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By Root 1625 0

meantime . . . well, if I can get back in touch with Control somehow and tell them not to send Mo in after me that would be a good thing. I find I’m shaking. This new Mo, fresh from some kind of special forces class at Dunwich, spilling blood with casually ruthless abandon, and working as an assault thaumaturgist with Alan’s headbangers, scares me. I’ve lived with her for years, and I know how hard she can be when it’s time to rake a folk festival organizer over the coals, but that new violin she’s carrying gives me the willies. It’s as if it comes with a mean streak, a nasty dose of ruthlessness that’s crawled into the tough-minded but intermittently tender woman I love, and poisoned her somehow. And she’s heading for the Explorer, now, to—secure the field generator, release the hostages, neutralize the chthonian artifact, sink the Explorer—

I stop dead in mid-thought. “Huh?” I mumble to myself. “Secure the field generator?”

That was the geas field she and Alan were discussing. The probability-warping curse that dragged me kicking and screaming into this stupid role-play thing, the very invocation I’m supposed to be destroying. She thinks it’s aboard the Explorer? And Angleton wants her to keep it running ?

I stare at my phone. There’s no base station signal, but I’ve still got a chunk of battery charge. “Does not compute,” I say, and stub my thumb on the numeric keypad. I’m frustrated: I admit it. Nobody tells me anything; they just want to use me as a communications link, keep me in the dark and feed me shit, pose around in evening drag at a casino and drink disgusting cocktails. I go back to the desk, flip the keyboard rightside up, and hit the boss key again. Mo’s sitting in the cockpit of the cigarette boat, fastening her five-point safety harness. A pair of sailors is installing a kit-bag full of ominous black gadgets in the seat next to her; over the windscreen I can see the gray flank of a Royal Navy destroyer, bristling with radomes and structures that could be anything from missile batteries to gun turrets or paint lockers, to my uneducated eye. The horizon is clear in all directions but for the ruler-straight line of an airplane’s con-trail crawling across the sky. I glance sidelong at the phone, longingly: if I could call her up I could tell her—if only I wasn’t stuck on board this goddamn yacht, moping like the token love interest in a bad thriller while the shit is going to hit the fan in about two hours aboard the Explorer, which is sitting less than half a kilometer away—

“What the fuck has gotten into me?” I ask, wondering why I’m not angry. This bovine passivity just isn’t me: Why does it feel like my best option is to just sit here and wait for Mo to arrive? Damn it, I need to get things moving. McMurray can’t afford to lose me before Ramona’s delivered her surprise party trick to Billington: that gives me a lever I can pull on. And Angleton wants the geas field generator kept running? That’s my cue. The penny drops: if the geas field actually works, and Billington can’t shut it down, then he’s going to be in a world of hurt. Could that be Angleton’s plan? It’s so simple it’s fiendish. Almost without thinking, I dial 6-6-6. It’s time to call my ride and get moving. After all, even the Good Bond Babe—token love interest and all—doesn’t always spend the final minutes of the movie waiting for her absent love to come rescue her. It’s time to kick ass and set off explosions.

15.

SCUTTLE TO COVER

AN HOUR LATER, HAVING DONE EVERYTHING I CAN via the Media Center PC, I pocket my phone and open the door to my room.

There’s a lot you can do in an hour with a PC on a supposedly secure but in reality penetrated-to-Hell-and-back network, especially if you’ve got a USB flash drive full of hacking tools. Unfortunately there’s rather less you can do on such a network without making it blindingly and immediately obvious that it’s been 0wnZor3d. But on the third hand, by this point I don’t give a shit. I mean, I thoroughly expect what I’ve done to the PC to be exposed within a matter of hours, but worrying about