Jennifer Morgue (42 page)
Authors: Charles Stross
The ship's superstructure hangs in the air like a hallucination heeled over through almost ninety degrees. Loose life rafts and stores tumble across the deck and fall into the sea.
With majestic slowness it begins to roll back upright — warships aren't designed to capsize easily — and I steel myself for the inevitable backwash when four or five thousand tons of ship go under I floor the accelerator pedal to open up some distance behind us which is, of course, the cue for the engine to die.
There's an embarrassed beep from the dashboard. I mash my thumb on the START button, but nothing happens, and I realize that the blinking red light on the dash has turned solid. There's a little LCD display for status messages and as I stare at it in disbelief a message scrolls across: MANDATORY SERVICE INTERVAL REACHED RETURN TO MAIN DEALER FOR ENGINE MANAGEMENT RESET.
Behind me, there's a sinking frigate, while ahead of me, the Explorer has begun to make way. I start swearing: not my usual "shirfuckpisscuntbugger" litany, but really rude words.
Ramona sinks her fingers into my left arm. "This can't be happening!" she says, and I feel a wash of despair rising off her.
"It's not. Brace yourself." I flip open the lid on top of the gear-stick and punch the eject button. And the car ejects.
The car. Ejects. Three words that don't belong in the same sentence or at any rate in a sentence that's anywhere within a couple hundred meters of sanity street. In real life, cars do not come with ejector seats, for good reason. An ejector seat is basically a seat with a bomb under it. The traditional way they're used is, you pull the black-and-yellow striped handle, say goodbye to the airplane, and say hello to six weeks in traction, recovering in hospital — if you're lucky. The survival statistics make Russian roulette look safe. Very recent models buck the trend — they've got computers and gyroscopes and rocket motors to stabilize and steer them in flight, they've probably even got cup holders and cigarette lighters — but the basic point is, when you pull that handle, Elvis has left the cockpit, pulling fifteen gees and angling fifteen degrees astern. Now, the ejector system Pinky and Brains have bolted to the engine block of this car is not the kind you get in a fifthgeneration 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 sun-roof 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 BlLLINBTON, 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, feeing 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 ringer 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 and 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, b u t ... "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 graypainted 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.
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