The Jennifer Morgue l-3

by Charles Stross

  **We could have saved them! You knew what was going to happen! You could have warned us! If you hadn't been so fucking curious to know what was buried in the presentation — shit, why didn't you just snarf a copy and edit it yourself? This isn't the first time it's happened, is it?" She lets me rant for a minute or so, until I run down.

  **Bob, Bob. This is the first time this has happened. At least, the first time anyone's gotten out of one of these presentations alive.**

  **Jesus. Then why do you keep having them?** I realize I'm waving my arms around but I'm too upset to stop. I have a terrible feeling that if I'd just given in to my first impulse to yank the cord on the projector — **lt's murder! Letting it go ahead like that — **

  **We don't. My department — doesn't. TLA is selling hard outside the US, Bob. They sell in places like Malaysia or Kazakhstan or Peru, and in places that aren't quite on the map, if you follow me. We've heard rumors about this. We've seen some of the ... fallout. But this is the first time we've gotten in on the ground floor. Sophie Frank was fingered by your people, if you must know. Your Andy Newstrom raised the flag. She's been behaving oddly for the past couple of months. You were sent because, unlike Newstrom, you're trained for this category of operation. But nobody else took the warnings sufficiently seriously — except for your department, and mine.**

  **But what about the others?** She stares at me grimly. **Blame Ellis Billington, Bob.

  Remember, if he wasn't into the hard sell, this wouldn't have happened.** Then she turns and stalks away, leaving me alone and shaking in the corridor, with a corpse and a locked conference room full of middle-management zombies to explain.

  4: YOU'RE IN THE JET SET NOW

  MY CHECKOUT IS EVER SO SLIGHTLY DELAYED. I spend about eight hours at the nearest police station being questioned by one GSA desk pilot after another. At first I think they're going to arrest me — shoot the messenger is a well-known parlor game in spook circles — but after a few fraught hours there's a change in the tone of the interrogation.

  Someone higher up has obviously got a handle on events and is smoothing my path. "It is best for you to leave the country tomorrow," says Gerhardt from Frankfurt, not smiling. "Later we will have questions, but not now." He shakes his head. "If you should happen to see Ms. Random, please explain that we have questions for her also." A taciturn cop drives me back to the hotel, where a GSA cleaning team has replaced the conference room door with a blank stretch of brand-new wall. I walk past it without quite losing my shit, then retreat to my shielded bedroom and spend a sleepless night trying to second guess myself. But not only is the past another country, it's one that doesn't issue visas; and so, first thing in the morning, I head downstairs to collect the hire car.

  A tech support nightmare is waiting for me down in the garage. Pinky is goose-stepping around with a clipboard, trying to look officious while Brains is elbow-deep in the trunk with a circuit tester and a roll of gaffer tape.

  "What. The. Fuck?" I manage to say, then lean against a concrete pillar.

  "We've been modifying this Smart car for you!" Pinky says excitedly. "You need to know how to use all its special features."

  I rub my eyes in disbelief. "Listen guys, I've been attacked by brain-eating zombies and I'm due on a flight to Saint Martin tonight. This isn't the right time to show me your toys. I just want to get home — "

  "Impossible," Brains mutters around a mouthful of oily bolts that look suspiciously as if they've just come out of the engine manifold.

  "Angleton told us not to let you go until you'd finished your briefing!" Pinky exclaims.

  There's no escape. "Okay." I yawn. "You just put those bolts back and I'll be going."

  "Look in the boot, here. What our American friends would call the trunk. Careful, mind that pipe! Good. Now pay attention, Bob. We've added a Bluetooth host under the driver's seat, and a repurposed personal video player running Linux. Peripheral screens at all five cardinal points, five grams of graveyard dust mixed with oil of Bergamot and tongue of newt in the cigarette lighter socket, and a fully connected Dee-Hamilton circuit glued to the underside of the body shell. As long as the ignition is running, you're safe from possession attempts. If you need to dispose of a zombie in the passenger seat, just punch in the lighter button and wait for the magic smoke. You've got a mobile phone, yes?

  With Bluetooth and a Java sandbox? Great, I'll email you an applet — run it, pair your phone with the car's hub, and all you have to do is dial 6-6-6 and the car will come to you, wherever you are. There's another applet to remotely trigger all the car's countermeasures, just in case someone's sneaked a surprise into it."

