the change to set in, and her fingers have begun to web. By the t she's got her top layer unzipped, the car has slowly pulled up to platform edge and driven aboard. The engine stops.
'Who's that?' she asks, pointing through the windscreen.
'Oops, I forgot about him.' It's Marc, sometime procurer and latterly zombie. He's bloated up against the front windscreen and the driver's side door. 'You'll have to help me get him out of there.'
'This is why I never date the same guy twice — avoids raisv ing a stink, you know'
I get the door open, just in time to be hit by an olfactory experience almost as good as Johanna's buffet. 'Ick.'
'You can say that again, monkey-boy. He's leaked all over the seats — you expect me to ride in this'
'You're the one who told me about the scuttling charges, I'm the one with the biometrics that match the ignition button. Your call.'
I grab hold of one arm. To my great delight, it doesn't come off in my hand. Ramona opens the opposite door and shoves him towards me. I do a two-step with the stiff, twist him round, and shove him onto the platform. I grab the bundled-up geas generator and shove it into the shoe box that passes for a boot in this thing. Ramona winces as she tries to belt herself in, and holds something up: 'What's this'
'Marc's idea of a conversational intro.' I pass her the MP-5. 'You know how to use one of these, I figure I'll take the pistol.' It's another Glock, of course, with a whizzy lasersighting widget and an extended magazine. 'Now let's go visit Ellis, huh'
I push the ignition button, check that the doors and windows are closed, then gently tap the gas pedal. There's a red light blinking on the dash, but the engine starts. We tilt alarmingly as I drive off the edge of the platform, but the car stabilizes fairly fast, leaving us bobbing like a cork in the water. I stroke the accelerator again. That starts a lot of spray flying — this thing isn't the world's most efficient paddle boat — but we begin to move away from the Mabuse, and I start the windscreen wipers so I can see where we're going. The Explorer is a huge, gray bulk about 400 meters away.
There's the beginning of a trail of foam at her stern, but I'm pretty sure I can catch her — even a Smart car can outrun a 60,000-ton, deep-ocean drilling ship, I figure. Ramona leans against my sore shoulder and I feel her bone-deep exhaustion, along with something else, a creeping smugness. 'We make a pretty good team,' she murmurs.
I'm about to say something intended to take the place of a witty reply when the rearview mirror lights up like a flash bulb. I goose the accelerator and we lurch wildly, nearly nosing over as a spray of water goes everywhere. Then there's a sound like the door of Hell slamming shut behind me, and another huge lurch sets us bobbing side to side. A water spout almost as high as the topmost radar mast hangs over the ship, then comes crashing back down 'Fuck fuck fuck ... ' We're less than a ship-length away from the Mabuse, on the opposite side to the scuttling charge, and that's probably what saves us: most of the blast is heading in the opposite direction. On the other hand, the ship is rolling, heeling over almost sixty degrees, and there's a gash below the waterline that's raised so high above the surface I can see it in my rearview mirror. It looks large enough to take on a hundred tons of water a second. Johanna opened the bulkhead doors below the waterline, and as if it isn't enough that the charge has ripped the yacht's skin open, cavitation from the explosion has broken her keel. I suppose Billington doesn't much care about money at this point — when he's Planetary Overlord he can have as many yachts as he likes — but right now / care because we're less than 200 meters away from something as massive as a ten-story office block that's just begun to disintegrate. As a way of ensuring that annoying witnesses are silenced and the geas generator stops working, it's overkill, but if it succeeds I suppose Lloyds of London are the only people who're going to complain.
The ship's superstructure hangs in the air like a hallucination heeled over through almost ninety degrees. Loose life rafts and stores tumble across the deck and fall into the sea.
With majestic slowness it begins to roll back upright — warships aren't designed to capsize easily — and I steel myself for the inevitable backwash when four or five thousand tons of ship go under I floor the accelerator pedal to open up some distance behind us which is, of course, the cue for the engine to die.
There's an embarrassed beep from the dashboard. I mash my thumb on the START button, but nothing happens, and I realize that the blinking red light on the dash has turned solid. There's a little LCD display for status messages and as I stare at it in disbelief a message scrolls across: MANDATORY SERVICE INTERVAL REACHED RETURN TO MAIN DEALER FOR ENGINE MANAGEMENT RESET.
