The Delirium Brief

by Charles Stross

  “That one too!” Cassie says merrily and points at the other headless body’s tented crotch, where something is twitching and pushing to get out. “Shoot it kill it burn it with fire! YesYes!”

  Johnny unloads the rest of the magazine into the alien nightmare. In the ear-ringing silence that follows when he ceases fire I hear a moaning hiccuping noise: the vampire is throwing up behind the sofa.

  I take another deep breath, force my stomach to shut the fuck up and stop churning, and manage to look as calm and professional as I can with bits of the Sleeper’s hit squad trickling down my face. “Well, I think you’ve just seen the other side’s counteroffer,” I tell Cassie, and force myself to smile as I look Death in the eye and Death cutes at me shamelessly. Then I turn to Alex. “Would you like some more time to think about it, or shall I swear you in right now so we can be on our way?”

  * * *

  Breaking out of a military prison camp is not supposed to be easy. However, there are two unexpected but useful side effects of our arrival having coincided so neatly with the arrival of the hit squad from the other side: namely, the availability of a couple of headless bodies.

  “Sometimes it pays to be subtle,” I tell Cassie, while Johnny tries to scare up a couple of clean towels in the other room of the briefing suite, “but this isn’t one of them.” I smile and Alex flinches slightly. I can only imagine I must look as much of a fright as he does. “Johnny and I are going to walk out of here disguised as ourselves. And you and Cassie are going to walk out of here disguised as these two”—I bend over and open the dead man’s suit jacket, then start going through his wallet—“if your girlfriend can glam you up. Can you?” I ask.

  Cassie’s eyes have gone all deer-in-the-headlights and she looks wan and shaky—no surprise in view of the massive jolt of power she just channelled—but she manages to nod. “Easy enough,” she says dismissively, “while I have the Host to draw on.”

  A horrible thought occurs to me. “But we’re going outside the wire—the binding ward. That’s going to cut you off, isn’t it?”

  She shrugs. “But by that point we’ll be outside the camp, YesYes?” I find the key fob for a Mercedes. Jackpot. “They won’t see us once we are in a car.”

  “That’s the idea.” I don’t tell her about the buttoned-up Challenger MBTs hull-down on the hills around the camp. That kind of heavy metal blocks alfär death-spells. Also, unlike most NATO main battle tanks, Challengers retain the ability to fire high-explosive shells that can blow up buildings and take out soft-skinned targets, as well as armor-penetrating hypervelocity spikes for kebabing enemy armor. If this works we’ll be out of range before the tanks get the call …

  “We’re both lawyers: you’re civilian and I’m military, so we’re going to walk out of here casually talking shop, then get in our cars and drive away. You can follow Johnny and me and we’ll swap vehicles once we reach—what is it?”

  Alex is shaking his head. “I’m not licensed to drive a car,” he says. “Low-capacity motorbikes only. And Cassie—”

  “I can’t drive!” Her face wrinkles pathetically. “I am a miserable failure at humaning!”

  I count to ten. “Alex, do you know how to drive a car? Where the controls are? In theory?”

  “Um.” He gives an annoying bobblehead nod. “I think so?”

  “Well then.” I smile at him. “We’re going to add driving without insurance and taking without owner’s consent to your charge sheet, which currently stands at aiding and abetting murder, breaking out of prison, waging illegal war, giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and”—I draw a blank—“forget it, if you don’t feel good about driving you can ride shotgun with Johnny and I’ll drive Cassie, or vice versa.”

  “Whee! I’ll go with you!” Cassie, unlike Alex, seems to actually be enjoying this meeting. She’s probably bored out of her skull here, and I’m the most exciting thing that’s happened all week. I just hope it doesn’t all end in tears.

  Johnny steps back inside. He’s got the worst of the gore off his uniform and he tosses me a kitchen roll. “You ready to rock, me old cock?”

  “I think so”—I wipe my face down—“can you glam us up now?”

