by Lamb, Robert
***
UDEX. The Deep Ones. A pact sealed in blood.
Joll ran the possibilities through his head. All his inquires with the Varney's fellow executives had yielded the same shit-pot of lies, half-truths and self-deceptions. But at the bottom of it, he'd sifted out what mattered: They'd been too fucked up from the goddamn rites, too wrapped in their individual guilt trips to notice someone was missing on the trip home.
And they always made the trip home. That was the kicker. In the entire history of the pact, no pure-human initiate had ever failed to flee back to the fucking sub -- even if the bastard just wound up swallowing a gun barrel a few days later.
Nope, it wasn't till they brought the memories home with them that they gave up.
Still, perhaps Varney was the exception that proved the rule. Sea floor station or not, he'd heard it was a maze down there. A man could lose himself if he wanted.
And then there was the other big possibility, the one that filled him with the most dread. What if they'd done something to him? What if they'd broken him so he could never come back, or were keeping him as some sort of message to UDEX? How would they receive him, the emissary and investigator from the surface world, if they harbored the guilt? If they were playing some unimaginable game, what would happen to a pawn?
But damn, pawn or not, he needed to feel like a knight in the morning. He needed sleep.
He took another drop of the black stuff for his nerves, and then chased it with a shot of whiskey and a couple of Ambien. He dimmed the lights and climbed under the musty sheets. With his eyes shut, he listened to the hum of air vents, the murmur of engines and the soft breathing of the girl, wrapped up in her makeshift bed by the dresser.
He'd agreed to look the other way when they finally arrived, but he sure as fuck wasn't helping her out beyond that. She was on her own.
The pills came down hard -- closed him like a goddamn book.
***
Hours passed and he gradually came to realize she'd crawled into bed with him. He merely lay there in his dope haze. He smelled the soap on her, and something soft and feminine under that. He felt her hand move down his belly and slide into his gi, arousing nothing.
It wasn't the girl or her breeding -- wasn't even the drugs. It was the training, the two weeks in the Tokyo brothel and all the applications of "the regiment" he'd received over the years. He was too jaded, too blunted on the walls of desire to stir so easily.
And that was whole goddamn point.
He'd been a Grid Corp mercenary before UDEX hired him, an Army grunt before that. But turns out, it wasn't enough to know how to kill a Deep One or recognize faint traces of the look in folks. Your standard TGO was born to either a Deep One-impregnated human mother or some mix of human/hybrid or hybrid/hybrid. The offspring would act and appear human for decades. Then, baring problems with the mutation, they'd eventually molt to full-on monster and take to the deep.
The ones born of a Deep One mother and a human father, however, were a different matter. They mutated the other way around.
They called them "sirens" -- special transgenics who could sexually enrapture man or woman with a mere wink. Some said they bred it into them for a particular purpose, others that it was just a curious byproduct of interspecies breeding. Either way, the end result was power. How could you negotiate with walking sex? How could you stand against it?
Some of the oil companies had experienced with eunuchs. Hell, the Brazilian companies still swore by them. But UDEX took the opposite approach. It was all about becoming impervious to even the strongest, most unnatural allures.
Dear god, the things he'd experienced…
Whacked on a constant barrage of chemical cocktails, he'd moved through a blurred sea of caresses and moans -- orgasms that sent him down the goddamn rabbit hole. He'd ravished men and women of every exotic flare, every anatomical variant both natural and devised: dwarves, post-op transsexuals.
You name it, he'd fucked it.
It was only after they’d ruined him with a heaven of Earthly delights that they plunged him head-on into what UDEX called the Nine Deadly Venoms.
There were bits of it he couldn't make himself remember -- black streaks in the soul.
Faces. Things in the grey.
He was pretty sure they'd brought him transgenics.
There was a woman wrapped in bandages.
All a haze…
And something else.
… muzzle grating teeth beneath a rubber hood, arms that terminated in manacled stumps, the taste of scales and sea water against his tongue…
Something deep inside him, submerged beneath his stupor calm, shivered in revulsion.
