then the clean air of a spring meadow, Ramona's arms cradling me, her legs entwined around me, her lips locked against mine like a lovesick mermaid trying to kiss the drowned sailor back to life — or infuse his blood with oxygen through force of proximity alone.
Ob. We're in the tunnel. Totally black, walls either side of me, five meters of water between my head and the heavy iron grating, nothing but delirium's arms holding my sanity together. Distracting me. I am distracted. It's incongruous.
There are divers out there hunting the waters for us, and here I'm getting an erection. Ramona's tongue, tentacular, searches my lips. She's aroused, I can feel it like an itch at the back of my mind.
''This is a really bad idea,'' I overhear her thinking.
''We're feeding off each other.'' I'm drowning. I'm horny. I'm drowning. I'm — feedback. Too far apart and I start to choke, too close together and I start noticing her body, and whichever I'm paying attention to bleeds through into her head. ''Got to stop.''
''Tell me about it.'' An uneasy thought. ''How much of this before the Other notices?''
''It's not ready yet — I think.'' She pulls back a few centimeters while I concentrate on not thinking about drowning. ''How long do you think we've been down here?''
''I've lost track,'' I admit. ''Half an hour?'' I lean back against the rough wall of the tunnel that shouldn't exist. ''Longer?''
''Damn.'' I can feel the clockwork of her thoughts, tasting of rusty iron. It's like there's a weird tube of pressure squeezing us together down here; the tunnel is a flaw in the countermeasure wards, but outside it there's an almost unimaginable amount of power chained down and directed towards the exclusion of occult manifestations — like our own entanglement. Threatening to crush us to a bloody paste between walls of concrete. ''Can we leave yet?''
''Your breathlessness — have you ever been claustrophobic before?'' Is that what it is? ''Great time to find out.'' I shudder and my heart tries to flutter away.
''We're in as much danger if we stay down here as if we surface '' she announces. ''Come on. Slowly.'' Still locked together, we finger-and-toe our way up the narrow chimney in the rock, feeling ahead for rough bumps and the joints between concrete castings. As we rise, the nightmare awareness of my own death begins to fade. All too soon we reach the grating at the top, a cold wall of rusty iron.
I tense up and try not to give in to the scream that's bubbling up inside. ''Can you lift it?'' I ask.
''On my own? Shit.'' I feel her straining. ''Help me!'' I brace my legs against one wall and my back against the opposite and raise my arms; Ramona leans against me and puts her back into it, too. The roof gives a little. I tense and shove hard, putting all my fear of drowning into it, and the lid squeals and lifts free above us. ''Turn!'' I start twisting, rotating the rectangular lid so that when we let go it won't settle back into place. There's a roaring in my ears. I can hear my pulse. And suddenly I'm choking underwater with a lungful of air: we've lost skin contact and I'm going to have aching muscles tomorrow — if there is a tomorrow — and I can't get enough oxygen, so I kick out in near panic and the lid slides away and I kick out again, rising nightmarishly slowly towards the silver ceiling high above me, with my lungs on fire. Then I'm on the surface, bobbing like a cork in a barrel and I breathe out explosively and start to inhale just as a wave comes over the top of the reef and the platform and breaks over me.
The next few seconds are crazy and painful and I'm coughing and spluttering and close to panic again. But Ramona's in the water with me and she's a strong swimmer, and the next thing I know I'm on my back, coughing up my guts as she tows me towards the shallows like a half-drowned kitten. Then there's sand under my feet and an arm round my shoulders.
"Can you walk"
I try to talk, realize it's a bad idea, and nod instead. A sidelong glance tells me her glamour's back in place. "Don't look back. There's a dive boat just over the far side of the reef and they're looking out to sea. I figure we've got maybe two minutes before they check their tracker ward and see you're showing up again. Have you got any smoke screens on that fancy phone of yours?
Think fast. I try to remember what I've loaded on it, remember the block I put on the car, and nod again. I'm not certain it'll work, but if it doesn't we're fresh out of options.
"Okay." We're about waist-deep now. "Blanket's over there. Think you can run"
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