I'm boggling already. "Are you telling me you've turned your cosmetics company into some kind of occult ubiquitous surveillance operation? Is that what this is"
"Yup, that's about the size of it." Billington nods smugly. "Of course, it's expensive — but we manage to just about break even on a twenty buck tube of mascara, so it works out all right in the end. And it's less obvious than using several million zombie seabirds." He clears his throat.
"Anyway, that's by way of demonstrating to you that you can run, but you can't hide. Now, to explain why you shouldn't run ..."
He flicks to the next slide, and it's not a photograph, it's a live surveillance take from a camera somewhere. I'm pretty sure it's aboard this very ship. It's Ramona, of course. She's sprawling across a double bed in a stateroom, out cold.
"Here's Ms. Random. I figure you know by now that you don't get to talk to her without my say-so. You need to know three things about her. Firstly, if I've got you, I can make her do anything I want — and vice versa. You've figured that out?
Excellent."
He pauses for a few seconds while I force myself to stop trying to break the arms of my chair. "There's no need for that, Mr. Howard. No harm will come to either of you unless you force my hand. You're here because I need her to do a little job for me, one relating to the recovery of the alien artifact — and I need her willing cooperation. So that's item two out of the way. Item three, I gather you've met Mr.
McMurray? Good. It might interest you to know that he's a specialist in controlling entities like Ramona's succubus, or Johanna's necrophage. I could threaten to hurt you if she tries to resist, but I always find that positive incentivization works much better than the big stick on employees: so I'm going to offer her a deal. If you and Ms. Random cooperate fully, I'll have Mr. McMurray see if he can permanently separate her from her little helper. As he was part of the team who invoked and bound it to her in the first place ... well, what do you think she'll say to that"
I pick up my water glass and drain it, hoping for something, anything, to occur to me that'll show me a way out.
Billington may not have tried to figure out my price, but I'm pretty sure he's got Ramona's. "What's the job"
Billington prods at his fancy remote again and another screen comes to life: a view of a huge metal chamber, something like a factory floor — only the floor itself is covered in black water. A moment's confusion, then it springs into focus for me. "Isn't that the Glomar Explorer"
"It's now the TLA Explorer, but yes, well-spotted, Mr.
Howard."
I focus on the pipe that pierces the heart of the pool of water. There's something big and indistinct lurking just under the surface down there, impaled on the end of the drill string. "What's that"
"Can't you guess? It's the TMB-2, a clone of the original Hughes Mining Barge-1, equipped with updated telemetry and new materials so that pressure-induced brittleness in the grab cantilever arms won't stop it from working this time."
"But you know the Deep Ones won't let you retrieve — "
"Really?" His grin widens.
"But!" My head's spinning. I know about the original HMB-1, Operation JENNIFER, the BLUE HADES defense system that nearly dragged the mother ship down. "You said this was about Ramona"
"She's one of the in-laws," Billington explains cheerfully.
"She's got the Innsmouth look, you know? She tastes right to their minions the abyssal polyps. You didn't think the Deep Ones guarded every inch of their territory in person, did you?
The polyps are subsentient just like your burglar alarm. They work by biochemical tracers, discriminating self from other."
He picks up his whisky. "I need her to ride the grab down and keep an eye on it while it locks onto the target. If the defenders of the deep smell Old One in the water they'll stay cowering in their burrows in the abyssal mud. What do you say to that"
"It's an interesting theory," I admit, which is true because I don't know one way or the other whether it'll work.
"It's more than a theory. I sank a lot of money into arranging for the Black Chamber to send her, boy. Her folk aren't so numerous and most of them would die rather than let themselves be turned to such a purpose. She's been tamed, which is unusual, and you've got a handle on her, and I've got you. So, I'll make you a new offer. Convince her to ride the barge for me willingly, and I'll have McMurray free her from her curse. Convince her to ride the barge and I won't even have to threaten you. How about it"
He's backed me into a corner, I realize. And not just with menaces; the thing is, he has found Ramona's price. And having been inside her skull, even if only a bit, I'm not sure I can criticize her. Or easily stand in her way, if she really wants to do it. Threats of torture are redundant — just forcing her to go on living in her current state is torment enough.
Plus, if she doesn't cooperate, Billington might turn nasty and take it out of my hide. Which reminds me of something else ...
"Why me?" I finally burst out. "I mean, if you needed her, surely you don't specifically need me to control her? I'm nothing to you. You've got McMurray. You already know about my government's offer. What am I doing here? Why don't you just do the disentangling ritual and dump me overboard"
Billington's smile widens, disturbingly: "Ah, but that's where you're wrong, Mr. Howard. Your presence here prevents anyone else — like the US Navy, for example — from turning up and spoiling my scheme. Which I realized would be a likely response to my current operation right at the outset, and took steps to prevent, in the form of a monumentally expensive and rather intricate destiny-entanglement geas that compels the participants to adopt certain archetypal roles that have been gathering their strength from hundreds of millions of believers over nearly fifty years. The geas doesn't mess with causality directly, but it does ensure that the likelihood of events that mesh with its destiny model are raised, while other avenues become less ... probable. Going against the geas is hard; agents get run over by taxis, aircraft suffer inexplicable mechanical failures, that sort of thing. Now you've jumped through all the hoops in the geas and in so doing massively reinforced it. You've taken on the role of the heroic adversary. Which in turn means that nobody else is allowed to play the hero around here. And in accordance with another aspect of the geas, you're in my power for the time being and you're going to stay there until a virtuous woman turns up to release you. Got that"
My head's spinning. What the hell is he on about? And where am I going to find a virtuous woman on board a mad billionaire's yacht at three in the morning as we steam towards the Bermuda Triangle? "What about the auction?" I ask plaintively.
Billington laughs raucously. "Oh, Mr. Howard! The auction was only ever a blind, to make your superiors believe I could be bought and sold!" He leans forwards across the Desk, and his eyebrows furrow like thunderclouds: "What use do you think I have for mere gigabucks? This is the highstakes table." He looks past my shoulder, towards the gorilla.