The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [131]
The goon who’s climbing the steps ahead of me stops and looks round at me. “It’s the eyeliner,” he says finally. “You think wearing mirrorshades at night looks stupid, you should try carrying an MP-5 with a black jumpsuit and a beret while wearing eye shadow.”
“Cosmetics don’t go / with GI Joe,” chants the goon behind me, a semitone out of tune with himself.
“Eye shadow?” I shake my head and manage to climb another step.
“It’s the downside of our terms and conditions of employment,” says Goon Number One. “Some folks have to piss in a cup to pass federally mandated antidrug provisions; we have to wear make-up.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Why would I do a thing like that? I’ve got stock options that’re going to be worth millions after we IPO. If someone offered you stock options worth a hundred million and said you had to wear eyeliner to qualify . . .”
I shake my head again. “Hang on a moment, isn’t TLA Corporation already publicly traded? How can you IPO if it’s already listed on NASDAQ?”
Goon Number Two behind me chuckles. “You got the wrong end of the stick. That’s Install Planetary Overlord, not Initial Public Offering.”
We climb the rest of the steps in silence and I reflect that it makes a horrible kind of sense: if you’re running a ubiquitous surveillance web mediated by make-up, wouldn’t it make sense to plug all your guards into it? Still, it’s going to make breaking out of here a real pain in the neck—much harder than it looked before—if the guards are also nodes in the surveillance system. As we trudge through the corridors of the ship, I speculate wildly. Maybe I can use my link into Eileen’s surveillance network to install an invisibility geas on the server, and use the sympathetic link to their eyes as a contagion tunnel so that they don’t see me. On the other hand, that sort of intricate scheme tends to be prone to bugs—get a single step wrong in the invocation and you might as well be donning a blinking neon halo labeled ESCAPING PRISONER. Right now I’m so tired that I can barely put one foot in front of another, much less plan an intricate act of electronic sabotage: so when we get to my room I stagger over to the bed and lie down before they even have time to close the door.
Lights out.
It’s still dark when I wake up shuddering in the after-shock of a nightmare. I can’t remember exactly what it was about but something has filled my soul to overflowing with a sense of profound horror. I jerk into wakefulness and lie there with my teeth chattering for a minute. It feels like an entire convention of bogeymen has slithered over my grave. The shadows in my room are full of threatening shapes: I reach out and flick the bedside light switch, banishing them. My heart pounds like a diesel engine. I glance at the bedside clock. It’s just turned five in the morning.
“Shit.” I sit up and hold my head in my hands. I’m not making a good showing for myself, I can tell that much: frankly, I’ve been crap. After a moment I stand up and walk over to the door, but it’s locked. No moonlight excursions tonight, I guess. Somewhere a kilometer below the surface, Ramona will be dozing in that chair, slowly decompressing as a nightmare dreams on in the ancient war machine tucked between the ten mechanical grabs on the underside of the retrieval platform. Aboard the Explorer, Billington paces the command center of his operation, those weirdly catlike eyes slitted before the prospect of world domination. Somewhere else on board the Explorer, the treacherous McMurray is waiting for Billington to terminate the Bond geas, so that he can release Ramona’s daemon and then she can assassinate the crazed entrepreneur, delivering JENNIFER MORGUE Site Two into the hands of the Black Chamber.
It’s pretty damn clear now, isn’t it? And what am I doing about it? I’m sitting on