Jennifer Morgue (13 page)
Authors: Charles Stross
SLIDE 10: A close-up of the cylindrical structure from Slide 7. Intricate traceries of inlaid calligraphy — or perhaps circuit diagrams — cover the walls of the machine, disturbing in their non-linearity. At one edge of the picture the conical top is visible, and in close-up the details become apparent: a conical spike with a cutting edge spiraling around it.
"This is our closest photograph of JENNIFER MORGUE Site One. It presents a clear hazard to this day: K-129 was lost inspecting it, as were several ROVs sent by the US Office of Naval Intelligence. It was the secondary target for Operation AZORIAN/JENNIFER before that project was Watergated. It's a rather recalcitrant target because there seems to be some sort of defense field around it, possibly acoustic — anything entering within a two-hundred-and-sixmeter radius stops working. (If you look near the top right of this photograph you'll see the wreckage of a previous visitor.) Our current theory is that it is either a DEEP SEVEN artifact or a BLUE HADES system designed to prevent incursions by DEEP SEVEN. We presume the Soviets were trying to make contact with DEEP SEVEN by way of the Gravedust system on the K-129 — and failed, catastrophically."
SLIDE 11: A similar-looking photograph of another machine, this time looking less badly damaged. The photograph is taken from much closer range, and though one curved side has a jagged hole in it, the hull is otherwise intact.
"This is a similar artifact, located near the north end of the Puerto Rico Trench, about four kilometers down on a limestone plateau. JENNIFER MORGUE Site Two appears to be damaged, but the same exclusion field is still in place and operational. Initial exploratory investigation with an ROV discovered ..."
SLIDE 12: A very dim, grainy view through the jagged hole in the side of the artifact. There appears to be a rectangular structure within. Odd curved objects surround it, some of which recall the shape of internal organs.
"This structure appears to contain — or even consist of — vitrified or otherwise preserved DEEP SEVEN remnants.
You'll note the similarity of this structure to some sort of cockpit: we believe it to be a deep-crustal or high-mantle boring machine, possibly making it the DEEP SEVEN equivalent of a tank or a space suit. We're not sure quite what it's doing here, but we are now extremely intrigued by Ellis Billington's interest in it. He's purchased the Explorer, heavily modified it, and, using it as a host, has been conducting sea trials with a remotely operated vehicle. Our intel on Billington's activities is alarmingly deficient, but we believe he intends to raise and possibly activate the DEEP SEVEN artifact. His expertise in Gravedust systems suggests that he may try to retrieve information from the dead DEEP SEVEN aboard it, and the direction of his operation suggests that he has some idea of what it's doing there.
"I do not intend, at this point, to get into a lengthy discussion of the consequences of annoying the Chthonians — excuse me, DEEP SEVEN — or of getting involved in a geopolitical pissing match between DEEP SEVEN and BLUE HADES. Suffice to say, preserving the collective neutrality of the human species is a high priority for this department, and you should take that as your primary point of reference in the days ahead.
"But in summary, your mission is to get close to Billington and find out what the hell he's planning on doing with JENNIFER MORGUE Site Two. Then tell us, so we can work out what action we need to take to stop him pissing off BLUE HADES or DEEP SEVEN. If he wakes the ancient sleeping horrors I am going to have to brief the private secretary and the Joint Intelligence Oversight Committee so that they can explain CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN to the COBRA Committee, chaired by the Prime Minister, and I expect that will make them extremely unhappy. Britain is relying on you, Bob, so try not to make your usual hash of things."
Angleton fades out, to be replaced by a more normal dream sleep, punctuated by vague echoes of thrashing around restlessly in a huge hotel bed. I wake up eventually, to discover that the in-flight movie is over and we're in the middle of nowhere in particular. The airbus bores on through the clear Atlantic skies, ghosting high above the sunken treasure galleons of the Spanish Main. I stretch in place, try to massage the crick out of the side of my neck, and yawn. Then I wake up my laptop. Almost immediately the Skype window starts flashing for attention. You have voice mail, it says.
Voice mail? Hell, yes — in this Brave New World there's no escape from the internet, even at 40,000 feet. I yawn again and plug in my headset, trying to shake off the influence of Ramona's distantly sensed repose. I glance at the screen. It's Mo, and she's on Skype, too, so I place a call.
