The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [148]
An alarm klaxon begins to blare on and off mournfully, then a speaker crackles into life: “Alert! Incoming helicopters! All hands to point defense!”
Where’s Billington gotten to? I shake my head, trying to dislodge the dreadful keening sound of strings. The straps are gone. I sit up and lean over the side of the chair, then stumble to my feet and stagger round to the other side. Ramona’s out for the count, and she looks really ill—breathing fast, the livid, bruised stripes of her gill slits pulsing against the fish-white scales around the base of her neck. She’s too dry, I realize. Too dry? A stab of guilt: I glance across at Mo, who is single-mindedly driving the surviving black berets out of the room. They’re panicking, running for safety. Where’s their master?
I glance through the shattered window overlooking the moon pool and my blood runs cold. The thing in the cradle dangling from the drilling rig is twitching fitfully. Down below it a familiar figure hunkers down on the deck, staring up at the chthonic killing machine. Shit, so that’s where he’s gotten to. Then I notice the second, smaller creature standing in front of him. And that’s the host body. He’s going to try to reactivate it! Which means—
I shuffle painfully away from the chairs, and nearly trip over a pistol. Bending down, I pick it up: it’s either the futuristic-looking P99 with laser scope that Marc had, or its identical twin. “Mo?” I call.
She turns round and says something. I can’t hear a single word over the howling reverberation of her violin.
“I’ve got to stop him!” I yell. I can barely hear myself. She looks blank, so I point at the door onto the catwalk. “He’s out there!”
She points at one of the inner doors emphatically, as if suggesting I should head that way instead. So I shake my head and stumble towards the catwalk. Behind me, the flickers of light suggest more electrical fires breaking out among the high-voltage bearers. I lean over the railing and look down dizzily. It’s about twenty meters away—a small target at that range. I fumble with the pistol and switch on the laser. My hand’s shaking. If I’m right—
The red dot dances across the far wall. I trace it down the wall, swearing under my breath, and run it rapidly across the deck towards the drained floor of the moon pool. I keep my finger away from the trigger. If I’m wrong—
Billington is an expert at soul-sucking abominations. Now he’s in thrall to another, greater evil: one with a damaged body, so he’s provided it with a convenient temporary replacement while he comes up with enough sacrificial victims and spare parts to repair its original one. What entity aboard this ship exhibits all the personality traits of a cold-blooded killing machine, combined with the monstrous, overweening vanity and laziness of a convalescent war god lounging in their personal Valhalla while their minions prepare their armor? There’s only one answer.
The Persian tomcat sits underneath the alien horror, washing itself without concern. “C’mon, Fluffy,” I tell it. “Show me what you are.” We all know about cats and lasers. Lasers are the best cat toy ever invented: the red-dot machine that comes out for playtime. Used skillfully, you can make a cat chase the dot so slavishly that she’ll run headfirst into a wall. It’s like the sitting-in-cardboard-boxes thing, or the sniffing-an-extended-finger reflex. All cats do it, unless they’re so enervated that they choose to ignore the lure and groom their fur instead.