Authors: Charles Stross
Jennifer Morgue (30 page)
If they're too dumb to be useful they're a drain on your management time. All corporations are an economy of attention, from the top down. You should take McMurray as a role model, Mr. Howard, if you ever make it back to your petty little civil service cubicle farm. He's a consummate senior field agent and a huge asset to his employers.
No manager in their right mind would ever terminate him, but because he likes fieldwork he doesn't spend enough time in the office to get a leg up the promotion ladder. And he knows it." He falls silent. I take advantage of the break in his spiel to take a mouthful of water. "That's why I headhunted him away from the Black Chamber," Billington adds.
When I finish coughing, he looks at me thoughtfully.
"You strike me as being a reasonably adaptable, intelligent young man. It's really a shame you're working for the public sector. Are you sure I can't bribe you? How would a million bucks in a numbered account in the Caymans suit you"
"Get lost." I struggle to maintain my composure.
"If it's just that silly little warrant card you guys carry, we can do something about it," he adds slyly.
Ouch. That's a low blow. I take a deep breath: "I'm sure you can, but — "
He snorts. And looks amused. "It's to be expected. They wouldn't have sent you if they thought you had an easy price.
It's not just money I can offer, Mr. Howard. You're used to working for an organization that is deliberately structured to stifle innovation and obstruct stakeholder-led change. My requirements are a bit, shall we say, different. A smart, talented, hard-working man — especially a morally flexible one — can go far. How would you like to come on board as deputy vice-president for intelligence, Europe, Middle East, and Africa division? A learning sinecure, initially, but with your experience and background in one of the world's leading occult espionage organizations I'm sure you'd make your mark soon enough."
I give it a moment's thought, long enough to realize that he's right — and that I'm not going to take the offer. He's offering me crumbs from the rich man's table, and not even bothering to find out in advance if that's the sort of diet I enjoy. Which means he's doing me the compliment of not taking the prospect of my defection seriously, which means he considers me to be a reliable agent. And now I stop to think about it, I realize to my surprise that I am. I may not be happy about the circumstances under which I took the oath, and I may gripe and moan about the pay and conditions, but there's a big difference between pissing and moaning and seriously contemplating the betrayal of everything I want to preserve. Even if I've only just come to realize it.
"I'm not for sale, Ellis. Not for any price you can pay, anyway. What's this archetype business"
He nods minutely, examining me as if I've just passed some sort of important test. "I was getting to that." He rotates his chair until he's half-facing the big monitor off to my right. He stabs at the mouse mat with one finger and I wince, but instead of fat purple sparks and a hideous soulsucking manifestation, it simply wakes up his Windows box.
(Not that there's much difference.) For a moment I almost begin to relax, but then I recognize what he's calling up and my stomach flip-flops in abject horror.
"I do everything in PowerPoint, you know." Billington grins, an expression which I'm sure is intended to be impish but that comes across to his intended victim — me — as just plain vicious. "I had to have my staff write some extra plugins to make it do everything I need, but, ah, here we are ..."
He rapidly flips through a stack of tediously bulleted talking points until he wipes into a screen that's mercifully photographic in nature. It's a factory, lots of workers in gowns and masks gathered around worktops and stainless steel equipment positioned next to a series of metal vats.
"Eileen's Hangzhou factory, where our Pale Grace(TM) Skin Hydromax(R) range of products are made. As you probably already figured out, we apply a transference-contagion glamour to the particulate binding agent in the foundation powder, maintained by brute force from our headquarters operation in Milan, Italy. Unlike most of the cosmetics on the market, it really does render the wrinkles invisible. The ingredients are a bit of a pain, but she's got that well in hand; instead of needing an endless supply of young women just to keep one old bat pretty we can make do with only about ten parts per million of maid's blood in the mix. It's just one of the wonders of modern stem cell technology. Shame we can't find a replacement for the stress prostaglandins, but those are the breaks."
