Then I fumble on the floor for the plastic box containing the tokens that Johanna taunted Ramona with. My hands shake as I finally tie off the corners of the tablecloth in a rough knot. **Got it,** I tell her.
**Get the hell out!** She doesn't need to tell me twice. I head for the door, grabbing the MP-5 on the way, and cast around the corridor for the door onto the sun deck.
**That one, Bob — ** The daylight glare nearly brings tears to my eyes after the death-stink below decks. I step out onto the deck and walk to the side of the ship, then look aft. In the distance there's a white trail etched across the wave crests. Breathe. I blink, and see through Ramona's eyes, looking up at the light from beneath the keel of the frigate. From down here it looks enormous, the size of a city. Run. I weave my way aft, back into the access passage to the boat deck. There's a crane and boarding steps descending over the side, ending just above a floating platform at the waterline. I take the steps two at a time, nearly tumbling into the water in my haste.
**Get yourself overboard! Now!** Breathe. She can see the grid of the platform, the shadows of my feet on the metal grating.
**Not yet.** I gasp for breath, my vision flickering with the bright sparkles of hyperventilation as I set down the stolen diorama and pull out my phone: 74Km/99% Complete.
**How do you think we're going to get onto the Explorer? Neither of us is in any condition to swim that far, and anyway — it's moving.** There's white foam at the bow of the huge drilling ship as its positioning thrusters power up. Billington isn't stupid enough to sit too close while his yacht self-destructs: even if he isn't afraid of the backwash from the geas generator he's got to be worried about the fuel tanks. **We've got to get over there!** She's near the surface.
**I've got a plan.** Breathe. I reach down into the water as — With all her remaining energy she reaches up towards the hand breaking through the silvery mirror-surface above her and — "Ow!" Water splashes over me as Ramona breaks the surface and grabs onto my hand.
"Plan. What plan? Ow ... " I heave. Something in my back registers a complaint, in triplicate, then locks up and goes on strike.
Ramona twists round and falls back onto the platform.
Out of the water, she goes limp. I can feel her muscles. I wish I couldn't. "Look over there." I point. The silvery trail is curving towards us like a bizarre missile running just above the surface of the water. There's something that looks like a glassy black sphere in the middle of it, surrounded by four huge orange balls: "It's my car."
"You. Have got to be. Kidding."
"Nope." I grin like a mad thing as the Smart Fortwo whines towards me eagerly, its hub-mounted air bags thrashing the water into submission. "It may not be a BMW or an Aston Martin, but at least it comes when I call it." It slows as it nears the edge of the platform. Ramona sits up wearily and begins to peel off her outer-heated wet suit. Her skin is silvery-gray, the scales clearly visible: even the few hours underwater have been enough to cause the change to set in, and her fingers have begun to web. By the t she's got her top layer unzipped, the car has slowly pulled up to platform edge and driven aboard. The engine stops.
"Who's that?" she asks, pointing through the windscreen.
"Oops, I forgot about him." It's Marc, sometime procurer and latterly zombie. He's bloated up against the front windscreen and the driver's side door. "You'll have to help me get him out of there."
"This is why I never date the same guy twice — avoids raisv ing a stink, you know"
I get the door open, just in time to be hit by an olfactory experience almost as good as Johanna's buffet. "Ick."
"You can say that again, monkey-boy. He's leaked all over the seats — you expect me to ride in this"
"You're the one who told me about the scuttling charges, I'm the one with the biometrics that match the ignition button. Your call."
I grab hold of one arm. To my great delight, it doesn't come off in my hand. Ramona opens the opposite door and shoves him towards me. I do a two-step with the stiff, twist him round, and shove him onto the platform. I grab the bundled-up geas generator and shove it into the shoe box that passes for a boot in this thing. Ramona winces as she tries to belt herself in, and holds something up: "What's this"
"Marc's idea of a conversational intro." I pass her the MP-5. "You know how to use one of these, I figure I'll take the pistol." It's another Glock, of course, with a whizzy lasersighting widget and an extended magazine. "Now let's go visit Ellis, huh"
I push the ignition button, check that the doors and windows are closed, then gently tap the gas pedal. There's a red light blinking on the dash, but the engine starts. We tilt alarmingly as I drive off the edge of the platform, but the car stabilizes fairly fast, leaving us bobbing like a cork in the water. I stroke the accelerator again. That starts a lot of spray flying — this thing isn't the world's most efficient paddle boat — but we begin to move away from the Mabuse, and I start the windscreen wipers so I can see where we're going. The Explorer is a huge, gray bulk about 400 meters away.
There's the beginning of a trail of foam at her stern, but I'm pretty sure I can catch her — even a Smart car can outrun a 60,000-ton, deep-ocean drilling ship, I figure. Ramona leans against my sore shoulder and I feel her bone-deep exhaustion, along with something else, a creeping smugness. "We make a pretty good team," she murmurs.
I'm about to say something intended to take the place of a witty reply when the rearview mirror lights up like a flash bulb. I goose the accelerator and we lurch wildly, nearly nosing over as a spray of water goes everywhere. Then there's a sound like the door of Hell slamming shut behind me, and another huge lurch sets us bobbing side to side. A water spout almost as high as the topmost radar mast hangs over the ship, then comes crashing back down "Fuck fuck fuck ... " We're less than a ship-length away from the Mabuse, on the opposite side to the scuttling charge, and that's probably what saves us: most of the blast is heading in the opposite direction. On the other hand, the ship is rolling, heeling over almost sixty degrees, and there's a gash below the waterline that's raised so high above the surface I can see it in my rearview mirror. It looks large enough to take on a hundred tons of water a second. Johanna opened the bulkhead doors below the waterline, and as if it isn't enough that the charge has ripped the yacht's skin open, cavitation from the explosion has broken her keel. I suppose Billington doesn't much care about money at this point — when he's Planetary Overlord he can have as many yachts as he likes — but right now / care because we're less than 200 meters away from something as massive as a ten-story office block that's just begun to disintegrate. As a way of ensuring that annoying witnesses are silenced and the geas generator stops working, it's overkill, but if it succeeds I suppose Lloyds of London are the only people who're going to complain.
The ship's superstructure hangs in the air like a hallucination heeled over through almost ninety degrees. Loose life rafts and stores tumble across the deck and fall into the sea.
With majestic slowness it begins to roll back upright — warships aren't designed to capsize easily — and I steel myself for the inevitable backwash when four or five thousand tons of ship go under I floor the accelerator pedal to open up some distance behind us which is, of course, the cue for the engine to die.
There's an embarrassed beep from the dashboard. I mash my thumb on the START button, but nothing happens, and I realize that the blinking red light on the dash has turned solid. There's a little LCD display for status messages and as I stare at it in disbelief a message scrolls across: MANDATORY SERVICE INTERVAL REACHED RETURN TO MAIN DEALER FOR ENGINE MANAGEMENT RESET.