**Oh, you mean kill Ellis, massacre his guards, and set the ship on fire, before making our escape on jet skis?** she says brightly.
**Something like that.** A thought bubbles up to the surface of my mind and pops, halfheartedly: **You gave that a lot of thought, huh?**
**The jet skis are on C deck, and there are only two of them. I've got to get Pat out of here — I'm afraid you'll have to make your own arrangements,** she says briskly. **But yeah, I can definitely nail Billington.** The penny drops — icy and cold, right down the back of my metaphorical net. **You've been planning this as a hit on Billington right from the start!**
**Well, that's the whole point of my being here, isn't it?
Why else would they send an assassin? I mean, d'oh!** I ought to be more shocked; maybe it's had time to sink in, what she really is. (And there's the whole escape thing, of course. Am I imagining things or did she feel a twinge of guilt when she told me I'd have to swim for myself?) **Your people used me to get close to Billington,** I accuse.
**Yup.** It's funny how these little misunderstandings only come clear when you're 800 meters below sea level and dropping like an express elevator towards Davy Jones's tentacle-enhanced locker. **As soon as Billington shuts down the geas field I'll be free to act on my own agency.** I can feel a funny tight smirk tugging at the sides of her mouth.
It's not humor. **He doesn't realize it yet, but he's so screwed you could plug him into the mains and call him Albert Fish.**
**But you can't do that unless we're disentangled, surely?
And for that you need — ** The other shoe drops, or rather, she kicks me between the eyes with it in her next comment: **Yes, that's why Pat is here. You didn't think supervisors from Department D routinely defect, did you? He's under even tighter control than I am.** And at that moment I can see the geas that's binding her to the Black Chamber tying her to the daemon they've imposed on her wilclass="underline" bright as chromed steel, thick as girders, compelling obedience. The Laundry warrant card is bad enough — if you try to spill our secrets you'll die, not to put too fine a point on it — but this is even worse. We do it for security. This is nothing short of vindictive. If she thinks a disloyal thought too far, the Other will be let loose — and the first thing it will do is feed on her soul. No wonder she's terrified of falling in love.
I'm fully awake now, mind spinning like a hamster on a — wheel in a cage on a conveyor belt heading for the maw of an industrial-scale wood chipper: there are thoughts I really desperately don't want to think while I'm inside her skull and vice versa. On the other hand, something does occur to me ...
**If McMurray's working with you, do you think you can convince him to give me back my mobile phone?**
**Huh?**
**It's no big deal,** I explain, **it's just, if I've got my phone I can escape. You want that to happen, right? Once we get back to the surface, you and McMurray want me out of the picture as soon as possible. I can get a ride home just about any time, as long as I've got my phone.**
**But we're out of range of land,** she points out logically.
**What makes you think I was going to use it to make a phone call?**
**Oh.** We watch the pipe string unreel for a minute or two in silence. Then I feel her acquiesce: **Yeah, I don't think that'll be a problem. In fact, why don't you just ask him for it? I mean, it's not as if you can phone home, so you can probably use some of your super-agent mojo while you've got it.** I am conflicted between wanting to hug Ramona, and kick her in the shins for being a smart-arse. But I guess that's her job, I mean, she really is a glamorous, high-flying superspy and assassin and I'm just an office nerd who's along for the ride. It doesn't matter what Angleton thinks of me, all I can really do here is lie back and think of — England — not to mention the ... game ofTetris ... on my phone — **Stop trying to think, monkey-boy, you're making my head hurt and I've got to drive this thing.** Monkey-boy? That does it. I send her a picture of a goldfish gasping in a puddle of water beside a broken bowl. Then I clam up.
14:
WE RIDE DOWN TO THE ABYSSAL PLAIN IN SILENCE, doing our best to barricade each other out of our minds.
The journey down actually takes nearer to three hours than one. There's a lengthy pause in the darkness of the bathypelagic zone, a kilometer down, while Ramona stretches and twists in strange exercises she's learned for adapting to the pressure. Her joints make cryptic popping noises as she moves, accompanied by brief stabbing pains. It's almost pitch-black outside our ring of lights, and at one point she unstraps herself from the seat and swims over to the edge of the platform to relieve herself, still tethered by the umbilical hose that pumps warm water through her suit.
Looking out into the depths, her eyes ad just slowly: I can see a cluster of faint reddish pinpricks swimming at the edge of visibility. There's something odd about her eyes down here, as if their lenses are bulging and she can see further into the red end of the spectrum; by rights she ought to be as blind as a bat. From the sounds these sea creatures are making they're some sort of shrimp, luminescent and torpid as they feed on the tiny scraps of biomass raining down from the illuminated surface like oceanic dandruff.
The water down here is frigid — if Ramona didn't have the heated suit she'd likely freeze to death before she could surface again. She messes with a pair of vents near her chin, and a tepid veil of warm water flows across her face, smelling faintly of sulfur and machine oil. "Let's get this over with,"
she mutters as a weird itching around her gills peaks and begins to subside: "If I stay down here much longer I'll begin to change." She says it with a little shudder.
She fastens herself back into the control chair and throws the lever to resume our descent. After an interminable wait, there's a loud clang that rattles through the platform. "Aha!"
She glances round. The descent rollers have just passed a football-shaped bulge in the pipe painted with the white numerals "100."
"Okay, time to slow down." Ramona hits the brakes and we slide over another football, numbered "90," then "80." They're counting down meters, I realize, indicating the distance to go until we hit something.
I feel Ramona working my jaws remotely; it's most unpleasant — my mouth tastes as if something died in it.
"Nearly there," she tells the technician who's taken Billington's place during the boring part of the descent.
"Should be seated on the docking cone in a couple of minutes."
She squeezes the brake lever some more. "Thirty meters. What's our altitude"
The technician checks a screen that's out of my line of sight: "Forty meters above ground zero, one-seventy degrees out by two-two-five meters."
"Okay ..." We've slowed to a crawl. Ramona squeezes the brake lever again as the "10" meter football creeps past, climbing the pipe string. The brakes are hydraulically boosted — the grab she's sitting on weighs as much as a jumbo jet — and the big rollers overhead groan and squeal against the pipe string, scraping away the paint to reveal the gleam of titanium-graphite composite segments. (No expense is spared: that stuff is usually used for building satellites and space launchers, not drilling pipes that are going to be cut apart once they've been hauled back up to the surface.) I watch as Ramona frowns over a direction indicator and carefully uses another lever to release water to the directional control jets, shoving the platform round until it's lined up correctly with the docking cone below. Then she releases the brake again, just enough to set us gliding down the final stretch.