He clicks his mouse. "Here's the other end of the operation." It's a room full of skinny, suntanned guys in short-sleeved shirts hunched over cheap PCs, row upon row of them: "My floating offshore programmer ranch, the SS Hopper. You've probably read about it, haven't you? Instead of offshoring to Bangalore, I bought an old liner, wired it, and flew in a number of Indian programmers to live on board. It stays outside the coastal limit and with satellite uplinks it might as well be in downtown Miami. Only they're not, um, actually programming anything. Instead, they're monitoring the surveillance take from the mascara. Because the Pale Grace(TM) Bright Eyes(R) products don't just link into the transferencecontagion glamour, they contain particles nano-engraved with an Icon of Bhaal-She'vra that backdoors them into my surveillance grid. That's actually the main product of my sixty-nanometer fab line these days by the way, not the bespoke microprocessors everyone thinks it makes. It's a very useful similarity hack — anything the wearer can see or hear, my monitors can pick up, and we've got flexible batch manufacturing protocols that ensure every single cosmetics product is uniquely coded so we can tell them apart. It's almost embarrassing how much intelligence you can gather from this sweep, especially as Eileen's affiliates are running a loyalty scheme that encourages users to register their identity with us at time of sale for free samples, so that we know who they are."
I'm boggling already. "Are you telling me you've turned your cosmetics company into some kind of occult ubiquitous surveillance operation? Is that what this is"
"Yup, that's about the size of it." Billington nods smugly. "Of course, it's expensive — but we manage to just about break even on a twenty buck tube of mascara, so it works out all right in the end. And it's less obvious than using several million zombie seabirds." He clears his throat.
"Anyway, that's by way of demonstrating to you that you can run, but you can't hide. Now, to explain why you shouldn't run ..."
He flicks to the next slide, and it's not a photograph, it's a live surveillance take from a camera somewhere. I'm pretty sure it's aboard this very ship. It's Ramona, of course. She's sprawling across a double bed in a stateroom, out cold.
"Here's Ms. Random. I figure you know by now that you don't get to talk to her without my say-so. You need to know three things about her. Firstly, if I've got you, I can make her do anything I want — and vice versa. You've figured that out?
Excellent."
He pauses for a few seconds while I force myself to stop trying to break the arms of my chair. "There's no need for that, Mr. Howard. No harm will come to either of you unless you force my hand. You're here because I need her to do a little job for me, one relating to the recovery of the alien artifact — and I need her willing cooperation. So that's item two out of the way. Item three, I gather you've met Mr.
McMurray? Good. It might interest you to know that he's a specialist in controlling entities like Ramona's succubus, or Johanna's necrophage. I could threaten to hurt you if she tries to resist, but I always find that positive incentivization works much better than the big stick on employees: so I'm going to offer her a deal. If you and Ms. Random cooperate fully, I'll have Mr. McMurray see if he can permanently separate her from her little helper. As he was part of the team who invoked and bound it to her in the first place ... well, what do you think she'll say to that"
I pick up my water glass and drain it, hoping for something, anything, to occur to me that'll show me a way out.
Billington may not have tried to figure out my price, but I'm pretty sure he's got Ramona's. "What's the job"
Billington prods at his fancy remote again and another screen comes to life: a view of a huge metal chamber, something like a factory floor — only the floor itself is covered in black water. A moment's confusion, then it springs into focus for me. "Isn't that the Glomar Explorer"
"It's now the TLA Explorer, but yes, well-spotted, Mr.
Howard."
I focus on the pipe that pierces the heart of the pool of water. There's something big and indistinct lurking just under the surface down there, impaled on the end of the drill string. "What's that"
"Can't you guess? It's the TMB-2, a clone of the original Hughes Mining Barge-1, equipped with updated telemetry and new materials so that pressure-induced brittleness in the grab cantilever arms won't stop it from working this time."
"But you know the Deep Ones won't let you retrieve — "
"Really?" His grin widens.
"But!" My head's spinning. I know about the original HMB-1, Operation JENNIFER, the BLUE HADES defense system that nearly dragged the mother ship down. "You said this was about Ramona"
"She's one of the in-laws," Billington explains cheerfully.