"Bob?" Her voice crackles a little — the signal is being bounced via satellite to the plane and the latency is scary.
"Mo, I'm on a plane. Are you in the Village"
"I'm in the Village, Bob — checking out tomorrow. Listen, you asked me a question yesterday. I've been doing some poking around and this destiny-entanglement stuff is really ugly. Have they already done it to you? If not, run like hell.
You'll start to share dreams, there's telepathy going with it, but worse, there's reality leakage, too. You end up taking up aspects of your entanglement partner, and vice versa. If they're killed you're likely to drop dead on the spot; if it lasts more than a couple of weeks it goes beyond sharing thoughts, you could end up merging with them permanently.
The good news is, the entanglement can be broken by a fairly simple ritual. The bad news is, it takes both parties cooperating to do it. Do you have any way out of it"
"Too late. They ran it yesterday — "
"Shit. Love, how long is it going to take you to realize that if they ask you to do them a special favor you need to run like — "
"Mo."
"Bob"
"I know — " My throat closes up and I stop talking for a moment. "I love you."
"Yes." Her voice is faint at the end of the internet connection.
"I love you, too — "
This is too painful to hear. "She's asleep."
"She"
"The demon." I glance round, but there's nobody in the row in front of me and I'm directly in front of the partition between business and cattle class. "Ramona. Black Chamber operative. I don't — " This is too unpleasant: I start trying to figure out another way of approaching the subject.
"Has she hurt you?" Mo's tone is chilly enough to freeze my ear.
"No." Not yet. "I don't want you to go near her, Mo. It's not her fault. She's as much a victim of this as — "
"Bullshit, love. I want you to tell her, from me, that if she even thinks about messing with you I'll break every bone in her body — "
"Mo! Stop it!" I lower my tone of voice. "Don't even think about it. You don't want to get involved in this. Just don't.
Wait 'til it's all over and we'll go on holiday together and get away from it all."
A pause. I tense up inside, desperately hoping for the best. Finally: "It's your judgment call and I can't stop you.
But I'm warning you, don't let them fuck with you. You know how they use people, what they did to me, right?
Don't let them do it to you, too." A sigh. "So why did they send you"
I swallow. "Angleton says he needs me to get inside an operation and I think he wants an unblockable communications channel back to the field controller. Did you ask him what it's about — "
"Not yet I haven't. Hang in there, love. I'm finishing up here and I've got to go back to London tomorrow: I'll drag everything out of Angleton before sunset. Where is he sending you? Who's your backup"
"I'm on my way to the Princess Juliana Airport on Saint Martin, staving in the Sky Tower at Maho Bay. He's sent Boris, Pinky, and Brains to look after — " I suddenly realize where this is leading. Quick on the uptake I ain't. "Listen, don't bother trying to — "
"I'll be on the next flight out, I just have to touch base long enough to mug Harry the Holiday Piggy Bank. It'll be a cold day in Hell before I'm trusting your skin to their — "
"Don't!" I can see it already, horrible visions welling up out of the twisted depths of my subconscious. Does Mo realize what my being entangled with Ramona means? I hate to think what she'll do if she figures it out and Ramona's on the same continent. Mo is a very tactical person. Tactile, too — passionate, fiery, and capable of thinking outside the box — but if you show her an obstacle, she has a disturbing tendency to punch right through it. That's how she ended up in the Laundry, after all: making an end run round the Black Chamber, straight into our organization's lap. I love her dearly, but the thought of her turning up at my hotel room and me trying not to touch her while I'm in this embarrassing bind with Ramona scares the shit out of me. It's not exactly your normal sordid extramarital affair, is it? It's not as if I'm actually sleeping with Ramona and it's not as if I'm married to Mo, either. But it's got all the same potential to explode in-my face — and that's before you factor in the little extra details like Ramona being the corporeal manifestation of a demonic entity from beyond space-time and Mo being a powerful sorceress.
"You're breaking up. Hang in there! See you the day after tomorrow!" She buzzes, then the connection drops.
I stare at the screen for a moment. Then I dry-swallow and press the SERVICE button for the flight attendant. "I need a drink," I say, "vodka and orange oti the rocks." Then some instinct makes me add: "Shaken." Just like me.
