"Ah, Ms. Random, Mr. Howard! So glad you could make the show!" I twitch at Billington's victorious smirk.
Somehow or other I'm having difficulty controlling the urge to punch him out, sap two or three black-uniformed guards, steal an MP5K, and let fly.
"You need to turn down the gain on that geas: it's overpowering,"
I suggest.
"All in due course." Billington looks amused, then mildly concerned. "Are you feeling up to the job, Ms. Random? You look a bit peaked."
Ramona snorts. "If you want me to do this thing, you really ought to tell Pat to drop the interference. I can't hear myself think, much less Bob."
"Thinking is not what I'm paying you for. However, no purpose is served by separating you at this time." Billington nods to McMurray: "Allow them full intercourse."
McMurray looks alarmed: "But the suppressor's all that's keeping their entanglement from proceeding to completion!
If I stop it now they'll only have about two days' individuality left, then we'll have to cut them loose or deal!"
Shit. I glance at Ramona. She stares at me, wide-eyed. "I understand," Billington says affably, "but as it will take less than twenty-four hours to accomplish the retrieval, I fail to see what the objection is?" He thinks for a moment then comes to a decision. "Drop the suppressor field now. When Ms. Random returns, you will immediately end their state of entanglement, as we discussed earlier." He turns to me, and gestures at the dentist's chair arrangement: "Please take a seat, Mr. Howard."
I stare at him. "What is that thing"
Billington's pupils narrow, lizardlike: "It's a comfy chair, Mr. Howard. Don't make me ask twice."
"Uh-huh." Behind me I sense more than see McMurray adjust some sort of compact ward he keeps strapped to his left wrist: the fuzzy fogbank in my head fades away and I can feel Ramona's unease, the cold, hard deck beneath her feet, and the churning emptiness in her stomach.
**Bob, do as he says!** Ramona's sense of urgency carries over leaving a nasty metallic taste in my mouth. I edge towards the chair nervously.
. "What are the straps for?" I ask.
"They're just in case of convulsions," Billington says soothingly, "nothing you need to worry about."
**lt's a high-bandwidth sympathetic resonator,** Ramona tells me. Snowflakes of half-remembered knowledge slide into place in my head. Control cables suffer weird anomalies when you stick them under kilometers of water; Billington wants a better way of tracking his submersible grab, of staying in control over the retrieval process. Unlike its seventies predecessor, the new grab that Billington's had built is designed to be manually operated by one of Ramona's people, the Deep One/human hybrids. And it doesn't use fiber optics or electrical cables for monitoring the process via TV — it uses two entangled occult operatives. This chair will plug me right into Eileen's surveillance grid, far more efficiently than a swipe of mascara across the eyelashes. **Look, if you don't do it, we're screwed so hard it's not funny.** I weigh my chances, then swallow. "The straps go," I say.
Then I sit down tensely before I can change my mind.
"Jolly good." Billington smiles. "Pat, if you'd be so good as to escort Ms. Random to the pool, I believe her watery chariot is ready to depart."
That's about the last thing I hear, because as my butt hits the padding on the chair I almost black out. I've been strongly aware of Ramona's presence ever since McMurray dropped his blocking ward, like having a mild case of double vision. But that was before I plugged myself into the chair.
It's an amplifier. I'm not sure how they've managed to make it work, but Ramona's perceptions almost overwhelm my awareness of my own body. She's got a sharper sense of smell than me, and I can appreciate her mild disgust with Billington's after-shave — there's a bilious undernote of ketosis to it, as if it's covering up something rotten — and the tang of ozone and leaking hydraulic fluid as she moves towards the doorway. Her dislike and fear of McMurray is gnawing away in the background, and there's her concern for — I shy away.
It takes a real effort of will to move my arms, even to realize that they're still there: I manage to lie down, or rather to flop bonelessly, then close my eyes.
**Ramona?** I ask.
**Bob?** She's curious, worried, and anxious.
**This chair, it's an amplifier — **
**You really didn't know? You weren't being sarcastic?** She pauses with her hand on the doorknob. McMurray looks round.
**No shit, what am I meant to do here? What's it for?**
**If you're asking, they haven't switched it on yet.** She looks round and now I can see myself lying in the chair, with a couple black berets leaning over me — **Hey! What are they doing — **
**Relax, it's in case you start convulsing.** McMurray starts to say something, and Ramona speaks aloud: "It's Bob.
You didn't tell him what to expect."
'i-i "I see," says McMurray. "Ramona, channel. Bob, can you hear me"
I swallow — no, I swallow with Ramona's throat muscles.
"What's happening?" My voice sounds oddly high. Not surprising, considering whose throat it's coming out of.
McMurray looks pleased. He glances at the guards bending over my body, and I turn my head to follow, feeling the unaccustomed weight of her hair, the faint pull of tension on the gills at the base of her throat: I see myself — Bob — lying flat out, strapped down while they hook up bits of bleeping biotelemetry. A medic stands by, holding a ventilator mask.
"Amplification to level six, please," says McMurray, then he looks back at me — at Ramona, that is. "Your entanglement lets you see through Ramona's eyes, Bob. It also lets her speak through your mouth, when you're at depth. The defense field around the chthonic artifact plays hell with electronics and scrambles ordinary scalar similarity fields, but the deep entanglement between you and Ramona is proof against just about any interference short of the death of one of the participants. When she's at depth, Ramona will operate the controls of the retrieval grab by hand — they're simple hydraulic actuators — to lock onto the artifact, then signal through you to commence the lift process."
"But I thought, uh, doesn't it take days to ride the grab down"
McMurray shakes his head. "Not using this model." He looks insufferably smug. "Back in the sixties they designed the grab to be fixed to the end of the pipe string. We've updated it a little; the grab clamps to the outside of the string and drops down it on rollers, then locks into place when it reaches the end. If we were going to unbolt and store the pipe sections when we retrieved it, we'd take two days to suck it all back up, it's true — but to speed things up we've got a plasma cutter up top that can slice them apart for recycling instead of unbolting each joint. This baby is nearly four times faster than the original."
"Doesn't Ramona need to decompress or something, on the way up?
"That's taken care of: her kind have different needs from us land-dwellers. It'll still take us a whole day to bring the string up; she'll be all right." He turns away, dismissively.
"Dive stations, please."
Ramona follows him through the door and along the catwalk to a dive room where there's a whole range of esoteric kit laid out for her. She's done this sort of thing before and finds a kind of comfort in it. It's very strange to feel her hands working with straps and connectors that feel large to her slim fingers — shrugging out of her clothes and across the chilly steel deck plates, then one leg at a time into a wet suit.