  I shake my head, but it won't stop spinning. "Zombie smoke in the lighter socket, Dee-Hamilton circuit in the body shell, and the car comes when I summon it. Okay. Hey, what's — "

  He slaps my hand as I reach for the boxy lump fastened to the gearshift with duct tape. "Don't touch that button, Bob!"

  "Why? What happens if I touch that button, Pinky"

  "The car ejects!"

  "Don't you mean, the passenger seat ejects?" I ask sarcastically.

  I've had just about enough of this nonsense.

  "No, Bob, you've been watching too many movies. The car ejects." He reaches across the back of my seat and pats the fat pipe occupying the center of the luggage area.

  I swallow. "Isn't that a little ... dangerous"

  "Where you're going you'll need all the help you can get."

  He frowns at me. "The tube contains a rocket motor and a cable spool bolted to the chassis. The airbags in the wheel hubs blow when the accelerometer figures you've hit apogee, if you haven't already used them in amphibious pursuit mode. Whatever you do don't push that button while you're in a tunnel or under cover." I glance up at the concrete roof of the car park and shudder. "The airbags are securely fastened, if you land on water you can just drive away." He notices my fixed, skeptical stare and pats the rocket tube.

  "It's perfectly safe — they've been using these on helicopter gunships for nearly five years!"

  "Jesus." I close my eyes and lean back. "It's still a fucking Smart car. Range Rovers carry them as lifeboats. Couldn't you get me an Aston Martin or something"

  "What makes you think we'd give you an Aston Martin, even if we could afford one? Anyway, Angleton says to remind you that it's on lease from one of our private sector partners. Don't bend it, or you'll answer to the Chrysler Corporation. You've already exceeded our consumables budget, totalling that Compaq in the meeting — there's a new one waiting for you in the case in the boot, by the way. This is serious business: you're representing the Laundry in front of the Black Chamber and some very big defense contractors, old school tie and all that."

  "I went to North Harrow Comprehensive," I say wearily, "they didn't trust us with neckties, not after the upper fifth tried to lynch Brian the Spod."

  "Oh. Well." Pinky pulls out a thick envelope. "Your itinerary once you arrive at Juliana Airport. There's a decent tailor in the Marina shopping center and we've faxed your measurements through. Um. Do you dress to the left, or..."

  I open my eyes and stare at him until he wilts. "Eight dead." I hold up the requisite number of fingers. "In twentyfour hours. And I have to drive up the fucking autobahn in this pile of shit — "

  "No, you don't," says Brains, finally straightening up and wiping his hands on a rag. "We've got to crate up the Smart if we're going to freight it to Maho Beach tomorrow — you're riding with us." He gestures at a shiny black Mercedes van parked opposite. "Feel better"

  Wow — I'm not going to be strafed with BMWs again.

  Miracles do sometimes happen, even in Laundry service. I nod. "Let's get going."

  I sleep most of the way to Frankfurt. We're late getting to the airport — no surprise in light of preceding events — but Pinky and Brains prestidigitate some sort of official ID out of their warrant cards and drive us through two chain-link barriers and past a police checkpoint and onto the apron, hand I me a
briefcase, then drop me at the foot of the steps of an air bridge. It's latched onto a Lufthansa airbus bound for Paris's Charles de Gaulle and a quick transfer. "Schnell!" urges a harried-looking flight attendant. "You are the last. Come this way."

  One and a half hours and a VIP transfer later, I'm in business class aboard an Air France A300 bound for Princess Juliana International Airport. The compartment is halfempty.

  "Please fasten your seatbelts and pay attention to the preflight briefing." I close my eyes while they close the doors behind me. Then someone shakes my shoulder: it's a flight attendant. "Mr. Howard? I have a message to tell you that there's WiFi access on this flight. You are to call your office as soon as we are airborne at cruising altitude and the seatbelt light goes off."

  I nod, speechless. WiFi? On a thirty-year-old tourist truck like this? "Bon voyage!" She stands up and marches to the back of the cabin. "Call if you need anything."