  “Done.” Cassie clicks her heels and suddenly she’s a straight-haired blonde in a black skirt-suit and Alex looks like a Mormon missionary. I take another deep breath and pull my rubber mask on, then look at Johnny. There’s something not quite right about his uniform, but my eyes skitter away whenever I try to see the bloodstains. Wow, she’s good. “Is right, YesYes?”

  “Is very right,” I agree. “Johnny, you’re driving the Peugeot with Alex, I’m taking the bad guys’ Mercedes with Cassie. You lead. Once we get off-site to the first services we dump the bad guys’ wheels and carpool to the RDV. Right?”

  “Sure.” Johnny grins cynically. “Piece of cake. What could possibly go wrong?”

  * * *

  Nothing actually goes wrong until we’re almost out the gates of Camp Tolkien, largely because Schiller’s missionaries (or their hideous controlling parasites) have cleared the way for us. Captain Marks is lying dead in his office and we pass three other dead soldiers on the way out, two of them armed guards who didn’t have time to go for their sidearms before something hit them. (My guess is the missionaries had their own occult mojo to throw around—skin contact, probably. Everyone assigned to the camp wears a ward, but wards will only protect you against minor threats, much like body armor won’t protect you from a high-velocity rifle bullet to the face. How they got the pistol through security is a worrying question to raise later, but the way the adversary has gotten inside our decision loop doesn’t give me the warm fuzzies. What we need to focus on is getting out of here right now so we can make our report.)

  So here we are: a military lawyer and his female civilian opposite chatting cordially, while behind them follow a redcap sergeant and a legal aid with a double armful of papers. We proceed through to the first checkpoint, are signed out, and acquire an escort who leads us to the outer checkpoint and the guardhouse where we are signed out again. There are no searches on the way out, because legal privilege is a powerful magic, and we’re actually out in the open-air car park just inside the fence, and I’m trying to spot the Mercedes without looking obvious about it, when our escape plan goes to hell.

  I’ve just spotted the giveaway flash of side lights on a huge black car a few cars away and Johnny is unlocking the Peugeot when a siren begins to wail somewhere behind us. I catch his eye and nod, then tap Cassie on the shoulder. “Johnny, Alex? Come with me,” I tell them, and begin to quick-march towards the Mercedes.

  Cassie catches on and trots after me. “WhatWhat?” she asks, an all-purpose interrogative.

  “Don’t know, let’s get out of here.” I open the driver’s door, which is ridiculously heavy and solid feeling, drop into the seat, hit the engine start button, and am sliding the chair forward so I can reach the pedals when Cassie climbs into the passenger seat. Behind me I hear muffled swearing as Alex and Johnny get in the back.

  “Ooh, it’s so shiny!” she says. “I’ve never been in one of these.” I think she means a Mercedes but after a second I realize she’s talking about cars in general.

  “Fasten your seat belt”—I demonstrate—“and shut the door.” There’s a thunk as the door closes like a bank vault and I realize it’s dark in here, as if we’re underwater; the window glass has got to be two centimeters thick and the view out the rear window is like looking through a tiny porthole. It’s a limo, just not a stretched one; there’s a logo on the dash saying S600 GUARD, whatever that means. I shove the car into gear and move off towards the airlock-style double-gated entryway because I’ve got a very bad feeling about this. The barrier is down and a soldier is coming out of the guardhouse and bending towards my window and then his rifle is coming up—

  I don’t have time for subtlety: I crunch down on his ward and it shatters and I can feel his mind naked and vulnerable before me for a moment, and I
push instead of chewing, and he drops like a stone. I think he’s still breathing. I hit the gas. There’s a thunderous gurgle of fuel draining into an engine the size of a destroyer’s, followed by a surge of acceleration, and then we crash into the barrier and it goes flying, chunks bouncing off the windscreen. I hear distant shouts from outside and take my eyes off the road as I stretch my mouth wide and blow, and the little mayfly minds around us tumble and dim, and then we hit the front gates and crash right through them. This isn’t a regular car: I seem to have stolen an armored limo, a heavily reinforced VIP transporter. Suddenly the picture comes into focus: the attempted snatch in London, another team coming here with a vehicle with a sealed, soundproofed rear compartment, this is Schiller’s style now—

