The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [146]
“You’ve got to stop it!” I shout at Billington. “Why are you doing this? It’s insane!”
“On the contrary.” Billington turns away from me and holds his hands behind his back. “I don’t like doing this, but it’s necessary if we’re to meet our third-quarter target for energizing the revivification matrix,” he says tightly. “By the way, you ought to relax: you’re in the circuit, too.”
I jackknife against the straps and nearly choke myself. “What—”
“Oh shit,” swears Ramona, despair and apprehension sweeping over her.
“Considering you appear to have prevented Johanna from returning, it’s the least you can do for me,” Billington explains. “I need a soul devourer. Otherwise it’s just more dead meat, which doesn’t help anyone. And while you’re so inconveniently entangled I might as well plug both of you into the summoning grid to reduce the side-band leakage.”
The platform unfolds shutterlike flaps as McMurray nears it. I can distantly hear his voice screaming in Ramona’s head. ★★Get me out of this! That’s an order!★★ Billington needs an infovore, I realize. He’s feeding the chthonian by destroying souls in its presence. My knees feel like jelly: I’ve seen this sort of thing before. Which means—
Ramona convulses against the straps and begins to choke. I gag, my guts rolling, because I can feel the backwash from McMurray’s ill-considered words echoing off the inside of her skull like thunder and lightning. Ramona can’t not obey, but she’s immobile, unable to respond to her master’s voice, and she’s capable of choking herself to death and taking me with her.
★★Get me out!★★ McMurray howls as the conveyor deposits him on the killing platform under the cylinder. Then the platform begins to sink and the shutters close in on top of it and I realize what I’m looking at: a hydraulic iron-maiden, a car crusher built for humans.
Ramona’s daemon is rising. I can feel a monstrous pressure in my balls. I can’t see properly and I’m choking, I can’t move—Ramona can’t move—and a hideous heat spreads through my crotch. Her crotch. Proximity to death excites it, whether hers or her victim’s. And this is about as close as it gets: the shutters are steel slabs, driven by hydraulic rams. There’s a whine of motors, deepening and slowing, and a muffled noise I can’t identify. I can’t breathe, or Ramona can’t breathe, and her daemon senses the flow of life from the killing box down below. As the flow spurts into us the daemon feeds greedily, and Ramona convulses and falls unconscious.
With the last of my energy I inhale in a ragged breath, and scream.
“Oh dear,” says Billington, turning round. “What seems to be the problem?”
I draw another breath.
“You really shouldn’t have done that,” says the woman in the pink suit, standing in the doorway.
“Hurt her—” I gasp. Then I start coughing. I can’t sense Ramona’s daemon, but Ramona herself is deeply unconscious. “She needs water. Lots of seawater.” I’m breathing for two of us but I can’t quite get enough air, because what Ramona needs now is full-body immersion. I can feel it, the changes in her cells, her organs slowly contracting and rearranging inside her frame, the fever of mutation that will only end in her death or complete metamorphosis—
“What took you so long, dear?” asks Billington, looking at the doorway.
“I was putting my face on,” says the woman in pink. I’m still gasping as a pair of black berets close in on Ramona’s chair with buckets in hand, but something about the woman in pink trips my attention. Hang on, that’s not Eileen—
“Excellent.” Billington glances at the black berets bending over Ramona and frowns. “We seem to have a little problem, this one isn