The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [129]
“Good.” Somewhere disturbingly close to the back of my own mind I can feel her daemon coil uneasily in its sleep, a sensual shudder rippling through us as it senses the proximity of death. The skin of my scrotum crawls; I feel Ramona’s nipples tighten. She shudders. “What’s that?”
Billington leans over me now. “You’re twenty meters off the counter-intrusion field rim, sitting in the middle of a contagion mesh with a defensive ward around you. If my analysis is correct, the field will absorb the sacrifice and let you in. Your entanglement with Bob up here will confuse its proximity sense and should let you survive the experience. You might want to uncap your periscope at this time: from now on, you’re on your own until you dump the ballast load.”
He steps back smartly and the wards inscribed on the floor around my chair light up so bright that the glare reflects off the ceiling of the control room above me, pulling me back into my own head for a moment. “Hey—” I begin to say, and just then . . .
Things.
Get.
Confused.
I’m Ramona: leaning over a narrow, glass letter box in the middle of the console, staring down at a brown expanse of mud as I twitch the thruster control levers, flying the platform and its trailing grapple arms closer towards a cylindrical outcropping in the middle of the featureless plain. I’m in my element, slippery and wet, comfortably oblivious to the thousands of tons of pressure bearing down on me from above.
I’m Bob: limp as a dishrag, passive, lying on a dentist’s chair in the middle of a pentacle with lights flaring in my eyes, a cannula taped into my left forearm, and a saline drip emptying into it through an infusion pump—They’ve drugged me, I realize dizzily—a passenger, along for the ride.
And I’m someone else: frightened half to death, strapped down on a stretcher with cable ties so I can’t move, and the robed figures around me are chanting, and I’d scream if I could but there’s something wrong with my throat and why won’t anyone rescue me? Where are the police? This isn’t supposed to happen! Is it some kind of sorority initiation thing? One of the sisters is holding a big knife. What’s she doing? When I get out of here I’m going to—
I stare down at the muddy expanse unrolling beneath the platform. Rotating the periscope I check the ten grab-arms visually: they all look okay from here, though it won’t really be possible to tell for sure until I fire the hydraulic rams. They cast long shadows across the silt. Something white gleams between two of them, briefly: skeletal remains or something. Something.
Glimpse of silvery strings across the grayness, like the webs of a spider as big as a whale. Conical spires rising from the mud, dark holes in their peaks like the craters of extinct volcanoes. Guardians, sleeping. I can feel their dreams, disturbed thoughts waiting: but I can reassure them, I’m not who you want. Beyond them, more open ground and a sense of prickling fire that ripples across my skin as I float past an invisible frontier left over from a war that ended before humans existed—
She screams silently and the terror gushes inside my head as the knife tears through her throat, blood spurting in thick pulses draining towards zero—
The daemon in my head is awake now, noticing—
The blood vanishing, drained into the fiery frontier on the seafloor—
And we’re inside the charmed circle of death around JENNIFER MORGUE Site Two.
A LONG TIME LATER, MCMURRAY COMES UP TO ME and clears his throat. “Howard, can you hear me?” he asks.
I mumble something like Leave me alone. My head aches like it’s clamped in a vice, and my mouth is a parched desert.
“Can you hear me?” he repeats patiently.
“Feel. Like shit.” I think for a minute, during which time I manage to crowbar my eyes open. “Water?” Something’s missing, but I’m not sure what.
McMurray turns away and lets a medical type approach me with a paper cup. I try to sit up to drink but I’m as weak as a baby. I manage a sip, then I swallow: half the contents of the cup go down