  There’s a screech and tearing of metal and I’m thrown forward for a second, but then the tall gate topples forward into the road, ripped right off its hinges by several tons of armor. It’s not a very substantial gate because the real security around Camp Tolkien totes SA90 rifles, but I’m on that and feeling icily detached as I realize there’s another Power riding shotgun in the seat beside me, mouth and eyes wide open as she sees how I’m clearing the exit of anyone who might be able to interfere with us. I drive forward across the gate, the Mercedes bouncing heavily on its shocks, and then we’re back on the road again and I hammer the throttle wide open just as Johnny figures out how to wind down the screen behind us and shouts, “What the fucking fuck, Bob?” in my left ear.

  “Can’t stop, clowns will catch us!” Or if not clowns, anyone who’s monitoring the CCTV cameras overlooking the exit.

  “Challenger’s covering the exit road about two kilometers down, you can’t outrun it,” he points out, inhumanly calmly. “This is good for rifle bullets but not for a GPMG let alone the main gun and we’ll be under their sights for at least fifteen hundred meters.”

  The engine is bellowing and the smooth surge of power is still coming—we’re up to 120 kilometers per hour already and I’m finding that tracking the two-lane blacktop ahead is a challenge. Looks like we’ll be into the killing zone in another thirty seconds and it’ll take us about two minutes to clear it. Maybe less if I can hold this thing on the road. If I wasn’t driving and could get line of sight on the dug-in defenses I could take their crews’ minds off the job, but trying to delicately nibble on souls at extreme range while practicing high-speed evasive driving is way above my pay grade. And I don’t want to kill them: they’re only doing their job, and it’s a necessary one for the most part. “Cassie, can your glamour stretch to an invisibility spell?” I ask.

  “Nope!” she chirps. “But I can throw our shadow around?”

  “You can what our what?”

  “Just drive,” Johnny tells me.

  Alex moans, “I don’t want to die!” I catch a glimpse of him in the rearview mirror and realize that it’s cloudy and overcast outside, but he already looks like he’s got a bad case of sunburn.

  We hit 140 kilometers per hour and I’m sweating bullets and hanging onto the wheel as we rock and roll all over the road. I’m not even trying to stick to my side of the white line; this beast is almost as wide as one of the lanes anyway. The road twists and bends around the base of a low hill, climbing, and there are warded minds on another hilltop beyond it and well off to one side, forming a tight knot of watchful vigilance just over the crest. I punch at them, trying to flick them away, but I can’t concentrate on them without risking losing our grip and there’s something more than a regular ward guarding them. Cassie is singing something in a weird, breathy voice and after a second or two I realize it’s a chant in Old Enochian, some sort of incantation. She feels a lot dimmer than she was back in the camp, and I realize with a sick sense of apprehension that she’s cut off from her servants, unable to draw on the power of the Host.

  I hold the armored Mercedes on the road as we hurtle around the curve at the crest of the hill, slowing to a sluggish hundred, then hammering the brakes so hard that the judder of ABS kicks in because there’s a blind hairpin bend right ahead of us and there, that hill over there, that’s where they’re stationed. It’s a watchtower overlooking the road, but this time I’ve got my macro lined up and I swat the men inside and leave them puking over the barrel of their machine gun. Then I’ve got us down to thirty just in time to slew around the bend and register the ruler-straight road ahead, diving downhill into a valley and then up the far side. I floor the gas pedal and aim at the horizon, watching the speedometer needle creep towards two hundred, then on towards two-fifty, and I can just about see the minds of the tank crew so far ahead, but I can’t touch them or recite a memorized trigger incantation, not while I’m trying to keep us alive and on the road.