At some point the girl let go of his limp member -- out of relief or shame, he'd never know.
He had depths she could never hope to touch, inner-calluses worn to thickness by unbearable ecstasy.
There was no toll to pay on this voyage, no coin available to her if there was.
***
For the final hour of approach, Joll sent the girl back to her stowaway crate in the cargo bay. Then he downed two cans of chilled coffee from the mini-bar and took another hit of the vile elixir.
He threw on a pair of black slacks and a white dress shirt, one with collar enough to hide his throat chakra. Thanks to the snap buttons, he was always one stripper's flourish away from a four-Elder Sign salute -- enough to empty the bowels of anything sufficiently fishy in his midst. He covered the other two marks with an old Stetson he'd picked up in Moscow of all places.
He looked like some sort of fucking nightclub cowboy, but what can you do?
He tucked the little black bottle into one pocket, the dummy pack of smokes in the other. He left his throwing knives and instead grabbed the thick brochure on South Heaven Spas. He glanced at the cover illustration: a redhead's lips curling with pleasure as a pair of kneading hands worked her back.
"Let it all go," said the slogan.
Indeed. He crammed it in his back pocket.
***
The cargo crawler and the station embraced like insect lovers, joining their organs with a groan of straining steel and humming mechanized seals.
A phlegm-thick voice addressed Joll through the PA system.
"Follow the walkway after you board," the voice said, "It leads straight to the audience chamber."
He took another drop of the black liquid, washed it down with a swig of Jack. The calm came over him like a second skin. A lacquered coat. He began to walk.
There wasn't so much as a peep from the girl as he strolled through the cargo bay -- which was precisely the arrangement. As far as anyone else was concerned, he hadn't seen her, hadn't helped her. She could slink out after he'd boarded.
When he came to the closed cargo bay doors, he entered a few quick key strokes on the security pad and the doors rolled open.
The first thing to hit him was the smell: not a full-blown stench, but the soft, noisome reek of stale, recycled air. It just felt used somehow, like you could taste the capillaries of foreign lungs in each breath.
He walked out onto the elevated walkway. The temperature was chill, the illumination limited to floor runners and a few stray lights down below. He walked over to the guardrail and looked down into what he knew from schematics to be the outer ring, the wide-open circular habitat tube originally intended for greenhouse use. A quick glance overhead confirmed that the solar lamps were still there, black and cold.
Amid the gloom below, he picked out the shape of at least one greenhouse amid the squalor, but the rest was a shantytown built from old cargo crates, crawlers and tents sewn from old parachutes and inflatable rafts. A few baleful lamps burned here and there, highlighting stooped doorways.
He inhaled deeper and caught a whiff of fried fish and stagnant water -- just a hint of latrine.
"Interested in the slums, hu?"
Joll turned to see a middle-aged man in a shabby suit emerge from a hatchway. Greasy hair. Desperate eyes. The remainder
of the walkway stretched between them.
"Not particularly," Joll replied, closing the distance.
"Only place you can get a fresh cooked meal," the man said with a smile. He extended a hand. "Name's Phil Paxton -- UDEX's operation's manager down here on Mariana. I take it you're Howard Joll."
Paxton had all the style and grooming of a TV bail bondsman. He was slightly heavyset and oily-skinned. He reeked of alcohol.
He sure as hell wasn't a siren, that was for sure -- not a touch of the look, either, thinning hair aside.
He accepted the man's limp handshake.
"Who am I meeting with today?" Joll asked.
"The venerable Lady Marsh," Paxton said. "Been on the UDEX board of directors since the beginning."
And had to flee down here three years in, Joll thought grimly. He shuddered to think what 17 years of mutation had done to her. She’d likely never fully transformed. Many didn’t.
"I assume it won't be just the three of us?" Joll asked.
"Sadly, I won't be joining you -- just you, her and a couple of, er…"
"Sirens?"
