The Delirium Brief

by Charles Stross

  “Yeah, thanks.” I watch as he grabs a mug from a cupboard and pours. “You’ll be wanting an explanation next, am I right?”

  “It’d help. Who were those people? And the, the things? What’s going on?”

  He passes me the mug as the door at the other end of the room opens and the Queen of Air and Darkness walks in, and he begins filling another one immediately: she’s already got him trained. “I’m pretty sure what’s going on is that the folks who are attacking the agency sent those, uh, people, to kidnap you. Either or both of you. Incidentally confirming my theory about who the attackers are and why this is all kicking off now. I was sent to make sure that they didn’t get their hands on”—I nod at the aforementioned Empress of All the (surviving) Elves5—“you.”

  “Cool!” she says brightly, and bounces onto the sofa next to Alex. He puts his arm around her shoulder protectively as she leans against him. So it’s like that, I think. “What happens now?”

  “We need to talk about your future,” I tell them. “Dr. Armstrong sent me.” Alex twitches at the name, as startled as if I’d said Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. (At least he’s got enough of a clue to be afraid of the Senior Auditor. Good.) “Short version: the chaos over here shook stuff loose and some bad guys from overseas decided to move in. Said bad guys have friends in very high places, everyone’s looking for scapegoats, and yesterday the Cabinet Office rammed through an order shutting down the Laundry completely. They’re establishing a new agency next week, but that’s not good news because it’s going to be staffed and run by Schiller’s people. Uh … Schiller? Raymond Schiller?” They both look blank. “Big American televangelist, does subcontract work for the Black Chamber”—more blank looks—“our nearest American-equivalent occult agency, they’ve been kind of captured by the things they work with … anyway, Schiller runs a church and last time we had a run-in with them they were trying out a ritual to bring about the resurrection, only it turns out that if something hands you a piece of magic that says ‘open can to bring about the Second Coming’ you should really ask ‘Second Coming of what’ before you perform it.”

  I can see I’m making a hash of this, so I take a sip of too-hot tea before I continue. “Schiller’s people are cultists, a great big very rich religious cult, hiding inside a not-quite-mainstream fundamentalist church. His Inner Temple pray with a Bible that has several extra books and a very different ending. Anyway, he flew in a week ago and has been having loads of meetings with cabinet ministers, even the PM—and then the hammer comes down on the Laundry. Those people who tried to take you are his; I recognize the type. He’s big on using mind-controlling parasites to keep his flock in line, and I’m pretty sure she was a handmaid—one of his more fanatical female followers. They tried to tackle me on the streets of London last week, they killed a foreign contact who was busy leaking their operational plans our way, they’ve got form. So: as of yesterday everyone who worked for SOE is out of a job, those of us who are directly on Schiller’s radar are wanted for arrest on faked-up criminal charges, the fox is making a public-private partnership bid for the henhouse with the support of the Prime Minister, and they’re moving to steal those bits of the household silver that look particularly tasty to them. Like you guys.”

  “FuckFuck!” Cassie sounds disgusted. “What a mess. Why can’t humans run a nice sensible feudal hierarchy like anyone else? Then you wouldn’t have these problems!”

  I decline to derail onto the Wars of the Roses. “We work with what we’ve got. Anyway, it’s not as if there wasn’t a plan for this sort of thing. The Laundry has other sources of funding and political legitimacy. Dissolving SOE triggered ramp-up of a different core agency called Continuity Operations, tasked with addressing whatever circumstances caused a government to turn hostile, and CO sent me to get to you before the bad guys.”

  “Uh-huh.” Alex frowns. “And what makes you any better than—”

  He’s interrupted by his maniac pixie dream girl, who punches him affectionately on the shoulder. “Stop it! You’re spoiling all the fun!” Cassie, unlike Alex, seems to be enjoying the meeting. She leans forward, nostrils flaring as she hams it up. “I know what we can do for you. What can you do for us?”

  I fix my professional smile in place: the one that says this won’t hurt, not a bit. Ideally I should have done this part as soon as I swore him in, but I was distracted by the extradimensional hypercastrating parasites. “Cassie, I need to ask Alex a question. Please don’t interrupt, no matter how strange it seems.” I don’t stop, but roll straight on, and now I dig into my pocket and pull out my warrant card. “By the authority delegated to me, here goes … Hertzprung, Sapphire, Ocelot, Baculum. Execute Sitrep One, Dr. Schwartz.” The words feel like lumps of mercury dripping from my tongue and Alex’s eyes go wide, then unfocused.

