The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [102]
Billington prods at his fancy remote again and another screen comes to life: a view of a huge metal chamber, something like a factory floor—only the floor itself is covered in black water. A moment’s confusion, then it springs into focus for me. “Isn’t that the Glomar Explorer?”
“It’s now the TLA Explorer, but yes, well spotted, Mr. Howard.”
I focus on the pipe that pierces the heart of the pool of water. There’s something big and indistinct lurking just under the surface down there, impaled on the end of the drill string. “What’s that?”
“Can’t you guess? It’s the TMB-2, a clone of the original Hughes Mining Barge 1, equipped with updated telemetry and new materials so that pressure-induced brittleness in the grab cantilever arms won’t stop it from working this time.”
“But you know the Deep Ones won’t let you retrieve—”
“Really?” His grin widens.
“But!” My head’s spinning. I know about the original HMB-1, Operation JENNIFER, the BLUE HADES defense system that nearly dragged the mother ship down. “You said this was about Ramona?”
“She’s one of the in-laws,” Billington explains cheerfully. “She’s got the Innsmouth look, you know? She tastes right to their minions, the abyssal polyps. You didn’t think the Deep Ones guarded every inch of their territory in person, did you? The polyps are subsentient, just like your burglar alarm. They work by biochemical tracers, discriminating self from other.” He picks up his whisky. “I need her to ride the grab down and keep an eye on it while it locks onto the target. If the defenders of the deep smell Old One in the water they’ll stay cowering in their burrows in the abyssal mud. What do you say to that?”
“It’s an interesting theory,” I admit, which is true because I don’t know one way or the other whether it’ll work.
“It’s more than a theory. I sank a lot of money into arranging for the Black Chamber to send her, boy. Her folk aren’t so numerous, and most of them would die rather than let themselves be turned to such a purpose. She’s been tamed, which is unusual, and you’ve got a handle on her, and I’ve got you. So, I’ll make you a new offer. Convince her to ride the barge for me willingly, and I’ll have McMurray free her from her curse. Convince her to ride the barge and I won’t even have to threaten you. How about it?”
He’s backed me into a corner, I realize. And not just with menaces; the thing is, he has found Ramona’s price. And having been inside her skull, even if only a bit, I’m not sure I can criticize her. Or easily stand in her way, if she really wants to do it. Threats of torture are redundant—just forcing her to go on living in her current state is torment enough. Plus, if she doesn’t cooperate, Billington might turn nasty and take it out of my hide. Which reminds me of something else . . .
“Why me?” I finally burst out. “I mean, if you needed her, surely you don’t specifically need me to control her? I’m nothing to you. You’ve got McMurray. You already know about my government’s offer. What am I doing here? Why don’t you just do the disentangling ritual and dump me overboard?”
Billington’s smile widens, disturbingly: “Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Howard. Your presence here prevents anyone else—like the US Navy, for example—from turning up and spoiling my scheme. Which I realized would be a likely response to my current operation right at the outset, and took steps to prevent, in the form of a monumentally expensive and rather intricate destiny-entanglement geas that compels the participants to adopt certain archetypal roles that have been gathering their strength from hundreds of millions of believers over nearly fifty years. The geas doesn’t mess with causality directly, but it does ensure that the likelihood of events that mesh with its destiny model are raised, while other avenues become less . . . probable. Going against the geas is hard; agents get run over by taxis, aircraft suffer inexplicable mechanical failures, that sort of thing. Now you’ve jumped through all the hoops in the geas and in so doing massively reinforced it. You’ve taken