The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [126]
★★I’ll cope,★★ I tell her. The light outside our charmed circle of lamps has dimmed to a faint twilight. In the distant murk I spot a gray belly nudging past, possibly a deep-ranging tiger shark or something less well-known. The pipe rolls endlessly up through the docking harness.
“Dive stable at one meter per second,” Ramona tells Billington. I lie back, do the math: it’s going to take us a little over an hour to reach the abyssal plain where JENNIFER MORGUE Two lies broken and desolate beneath 400 atmospheres of pressure, on a bed of gray ooze that’s been accreting since before hairless apes slouched across the plains of Africa.
There’s something soothing about the motion of the pipe string. Once every few minutes Ramona opens my mouth and murmurs something technical: some of the time Billington turns and relays an instruction or two to the ever-present flunky waiting at his shoulder. I lapse into a dreamy, near-hypnotized state. I know something’s wrong, that I shouldn’t be this relaxed under the circumstances—but a great sense of lassitude has come over me as our entanglement nears completion. Lie back and think of England. Where the hell did that come from? I blink and try to throw back the sense of disengagement.
★★Ramona—★★
★★Shut up and let me concentrate here.★★ She’s working two of the levers and there’s a loud clank-bump that I feel more than hear. ★★Okay, that’s it.★★ We resume our descent, passing an odd bulge where the pipe triples in diameter for about three meters, like a python that’s just swallowed a small pig. ★★What is it?★★
★★What do we do after you raise the artifact?★★
★★What do—★★ She stops. ★★We get disentangled, right?★★
★★Yes, but what then?★★ I persist. For some reason I feel dizzy when I try to follow this line of reasoning. I can almost sense my own body again, see Billington leaning over me expectantly like an eager cultist inspecting his dead leader for signs of imminent resurrection. ★★Aren’t we supposed to do ... something?★★
★★Oh, you mean kill Ellis, massacre his guards, and set the ship on fire before making our escape on Jet Skis?★★ she says brightly.
★★Something like that.★★ A thought bubbles up to the surface of my mind and pops, halfheartedly: ★★You gave that a lot of thought, huh?★★
★★The Jet Skis are on C deck, and there are only two of them. I’ve got to get Pat out of here—I’m afraid you’ll have to make your own arrangements,★★ she says briskly. ★★But yeah, I can definitely nail Billington.★★
The penny drops—icy and cold, right down the back of my metaphorical net. ★★You’ve been planning this as a hit on Billington right from the start!★★
★★Well, that’s the whole point of my being here, isn’t it? Why else would they send an assassin? I mean, d’oh!★★
I ought to be more shocked; maybe it’s had time to sink in, what she really is. (And there’s the whole escape thing, of course. Am I imagining things or did she feel a twinge of guilt when she told me I’d have to swim for myself?) ★★Your people used me to get close to Billington,★★ I accuse.
★★Yup.★★ It’s funny how these little misunderstandings only come clear when you’re 800 meters below sea level and dropping like an express elevator towards Davy Jones’s tentacle-enhanced locker. ★★As soon as Billington shuts down the geas field I’ll be free to act on my own agency.★★ I can feel a funny tight smirk tugging at the sides of her mouth. It’s not humor. ★★He doesn’t realize it yet, but he’s so screwed you could plug him into the mains and call him Albert Fish.★★
★★But you can’t do that unless we’re disentangled, surely? And for that you need—★★
The other shoe drops, or rather, she kicks