mild disgust with Billington's after-shave — there's a bilious undernote of ketosis to it, as if it's covering up something rotten — and the tang of ozone and leaking hydraulic fluid as she moves towards the doorway. Her dislike and fear of McMurray is gnawing away in the background, and there's her concern for — I shy away.
It takes a real effort of will to move my arms, even to realize that they're still there: I manage to lie down, or rather to flop bonelessly, then close my eyes.
**Ramona?** I ask.
**Bob?** She's curious, worried, and anxious.
**This chair, it's an amplifier — **
**You really didn't know? You weren't being sarcastic?** She pauses with her hand on the doorknob. McMurray looks round.
**No shit, what am I meant to do here? What's it for?**
**If you're asking, they haven't switched it on yet.** She looks round and now I can see myself lying in the chair, with a couple black berets leaning over me — **Hey! What are they doing — **
**Relax, it's in case you start convulsing.** McMurray starts to say something, and Ramona speaks aloud: 'It's Bob.
You didn't tell him what to expect.'
'i-i 'I see,' says McMurray. 'Ramona, channel. Bob, can you hear me'
I swallow — no, I swallow with Ramona's throat muscles.
'What's happening?' My voice sounds oddly high. Not surprising, considering whose throat it's coming out of.
McMurray looks pleased. He glances at the guards bending over my body, and I turn my head to follow, feeling the unaccustomed weight of her hair, the faint pull of tension on the gills at the base of her throat: I see myself — Bob — lying flat out, strapped down while they hook up bits of bleeping biotelemetry. A medic stands by, holding a ventilator mask.
'Amplification to level six, please,' says McMurray, then he looks back at me — at Ramona, that is. 'Your entanglement lets you see through Ramona's eyes, Bob. It also lets her speak through your mouth, when you're at depth. The defense field around the chthonic artifact plays hell with electronics and scrambles ordinary scalar similarity fields, but the deep entanglement between you and Ramona is proof against just about any interference short of the death of one of the participants. When she's at depth, Ramona will operate the controls of the retrieval grab by hand — they're simple hydraulic actuators — to lock onto the artifact, then signal through you to commence the lift process.'
'But I thought, uh, doesn't it take days to ride the grab down'
McMurray shakes his head. 'Not using this model.' He looks insufferably smug. 'Back in the sixties they designed the grab to be fixed to the end of the pipe string. We've updated it a little; the grab clamps to the outside of the string and drops down it on rollers, then locks into place when it reaches the end. If we were going to unbolt and store the pipe sections when we retrieved it, we'd take two days to suck it all back up, it's true — but to speed things up we've got a plasma cutter up top that can slice them apart for recycling instead of unbolting each joint. This baby is nearly four times faster than the original.'
'Doesn't Ramona need to decompress or something, on the way up?
'That's taken care of: her kind have different needs from us land-dwellers. It'll still take us a whole day to bring the string up; she'll be all right.' He turns away, dismissively.
'Dive stations, please.'
Ramona follows him through the door and along the catwalk to a dive room where there's a whole range of esoteric kit laid out for her. She's done this sort of thing before and finds a kind of comfort in it. It's very strange to feel her hands working with straps and connectors that feel large to her slim fingers — shrugging out of her clothes and across the chilly steel deck plates, then one leg at a time into a wet suit.
There's more unfamiliar stuff: an outer suit threaded with thin pipes that connect to an external coupling, weight belt, a knife, torches. **What's the plumbing for?** I ask. **I thought you could breathe down there.**
**I can, but it's cold, so they're giving me a heated suit.** I get a picture: hot water is pumped down through the pipe string under high pressure, used to power the grab assembly via a turbine. Some of the water is bled off and cooled by a radiator until it's at a comfortable temperature for circulating through Ramona's suit. She's going to be down there for more than a day — **You're taking a bar of chocolate?** I ask, boggling slightly as she slides the foil-wrapped packet into a thigh pocket.
**There are fish down there, but you wouldn't want to eat them raw. Shut up and let me run through this checklist again.** I hang back and wait, trying not to get in the way. A dive error wouldn't be the lethal disaster for Ramona that it would be for me but it could still leave her stranded and exposed in the chilly darkness, kilometers below the surface.
Even if she's immune to the predations of the BLUE HADES defense polyps, there are other things down there — things with teeth out of your worst nightmares, things that can see in the dark and burrow through flesh and bone like drillmouthed worms. Ramona finally pulls her helmet on. Open-faced, with no mask or regulator, she turns and faces McMurray. 'Ready when you are.'
'Good. Take her to the pool,' he says to the technicians, and strides back out in the direction of the observation room.
Down in the moon pool, the waters are warm and still.
The drill string has stopped descending, although there are muted clanking and clattering noises from the platform overhead.
Around the walls of the pool the sea is dark, but something bulky and flat squats below the water in the middle of the pool. There are technicians in the water, scudding about in a Zodiac with an electric outboard: they seem to be collecting cables that connect the submerged platform to the instrument bay below the observation room windows.
Ramona walks heavily down the metal steps bolted to the wall of the pool until she's standing just above the waterline.
There are lights on top of the submersible grab, lined up in two rows to either side of an exposed platform with railings and, incongruously, an operator's chair, its seat submerged beneath two meters of seawater. There are two divers working on a panel in front of the seat; behind it, there's a bulky arrangement of shock absorbers and rollers clamped around a steel yoke the size of a medium truck, threaded around the drill string. Ramona steels herself, then steps off the platform.
Water slaps her in the face, cool after the humid air in the moon pool. She drops below the surface neatly, opens her eyes, and — this fascinates me — blows a stream of silver bubbles towards the surface. Her nasal sinuses burn for a moment as she inhales a deep draught of water, and there's a moment of panicky amphibian otherness before she relaxes the flaps at the base of her throat, and kicks off towards the submerged control platform, reveling in the sense of freedom and the flow of water through her gills. Nictitating membranes slide down across my — no, her — eyes, adding a faint iridescent haze to the view.
'Ready to go aboard,' I feel her saying through my throat.
'Can you hear me, Billington?' Somewhere a long way away I can hear my body coughing as Ramona swims over the seat and lets the two support divers strap her into it and hook up her warm-water hoses. She's doing something funny with my larynx and it's not used to it.
**Hey, careful about that,** I nudge her.
There's an echoing flash of surprise. **Bob? That feels really weird ...**
**You're not doing it right. Try using it like this.** I show her, swallowing and clearing my throat. She's right, it feels really weird. I close my eyes and try to ignore my body, which is lying on the dentist's chair as Ellis Billington leans close to listen to her.
There's a panel with about six dozen levers and eight mechanical indicator dials on it, all crude-looking industrial titanium castings with rough edges. Ramona settles in her seat and waves a hand signal at the nearest diver. There's a lurch, and the seat drops under her. A loud metallic grating sound follows, felt as much as heard, and she glances round to watch the huge metal harness grip the pipe string. I feel a pressure in her ears and I swallow for her. The pipe is rising through the docking collar — no, the platform I'm sitting on is sinking, about as fast as an elevator car. The great wheels grip the pipe, held in place to either side by hydraulic clamps. I manage to