Paxton snickered and clapped Joll on the back. "Hey, you know the score, don't ya? It's a lovely pair she keeps with her. Like Adam and Eve. I'm sure they've conditioned you out the ass to keep from creaming your breeches at the mere sight of 'em, but, man! Just between you and me, I'd take seven minutes in Heaven with either of 'em.
Paxton led him though an inner office -- all antiquated PCs and shabby furnishings that looked even shabbier under flickering fluorescent tubes. They didn't run into another soul. At the end of another hall, he directed Joll through to the audience chamber.
Joll pawed absently at the little bottle in his slacks as he stepped into the high-vaulted, oval chamber. Ambient, pomegranate lighting emanated from runners around the walls, leaving the center of the room a dark pit of shadow.
It was there that Lady Marsh had positioned herself -- or at least that's where they'd wheeled the tank that contained her. Black lace curtains veiled the cylindrical vat. Ventilation mechanisms hummed monotonously at its base, accompanied by the occasional sloshing of something inside. Even in the sparse illumination, he caught just a glimpse of bloated, distorted tissue inside -- ghastly pale nudity swollen to genetic chaos. Something slid across the glass with a horrid smudging sound.
The tank was flanked to either side by a specimen of ridicules grace -- one male, one female, but it hardly made any difference. The sirens brought out the bi in everyone.
They might have looked like super models, he reminded himself, but they were born monsters down in the lightless depths -- hatched from translucent eggs, feasting on their siblings in leathery pouches. Even now, their minds were still alien; their bodies breed into a pheromonic weapon. An instrument of control.
Word had it that they were all the bastard sons and daughters of oilmen. Thus those strange, corporate pleasure cruises.
The male siren was dressed in ball-hugging slacks and the kind of sleeveless, skin-tight shirt you'd expect to see on some sort of German club kid. His jet-black hair obscured one of eye and you could have opened a bottle on his cheekbones.
His female counterpart wore an equally ridicules red evening gown, with white-blond hair cascading around her shoulders -- Marilyn Monroe born from a sack of fucking caviar.
Joll had to stifle a laugh at the sight of the two. Their Jedi cock tricks wouldn’t work on him. He saw them for the ridicules parodies they were. He shot them each a contemptuous look, letting them know they'd have to do a lot more than stand there and vamp it up if they wanted to get a rise out of him.
He bowed to the veiled tank.
"Lady Marsh, I presume?"
Something gurgled inside. A digital voice emanated from hidden speakers.
"Greetings, Mr. Joll, though I'm sorry this meeting has to take place at all. The disappearance of Andrew Varney has deeply disturbed us as well. I understand surface investigations have been inconclusive?"
"So far," he said. "Though I've heard Varney might have taken a shine to one of the hired escorts on the ride down -- how much of a shine, I don't know."
"You think he might have absconded?"
"Maybe."
"And where would he have fled to?"
"I dunno, you tell me. The slums?"
"We've searched them," the voice said.
"For Varney?"
"For anything suspicious, anything that might shed light on the situation. We're not accustomed to incidents on Mariana Station, Mr. Joll."
"How about the deeper stations?" he asked, a tinge of fear working its way back up his spine. There were operating facilities and drilling templates that no pure-bred human had ever seen, parts of the UDEX system that were as much as 80 percent shoggoth construction.
"There are no uncertainties down there," the voice said. "If he's here we would have found him. If he'd exited the station on our watch, there are those who would have noticed."
"My employers don't care for mystery."
"Nor do we," the voice said, as something squirmed in the tank. "What we propose is a little information sharing. Between the two of us, we…"
The two sirens had kept their eyes locked on him the entire time, their lips curled in the best cock-teasing sneers they could muster -- but then they glanced up at something behind Joll.
Their sneers turned to snarls.
Joll turned, just as the shape rushed past him.
