The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [141]
“Who’s that?” she asks, pointing through the windscreen.
“Oops, I forgot about him.” It’s Marc, sometime procurer and latterly zombie. He’s bloated up against the front windscreen and the driver’s side door. “You’ll have to help me get him out of there.”
“This is why I never date the same guy twice—avoids raising a stink, you know?”
I get the door open, just in time to be hit by an olfactory experience almost as good as Johanna’s buffet. “Ick.”
“You can say that again, monkey-boy. He’s leaked all over the seats—you expect me to ride in this?”
“You’re the one who told me about the scuttling charges, I’m the one with the biometrics that match the ignition button. Your call.”
I grab hold of one arm. To my great delight, it doesn’t come off in my hand. Ramona opens the opposite door and shoves him towards me. I do a two-step with the stiff, twist him round, and shove him onto the platform. I grab the bundled-up geas generator and shove it into the shoe box that passes for a boot in this thing. Ramona winces as she tries to belt herself in, and holds something up: “What’s this?”
“Marc’s idea of a conversational intro.” I pass her the MP- 5. “You know how to use one of these, I figure I’ll take the pistol.” It’s another Glock, of course, with a whizzy laser-sighting widget and an extended magazine. “Now let’s go visit Ellis, huh?”
I push the ignition button, check that the doors and windows are closed, then gently tap the gas pedal. There’s a red light blinking on the dash, but the engine starts. We tilt alarmingly as I drive off the edge of the platform, but the car stabilizes fairly fast, leaving us bobbing like a cork in the water. I stroke the accelerator again. That starts a lot of spray flying—this thing isn’t the world’s most efficient paddleboat—but we begin to move away from the Mabuse, and I start the windscreen wipers so I can see where we’re going. The Explorer is a huge, gray bulk about 400 meters away. There’s the beginning of a trail of foam at her stern, but I’m pretty sure I can catch her—even a Smart car can outrun a 60,000-ton, deep-ocean drilling ship, I figure. Ramona leans against my sore shoulder and I feel her bone-deep exhaustion, along with something else, a creeping smugness.
“We make a pretty good team,” she murmurs.
I’m about to say something intended to take the place of a witty reply when the rearview mirror lights up like a flash bulb. I goose the accelerator and we lurch wildly, nearly nosing over as a spray of water goes everywhere. Then there’s a sound like the door of Hell slamming shut behind me, and another huge lurch sets us bobbing side to side. A water spout almost as high as the topmost radar mast hangs over the ship, then comes crashing back down.
“Fuck fuck fuck . . .” We’re less than a ship-length away from the Mabuse, on the opposite side to the scuttling charge, and that’s probably what saves us: most of the blast is heading in the opposite direction. On the other hand, the ship is rolling, heeling over almost sixty degrees, and there’s a gash below the waterline that’s raised so high above the surface I can see it in my rearview mirror. It looks large enough to take on a hundred tons of water a second. Johanna opened the bulkhead doors below the waterline, and as if it isn’t enough that the charge has ripped the yacht’s skin open, cavitation from the explosion has broken her keel. I suppose Billington doesn’t much care about money at this point—when he’s Planetary Overlord he can have as many yachts as he likes—but right now I care because we’re less than 200 meters away from something as massive as a ten-story office block that’s just begun to disintegrate. As a way of ensuring that annoying witnesses are silenced and the geas generator stops working, it’s overkill, but if it succeeds I suppose Lloyds of London are the only people who’re going to complain.
The ship’s superstructure hangs in the air