I spend a good chunk of the rest of the flight determinedly trying to get drunk. I know you're not supposed to do that sort of thing when flying in a pressurized cabin — you get dehydrated, the hangover's worse — but I don't give a shit.
Somewhere near Iceland Ramona wakes up and snarls at me for polluting her cerebral cortex with cocktail fallout, but either I manage to barricade her out or she decides to give me the day off for bad behavior. I play a drunken round of Quake on my Treo, then bore myself back to sleep by reading a memorandum discussing my responsibility for processing equipment depreciation and write-off claims pursuant to field-expedient containment operations. I don't want to be on the receiving end of a visit from the Auditors over a misfiled form PT-411/E, but the blasted thing seems to be protected by a stupefaction field, and every time I look at it my eyelids slam shut like protective blast barriers .
I wake up half an hour before landing with a throbbing forehead and a tongue that tastes like a mouse died on it. The huge gleaming expanse of Maho Beach is walled with hotels: the sea is improbably blue, like an accident in a chemistry lab. The heat beats down on me like a giant oven as I stagger down the steps onto the concrete next to the terminal building.
Half the passengers are crumblies; the rest are surf Nazis and dive geeks, like extras auditioning for an episode of Baywatch. A strike force of hangover faeries is diving and weaving around me on pocket jet-packs when they're not practicing polo on my scalp with rubber mallets. It's two in the afternoon here, about six o'clock in Darmstadt, and I've been in transit for nearly twelve hours: the business suit I'm wearing from the meeting in the Ramada feels oddly stiff, as if it's hardening into an exoskeleton. I feel, not to put too fine a point on it, like shit; so when I come out of baggage claim I'm deeply relieved to see a crusty old buffer holding up a piece of cardboard upon which is scrawled: HOWARD — CAPITAL LAUNDRY SERVICES.
I head over towards him. "Hi. I'm Bob. You are ..."
He looks me up and down like I'm something he's just peeled off the underside of his shoe. I do a double-take. He's about fifty, very British in a late-imperial, gin-pickled kind of way — in his lightweight tropical suit, regimental tie, and waxwork mustache he looks like he's just stepped out of a Merchant-Ivory movie. "Mr. Howard. Your warrant card, please."
"Oh." I fumble with my pocket for a while until I find the thing, then wave it vaguely in his direction. His cheek twitches.
"That'll do. I'm Griffin. Follow me." He turns and strides towards the exit. "You're late."
I'm late? But I only just got here! I hurry after him, trying not to lurch into any walls. "Where are we going?" I ask.
"To the hotel." I follow him outside and he waves an arm peremptorily. An old but well-kept Jaguar XJ6 pulls up and the driver jumps out to open the door. "Get in." I almost fall into the seat, but manage to cushion my briefcase just in time to save the laptop. Griffin shoves the door shut on me then gets into the front passenger seat and raps the dashboard: "To the Sky Tower! Chop-chop."
I can't help it: my eyes slide closed. It's been a long day and my snatch of sleep aboard the airbus wasn't exactly refreshing. My head's spinning as the Jag pulls out onto a freshly resurfaced road. It's oppressively hot, even with the air conditioning running flat-out, and I just can't seem to stay awake. Seemingly seconds later we pull up in front of a large concrete box and someone opens the door for me. "Come on, get out, get out!" I blink, and force myself to stand up.
"Where are we?" I ask.
"The Sky Tower Hotel; I've booked you in and swept the room. Your team will be working out of a rented villa when they arrive — that's in hand, too. Come on." Griffin leads me past reception, past a stand staffed by Barbies giving away free cosmetic samples, into an elevator, and down another anonymous hotel-space passage decorated randomly with cane furniture. We end up in some corporate decorator's vision of a tropical hotel room, all anonymous five-star furniture plus a French door opening onto a balcony exploding with potted greenery. A ceiling fan spins lazily, failing to make any impression on the heat. "Sit down. No, not there, here." I sit, suppress a yawn, and try to force myself to look at him. Either he's frowning or he's worried. "When are they due, by the way?" he asks.
"Aren't they here yet?" I ask. "Say, shouldn't you show me your warrant card"
"Bah." His mustache twitches, but he reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a thing that anyone who isn't expecting a warrant card will see as a driving license or a passport. There's a faint smell of sulfur in the air. "You don't know."
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