see further into the red end of the spectrum; by rights she ought to be as blind as a bat. From the sounds these sea creatures are making they're some sort of shrimp, luminescent and torpid as they feed on the tiny scraps of biomass raining down from the illuminated surface like oceanic dandruff.
The water down here is frigid — if Ramona didn't have the heated suit she'd likely freeze to death before she could surface again. She messes with a pair of vents near her chin, and a tepid veil of warm water flows across her face, smelling faintly of sulfur and machine oil. 'Let's get this over with,'
she mutters as a weird itching around her gills peaks and begins to subside: 'If I stay down here much longer I'll begin to change.' She says it with a little shudder.
She fastens herself back into the control chair and throws the lever to resume our descent. After an interminable wait, there's a loud clang that rattles through the platform. 'Aha!'
She glances round. The descent rollers have just passed a football-shaped bulge in the pipe painted with the white numerals '100.'
'Okay, time to slow down.' Ramona hits the brakes and we slide over another football, numbered '90,' then '80.' They're counting down meters, I realize, indicating the distance to go until we hit something.
I feel Ramona working my jaws remotely; it's most unpleasant — my mouth tastes as if something died in it.
'Nearly there,' she tells the technician who's taken Billington's place during the boring part of the descent.
'Should be seated on the docking cone in a couple of minutes.'
She squeezes the brake lever some more. 'Thirty meters. What's our altitude'
The technician checks a screen that's out of my line of sight: 'Forty meters above ground zero, one-seventy degrees out by two-two-five meters.'
'Okay ...' We've slowed to a crawl. Ramona squeezes the brake lever again as the '10' meter football creeps past, climbing the pipe string. The brakes are hydraulically boosted — the grab she's sitting on weighs as much as a jumbo jet — and the big rollers overhead groan and squeal against the pipe string, scraping away the paint to reveal the gleam of titanium-graphite composite segments. (No expense is spared: that stuff is usually used for building satellites and space launchers, not drilling pipes that are going to be cut apart once they've been hauled back up to the surface.) I watch as Ramona frowns over a direction indicator and carefully uses another lever to release water to the directional control jets, shoving the platform round until it's lined up correctly with the docking cone below. Then she releases the brake again, just enough to set us gliding down the final stretch.
The pipe flares out to three times its previous diameter, then stops being a pipe: there's an enormous conical plug dangling from the drill string, point uppermost, with flanges that lock into a tunnel on the underside of the platform's harness, like Satan's own butt-plug. We drop steadily, and the rollers are pushed outwards by the cone until the harness locks into place around the cone. 'Okay securing the grab now,' Ramona comments, and throws the final lever. There's an uneven series of bangs from below the deck as hydraulic bolts slide into place, nailing us to the end of the pipe. 'You want to begin steering us over to the target zone'
'Make sure you're secured in your seat,' the tech advises her whispering in my ear. 'Visual check. Are your wards contiguous?' Ramona switches on her hand torch, casts the beam around the metal panels at her feet. Pale green light picks out the non-Euclidian circuitry of a Vulpis exclusion array etched into the deck with a welding torch. It extends all the way around her chair. 'Check. Wards clear and unobstructed. How are they powered'
'Don't worry, we took care of that.' Oh great, I realize, they're going to drop Ramona into the field around JENNIFER MORGUE Site Two — a field that tends to kill electronics and, quite possibly people — with only a ward for protection, one that needs blood to power it. 'It's full of Pale Grace(TM) Number Three(R)[13 The word 'Three' and the digit '3' (and non-English localizations thereof) are patented intellectual property of TLA Systems Corporation and denote the entity that, in the set of integers, is the ordinal successor of 2 and predecessor of 4. Used by kind permission.], and we've got a sacrifice waiting in cell four to energize it. Should be commencing exsanguination in two minutes.'
'Um, okay.' Ramona checks her compass, suppressing a stab of anger so strong it nearly shocks me into a languorous yawn. 'What did the subject do to rate a starring role'
'Don't ask me — underperforming sales rep or something.
There's plenty more where she came from.' The technician steps back for a while, at Billington's command, then nods, and steps forwards into view again. 'Right. You're about to see the wards light up. Tell me immediately if they stay dark.'
Ramona glances down. Eerie red sparks flicker around the runes on the deck. 'It's lit.'
'Good.' Somewhere disturbingly close to the back of my own mind I can feel her daemon coil uneasily in its sleep, a sensual shudder rippling through us as it senses the proximity of death. The skin of my scrotum crawls; I feel Ramona's nipples tighten. She shudders. 'What's that'
Billington leans over me now. 'You're twenty meters off the counter-intrusion field rim, sitting in the middle of a contagion mesh with a defensive ward around you. If my analysis is correct, the field will absorb the sacrifice and let you in. Your entanglement with Bob up here will confuse its proximity sense and should let you survive the experience.
You might want to uncap your periscope at this time: from now on, you're on your own until you dump the ballast load.'
He steps back smartly and the wards inscribed on the floor around my chair light up so bright that the glare reflects off the ceiling of the control room above me, pulling me back into my own head for a moment. 'Hey — ' I begin to say, and just then ...
Things.
Get.
Confused.
I'm Ramona: leaning over a narrow, glass letter box in the & middle of the console, staring down at a brown expanse of mud as I twitch the thruster control levers, flying the platform and its trailing grapple arms closer towards a cylindrical outcropping in the middle of the featureless plain. I'm in my element, slippery and wet, comfortably oblivious to the thousands of tons of pressure bearing down on me from above.
I'm Bob: limp as a dishrag, passive, lying on a dentist's chair in the middle of a pentacle with lights flaring in my eyes, a cannula taped into my left forearm, and a saline drip emptying into it through an infusion pump — They've drugged me, I realize dizzily — a passenger, along for the ride.
And I'm someone else: frightened half to death, strapped down on a stretcher with cable ties so I can't move, and the robed figures around me are chanting, and I'd scream if I could but there's something wrong with my throat and why won't anyone rescue me? Where are the police? This isn't supposed to happen! Is it some kind of sorority initiation thing? One of the sisters is holding a big knife. What's she doing? When I get out of here I'm going to — I stare down at the muddy expanse unrolling beneath the platform. Rotating the periscope I check the ten grab-arms visually: they all look okay from here, though it won't really be possible to tell for sure until I fire the hydraulic rams.
They cast long shadows across the silt. Something white gleams between two of them, briefly: skeletal remains or something. Something.
Glimpse of silvery strings across the grayness, like the webs of a spider as big as a whale. Conical spires rising from the mud, dark holes in their peaks like the craters of extinct volcanoes. Guardians sleeping. I can feel their dreams, disturbed thoughts waiting: but I can reassure them, I'm not who you want. Beyond them, more open ground and a sense of prickling fire that ripples across my skin as I float past an invisible frontier left over from a war that ended before humans existed — She screams silently and the terror gushes inside my head as the knife tears through her throat, blood spurting in thick pulses draining towards zero — The daemon in my head is awake now, noticing — The blood vanishing, drained into the fiery frontier on the sea floor — And we're inside the charmed circle of death around JENNIFER MORGUE Site Two.
A long time later, McMurray comes up to me and clears his throat. 'Howard, can you hear me?' he asks I mumble something like leave me alone. My head aches like it's clamped in a vice, and my mouth is a parched desert.
'Can you hear me?' he repeats patiently.
'Feel. Like shit.' I think for a minute, during which time I manage to crowbar my eyes open. 'Water?' Something's missing, but I'm not sure what.