  Cassie tenses and glares at me. “You—” she begins.

  “Subjective integrity maintained. Subjective continuity maintained. Subject observes no tampering.” Alex’s voice is flat and his answers are about what I expected. If they were anything else? Let’s not go there.

  I push on. “Very good. Now execute Sitrep Two, Alex.”

  Cassie keeps staring daggers at me but shuts up as Alex answers. “V-parasites at zero point seven. Interference at zero point three, rising.” The V-parasites tend to render PHANGs insensitive to geasa. “Subjective compliance at zero point six six, falling.”

  I exhale heavily. “Exit supervision.” As Alex slumps I look at Cassie. “You will speak of this to no one. Those words won’t work on you,” I add. “Do you understand why I did that?”

  Alex is blinking his way back towards full consciousness as she looks away from me and nods, just a sharp jerk of the chin. “Your kind’s loyalties are variable, YesYes?”

  “Yeah, that.” I put the warrant card away. “Especially since dissolving the Laundry shut down our fucking oath of office for a while. I had to confirm that he hasn’t been meddled with. It’s a necessary precaution.”

  “Ow.” Alex’s eyes are closed but I can feel his mind sharpening, like a bundle of razor wire emerging from the fogbank on the sofa opposite me next to the miniature lightning cloud that is Cassie. (There is no way in hell that anyone would try to bind Cassie with an oath of office. It’s bad enough getting traction on a PHANG’s soul-bleedingly sharp surfaces; if you tried to net the alfär All-Highest in a geas you’d set fire to your head—and that of everyone else in the same web of thaumaturgically enforced trust.) “What did you just do?”

  “Trust but verify, Doctor. Continuity Ops is a rump and everyone is overstretched—even the Auditors—so he delegated the dirty work to me.” Cassie gloms onto him for reassurance and glares at me on his behalf; they’re still at the stage in the relationship where it takes a crowbar to prise them apart, and it makes me feel like a heel. “Cassie isn’t bound by our oath, obviously, but we have protocols for working with External Assets and”—at this point I’m pitching to her as much as to him—“I assume you have each other’s best interests at heart?”

  They nod simultaneously.

  “Good.” I drop the smile and crack my knuckles. “I assume neither of you want to go back to the camp, and I expect you’re not terribly keen on hosting one of those parasitic worms, which is what’s in store for you if Schiller gets his hands on you. And unlike Schiller, we take care of our own. So. Are you willing to join us and help fix whatever has broken our government? Because if so, we have an assignment waiting for you.”

  SIX

  PARTY PLANNERS

  Meanwhile, Continuity Operations are busy. It’s not just me, or the SA and Mo and the other Auditors; this little circus has drafted in all sorts of key players, from the regulars of Mahogany Row to various External Assets. And so it is that the very same day that Johnny and I are breaking out of a prison on Dartmoor, Persephone Hazard makes a call on a very unusual holiday camp in the Lake District, several hundred kilometers to the north.

  Camp Sunshine started out as
a disastrous experiment in the late 1940s. One of the big seaside resort operators—Pontins or Butlin’s perhaps—branched out and tried to establish a holiday camp in the beautiful wilderness of the Cumbrian Mountains, just outside the national park. I’m not sure quite why anybody thought this was a viable business plan, but it turns out that the sort of clientele who want to spend their annual works vacation on a week of sea, sun, and organized partying are going to be less than enthusiastic about a trek into the wilderness. Especially when said trek terminates in a dismal camp of prefab huts halfway up a mountainside where it rains sideways six days in every five, and the nearest nightlife is downtown Penrith on a Saturday evening, twelve miles down a dirt track. Heaven for hill-walkers it may be, but a seaside resort it ain’t.

  Which is why the Laundry acquired it in part-settlement of a corporation tax bill in the early 1950s, strung a wire fence and some really powerful containment grids around it, and put it to other uses.

  Merely visiting Camp Sunshine is problematic; starting out from London, it’s faster and easier to get to Moscow. Previously a visitor from Head Office might fly to Manchester Airport, hire a car, and drive the last eighty-odd miles. But thanks to the total shutdown of air travel two and a bit weeks ago, and the knock-on disruption that followed, that isn’t an option. So although she set off shortly after dawn, it’s late afternoon by the time Persephone leaves the A6, turns onto a B road, and cautiously points her Range Rover up a series of hairpin bends lined with drunkenly leaning reflective poles and signs warning of road closure in event of snow.

