The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [66]
★★This way,★★ she tells me, using our speech-free intercom. ★★Not too far. Can you manage ten minutes without a rest?★★
★★I hope so.★★ The waves aren’t strong inside the barrier formed by the reef, and in any event they’re driving us back onshore, but I hope she’s not planning on going outside the protective boundary.
★★Okay, follow me.★★
She strikes out away from the sunbathers and towards the outer reef, at an angle. Pretty soon I’m gasping for breath as I flail the water, trailing after her. Ramona is a very strong swimmer and I’m out of practice, and my arms and thigh muscles are screaming for mercy within minutes. But we’re approaching the reef, the waves are breaking over it—and to my surprise, when she stands up the water barely reaches her breasts.
“What the hell?” I flap towards her, then switch to treading water, feeling for the surface beneath my feet. I’m half-expecting to kick razor-sharp coral, but what I find myself standing on is smooth, slippery-slick concrete.
“No electronics, because someone might have tapped into it. No clothing because you might be bugged. Seawater because it’s conductive; if they’d tattooed a capacitive chart on your scalp while you were asleep it’d be shorted out by now. No bugs because we’ve got a high-volume white noise source all around us.” She frowns at me, deadly serious. “You’re clean, monkey-boy, except for whatever compulsion filters they’ve dropped on you, and any supernatural monitors.”
“Shit.” Enlightenment dawns: Ramona has dragged me out here because she thinks I’m bugged. “What’s down below us . . . ?”
“It’s a defensive emplacement. The French got serious about that in the early ’60s, before the treaty arrangements got nailed down. You’re standing on a discordance node, one of a belt of sixteen big ones designed to protect the east coast of Saint Martin against necromantic incursions. If you swim through it, any thaumaturgic bugs they’ve planted on you will be wiped—it’s a huge occult degaussing rig. Which is one of the reasons I brought you here.”
“But if it’s a defensive emplacement, how come the zombies up at—” I bite my tongue.
“Exactly.” She looks grave. “That’s part of what’s wrong here, which is the other thing I want to check out. About four months ago one of our routine geomantic surveillance flights noticed that the defensive belt was—not broken, exactly, but showed signs of tampering. One of Billington’s subsidiaries, a construction company, landed the contract to maintain the concrete ballast units. Do I need to draw you a diagram?”
Here we are surrounded by ocean, and my mouth is dry as a bone. “No. You think somebody’s running a little import /export business, right?”
“Yes.”
I take a deep breath. “Anything else?”
“I wanted to get you alone, with no bugs.”
“Hey, you only had to ask!” I grin, my heart pounding inappropriately.
“Don’t take this the wrong way.” She smiles ruefully. “You know what would happen if—”
“Only kidding,” I say, abruptly nervous. The conversation is veering dangerously close to territory I’m uncomfortable with. I look at her—correction: I force my eyes to track about thirty degrees up, until I’m looking at her face. She’s watching me right back, and I find I can’t help wondering what it would be like to . . . well. Sure she’s attached to a level three glamour so tight you’d need a scalpel to peel it off her, but I can probably cope with whatever’s underneath it, I think. Her daemon is something else again, but there are things we could do, without intercourse . . . but what about Mo? My conscience finally catches up with my freewheeling speculation. Well, what indeed? But the thought drags me back down to Earth, after a fashion. I manage to get my worst instincts under control then ask: “Okay, so why did you really bring me out here?”
“First, I need to know: Why the fuck did you go rushing off to Anse Marcel?