catches them, and does something that makes my eyes water and bile rise in the back of my throat. 'Come on, baby,' she pleads, spilling air from one side of the parachute so that it side-slips away from the docking tower, 'you can make it, can't you'
We swing back and forth like a plumb bob held by a drunken surveyor. I look down, trying to find a reference point to still my stomach: there's a tiny boat down there beside the Explorer — it's a speedboat, and from here it looks alarmingly similar to the boat I saw Mo loading stuff into. It can't be, I think, then hastily suppress the thought. It's best not to notice that kind of thing around Ramona.
We swing round and the deck rushes up towards us terrifyingly fast. 'Brace!' calls Ramona, and grabs me. There's a long-drawn-out metallic scraping crunching noise and the elephant makes a last baby-sized appearance in my lap, then we're down on the foredeck. Not that I can see much of it — it's shrouded beneath several dozen meters of collapsing nylon parachute fabric — but what I saw of it right before we landed wasn't looking particularly hospitable. Something about the dozens of black berets racing towards us, guns at the ready, suggests that Billington isn't too keen on the local skydiving club dropping in for tea.
'Get ready to run,' Ramona says breathily, just as there's a metallic racking noise outside the parachute fabric that's blocking our view. 'Come out with your hands up!' someone calls through a megaphone that distorts their voice so horribly that I can't hope to identify them.
I glance at Ramona. She looks spooked.
'We have a Dragon dialed in on you,' the voice adds, conversationally.
'You have five seconds.'
'Shit.' I see her shoulders droop in despair and disgust.
'It's been nice knowing you — '
'It's not over yet.'
I flick the catch and push the door open, wincing, then swing my feet out onto the deck. It's time to face the music.
16: REFLEX DECISION
'SO,' SAYS BlLLINBTON, PACING OUT A LAZY CIRCLE on the deck around me, 'the rumors of your resourcefulness were not misplaced, Mr. Howard.'
He flashes a cold smile at me, then goes back to staring at the deck plates in front of his feet, inspecting the wards around us. After a few seconds he passes out of my field of vision. I can feel Ramona flexing her arms against the straps; a moment later she spots him coming into view. Two more of the dentist's chairs are mounted side by side, feeing in opposite directions, on the same pedestal in the control room: Billington probably gets a bulk discount on them at villain-supply.com. Unfortunately he's also got Ramona and me strapped to them, and an audience of about fifty black berets who are either brandishing MP-5s or leaning over instrument consoles. These particular black berets are still human, not having succumbed to the dubious charms of Johanna Todt, but the freshly painted wards, inked out in human blood, sizzle and glow ominously before my Tillinghast-enhanced vision. 'Unfortunately your usefulness appears to have expired,'
says Ellis, walking back into view in front of me. He smiles again, his weird pupils contracting to slits. There's something badly wrong about him, but I can't quite put my ringer on it: he's not a soulless horror like the zombie troops, but he's not quite all there, either. Something is missing in his mind, some sense of self. 'Shame about that,' he adds conversationally. 'What are you going to do to us?' asks Ramona.
**I really wish you hadn't asked that,** I tell her silently, my heart sinking.
**Bite me, monkey-boy. Just keep him talking, okay?
While he's monologuing he isn't torturing us to death ...** 'Well, that's an interesting conundrum.' Billington glances over his shoulder at a clipboard-toting minion: 'Would you mind finding Eileen and asking her why she's late? It doesn't normally take her this long to terminate an employee.' The minion nods and hurries away. 'Following the logic of the situation that prevailed until I ended the invocation field by sinking the Mabuse, I ought to have you tortured or fed to a pool of hungry piranhas. Fortunately for you, the geas should be fully dissipated by now, I'm short on torturers, and urban legends to the contrary, piranhas don't much like human flesh.' He smiles again. 'I was inclined to be merciful, earlier: I can always find a niche for a bright, young manager in Quality Assurance, for example — ' I shiver, half-wondering if maybe the piranha tank wouldn't be preferable ' — or for a presentable young lady with your talents.' Then the smile drops away like a camo sheet covering an artillery tube: 'But that was before I discovered that you — ' he stabs a finger at Ramona ' — were sent here to murder me, and that you — ' I flinch from his bony digit ' — were sent here as a saboteur.'
He hisses that last, glaring at me malevolently.
'Saboteur?' I blink and try to look perplexed. When in doubt, lie like a very flat thing indeed. 'What are you talking about'
Billington gestures at the huge expanse of glass walling the control room off from the moon pool. 'Look.' His hand casually takes in the huge skeletal superstructure hanging from the ceiling by steel hawsers, its titanium fingers cradling a blackened cylinder with a tapered end: JENNIFER MORGUE Two, the damaged chthonian weapon. An odd geometric meshwork scarifies its hull: there are whorls and knots like the boles of a tree spaced evenly along it. From this angle it looks more like a huge, fossilized worm than a tunneling machine. It's quiescent, as if dead or sleeping, b u t ... 'I'm not sure. The Tillinghast resonator lets me notice things that would otherwise be invisible to merely human eyes, and something about it makes my skin crawl, as if it's neither dead nor alive, or even undead, but something else entirely; something waiting in the shadows that is as uninterested in issues of life and death as a stony asteroid rolling eternally through the icy depths of space, pacing out a long orbit that will end in the lithosphere of a planet wrapped in a fragile blue-green ecosystem. Looking at it makes me feel like the human species is simply collateral damage waiting to happen.
'Your masters want to stop me from helping him,' Billington explains. 'He's very annoyed. He's been trapped for thousands of years, stranded on a plateau in the rarefied and chilly dark, unable to move. Unable to heal. Unable even to revive.' Huge hoses dangle from the underside of the Explorer's, drilling deck, poking into the skin of the chthonian artifact like intravenous feeding lines. I blink and look back at Billington. He's lost it, I tell myself, with gathering horror. Hasn't he?
**You've only just figured that out?** asks Ramona.
**And here I was thinking you were quick on the uptake.** Despite the sarcasm, she feels very frightened, very cold. I think she knew some of this, but not the full scope of Billington's deviancy.
'I know all about your masters,' Billington adds in her direction. He can't hear our silent exchange, feel Ramona testing the strength of her bonds, or recognize me scoping out the parametric strength of the wards he's positioned around us — he just wants to talk, wants someone to listen and understand the demon urges that keep him awake late in the night. 'I know how they want to use him. They sent you to me in the hope of trading in a strong tool for a more powerful one. But he's not a tool! He's a cyborg warrior-god, a maker of earthquakes and an eater of souls, birthed for a single purpose by the great powers of the upper mantle. It is his geas to rejoin the holy struggle against the numinous aquatic vermin as soon as his body is sufficiently restored for him to resume residence in it. And it is our nature that the highest expression of our destiny must be to submit to his will and lend our strength to his glorious struggle.'
Billington spins round abruptly and jabs a stiff-armed salute at the thing hanging in its titanium cradle outside the window. He raises his voice: 'He demands and requires our submission!' Turning back to me, he shouts, 'We must obey!
There is glory in obedience! Fitness in purpose!' He raises a clenched fist: 'The deep god commands that his body be restored to its shining terror! You will help me! You will be of service!' Spittle lands on my face. I flinch but I can't do anything about it — can't move, don't dare express skepticism, don't piss off the lunatic ... I'm half- convinced, with an icy certainty verging on terror, that he's going to kill one of us in the next couple of minutes.
'How does he talk to you?' Ramona asks, only a faint unevenness in her voice betraying the fact that her palms are clammy and her heart is pounding like a drum.
