The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [149]
Fluffy takes a few seconds to lock on, and when he does, his response is immediate and drastic. He glances down at the deck, sees the red dot dancing around nearby—and dashes away like his tail’s on fire.
“Bob! We’ve got to get out of here! Ellis has gotten away.” I look round. Mo stands in the doorway, one hand cupped around an ear: “There are scuttling charges due to blow as soon as he’s clear—”
It’s déjà vu all over again. At least her eyeballs aren’t glowing blue and she isn’t levitating. I shake my head and point down at the moon pool: “Help me! We’ve got to stop him!”
“Who’s the target?” Mo ducks out and stands beside me.
“Him!” I pull the trigger. There’s an ear-stinging ricochet a fraction of a second after the shot. I’m nowhere near the target. “Damn, missed.”
“Bob, we’ve got to get out of here! Can you still feel that Black Chamber bitch? The chromatic disintermediator should have broken your entanglement, but—why are you trying to shoot that cat?”
“Because—” I squeeze off another shot “—it’s possessed!”
“Bob.” She looks at me as if I’m mad. There’s a loud bang from inside the control room, and a human figure in a black beret runs out onto the sealed doors flooring the pool: I shoot instinctively and miss, and he dives for cover. “Leave the fucking cat—hey, that’s Billington down there!” She raises her instrument and prepares to let fly.
The cat squirts out across the floor, a white blur targeting the downed bad guy. I shoot again, and again, and keep missing. “Not Billington! Get the cat!”
Mo sniffs skeptically. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m goddamn sure!” Billington’s standing in front of the iron maiden, as if steeling himself to jump inside. “It’s the enemy! Get it now, or we’re fucked!”
Mo raises her violin, squints darkly down at the deck below us, and drops a noise like a million felines being disemboweled down on top of Fluffy. Who opens his fanged maw to howl, then explodes like a gore-filled, white dandelion head. Mo turns and looks at me harshly. “That looked just like a perfectly ordinary cat to me. If you’ve—”
“It was possessed by the animation nexus behind JENNIFER MORGUE Two!” I gabble. “The clue—he saw a laser dot and dodged—”
“Bob. Back up a moment.”
“Yes?”
“The cat. You said it was the enemy. You didn’t say it was occupied by the mind of that thing?” She points up at the ceiling, where the chthonic warrior is definitely twitching and writhing. I stare.
“Uh, well, I meant—”
“And you thought killing it would improve matters?”
“Yes?”
One of the bole-like knots in the warrior’s hide is growing larger. Then it opens, revealing an eye the size of a truck tire. It stares right back at me.
She clouts me on the back of the head: “Run!”
The huge tentacle slams down onto the deck where Ellis Billington kneels in supplication before his god, landing with a percussive clang that rattles the remaining windows and reduces him to a greasy stain on the bulkhead. Which is probably why Mo and I survive: we stumble back through the control room doorway about two seconds before the tree-trunk-thick limb slams into the wall with the force of a runaway locomotive. Support trusses scream and buckle beneath the blow. I start coughing and my eyes water immediately. The air is gray with smoke and thick with the greasy fish-oil smell of burning insulation. I thump the big red button beside the door and metal shutters begin to drop down behind the broken glass—maybe it’s too little too late, but at least it makes me feel better. “Where’s Ramona? We’ve got to get her out of here!”
Mo glares at me. “What makes you think rescuing her’s on my list of mission objectives? You’re disentangled, aren’t you?”
I stare back at her, wondering who the hell she thinks she is, barging in here with her Class A thaumaturgic weapons. Then I blink and remember sharing a slow breakfast with her back before all this started, all those endless weeks ago—Is that all? “I think I know what you’re thinking,” I say slowly, feeling an awful weary emptiness inside me, “but that’s not what’s been going on between us. And if you leave