prod her into looking up: the moon pool and the ship merge into a dark fish-shaped silhouette against a deep blue sky, already darkening towards a stygian night broken only by the spotlights that ridge the spine of the huge grab we're riding on.
It's odd how Ramona's senses differ from my own. I can feel the pressure around me, but it's different from the way it feels to me in my own skin. Waves of sound move across me, sounds too low- or too high-pitched to hear with my own ears. Ramona can sense them in the small bones of her skull, though. There are distant clicking hunting noises from marine mammals, strange sizzling and clattering noises — krill, tiny crustaceans floating in the high waters like a swarm of locusts grazing on the green phytoplankton. And then there are the deep bass whoops and groans of the whales, growing abruptly louder as we drop below a thermocline.
The water on my exposed face is suddenly cold, and there's a sense of pressure on my skull, but a few deep gulps of water flushing through my gills clears it. Ramona swallows seawater as well as breathing it, letting it flood her stomach and feeling the chill as it infiltrates her gut. Rarely used muscles twitch painfully into life, forcing strange structures to realign themselves. **How are you taking this?** she asks me.
**I'll cope,** I tell her. The light outside our charmed circle of lamps has dimmed to a faint twilight. In the distant murk I spot a gray belly nudging past, possibly a deep-ranging tiger shark or something less well-known. The pipe rolls endlessly up through the docking harness.
'Dive stable at one meter per second,' Ramona tells Billington. I lie back, do the math: it's going to take us a little over an hour to reach the abyssal plain where JENNIFER MORGUE Two lies broken and desolate beneath 400 atmospheres of pressure, on a bed of gray ooze that's been accreting since before hairless apes slouched across the plains of Africa.
There's something soothing about the motion of the pipe string. Once every few minutes Ramona opens my mouth and murmurs something technical: some of the time Billington turns and relays an instruction or two to the everpresent flunky waiting at his shoulder. I lapse into a dreamy, — near-hypnotized state. I know something's wrong, that I shouldn't be this relaxed under the circumstances — but a great sense of lassitude has come over me as our entanglement nears completion. Lie back and think of England. Where the hell did that come from? I blink and try to throw back the sense of disengagement.
** Ramona — **
**Shut up and let me concentrate here.** She's working two of the levers and there's a loud dank-bump that I feel more than hear. **Okay, that's it.** We resume our descent, passing an odd bulge where the pipe triples in diameter for about three meters, like a python that's just swallowed a small pig. **What is it?**
**What do we do after you raise the artifact?**
**What do — ** She stops. **We get disentangled. right?**
**Yes, but what then?** I persist. For some reason I feel dizzy when I try to follow this line of reasoning. I can almost sense my own body again, see Billington leaning over me expectantly like an eager cultist inspecting his dead leader for signs of imminent resurrection. **Aren't we supposed to do ... something?**
**Oh, you mean kill Ellis, massacre his guards, and set the ship on fire, before making our escape on jet skis?** she says brightly.
**Something like that.** A thought bubbles up to the surface of my mind and pops, halfheartedly: **You gave that a lot of thought, huh?**
**The jet skis are on C deck, and there are only two of them. I've got to get Pat out of here — I'm afraid you'll have to make your own arrangements,** she says briskly. **But yeah, I can definitely nail Billington.** The penny drops — icy and cold, right down the back of my metaphorical net. **You've been planning this as a hit on Billington right from the start!**
**Well, that's the whole point of my being here, isn't it?
Why else would they send an assassin? I mean, d'oh!** I ought to be more shocked; maybe it's had time to sink in, what she really is. (And there's the whole escape thing, of course. Am I imagining things or did she feel a twinge of guilt when she told me I'd have to swim for myself?) **Your people used me to get close to Billington,** I accuse.
**Yup.** It's funny how these little misunderstandings only come clear when you're 800 meters below sea level and dropping like an express elevator towards Davy Jones's tentacle-enhanced locker. **As soon as Billington shuts down the geas field I'll be free to act on my own agency.** I can feel a funny tight smirk tugging at the sides of her mouth.
It's not humor. **He doesn't realize it yet, but he's so screwed you could plug him into the mains and call him Albert Fish.**
**But you can't do that unless we're disentangled, surely?
And for that you need — ** The other shoe drops, or rather, she kicks me between the eyes with it in her next comment: **Yes, that's why Pat is here. You didn't think supervisors from Department D routinely defect, did you? He's under even tighter control than I am.** And at that moment I can see the geas that's binding her to the Black Chamber tying her to the daemon they've imposed on her will: bright as chromed steel, thick as girders, compelling obedience. The Laundry warrant card is bad enough — if you try to spill our secrets you'll die, not to put too fine a point on it — but this is even worse. We do it for security. This is nothing short of vindictive. If she thinks a disloyal thought too far, the Other will be let loose — and the first thing it will do is feed on her soul. No wonder she's terrified of falling in love.
I'm fully awake now, mind spinning like a hamster on a — wheel in a cage on a conveyor belt heading for the maw of an industrial-scale wood chipper: there are thoughts I really desperately don't want to think while I'm inside her skull and vice versa. On the other hand, something does occur to me ...
**If McMurray's working with you, do you think you can convince him to give me back my mobile phone? **
**Huh?**
**It's no big deal,** I explain, **it's just, if I've got my phone I can escape. You want that to happen, right? Once we get back to the surface, you and McMurray want me out of the picture as soon as possible. I can get a ride home just about any time, as long as I've got my phone.**
**But we're out of range of land,** she points out logically.
**What makes you think I was going to use it to make a phone call?**
**Oh.** We watch the pipe string unreel for a minute or two in silence. Then I feel her acquiesce: **Yeah, I don't think that'll be a problem. In fact, why don't you just ask him for it? I mean, it's not as if you can phone home, so you can probably use some of your super-agent mojo while you've got it.** I am conflicted between wanting to hug Ramona, and kick her in the shins for being a smart-arse. But I guess that's her job, I mean, she really is a glamorous, high-flying superspy and assassin and I'm just an office nerd who's along for the ride. It doesn't matter what Angleton thinks of me, all I can really do here is lie back and think of — England — not to mention the ... game ofTetris ... on my phone — **Stop trying to think, monkey-boy, you're making my head hurt and I've got to drive this thing.** Monkey-boy? That does it. I send her a picture of a goldfish gasping in a puddle of water beside a broken bowl. Then I clam up.
14:
WE RIDE DOWN TO THE ABYSSAL PLAIN IN SILENCE, doing our best to barricade each other out of our minds.
The journey down actually takes nearer to three hours than one. There's a lengthy pause in the darkness of the bathypelagic zone, a kilometer down, while Ramona stretches and twists in strange exercises she's learned for adapting to the pressure. Her joints make cryptic popping noises as she moves, accompanied by brief stabbing pains. It's almost pitch-black outside our ring of lights, and at one point she unstraps herself from the seat and swims over to the edge of the platform to relieve herself, still tethered by the umbilical hose that pumps warm water through her suit.
Looking out into the depths, her eyes ad just slowly: I can see a cluster of faint reddish pinpricks swimming at the edge of visibility. There's something odd about her eyes down here, as if their lenses are bulging and she can
