Jennifer Morgue (43 page)

Of course it's energetically expensive for him to occupy another body, so we have to keep the sacrifice schedule in mind as a critical path element in the restoration project, but there's no shortage of centh-decile underperformers on the sales force ... ah, yes." He glances at his watch. "Top of the hour, right on time." The guard and the woman in the pink suit arrive just as Billington gestures at the window. Outside, on the moon pool floor, a structure like an airport baggage-conveyor terminates in a platform just underneath the chthonian's conical head. I squint: there are lines and curves on that pointed end, almost like the helical coils of a drill, or a squid's tightly coiled tentacles. Down on the conveyor, something wriggly is working its way towards the platform. Or rather, something on the conveyor is being fed forwards remorselessly, wriggling and twitching like a worm on a hook.

''What's that — ?'' Ramona is in my head, using my eyes.

''Not what — who.'' I peer closer, then blink. The hairworm on the conveyor is still alive, but black fire crawls along the edges of the platform at the far end. It twists and rolls, and it's funny how a change of angle changes your entire perspective on things because suddenly I see his face, eyes bugging out with fear, and what I'm looking at snaps into focus. He's been trussed up in gaffer tape and his mouth taped shut to stop him screaming but I recognize McMurray, and I recognize a human sacrifice when I see him.

He's heading towards that platform, and now I realize — "You've got to stop it!" I shout at Billington. "Why are you doing this? It's insane!"

"On the contrary." Billington turns away from me and holds his hands behind his back. "I don't like doing this, but it's necessary if we're to meet our third-quarter target for energizing the revivification matrix," he says tightly. "By the way, you ought to relax: you're in the circuit, too."

I jackknife against the straps and nearly choke myself.

"What — "

"Oh shit," swears Ramona, despair and apprehension sweeping over her.

"Considering you appear to have prevented Johanna from returning, it's the least you can do for me," Billington explains. "I need a soul devourer. Otherwise it's just more dead meat, which doesn't help anyone. And while you're so inconveniently entangled I might as well plug both of you into the summoning grid to reduce the side-band leakage."

The platform unfolds shutterlike flaps as McMurray nears it. I can distantly hear his voice screaming in Ramona's head.

''Get me out of this! That's an order!'' Billington needs an infovore, I realize. He's feeding the chthonian by destroying souls in its presence. My knees feel like jelly: I've seen this sort of thing before. Which means — Ramona convulses against the straps and begins to choke.

I gag my guts rolling, because I can feel the backwash from McMurray's ill-considered words echoing off the inside of her skull like thunder and lightning. Ramona can't not obey, but she's immobile, unable to respond to her master's voice, and she's capable of choking herself to death and taking me with her.

Ramona's daemon is rising. I can feel a monstrous pressure in my balls. I can't see properly and I'm choking, I can't move — Ramona can't move — and a hideous heat spreads through my crotch. Her crotch. Proximity to death excites it, whether hers or her victim's. And this is about as close as it gets: the shutters are steel slabs, driven by hydraulic rams.

There's a whine of motors, deepening and slowing, and a muffled noise I can't identify. I can't breathe, or Ramona can't breathe, and her daemon senses the flow of life from the killing box down below. As the flow spurts into us the daemon feeds greedily, and Ramona convulses and falls unconscious.

With the last of my energy I inhale in a ragged breath, and scream.

"Oh dear," says Billington, turning round. "What seems to be the problem"

I draw another breath.

"You really shouldn't have done that," says the woman in the pink suit, standing in the doorway.

"Hurt her — " I gasp. Then I start coughing. I can't sense Ramona's daemon, but Ramona herself is deeply unconscious.

"She needs water. Lots of seawater." I'm breathing for two of us but I can't quite get enough air, because what Ramona needs now is full-body immersion. I can feel it, the changes in her cells, her organs slowly contracting and rearranging inside her frame, the fever of mutation that will only end in her death or complete metamorphosis — "What took you so long, dear?" asks Billington, looking at the doorway.

"I was putting my face on," says the woman in pink. I'm still gasping as a pair of black berets close in on Ramona's chair with buckets in hand, but something about the woman in pink trips my attention. Hang on, that's not Eileen — "Excellent." Billington glances at the black berets bending over Ramona and frowns. "We seem to have a little problem, this one isn't as robust as the last."

I peer at the woman in pink. In one hand, she holds a shiny metal briefcase; the other arm is stretched rigidly down, close to her body, as if she has a ruler up her sleeve. I try to focus on the sparkling around her: class three glamour, at least, I realize. She's taller and younger than Eileen, and if I squint — I look past her at her reflection in the glass — red hair — "What do you expect?" asks the woman everyone but me seems to think is Eileen Billington. "She's not a movie hero, is she? And neither is he, for that matter."

"Not now that I've terminated the reel," Billington says briskly. "You, you, and you, go chuck the piranhas overboard, fill the fish tank with seawater, and get it over here — "

"Really?" asks the woman. "Are you sure it's all over"

Billington glances at her. "Pretty much, apart from a few little details — mass human sacrifices, invocations of chthonic demigods, Richter-ten earthquakes, harrowing of the Deep Ones, rains of meteors, and the creation of a thousand-year world empire, that sort of thing. Trivial, really. Yes, it's all nailed down, dear. Why do you ask"

"I was curious: Does it mean we're safe from any risk that the Hero-designate playing the archetypical role is going to leap out of the shadows, armed to the teeth with specialized lethal hardware, and wreck all our plans"

To my necromancy-stunned eyes it all seems to happen in very slow motion. Her clenched fist unclenches: a bone-colored bow drops down her sleeve like a concealed cosh until she grips it by one end and brings her hand up to unlatch the briefcase. Both sides of the case eject, leaving her clutching a handle and a sling attached to a pale violin that she raises to her chin in a smooth motion that speaks of long practice. The halves of the case contain compact amplified speakers, and there's a stark black-on-yellow sticker on the underside of the violin: THIS MACHINE KILLS DEMONS. I start to shout a warning as Ramona begins to stir, her gills flexing limply against the base of her throat and her mouth pouting, and Billington begins to inscribe a sigil in the air in front of his face — "This is a song of unbinding," says Mo, and the bow slides across the faintly pulsing things-that-aren't-strings, glowing like gashes in my retinas and trailing a ghostly haze when she moves. The first note sounds, wavering eerily on the air and building like the first breezy harbinger of a hurricane. "It unlocks — everything."

