McMurray glances at his watch, then chuckles. "About six hours." He raises one eyebrow. "Are you going to come quietly or am I going to have to have you sedated"
I shake my head. Quietly I say, "I know about Charlie Victor." His fingers dig into my shoulder like claws. "You want to settle with Billington, that's none of my business," I add hastily. "But give me back my phone first."
"Why?" he asks sharply. Heads turn, halfway across the control room floor: his face slides into an effortless smile and he waves at them then turns back to me. "Blow my cover and I'll take you down with me," he hisses.
"No fear." I swallow. How much can I safely reveal...? At least Ramona isn't listening in; I don't need to doublethink around McMurray right now. "She told me about the jet skis, I know how we're getting out of here." / know that there's a seat reserved for you, but no room for me. It's time to lie like a rug: "The phone isn't official issue, it's mine. I bought it unlocked, not on contract. Cost me close to a month's wages, I really can't afford to lose it when the shit hits the fan." I put a whine in my voice: "They'll take that expenses packet you made me gamble away out of my pay for the next year and I am going to be so screwed — "
"We're out of range of land," he says absent-mindedly, and his grip relaxes. I swing my legs over the floor and steady myself until the world stops spinning around my head.
"Doesn't matter: I'm not planning on phoning home. But can I have it back anyway?" I get one foot on the deck outside the ward.
McMurray cocks his head to one side and stares at me.
"Okay," he says, after a moment, during which I feel none of the weirdly other-worldly sense of strangeness that came over me while I was putting one across Eileen in the monitoring center. "You can have your damned phone back tomorrow, before Ramona surfaces. Now stand up — you're going back to the Mabuse."
McMurray details four black berets to escort me back to my room aboard the Mabuse, and it takes all of their combined efforts to get me there. I'm limp as a dishcloth, hung-over from whatever drugs Billington's tame Mengele pumped into me. I can barely walk, much less climb into a Zodiac.
It's dark outside — past sunset, anyway — and the sky is black but for a faint red haze on the western horizon. As we bump up against the side of the Mabuse, where they've lowered a boarding platform, I notice the guards are still wearing their trademark items: "Hey what's with the mirrorshades" I ask, slurring my words so that I sound half-drunk. " 'S nighttime, y'know"
The goon who's climbing the steps ah'ead of me stops and looks round at me. "It's the eyeliner," he says finally. "You think wearing mirrorshades at night looks stupid, you should try carrying an MP-5 with a black jumpsuit and a beret m while wearing eye shadow."
"Cosmetics don't go/with GI Joe," chants the goon behind me, a semitone out of tune with himself.
"Eye shadow?" I shake my head and manage to climb another step.
"It's the downside of our terms and conditions of employment,"
says Goon Number One. "Some folks have to piss in a cup to pass federally mandated antidrug provisions; we have to wear make-up.
"You're shitting me."
"Why would I do a thing like that? I've got stock options that're going to be worth millions after we IPO. If someone offered you stock options worth a hundred million and said you had to wear eyeliner to qualify ..."
I shake my head again. "Hang on a moment, isn't TLA Corporation already publicly traded? How can you IPO if it's already listed on NASDAQ"
Goon Number Two behind me chuckles. "You got the wrong end of the stick. That's Install Planetary Overlord, not Initial Public Offering."
We climb the rest of the steps in silence and I reflect that it makes a horrible kind of sense: if you're running a ubiquitous surveillance web mediated by make-up, wouldn't it make sense to plug all your guards into it? Still, it's going to make breaking out of here a real pain in the neck — much harder than it looked before — if the guards are also nodes in the surveillance system. As we trudge through the corridors of the ship, I speculate wildly. Maybe I can use my link into Eileen's surveillance network to install an invisibility geas on the server, and use the sympathetic link to their eyes as a contagion tunnel so that they don't see me. On the other hand, that sort of intricate scheme tends to be prone to bugs — get a single step wrong in the invocation and you might as well be donning a blinking neon halo labeled ESCAPING PRISONER.
Right now I'm so tired that I can barely put one foot in front of another, much less plan an intricate act of electronic sabotage: so when we get to my room I stagger over to the bed and lie down before they even have time to close the door.
Lights out.
It's still dark when I wake up shuddering in the aftershock of a nightmare. I can't remember exactly what it was about but something has filled my soul to overflowing with a sense of profound horror. I jerk into wakefulness and lie there with my teeth chattering for a minute. It feels like an entire convention of bogeymen has slithered over my grave. The shadows in my room are full of threatening shapes: I reach out and flick the bedside light switch, banishing them. My heart pounds like a diesel engine. I glance at the bedside clock. It's just turned five in the morning.
"Shit." I sit up and hold my head in my hands. I'm not making a good showing for myself, I can tell that much: frankly, I've been crap. After a moment I stand up and walk over to the door, but it's locked. No moonlight excursions tonight, I guess. Somewhere a kilometer below the surface, Ramona will be dozing in that chair slowly decompressing as a nightmare dreams on in the ancient war machine tucked between the ten mechanical grabs on the underside of the retrieval platform. Aboard the Explorer, Billington paces the command center of his operation, those weirdly catlike eyes slitted before the prospect of world domination. Somewhere else on board the Explorer, the treacherous McMurray is waiting for Billington to terminate the Bond geas, so that he can release Ramona's daemon and then she can assassinate the crazed entrepreneur, delivering JENNIFER MORGUE Site Two into the hands of the Black Chamber.
It's pretty damn clear now, isn't it? And what am I doing about it? I'm sitting on my arse in a gilded cage, looking pretty while acting pretty ineffectual. And I keep finding myself mumbling lie back and think of England, which is just plain humiliating. It's almost as if Billington has already terminated the invocation that's binding me to the heroic role — "Shit," I say again, startling myself. That's it! That's what I should have noticed earlier. The heroic pressure of the geas is no longer bearing down on me, skewing my perspective.
I'm back to being myself again, the nerdy guy in the corner.
In fact, it feels like I'm being squeezed into a state of fatalistic passivity, waiting for a rescuer to come get me out of this situation. The reason I feel so indecisive and like crap is, I'm going through cold turkey for heroism. Either that or the focus of the Hero trap has shifted — I check the alarm clock again. It's now ten past five. What did McMurray say? Sometime today. I pull out the chair and sit down in front of the Media Center PC. Jet skis on C deck.
They're going to give me my phone back soon. What was the speed dial code? As soon as we're untangled Charlie Victor is going to kill Billington. Gravedust systems. JENNIFER MORGUE isn't as dead as McMurray seems to think. That's the only explanation I can come up with for Billington's behavior.
"Oh Jesus, we are so rucked," I groan, and hit the boss key so I can see whether Mo, at least, is safe.
"It's like this," says Mo, checking the seals on her instrument case once more, "I can do it without attracting attention.