The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [136]
Oops. The door at the end of the corridor opens. “You. What are you doing outside your room? Go back at once!” The black beret draws his pistol.
My mind blanks for a moment, and there’s a big hollow feeling. I feel a doubled heartbeat: ★★Is that you, Ramona? ★★
★★What are you—★★
“There’s a problem with my faucet?” I hear my mouth saying. “Can you take a look at it?” And I’m opening the door and stepping backwards to make room.
★★Let me handle this, monkey-boy.★★ I can taste seawater in my sinuses.
★★What are you doing? Has McMurray lost it—★★
★★No, but Ellis has, he ordered Eileen off the Mabuse ten minutes ago and there are scuttling charges due to blow as soon as she’s clear. Something about contagious corruption in his oneiromantic matrix; he figures someone’s sabotaged the ship and he’s not in the mood for half-measures—★★
Shit. That would be me, wouldn’t it? The goon steps closer and I can see green shadows behind his mirrorshades, green writhing worms twitching and squirming in rotting cadaverous eye sockets as he steps closer and raises the pistol in both hands—
★★—Glock 17,★★ says Ramona.
And she takes over.
I jackknife forwards from the opposite side of the narrow room and bring my left hand down on the pistol, grabbing the slide and pushing it back, as my right hand comes up, curling uncomfortably to punch at his left eye. Glass shatters as he pushes up with the gun, not knowing to pull it back out of reach, and I twist it sideways. It goes off, and the noise is so loud in the confined space that it’s like someone’s slammed my head in a door. It feels like I’ve torn half the skin off my left hand, but I somehow keep turning while maintaining my grip, and kick and twist away from his follow-on punch, with a searing pain in my side, like I’ve pulled a muscle—then I’m facing the half-rotted zombie with a gun barrel in my left hand. I grab the butt with my right, and I pull the trigger, bang, and pull it again because somehow I managed to miss at a range of about half a meter—bang—and there’s blood all over the inside of the door and a faint distant tinkling of cartridges rattling as they bounce off the screen of the PC.
I gasp for breath and gag at the stench. The thing on the floor—at least, what the Tillinghast resonator is showing me—has been dead for weeks. ★★What just happened again?★★ I ask Ramona.
★★Billington.★★ She opens her eyes and I push myself into her head. She’s still underwater, but she’s not sitting in the control chair on board the submersible grab anymore: she’s free-swimming in near-total darkness, stroking upwards alongside the drill string, and I can feel the exhaustion as a tight band across the tops of her thighs. ★★It’s a double-cross.★★ I can taste her fear.
★★Talk to me!★★ I force myself to bend over and go through the corpse’s pockets. There’s another magazine for the pistol, and a badge: some species of RFID tag. I take it and glance around the cabin. My right hand is still bleeding but it doesn’t look as bad as it feels. (Memo to self: do not make a habit of gripping the slide of an automatic pistol while it is being fired.) ★★How long have I got? Where are you?★★
★★The grab—I was halfway home when one of the docking splines engaged, and the control deck disconnected and stayed stuck on the pipe string while the payload kept going up. It’s got to be intentional. He was planning on leaving me down there all along!★★
I can feel the panic, ugly and personal and selfish and pitiful. ★★Hang in there,★★ I tell her. ★★If you can make it to the surface we can pick you up—★★
★★You don’t understand! If I stay down here too long I’ll begin the change—it’s hereditary! I’ve put