The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [82]
★★On my own? Shit.★★ I feel her straining. ★★Help me!★★
I brace my legs against one wall and my back against the opposite and raise my arms; Ramona leans against me and puts her back into it, too. The roof gives a little. I tense and shove hard, putting all my fear of drowning into it, and the lid squeals and lifts free above us.
★★Turn!★★ I start twisting, rotating the rectangular lid so that when we let go it won’t settle back into place. There’s a roaring in my ears. I can hear my pulse. And suddenly I’m choking underwater with a lungful of air: we’ve lost skin contact and I’m going to have aching muscles tomorrow—if there is a tomorrow—and I can’t get enough oxygen, so I kick out in near panic and the lid slides away and I kick out again, rising nightmarishly slowly towards the silver ceiling high above me, with my lungs on fire. Then I’m on the surface, bobbing like a cork in a barrel and I breathe out explosively and start to inhale just as a wave comes over the top of the reef and the platform and breaks over me.
The next few seconds are crazy and painful and I’m coughing and spluttering and close to panic again. But Ramona’s in the water with me and she’s a strong swimmer, and the next thing I know I’m on my back, coughing up my guts as she tows me towards the shallows like a half-drowned kitten. Then there’s sand under my feet and an arm round my shoulders.
“Can you walk?”
I try to talk, realize it’s a bad idea, and nod instead. A sidelong glance tells me her glamour’s back in place.
“Don’t look back. There’s a dive boat just over the far side of the reef and they’re looking out to sea. I figure we’ve got maybe two minutes before they check their tracker ward and see you’re showing up again. Have you got any smoke screens on that fancy phone of yours?”
Think fast. I try to remember what I’ve loaded on it, remember the block I put on the car, and nod again. I’m not certain it’ll work, but if it doesn’t we’re fresh out of options.
“Okay.” We’re about waist-deep now. “Blanket’s over there. Think you can run?”
“Blanket—” I start coughing again.
“Run, monkey-boy!”
She grabs my hand and tugs me forwards. At the same time there’s a ghostly sensation in my chest: she starts coughing, but I feel a whole lot better. Moments later I’m the one who’s tugging her along through knee-deep water across a silvery beach, sunlight blazing down on my shoulders. I feel horribly exposed, as if there’s a target painted on the small of my back. The towel is just ahead, up a gentle rise. Ramona stumbles. I get an arm round her waist and help her up, then we stagger on up the beach.
Towel. Trunks. A little pile of everyday tourist detritus. “This ours?”
She nods, gasping for breath: she’s swallowed my water, I realize. I fumble under the towel and find the sealed polythene bag. Fingers shaking, I unseal it and pull out my Treo. The damn thing seems to take half an hour to boot up, and while I’m waiting for it I see heads bobbing to the surface near the boat on the far side of the reef. They’re tiny in the distance but we’re running out of time—
Ah. Scratchpad. “Lie down on the towel. Make like you’re sunbathing,” I tell her. Squinting at the tiny screen, I shield it with one hand so that I can see the schematic. A circuit design, I need a circuit design. But we’re on a beach, right? Sand is porous. And about fifty centimeters below us there’s a layer of conductive saline. Which means—
I squat on the sand and start drawing lines on the beach around us with my fingertips. I don’t have to go all the way down to the water, I just have to reduce the resistivity of the layer of insulating sand above it in a regular pattern. Divers are crawling back into the boat as I finish the main loop and add the necessary terminals. Phone, phone . . . the bloody thing has gone to sleep on me. I’m about to poke at the screen when I realize there’s sand on my fingertips. Silly me. I wipe them on the towel beside Ramona’s hip and carefully wake the Treo