  I doze through the usual preflight, waking briefly as the engine note rises to a thunderous roar and we pile down the runway. I feel unnaturally tired, as if drained of life, and I've got a strange sense that somebody else is sleeping in the empty seat beside me, close enough to rest their head on my shoulder — but the next seat over is empty. Overspill from Ramona? Then my eyes close again.

  It must be the cabin pressure, the stress of the last couple of days, or drugs in the after-takeoff champagne, because I find myself having the strangest dream. I'm back in the conference suite in Darmstadt, and the blinds are down, but instead of a room full of zombies I'm sitting across the table from Angleton. He looks half-mummified at the best of times, until you see his eyes: they're diamond-blue and as sharp as a dentist's drill. Right now they're the only part of him I can see at all, because he's engulfed in the shadows cast by an old-fashioned slide projector lighting up the wall behind him. The overall effect is very sinister. I look over my shoulder, wondering where Ramona's gotten to, but she's not there.

  "Pay attention. Bob. Since you had the bad grace to take so long during my previous briefing that it self-erased before you completed it, I've sent you another." I open my mouth to tell him he's full of shit, but the words won't emerge. An Auditor ward, I think, choking on my tongue and beginning to panic, but right then my larynx relaxes and I'm able to close my jaw. Angleton smiles sepulchrally. "There's a good fellow."

  I try to say blow me, but it comes out as "brief me" instead.

  It seems I'm allowed to speak, so long as I stay on topic.

  "Certainly. I have explained the history of the Glomar Explorer, and Operations JENNIFER and AZORIAN. What I did not explain — this goes no further than your dreams, and the inside of your own eyeballs, especially when Ramona is awake — was that JENNIFER and AZORIAN were cover stories. Dry runs, practical experiments, if you like. To retrieve artifacts from the oceanic floor, in the zones ceded by .humanity to BLUE HADES — the Deep Ones — in perpetuity under the terms of the Benthic Treaties and the Agreement of the Azores."

  Angleton pauses to take a drink from a glass of ice water beside his blotter. Then he flicks the slide advance button on the projector. Click-clack.

  "This is a map of the world we live in," Angleton explains. "And these pink zones are those that humans are allowed to roam in. Our reservation, if you like. The arid airswept continents and the painfully bright low-pressure top waters of the oceans. About thirty-four percent of the Earth's surface area. The rest, the territory of the Deep Ones, we are permitted to sail above, but that is all. Attempts to settle the deep ocean would be resisted in such a manner that our species would not survive long enough to regret them."

  I lick my lips. "How? I mean, do they have nuclear weapons or something"

  "Worse than that." He doesn't smile. "This — " click-clack " — is Cumbre Vieja, on the island of La Palma. It is one of seventy-three volcanoes or mountains located in deep water — most of the others are submerged guyots rather than climbable peaks — that BLUE HADES have prepared. Threequarters of humanity live within 200 miles of a sea coast. If they ever lose their patience with us, the Deep Ones can trigger undersea landslides. Cumbre Vieja alone is poised to deposit 500 billion tons of rock on the floor of the North Atlantic, generating a tsunami that will be twenty meters high by the time it makes landfall in New York. Make that more like fifty meters by the time it hits Southampton. If we provoke them they can wreak more destruction than an allout nuclear war. And they have occupied this planet since long before our hominid ancestors discovered fire."

  "But we've got a deterrent, surely ..."

  No." Angleton's expression is implacable. "Water absorbs the energy of a nuclear explosion far more effectively than air. You get a powerful pressure wave, but no significant heat or radiation damage: the shock wave is great for crushing submarines, but much less effective against undersea organisms at ambient pressure. We could hurt them, but nothing like as badly as they could hurt us. And as for the rest of it — he gestures at the screen " — they could have wiped us out before we discovered them, if they were so inclined. They have access to technologies and tools we can barely begin to imagine.

  They are the Deep Ones, BLUE HADES, a branch of an ancient and powerful alien civilization. Some of us suspect the threat of the super-tsunami is a distraction. It's like an infantryman pointing his bayonet-tipped assault rifle at a headhunter, who sees only a blade on a stick. Don't even think about threatening them, we exist because they bear us no innate ill will, but we have at least the power to change that much if we act rashly."

