The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [128]
She fastens herself back into the control chair and throws the lever to resume our descent. After an interminable wait, there’s a loud clang that rattles through the platform. “Aha!” She glances round. The descent rollers have just passed a football-shaped bulge in the pipe painted with the white numerals “100.” “Okay, time to slow down.” Ramona hits the brakes and we slide over another football, numbered “90,” then “80.” They’re counting down meters, I realize, indicating the distance to go until we hit something.
I feel Ramona working my jaws remotely; it’s most unpleasant—my mouth tastes as if something died in it. “Nearly there,” she tells the technician who’s taken Billington’s place during the boring part of the descent. “Should be seated on the docking cone in a couple of minutes.” She squeezes the brake lever some more. “Thirty meters. What’s our altitude?”
The technician checks a screen that’s out of my line of sight: “Forty meters above ground zero, one-seventy degrees out by two-two-five meters.”
“Okay . . .” We’ve slowed to a crawl. Ramona squeezes the brake lever again as the “10” meter football creeps past, climbing the pipe string. The brakes are hydraulically boosted—the grab she’s sitting on weighs as much as a jumbo jet—and the big rollers overhead groan and squeal against the pipe string, scraping away the paint to reveal the gleam of titanium-graphite composite segments. (No expense is spared: that stuff is usually used for building satellites and space launchers, not drilling pipes that are going to be cut apart once they’ve been hauled back up to the surface.) I watch as Ramona frowns over a direction indicator and carefully uses another lever to release water to the directional control jets, shoving the platform round until it’s lined up correctly with the docking cone below. Then she releases the brake again, just enough to set us gliding down the final stretch.
The pipe flares out to three times its previous diameter, then stops being a pipe: there’s an enormous conical plug dangling from the drill string, point uppermost, with flanges that lock into a tunnel on the underside of the platform’s harness, like Satan’s own butt-plug. We drop steadily, and the rollers are pushed outwards by the cone until the harness locks into place around the cone. “Okay, securing the grab now,” Ramona comments, and throws the final lever. There’s an uneven series of bangs from below the deck as hydraulic bolts slide into place, nailing us to the end of the pipe. “You want to begin steering us over to the target zone?”
“Make sure you’re secured in your seat,” the tech advises her, whispering in my ear. “Visual check. Are your wards contiguous?”
Ramona switches on her hand torch, casts the beam around the metal panels at her feet. Pale green light picks out the non-Euclidian circuitry of a Vulpis exclusion array etched into the deck with a welding torch. It extends all the way around her chair. “Check. Wards clear and unobstructed. How are they powered?”
“Don’t worry, we took care of that.” Oh great, I realize, they’re going to drop Ramona into the field around JENNIFER MORGUE Site Two—a field that tends to kill electronics and, quite possibly, people—with only a ward for protection, one that needs blood to power it. “It’s full of Pale Grace™ Number Three®13, and we’ve got a sacrifice waiting in cell four to energize it. Should be commencing exsanguination in two minutes.”
“Um, okay.” Ramona checks her compass, suppressing a stab of anger so strong it nearly shocks me into a languorous yawn. “What did the subject do to rate a starring role?”
“Don’t ask me—underperforming sales rep or something. There’s plenty more where she came from.” The technician steps back for a while, at Billington’s command, then nods, and steps forwards into view again. “Right. You’re about to see the wards light up. Tell me immediately if they stay dark.”
Ramona glances down. Eerie