The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [79]
★★I’m okay.★★ Ramona’s inner voice is tense, like she’s breathing for two of us.
★★Slow down, then.★★ There’s a great beige wall looming behind us in the gloom, bulging closer to the pillar. In the distance I see the streamlined torpedo silhouettes of hunting fishes. ★★Let’s get between the pillar and the cliff face.★★
Distant plopping, bubbling noises from above. ★★Here they come.★★ Ramona peers up towards the surface.
★★C’mon.★★ The cleft between the pillar and the rock face is about a meter wide at this depth. I swim into it then reach out and take her hand. She drifts towards me, still staring up at the distant sky, as I pull her into the shadow of the pillar. ★★How long can we hide down here? If they figure we’re just skinny-dippers, they may not think to come this deep.★★
★★No such luck.★★ She closes her eyes and leans back against me. ★★Have you ever killed anyone, Bob?★★
★★Have I ever ... ?★★ It depends what you mean by anyone. ★★Only paranormal entities. Does that count?★★
★★No. Has to be human.★★ She tenses. ★★I should have asked earlier.★★
★★What do you mean, has to be human?★★
★★That’s an oversight,★★ she says tightly. ★★You were supposed to be blooded.★★
★★What are you—★★
★★The geas. You have to kill one of them.★★ She turns round slowly, her hair swirling around her head like a dark halo. Here we are under twenty meters of seawater and my mouth’s gone as dry as the desert. ★★There are steps you have to carry out in sequence in order to adopt your role in the eigenplot. Jeopardy in a distant city, meet the dark anima, kill one of the other side’s assassins—at least one, more would be better—and then we have to figure out a way around my—damn, here they come. We’ll have to cover this later. Get ready.★★
She shoves something hard into my hand. After a moment’s confusion I realize it’s the handle of a vicious-looking knife with a serrated edge. Then she vanishes into the shadows lining the cliff face. I glance round as a shadow glides overhead: tracking up and over I see a diver in a wet suit, head down, peering into the depths.
I pass through a moment of acute disbelief and resentment. I’ve been in mortal danger before, but I’m not used to being in mortal danger from humans. It feels wrong. Any one of Alan’s mad bastards is probably capable of whacking half a dozen al Qaeda irregulars before breakfast and not working up an existential sweat, but I’m not prepared for this. I can shoot at targets, sure, and I’m death on wheels when it comes to terminating cases of demonic possession with extreme prejudice, but the idea of killing a real human being in cold blood, some eating, breathing, sleeping guy with a job on a rich man’s yacht, makes all the alarm bells in my head go tilt. Trouble is, I also have a deep conviction in my guts that whatever the hell Ramona is on about, she’s right. I’m here for a purpose, and I’ve got to move my feet through the occult dance steps in the right sequence or it’ll all be for nothing. And it doesn’t matter what I want or don’t want if Angleton’s right and Billington is gearing up to drop the hammer on us. When you come down to it, if there’s a war on, the bombs don’t care whether they’re falling on pacifists or patriots. And speaking of bombs . . .
The diver has seen something. Either that or he’s into swimming head down into the depths beside a decaying defense station just for the hell of it. He’s heading parallel to the pillar and he’s got something in his arms. I glance down and see Ramona below me, her skin a silvery flash like moonlight on ice, circling the pillar. My chest tightens. A stab of anger: ★★What the hell are you playing at?★★
★★Hanging my ass out to give you a clear shot.★★ She sounds lighthearted, but I can tell she’s wound up like a watch