The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [36]
I nod, speechless. WiFi? On a thirty-year-old tourist truck like this? “Bon voyage!” She stands up and marches to the back of the cabin. “Call if you need anything.”
I doze through the usual preflight, waking briefly as the engine note rises to a thunderous roar and we pile down the runway. I feel unnaturally tired, as if drained of life, and I’ve got a strange sense that somebody else is sleeping in the empty seat beside me, close enough to rest their head on my shoulder—but the next seat over is empty. Overspill from Ramona? Then my eyes close again.
It must be the cabin pressure, the stress of the last couple of days, or drugs in the after-takeoff champagne, because I find myself having the strangest dream. I’m back in the conference suite in Darmstadt, and the blinds are down, but instead of a roomful of zombies I’m sitting across the table from Angleton. He looks half-mummified at the best of times, until you see his eyes: they’re diamond-blue and as sharp as a dentist’s drill. Right now they’re the only part of him I can see at all, because he’s engulfed in the shadows cast by an old-fashioned slide projector lighting up the wall behind him. The overall effect is very sinister. I look over my shoulder, wondering where Ramona’s gotten to, but she’s not there.
“Pay attention, Bob. Since you had the bad grace to take so long during my previous briefing that it self-erased before you completed it, I’ve sent you another.” I open my mouth to tell him he’s full of shit, but the words won’t emerge. An Auditor ward, I think, choking on my tongue and beginning to panic, but right then my larynx relaxes and I’m able to close my jaw. Angleton smiles sepulchrally. “There’s a good fellow.”
I try to say Blow me, but it comes out as “Brief me” instead. It seems I’m allowed to speak, so long as I stay on topic.
“Certainly. I have explained the history of the Glomar Explorer , and Operations JENNIFER and AZORIAN. What I did not explain—this goes no further than your dreams, and the inside of your own eyeballs, especially when Ramona is awake—was that JENNIFER and AZORIAN were cover stories. Dry runs, practical experiments, if you like. To retrieve artifacts from the oceanic floor, in the zones ceded by humanity to BLUE HADES—the Deep Ones—in perpetuity under the terms of the Benthic Treaties and the Agreement of the Azores.”
Angleton pauses to take a drink from a glass of ice water beside his blotter. Then he flicks the slide advance button on the projector. Click-clack.
“This is a map of the world we live in,” Angleton explains. “And these pink zones are those that humans are allowed to roam in. Our reservation, if you like. The arid air-swept continents and the painfully bright low-pressure top waters of the oceans. About thirty-four percent of the Earth’s surface area. The rest, the territory of the Deep Ones, we are permitted to sail above, but that is all. Attempts to settle the deep ocean would be resisted in such a manner that our species would not survive long enough to regret them.”
I lick my lips. “How? I mean, do they have nuclear weapons or something?”
“Worse than that.” He doesn’t smile. “This—” click-clack “—is Cumbre Vieja, on the island of La Palma. It is one of seventy-three volcanoes or mountains located in deep water—most of the others are submerged guyots rather than climbable peaks—that BLUE HADES have prepared. Three-quarters of humanity live within two hundred miles of a sea coast. If they ever lose their patience with us, the Deep Ones can trigger undersea landslides. Cumbre Vieja alone is poised to deposit five hundred billion tons of