  Something is making my vision blur and I wish it would stop but it’s in the seat beside me and it’d be a bad idea to divert my attention and besides she sounds like Björk with a hangover and it’s kind of pretty, really, telling me that I’m somewhere else, floaty, fifty meters back or a hundred meters sideways or up in the sky above the road. Which is bad, because trying to keep to the middle of the road while flooring it for dear life is hard enough without being unsure where the road even is; whatever illusion Cassie is spinning up is so indiscriminate it’s even fooling me.

  Then the hillside I sense in the distance flashes white-hot fire. The sky spits thunder behind us and drives spikes into my ears, and I nearly lose control; but I keep my grip on the wheel and we’re barreling along at nearly 250 kilometers per hour—over 150 miles per hour in old money—and the hard knot of anger on the hillside is lurching into motion from behind cover and rising to meet the horizon, turret and main gun traversing as the tank commander tries to get a firing solution on us. The tank itself is too far away to get to the road before we pass it, but he can see us and what he can see he can kill, if he can see it clearly. We’re barreling along the road as fast as a helicopter, and my copilot is singing a song of delirium and hallucination to blind the tank crew.

  There’s another thunder crack and the world turns white for a moment, then the high-explosive shaped charge slams into the ground a hundred yards off to one side. But we’re getting closer all the time, and while our angular velocity past the tank is rising we’re also following a more predictable path and they’re going to get a lead on us and kill us in the next minute if we don’t do something. “Johnny, take the wheel,” I say, “take the fucking wheel,” even though I’m standing on the accelerator and the horizon is closing on us as the tank kicks up a plume of dirt and careens downhill towards the road—

  An arm reaches past my shoulder and grabs the steering wheel and we lurch sideways a bit but it’s okay, and I close my eyes and force myself to lift my hands. And then in the retinal darkness I can see them: four minds, eager and focused, closing for the kill as they finally get the thermal imager to work properly—Cassie has the optical sights totally flummoxed, bless her—and they’re getting closer and I can taste them and the wards put up a struggle and force me to really work at them and then—oh fuck I didn’t mean to do that but precision is hard and and and oh fuck I open my eyes and take the steering wheel again.

  “You can stop now,” I tell Cassie, and I ease off on the gas because we’re safe, and I drive the rest of the way to the nearest town with tear trails drying on my cheeks because I’ve finally done it, I’ve broken something that shouldn’t have been broken, and I’m really not sure who the monsters are anymore.

  * * *

  There is a safe house in a small town in Hampshire. When it’s safe to stop, Johnny and I swap seats and he drives the rest of the way there in silence, sticking within speed limits. I sit in the back with my eyes closed, wishing I could turn back time. Latest rap sheet additions: manslaughter times four. I’m pretty sure our Chief Counsel could make a convincing case that it was self-defense, but if it ever comes up in front of a judge I’m not sure I’d want her to, because I know I’m guilty. I should have stopped and surrendered, I should have worked out another way, I
should have known better. Only now it’s too late.

  Someone—a Lamplighter from another cell—has already visited and stocked the house with food and clothing, and there are two bathrooms, so I don’t have to wait to shower off the dried blood and tears, although I scrub and scrub until my face hurts. Once I’m done I dress again in sweatpants and a hoodie; I keep nothing I wore but the army boots, and I plan to toss them the instant I can get my trainers back. I don’t just feel guilty and heartsick, I feel drained. I’ve been using the beast in the back of my head without letting it feed properly, right up until the very bitter end of our wild ride. Now there’s nothing to do but eat and sleep and hope I don’t dream, because this is not the successful mission I’d aimed for.

  I walk into the living room at the back of the house, adjacent to the open-plan kitchen. The windows are curtained, as a courtesy to Alex. He’s mooching moodily in the vicinity of the kettle; he’s found a teapot and milk and is brewing up, because that’s what the English do when they’ve just broken out of military prison one jump ahead of murderous assassins from an alien death god cult, then survived being shot at by a main battle tank. Johnny has buggered off to get rid of the incriminating set of wheels, because we don’t actually need Raymond Schiller’s personal VIP transport, and the instant it’s reported missing there’s going to be a set of ANPR breadcrumbs leading our way.

  “Tea?” Alex asks guardedly.