The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [144]
“Unfortunately your usefulness appears to have expired,” says Ellis, walking back into view in front of me. He smiles again, his weird pupils contracting to slits. There’s something badly wrong about him, but I can’t quite put my finger on it: he’s not a soulless horror like the zombie troops, but he’s not quite all there, either. Something is missing in his mind, some sense of self. “Shame about that,” he adds conversationally.
“What are you going to do to us?” asks Ramona. ★★I really wish you hadn’t asked that,★★ I tell her silently, my heart sinking.
★★Bite me, monkey-boy. Just keep him talking, okay? While he’s monologuing he isn’t torturing us to death . . . ★★
“Well, that’s an interesting conundrum.” Billington glances over his shoulder at a clipboard-toting minion: “Would you mind finding Eileen and asking her why she’s late? It doesn’t normally take her this long to terminate an employee.” The minion nods and hurries away. “Following the logic of the situation that prevailed until I ended the invocation field by sinking the Mabuse, I ought to have you tortured or fed to a pool of hungry piranhas. Fortunately for you, the geas should be fully dissipated by now, I’m short on torturers, and urban legends to the contrary, piranhas don’t much like human flesh.” He smiles again. “I was inclined to be merciful, earlier: I can always find a niche for a bright, young manager in Quality Assurance, for example—” I shiver, half-wondering if maybe the piranha tank wouldn’t be preferable “—or for a presentable young lady with your talents.” Then the smile drops away like a camo sheet covering an artillery tube: “But that was before I discovered that you—” he stabs a finger at Ramona “—were sent here to murder me, and that you—” I flinch from his bony digit “—were sent here as a saboteur.”
He hisses that last, glaring at me malevolently.
“Saboteur?” I blink and try to look perplexed. When in doubt, lie like a very flat thing indeed. “What are you talking about?”
Billington gestures at the huge expanse of glass walling the control room off from the moon pool. “Look.” His hand casually takes in the huge skeletal superstructure hanging from the ceiling by steel hawsers, its titanium fingers cradling a blackened cylinder with a tapered end: JENNIFER MORGUE Two, the damaged chthonian weapon. An odd geometric meshwork scarifies its hull: there are whorls and knots like the boles of a tree spaced evenly along it. From this angle it looks more like a huge, fossilized worm than a tunneling machine. It’s quiescent, as if dead or sleeping, but . . . I’m not sure. The Tillinghast resonator lets me notice things that would otherwise be invisible to merely human eyes, and something about it makes my skin crawl, as if it’s neither dead nor alive, or even undead, but something else entirely; something waiting in the shadows that is as uninterested in issues of life and death as a stony asteroid rolling eternally through the icy depths of space, pacing out a long orbit that will end in the lithosphere of a planet wrapped in a fragile blue-green ecosystem. Looking at it makes me feel like the human species is simply collateral damage waiting to happen.
“Your masters want to stop me from helping him,” Billington explains. “He’s very annoyed. He’s been trapped for thousands of years, stranded on a plateau in the rarefied and chilly dark, unable to move. Unable to heal. Unable even to revive.” Huge hoses dangle from the underside of the Explorer’s drilling deck, poking into the skin of the chthonian artifact like intravenous feeding lines. I blink and look back at Billington. He’s lost it, I tell myself, with gathering horror. Hasn’t he?
★★You’ve only just figured that out?★★ asks Ramona. ★★And here I was thinking you were quick on the uptake. ★★ Despite the sarcasm, she feels very