Hot blood hit his face and he saw the male siren's head roll across the black tiles. He heard a gurgling scream and turned to see the blond fall to her knees, grasping at the blood-spewing gash in her throat and the deeper wound in her stomach. Ruptured bowel squeezed out against her fingers, dripping foulness onto the floor in dark, slopping drops.
Joll jerked his attention back to the tank, and set eyes on an impossibility.
Mara.
She was dressed in the blue jumpsuit again, her blond hair falling across her back. He couldn't see her face.
He watched as she pulled aside the black Curtin, revealing the mad, thrashing thing being behind the glass. Warts covered whole reaches of its tumor-bloated body like barnacles on a rotten hull. Veins teased the surface as thick as water hoses. What he first took for the deep crevasse of a naval suddenly opened in wide-eyed horror.
He opened his mouth to say something. He was already reaching for the snap buttons of his shirt when he noticed Mara's right arm was gone -- the very one that had caressed him in the night. In its place was an elongated branch of tissue, ending in something like a cross between crustacean claws and vulture's talons.
Some horrid organic weapon.
Lady Marsh's mechanical voice became gibbering nonsense. An ear-stabbing alarm bell started ringing. He watched the girl draw back the monstrous appendage, and then plunge it up through shattering glass.
The girl buried the torturous appendage up past the elbow in the thing called Lady Marsh. Blood and water flooded out onto the floor.
Someone was screaming, someone was yelling.
In a flash, Joll, flung his headwear and popped open his shirt -- fell into a defensive posture with his exposed chakra tattoos.
He reached for his back pocket, but that’s when something connected with the back of his skull and all went black.
***
Joll woke to the sensation of hot iron searing into his flesh.
His scream was a hoarse sound, echoed against unseen walls.
He thrashed across the floor, grasping at the excruciating bundle of nerves in the center of his chest.
Center of the chest…
"One down," a familiar voice said. "Six to go."
He looked up to see Paxton, the lawyer, standing over him. He'd discarded his coat and rolled up his sweat-stained shirt sleeves.
He held a red-hot branding iron in his right hand.
Oh god… Oh dear fucking god…
A brazier of coals burned nearby on a tripod.
Joll was naked on som
e sort of weirdly tiled floor, each segment raised in a different runic sigil. He reached up to his neck and felt the steel collar, felt the chill of the accompanying chain running down his back.
Fuck, fuck, fuck…
He remembered Mara drive a nightmare arm of twitching claws into the glass tank.
"I guess you're gonna make the next one a little harder for me," Paxton said, laughing as he jabbed the business end of the branding iron back in the brazier. "But I gotta get it done, man. I've only taken the first and second Oaths, so I can't actually question you myself. But we also can't hand you over to those who can thanks to all those nasty little Elder Signs on your hide."
"Where am I?" he gasped. He glanced over across the room, saw his clothes piled next to a grotesquely-carved pillar braced with modern, reinforced steel.
The damned bottle was probably still in the pocket.
"We're in the subbasement," Paxton said. "That's what we call it anyway. That's a manmade roof above us, manmade walls, but you're sitting on Deep One ruins. The whole station's built right on top of it. It's been down here a million years or so, but it's the same craftsmanship as most of UDEX's production wells. Just think about that: Good old shoggoth labor!"
"What happened? Who--"
"Who fisted Lady Marsh with about four feet of bolt-cutters-for-hands? Good question!"
Paxton looked down at him with a piteous grin. He loosened his tie, unfastened the top button. Joll could make out a giant, circular tattoo on the pale, hairy flesh underneath: the second oath to the Esoteric Order of Dagon.
"Look, if I was still a practicing attorney, I'd advise you to cooperate fully and freely from here on out," Paxton said. "I'm not sure what angle you're playing or why you smuggled that thing onboard, but I think we both know this can all only end one way. It's up to you how long, how arduous the path has to be."
"She was a fucking stowaway!"
"Sure she was," Paxton laughed, strolling back over to the brazier. "Did you fuck her? If so, I can't help but wonder what exactly you were pumping sauce into."
"You're making the biggest mistake of your life."
