The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [122]
“Up and out!” The black berets are waving us onto the platform. While Todt and the guards are busy down below, Ramona and I follow McMurray up the ladder towards a door two decks up. He leads us on a bewildering tour of the colossal drilling ship, up and down narrow corridors and cramped stairwells and finally along a catwalk overlooking a giant room with no floor—the moon pool. A black beret on duty at the door passes us ear defenders as we step out onto the catwalk. The noise is deafening and the air feels like I’ve walked into a cross between a sauna and a machine shop: greasy and humid with a stink of overheated metal parts. A sickly sweet undertone hints of fishy things that have died and not gone to heaven, embedded in the machinery that moves the underwater doors at the bottom of the moon pool. It’s not like this in the movies: presumably James Bond’s enemies all employ crack task-forces of janitors spritzing everything with pine-scented disinfectant at fifteen-minute intervals to keep down the rotten shellfish stink.
About ten meters in front of me, a metal pipe as thick as my thigh descends from the underside of the drilling deck, hypnotically spearing into the pool below. I stare at it, following it down to the bubbling point of white water where it plunges into the moon pool and the deep ocean below. Somewhere far down there a drowned alien artifact awaits its arrival. Presumably Billington, with his expertise in Gravedust interrogations, knows what to expect. Above us the drilling platform shudders and roars, hellishly loud as it feeds infinite numbers of pipe segments to the sea god.
McMurray walks along the catwalk until he reaches a row of incongruous office windows and a door, just as you’d expect to find overlooking the shop floor of a factory or a workshop. We follow him inside.
It’s a big room, and as befits the villain’s working headquarters, one wall is occupied by a gratuitously large projection screen showing a map of the seafloor below the Explorer. There are lots of consoles with blinking lights, and half a dozen black berets sitting at desks where they mouse around schematics on a computer-controlled engineering interface. So far so good. It would look a lot like the control room of a power station, if not for the fact that there’s something that resembles a dentist’s chair in the middle of the floor. The ankle and wrist straps and the pentacles around its base suggest that it’s not designed for root canal jobs. To top it all off there’s a gloating villain standing front and center, wearing a Nehru suit and cradling an excessively somnolent Tiddles in his arms.
“Ah, Ms. Random, Mr. Howard! So glad you could make the show!” I twitch at Billington’s victorious smirk. Somehow or other I’m having difficulty controlling the urge to punch him out, sap two or three black-uniformed guards, steal an MP5K, and let fly.
“You need to turn down the gain on that geas: it’s overpowering,” I suggest.
“All in due course.” Billington looks amused, then mildly concerned. “Are you feeling up to the job, Ms. Random? You look a bit peaked.”
Ramona snorts. “If you want me to do this thing, you really ought to tell Pat to drop the interference. I can’t hear myself think, much less Bob.”
“Thinking is not what I’m paying you for. However, no purpose is served by separating you at this time.” Billington nods to McMurray: “Allow them full intercourse.”
McMurray looks alarmed: “But the suppressor’s all that’s keeping their entanglement from proceeding to