"She's got the Innsmouth look, you know? She tastes right to their minions the abyssal polyps. You didn't think the Deep Ones guarded every inch of their territory in person, did you?
The polyps are subsentient just like your burglar alarm. They work by biochemical tracers, discriminating self from other."
He picks up his whisky. "I need her to ride the grab down and keep an eye on it while it locks onto the target. If the defenders of the deep smell Old One in the water they'll stay cowering in their burrows in the abyssal mud. What do you say to that"
"It's an interesting theory," I admit, which is true because I don't know one way or the other whether it'll work.
"It's more than a theory. I sank a lot of money into arranging for the Black Chamber to send her, boy. Her folk aren't so numerous and most of them would die rather than let themselves be turned to such a purpose. She's been tamed, which is unusual, and you've got a handle on her, and I've got you. So, I'll make you a new offer. Convince her to ride the barge for me willingly, and I'll have McMurray free her from her curse. Convince her to ride the barge and I won't even have to threaten you. How about it"
He's backed me into a corner, I realize. And not just with menaces; the thing is, he has found Ramona's price. And having been inside her skull, even if only a bit, I'm not sure I can criticize her. Or easily stand in her way, if she really wants to do it. Threats of torture are redundant — just forcing her to go on living in her current state is torment enough.
Plus, if she doesn't cooperate, Billington might turn nasty and take it out of my hide. Which reminds me of something else ...
"Why me?" I finally burst out. "I mean, if you needed her, surely you don't specifically need me to control her? I'm nothing to you. You've got McMurray. You already know about my government's offer. What am I doing here? Why don't you just do the disentangling ritual and dump me overboard"
Billington's smile widens, disturbingly: "Ah, but that's where you're wrong, Mr. Howard. Your presence here prevents anyone else — like the US Navy, for example — from turning up and spoiling my scheme. Which I realized would be a likely response to my current operation right at the outset, and took steps to prevent, in the form of a monumentally expensive and rather intricate destiny-entanglement geas that compels the participants to adopt certain archetypal roles that have been gathering their strength from hundreds of millions of believers over nearly fifty years. The geas doesn't mess with causality directly, but it does ensure that the likelihood of events that mesh with its destiny model are raised, while other avenues become less ... probable. Going against the geas is hard; agents get run over by taxis, aircraft suffer inexplicable mechanical failures, that sort of thing. Now you've jumped through all the hoops in the geas and in so doing massively reinforced it. You've taken on the role of the heroic adversary. Which in turn means that nobody else is allowed to play the hero around here. And in accordance with another aspect of the geas, you're in my power for the time being and you're going to stay there until a virtuous woman turns up to release you. Got that"
My head's spinning. What the hell is he on about? And where am I going to find a virtuous woman on board a mad billionaire's yacht at three in the morning as we steam towards the Bermuda Triangle? "What about the auction?" I ask plaintively.
Billington laughs raucously. "Oh, Mr. Howard! The auction was only ever a blind, to make your superiors believe I could be bought and sold!" He leans forwards across the Desk, and his eyebrows furrow like thunderclouds: "What use do you think I have for mere gigabucks? This is the highstakes table." He looks past my shoulder, towards the gorilla.
"Take him back to his room and lock him in until morning.
We'll continue this conversation over breakfast." The gorilla stomps over and lays a beefy hand on my shoulder. "When I have JENNIFER MORGUE they'll do anything I want," he mutters, and my skin crawls because I don't think he's talking to me anymore. "Anything at all. They'll have to listen to me once I own the planet."
The gorilla herds me back down a short flight of steps and onto a passage that sports a row of mahogany-paneled doors like a very exclusive hotel. He opens one of them and gestures me inside. I briefly consider trying to take him, but realize it won't work: they've got Ramona and they've got the surveillance network from Hell and I'm on a ship that's already out of sight of land. I'll only get one chance, at most, and I'd better make sure I don't blow it. So I go inside without a struggle, and look around tiredly as he turns the key in the lock.
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