Behind me, there's a sinking frigate, while ahead of me, the Explorer has begun to make way. I start swearing: not my usual 'shirfuckpisscuntbugger' litany, but really rude words.
Ramona sinks her fingers into my left arm. 'This can't be happening!' she says, and I feel a wash of despair rising off her.
'It's not. Brace yourself.' I flip open the lid on top of the gear-stick and punch the eject button. And the car ejects.
The car. Ejects. Three words that don't belong in the same sentence or at any rate in a sentence that's anywhere within a couple hundred meters of sanity street. In real life, cars do not come with ejector seats, for good reason. An ejector seat is basically a seat with a bomb under it. The traditional way they're used is, you pull the black-and-yellow striped handle, say goodbye to the airplane, and say hello to six weeks in traction, recovering in hospital — if you're lucky. The survival statistics make Russian roulette look safe. Very recent models buck the trend — they've got computers and gyroscopes and rocket motors to stabilize and steer them in flight, they've probably even got cup holders and cigarette lighters — but the basic point is, when you pull that handle, Elvis has left the cockpit, pulling fifteen gees and angling fifteen degrees astern. Now, the ejector system Pinky and Brains have bolted to the engine block of this car is not the kind you get in a fifthgeneration jet fighter. Instead, its closest relative is the insane gadget they use to eject from a helicopter in flight. Helicopters are nicknamed 'choppers' for a reason. In order to avoid delivering a pilot-sized stack of salami slices, helicopter ejection systems come with a mechanism for getting those annoying rotor blades out of the way first. They started out by attaching explosive bolts to the rotor hub, but for entirely understandable reasons this proved unpopular with the flight crew. Then they got smart.
Your basic helicopter ejector system is a tube like a recoilless antitank missile launcher, pointing straight up, and bolted to the pilot's seat. There's a rocket in it, attached to the seat by a steel cable. The rocket goes up, the cable slices through the rotor blades on the way, and only then does it yank the seat out of the helicopter, which by this time is approximately as airworthy as a grand piano.
What this means to me: There's a very loud noise in my ear, not unlike a cat sneezing, if the cat is the size of the Great Sphinx of Giza and it's just inhaled three tons of snuff. About a quarter of a second later there's a bang, almost as loud as the scuttling charge that broke the Mabuse, and an elephant sits down on my lap.
My vision blurs and my neck pops, and I try to blink. A second later, the elephant gets up and wanders off. When I can see again — or breathe — the view has changed: the horizon is in the wrong place, swinging around wildly below us like a fairground ride gone wrong. My stomach flip-flops — look ma, no gravity! — and I hear a faint moan from the passenger seat. Then there's a solid jerk and a baby hippopotamus tries me for a sofa before giving up on it as a bad deal — that's the parachute opening.
And we're into injury time.
Most of the time when someone uses an ejector seat, the pilot sitting in it has a pressing reason for pulling the handle — for example he's about to fly into the type of cloud known as cumulo-granite — and the question of where the seat — and pilot — lands is a bit less important than the issue of what will happen if it doesn't go off. And this much is true: if you eject over open water, you probably expect to land on the water, because there's a hell of a lot more water down there than ships, or whales, or desert islands stocked with palm trees and welcoming tribeswomen.
However, this isn't your normal ejection scenario. I've got Billington's Bond-field generator stuffed in the trunk, a glamorous female assassin with blood in her eye clutching a submachine gun in the passenger seat, and a date with a vodka martini in my very near future — just as soon as I make landfall alive. Which is why, as we swing wildly back and forth beneath the rectangular, steerable parachute (the control lines of which are fastened to handles dangling just above the sunroof), I realize that we're drifting on a collision course with the forward deck of the Explorer. If we're not lucky we're going to wrap ourselves around the forward docking tower.
'Can you work the parachute?' I ask. 'Yes — ' Ramona unfastens her seat belt, yanks at the sun-roof release latch: 'Come on! Help me!' We slide the roof back and she stands up, makes a grab for the handles,
