The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [124]
McMurray looks pleased. He glances at the guards bending over my body, and I turn my head to follow, feeling the unaccustomed weight of her hair, the faint pull of tension on the gills at the base of her throat: I see myself—Bob—lying flat out, strapped down while they hook up bits of bleeping biotelemetry. A medic stands by, holding a ventilator mask. “Amplification to level six, please,” says McMurray, then he looks back at me—at Ramona, that is. “Your entanglement lets you see through Ramona’s eyes, Bob. It also lets her speak through your mouth, when you’re at depth. The defense field around the chthonic artifact plays hell with electronics and scrambles ordinary scalar similarity fields, but the deep entanglement between you and Ramona is proof against just about any interference short of the death of one of the participants. When she’s at depth, Ramona will operate the controls of the retrieval grab by hand—they’re simple hydraulic actuators—to lock onto the artifact, then signal through you to commence the lift process.”
“But I thought, uh, doesn’t it take days to ride the grab down?”
McMurray shakes his head. “Not using this model.” He looks insufferably smug. “Back in the sixties they designed the grab to be fixed to the end of the pipe string. We’ve updated it a little; the grab clamps to the outside of the string and drops down it on rollers, then locks into place when it reaches the end. If we were going to unbolt and store the pipe sections when we retrieved it, we’d take two days to suck it all back up, it’s true—but to speed things up we’ve got a plasma cutter up top that can slice them apart for recycling instead of unbolting each joint. This baby is nearly four times faster than the original.”
“Doesn’t Ramona need to decompress or something, on the way up?”
“That’s taken care of: her kind have different needs from us land-dwellers. It’ll still take us a whole day to bring the string up; she’ll be all right.” He turns away, dismissively. “Dive stations, please.”
Ramona follows him through the door and along the catwalk to a dive room where there’s a whole range of esoteric kit laid out for her. She’s done this sort of thing before and finds a kind of comfort in it. It’s very strange to feel her hands working with straps and connectors that feel large to her slim fingers—shrugging out of her clothes and across the chilly steel deck plates, then one leg at a time into a wet suit. There’s more unfamiliar stuff: an outer suit threaded with thin pipes that connect to an external coupling, weight belt, a knife, torches. ★★What’s the plumbing for?★★ I ask. ★★I thought you could breathe down there.★★
★★I can, but it’s cold, so they’re giving me a heated suit.★★ I get a picture: hot water is pumped down through the pipe string under high pressure, used to power the grab assembly via a turbine. Some of the water is bled off and cooled by a radiator until it’s at a comfortable temperature for circulating through Ramona’s suit. She’s going to be down there for more than a day—
★★You’re taking a bar of chocolate?★★ I ask, boggling slightly as she slides the foil-wrapped packet into a thigh pocket.
★★There are fish down there, but you wouldn’t want to eat them raw. Shut up and let me run through this checklist again.★★
I hang back and wait, trying not to get in the way. A dive error wouldn’t be the lethal disaster for Ramona that it would be for me, but it could still leave her stranded and exposed in the chilly darkness, kilometers below the surface. Even if she’s immune to the predations of the BLUE HADES defense polyps, there are other things down there—things with teeth out of your worst nightmares, things that can see in the dark and burrow through flesh and bone like drill-mouthed worms.
Ramona finally pulls her helmet on. Open-faced, with no mask or regulator, she turns and faces McMurray. “Ready when you are.”
“Good, Take her to the pool,” he says to