'No talking out of class.' He looks at me speculatively. A porthole winds past the back of his head, embedded like a zit in the flank of a behemoth. 'Orders from the boss. Once you're aboard the TMB-2, then you get to talk among yourselves.'
'Enjoy the peace and quiet while you can,' Todt sneers.
We hit the water with a neck-jarring thump, and everything gets very busy for a minute or two. The two black berets who've been riding down with us fire up the engine and cast-off the cables securing us to the crane, which in turn throws us variously into one another and across the bottom of the boat. It's a bouncy, jarring ride, and I get a lungful of spray as I try to sit up. It ends with me coughing over the side, wishing I had Ramona's gills. By the time I'm halfrecovered we're turning away from the Mabuse and accelerating across open water. I finally get some air back and look around to see that we've circled the former destroyer. In the distance, there's land on the horizon, but much closer to home a monstrous cliff-like bulk looms over us — the former Glomar Explorer.
My sense of scale fails me when I try to take it in. I find myself looking up, and up, and up — the thing's as big as a skyscraper, nearly a fifth of a kilometer long. After the Explorer was retired and mothballed in the 1970s they cut the superstructure away, but Billington's people have rebuilt the huge derrick that towers ten stories above the deck, the two huge docking legs and the big cranes at each end of the moon pool, and the entire drilling platform and pipe management system. It looks like an oil rig humping a supertanker. There are loud pumps or engines running up on the deck, and a hammering noise overhead; looking up I see a chopper closing in on the helipad at the stern of the ship. 'Who's that'
I ask.
'That'll be the boss arriving,' says McMurray. To the driver: 'Take us in.'
We motor steadily towards a platform hanging near the waterline, halfway along one flank of the giant ship. The ship sits eerily still in the water, as if it's embedded in the top of a granite pillar anchored to the sea floor. As we get closer, the noise from the drilling platform up top gets louder, a percussion of rhythmic clanking and clattering sounds adding to the bass line of the motors and the squeal of drill segments grating across each other as the pipe-feeding mechanism winches them off the huge pile under the superstructure and passes them to the automatic roughneck mechanism. When we tie up alongside the metal staircase I feel the deep humming vibration of the bow and stern thrusters holding the ship on position against the waves.
'Up and out!' The black berets are waving us onto the platform. While Todt and the guards are busy down below, Ramona and I follow McMurray up the ladder towards a door two decks up. He leads us on a bewildering tour of the colossal drilling ship, up and down narrow corridors and cramped stairwells and finally along a catwalk overlooking a giant room with no floor — the moon pool. A black beret on duty at the door passes us ear defenders as we step out onto the catwalk. The noise is deafening and the air feels like I've walked into a cross between a sauna and a machine shop: greasy and humid with a stink of overheated metal parts. A sickly sweet undertone hints of fishy things that have died and not gone to heaven, embedded in the machinery that moves the underwater doors at the bottom of the moon pool.
It's not like this in the movies: presumably James Bond's enemies all employ crack task-forces of janitors spritzing everything with pine-scented disinfectant at fifteen-minute intervals to keep down the rotten shellfish stink.
About ten meters in front of me, a metal pipe as thick as my thigh descends from the underside of the drilling deck, hypnotically spearing into the pool below. I stare at it, following it down to the bubbling point of white water where it plunges into the moon pool and the deep ocean below.
Somewhere far down there a drowned alien artifact awaits its arrival. Presumably Billington, with his expertise in Gravedust interrogations, knows what to expect. Above us the drilling platform shudders and roars, hellishly loud as it feeds infinite numbers of pipe segments to the sea god.
McMurray walks along the catwalk until he reaches a row of incongruous office windows and a door, just as you'd expect to find overlooking the shop floor of a factory or a workshop. We follow him inside.