  "Then what the hell was JENNIFER about"

  Click-clack. "A misplaced attempt to end the Cold War prematurely, by acquiring a weapon truly hellish in its potential.

  The precise nature of which you have no need to know right now, in case you were thinking of asking."

  I'm looking down on a gloomy gray scene. It takes me a few seconds to realize that it's a deep-ocean mudscape.

  Scattered across the layered silt are small irregular objects, some of them round, some of them long. A couple more seconds and my brain acknowledges that what my eyes are seeing is a watery field of skulls and femurs and ribs. I've got an idea that not all of them are entirely human.

  "The Caribbean sea hides many secrets. This field of silt covers a deep layer rich in methane hydrates. When some force destabilizes the deposits they bubble up from the depths — like the carbon dioxide discharge from the stagnant waters of Lake Nyos in the Cameroon. But unlike Lake Nyos, the gas isn't confined by terrain so it dissipates after it surfaces.

  It's not an asphyxiation threat, but if you're on a ship that's caught above a hydrate release, then the sea under your keel turns to gas and you're going straight down to Davy Jones's locker." Angleton clears his throat. "BLUE HADES have some way of replenishing these deposits and triggering releases. They use them to keep us interfering hominids away from things that don't concern us, such as the settlement at Witch's Hole in the North Sea ... and the depths of the Bermuda Triangle."

  I swallow. "What's down there"

  "Some of the deepest oceanic trenches on Earth. And some of the largest BLUE HADES installations we're aware of."

  Angleton looks as if he's bitten into a lemon expecting an orange. "That isn't saying much — most of their sites are known to us only from neutrino mapping and seismology.

  The portion of the biosphere we understand is limited to the surface waters and continental land masses, boy. Below a thousand fathoms of water, let alone below the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, it's a whole different ball game."

  "The Moho-what"

  "The underside of the continental plates we live on — below the discontinuity lies the upper mantle. Didn't you study geography at school"

  "Uh ... " I spent most of my school geography lessons snoozing, doodling imaginary continents in the backs of exercise books, or trying to work up the courage to pass a message to Lizzie Graham in the next row. Now it looks like those missed lessons are about to come back and bite me.

  "Movin
g swiftly on, let me see if I've got this straight. Ellis Billington has purchased a CIA spy ship designed for probing BLUE HADES territory. He's got a high enough security clearance to be aware what it's capable of, and his people are trying to suborn various intelligence organizations, like in Darmstadt. He's playing some kind of endgame and you don't like the smell and neither does the Black Chamber, which explains me and Ramona. Am I right so far"

  Angleton nods minutely. "I should remind you that Billington is extraordinarily rich and has fingers in a surprising number of pies. For example, by way of his current wife — his third — he owns a cosmetics and haute couture empire; in addition to IT corporations he owns shipping, aviation, and banking interests. Your assignment — and Ramona's — is to get close to Billington. Ideally you should contrive to get yourself invited aboard his yacht, the Mabuse, while Ramona remains in touch with your backup team and the local head of station. Your technical backups are Pinky and Brains, your muscle backup is Boris, and you're to liaise with our Caribbean station chief, Jack Griffin. Officially, he's your superior officer and you'll be under his orders when it comes to nonoperational matters but you're to report directly to me, not to him. Unofficially, Griffin is out to pasture — take anything he says with a pinch of salt. Your job is to get close to Billington, remain in touch with us, and be ready to act if and when we decide to take him down."

  I manage not to groan. "Why does it have to be me aboard the yacht — why not Ramona? I think she'd be a whole lot better at the field ops thing. Or the station chief guy? Come to think of it, why aren't the AIVD doing this? It's their territory — "

  "They invited us in; all I can say for now is, we have specialist expertise in this area that they lack. And it has to be you, not Ramona. Firstly, you're an autonome, a native of this continuum: they can't trap you in a Dho-Nha curve or bind you to a summoning grid. And secondly, it's got to be you because those are the rules of Billington's game." Angleton's expression is frightening. "He's a player, Bob. He knows exactly what he's doing and how to work around our strengths. He stays away from continental land masses, uses games of chance to determine his actions, sleeps inside a Faraday cage aboard a ship with a silver-plated keel. He's playing us to a script. I'm not at liberty to tell you what it is, but it has to be you, not Ramona, not anyone else."