Across the room, a particularly alert black beret shouts a warning and raises his MP-5. The second note wavers and screams from the body of the instrument, resonating painfully with my back teeth. Every hair on my body is trying to stand on end simultaneously. These aren't sounds the human ear is supposed to be able to hear the psychoacoustic model is all wrong: I feel like I'm suddenly listening to bat song, the noises that drive dogs wild, the raw and bloody notes of silence. The brief hammering of gunfire drives nails into my eardrums then stops in a shattering of glass and a brief scream as Mo squeezes the fingerboard. The bow string is glowing red. A third note quavers weirdly out of the instrument, somehow building simultaneously with the first and second, which haven't stopped — they've taken root in the air of the room, thickening and turning it blue — and there's a popping noise as the buckles of the straps holding me down spring open.

More screams. Billington, being non-stupid, dashes for the door onto the catwalk outside. The bow reaches the end of its arc and begins to slice back across the bridge of the violin as lockers burst apart, spilling paper and supplies across the floor: zippers break belts unfasten, doors fly open.

The noise is so loud now that it feels like a god is ripping the two halves of reality apart: the sound of tearing inside my head is deafening. I can't hear or feel Ramona anymore, and the lack of her presence is a huge vacuum in my soul, trying to split me in two. The noise of another shot slams in my ears as I sit up and see Mo advancing across the room towards the guards, still playing one hideous note after another. Her skin crackles with static discharge and her hair stands on end as the black beret with the pistol takes aim again and I gulp air, about to shout a warning: but she notices him and anything I could say would be redundant because she merely points the fingerboard of her instrument at him and there's a spray of blood, unlocked from the skin that binds it. Across the room, there's a sudden flash of light and smoke begins to pour out of one of the equipment racks.

An alarm klaxon begins to blare on and off mournfully, then a speaker crackles into life: "Alert! Incoming helicopters!

All hands to point defense!"

Where's Billington gotten to? I shake my head, trying to dislodge the dreadful keening sound of strings. The straps are gone. I sit up and lean over the side of the chair, then stumble to my feet and stagger round to the other side. Ramona's out for the count, and she looks really ill — breathing fast, the livid, bruised stripes of her gill slits pulsing against the fishwhite scales around the base of her neck. She's too dry, I realize. Too dry? A stab of guilt: I glance across at Mo, who is single-mindedly driving the surviving black berets out of the room. They're panicking, running for safety. Where's their master?

She turns round and says something. I can't hear a single word over the howling reverberation of her violin.

"I've got to stop him!" I yell. I can barely hear myself. She looks blank, so I point at the door onto the catwalk. "He's out there!"

She points at one of the inner doors emphatically, as if suggesting I should head that way instead. So I shake my head and stumble towards the catwalk. Behind me, the flickers of light suggest more electrical fires breaking out among the high-voltage bearers. I lean over the railing and look down dizzily. It's about twenty meters away — a small target at that range. I fumble with the pistol and switch on the laser. My hand's shaking. If I'm right — The red dot dances across the far wall. I trace it down the wall, swearing under my breath, and run it rapidly across the deck towards the drained floor of the moon pool. I keep my finger away from the trigger. If I'm wrong — Billington is an expert at soul-sucking abominations.

Now he's in thrall to another, greater evil: one with a damaged body, so he's provided it with a convenient temporary replacement while he comes up with enough sacrificial victims and spare parts to repair its original one. What entity aboard this ship exhibits all the personality traits of a coldblooded killing machine, combined with the monstrous, overweening vanity and laziness of a convalescent war god lounging in their personal Valhalla while their minions prepare their armor? There's only one answer.

The Persian tomcat sits underneath the alien horror, washing itself without concern. "C'mon, Fluffy," I tell it. "Show me what you are." We all know about cats and lasers. Lasers are the best cat toy ever invented: the red-dot machine that comes out for playtime. Used skillfully, you can make a cat chase the dot so slavishly that she'll run headfirst into a wall.

It's like the sitting-in-cardboard-boxes thing, or the sniffing-an-extended-finger reflex. All cats do it, unless they're so enervated that they choose to ignore the lure and groom their fur instead.

Fluffy takes a few seconds to lock on, and when he does, his response is immediate and drastic. He glances down at the deck sees the red dot dancing around nearby — and dashes away like his tail's on fire.

"Bob! We've got to get out of here! Ellis has gotten away."

I look round. Mo stands in the doorway, one hand cupped around an ear: "There are scuttling charges due to blow as soon as he's clear — "

It's deja vu all over again. At least her eyeballs aren't glowing blue and she isn't levitating. I shake my head and point down at the moon pool: "Help me! We've got to stop him!"

"Who's the target?" Mo ducks out and stands beside me.

"Him!" I pull the trigger. There's an ear-stinging ricochet a fraction of a second after the shot. I'm nowhere near the target. "Damn, missed.

"Bob, we've got to get out of here! Can you still feel that Black Chamber bitch? The chromatic disintermediator should have broken your entanglement, but — why are you trying to shoot that cat"