It's a big room, and as befits the villain's working headquarters one wall is occupied by a gratuitously large projection screen showing a map of the sea floor below the Explorer. There are lots of consoles with blinking lights, and half a dozen black berets sitting at desks where they mouse around schematics on a computer-controlled engineering interface. So far so good. It would look a lot like the control room of a power station, if not for the fact that there's something that resembles a dentist's chair in the middle of the floor. The ankle and wrist straps and the pentacles around its base suggest that it's not designed for root canal jobs. To top it all off there's a gloating villain standing front and center, wearing a Nehru suit and cradling an excessively somnolent Tiddles in his arms.
'Ah, Ms. Random, Mr. Howard! So glad you could make the show!' I twitch at Billington's victorious smirk.
Somehow or other I'm having difficulty controlling the urge to punch him out, sap two or three black- uniformed guards, steal an MP5K, and let fly.
'You need to turn down the gain on that geas: it's overpowering,'
I suggest.
'All in due course.' Billington looks amused, then mildly concerned. 'Are you feeling up to the job, Ms. Random? You look a bit peaked.'
Ramona snorts. 'If you want me to do this thing, you really ought to tell Pat to drop the interference. I can't hear myself think, much less Bob.'
'Thinking is not what I'm paying you for. However, no purpose is served by separating you at this time.' Billington nods to McMurray: 'Allow them full intercourse.'
McMurray looks alarmed: 'But the suppressor's all that's keeping their entanglement from proceeding to completion!
If I stop it now they'll only have about two days' individuality left, then we'll have to cut them loose or deal!'
Shit. I glance at Ramona. She stares at me, wide-eyed. 'I understand,' Billington says affably, 'but as it will take less than twenty-four hours to accomplish the retrieval, I fail to see what the objection is?' He thinks for a moment then comes to a decision. 'Drop the suppressor field now. When Ms. Random returns, you will immediately end their state of entanglement, as we discussed earlier.' He turns to me, and gestures at the dentist's chair arrangement: 'Please take a seat, Mr. Howard.'
I stare at him. 'What is that thing'
Billington's pupils narrow, lizardlike: 'It's a comfy chair, Mr. Howard. Don't make me ask twice.'
'Uh-huh.' Behind me I sense more than see McMurray adjust some sort of compact ward he keeps strapped to his left wrist: the fuzzy fogbank in my head fades away and I can feel Ramona's unease, the cold, hard deck beneath her feet, and the churning emptiness in her stomach.
**Bob, do as he says!** Ramona's sense of urgency carries over leaving a nasty metallic taste in my mouth. I edge towards the chair nervously.
. 'What are the straps for?' I ask.
'They're just in case of convulsions,' Billington says soothingly, 'nothing you need to worry about.'
**lt's a high-bandwidth sympathetic resonator,** Ramona tells me. Snowflakes of half-remembered knowledge slide into place in my head. Control cables suffer weird anomalies when you stick them under kilometers of water; Billington wants a better way of tracking his submersible grab, of staying in control over the retrieval process. Unlike its seventies predecessor, the new grab that Billington's had built is designed to be manually operated by one of Ramona's people, the Deep One/human hybrids. And it doesn't use fiber optics or electrical cables for monitoring the process via TV — it uses two entangled occult operatives. This chair will plug me right into Eileen's surveillance grid, far more efficiently than a swipe of mascara across the eyelashes. **Look, if you don't do it, we're screwed so hard it's not funny.** I weigh my chances, then swallow. 'The straps go,' I say.
Then I sit down tensely before I can change my mind.
'Jolly good.' Billington smiles. 'Pat, if you'd be so good as to escort Ms. Random to the pool, I believe her watery chariot is ready to depart.'
That's about the last thing I hear, because as my butt hits the padding on the chair I almost black out. I've been strongly aware of Ramona's presence ever since McMurray dropped his blocking ward, like having a mild case of double vision. But that was before I plugged myself into the chair.
It's an amplifier. I'm not sure how they've managed to make it work, but Ramona's perceptions almost overwhelm my awareness of my own body. She's got a sharper sense of smell than me, and I can appreciate her