  Beyond the top of the pass, there is a gate in a drystone wall that runs alongside the road as it crosses a strip of moorland. Persephone pulls over, climbs down from the driver’s seat, pauses just long enough to stretch her back—she’s been driving for more than two hours—then opens the gate. As she does so she feels a warning vibration in the ward she wears under her jumper. It’s confirmation that her satnav was telling the truth; she hasn’t been here before, and Camp Sunshine doesn’t exactly advertise its presence these days. She slowly drives across the cattle grid, then closes the gate behind her. There’s very little traffic on the road behind her, and there are no witnesses to see when vehicle and driver fade from view as the gate latches shut.

  Back in the Range Rover, Persephone peers at the map display, then inches forward in low gear. Wheels spin momentarily on the moist pasture, but then a deep-rutted track appears in the grass. A crudely hand-painted wooden sign beside the path reads TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. Her gaze flickers to the rearview mirror as she brakes to a stop. “Merde,” she mutters—a bad habit, talking aloud to herself, but there are no witnesses—and she digs around in the passenger seat legwell for her handbag, then rummages in it for a small leather pouch, which she hastily attaches to the backside of the mirror, so that it is visible through the windscreen. Only when she has confirmed to her own satisfaction that the sigil inside it is active does she release the hand brake and drive on again.

  (Containment grids and razor wire fences are passive defenses, whereas the prisoners who live in Camp Sunshine warrant more active containment measures, and being shot by mistake is the least of ’Seph’s worries.)

  Driving across the field, she comes to another gate in a wall of loose-piled stones. This time she pulls up short but stays in the Range Rover and taps out a quick riff on the horn—shave and a haircut—then waits. A few seconds pass before a red light flashes between the stones, and the gate slowly swings open. She glances round warily, checks that all the windows are sealed and the central locking is engaged, then creeps forward. As she passes the threshold of the next field the quality of the daylight coming in through the windscreen changes subtly, as if she has driven into the penumbra of a storm cloud. Her ward stings, briefly, and there is a brief bluish flicker around the brightwork on the outside of the car, as of Saint Elmo’s fire. Disturbing shadows flicker at the edge of her vision as she drives across the field, and even though she knows full well what they are and that she is permitted to be here, her fingers whiten where she grips the steering wheel rim.

  (This is the main defensive zone around Camp Sunshine. Instructions for what to do, in the unlikely event of a breakdown: remain in the vehicle, do not open any door or window under any circumstances—even if it is on fire—and await the arrival of Camp Security. Being trapped in a burning vehicle would be bad, but leaving the vehicle would be far more dangerous.)

  Persephone has the climate control in the Range Rover set to a comfortable shirtsleeves temperature, but by the time she reaches the gate at the far side of the field, her back is slick with chilly fear-sweat. Something about the shape and motion of the dancing shadows brings atavistic night terrors bubbling to the surface of her mind, puts unease in the driving seat of the mammalian brain. It’s intentional: frightened mammals behave stupidly and predictably, providing easy prey for the Shadow Stalkers bound in this place where the walls between the worlds have been deliberately abraded, and the stars shine bright in the upturned indigo vault of the sky at noon.

  After what feels like an hour she reaches the gate at the opposite side of the killing field. (Her sense of the passage of time is off, for the field is less than a quarter of a kilometer wide at this point.) The gate at this side is ready for her approach and opens automatically. She revs the engine until the anti-slip kicks in with her eagerness to be out of the zone, then is dazzled by the return to full daylight. She has to brake hard to avoid ramming the outer fence of the camp.

  Persephone switches off the engine, reaches for a tissue, and dabs at her forehead. Her hands are shaking slightly. She knew what to expect—Dr. Armstrong provided the credentials and introduced her to the people in Detention Admin for a full safety briefing—but it’s still close to overwhelming. To occupy her hands while she waits for the gatekeeper to take note of her arrival, she pulls out her makeup compact and repairs her face, using the ritual of making herself look calm and collected to invoke and bind her rattled calm. The POW camp on Dartmoor is a Potemkin village, built in the glare of media scrutiny to reassure the public that its inmates are secure, but Camp Sunshine is the real deal. A black site, an undisclosed location, the answer to a snare and a delusion: how do you confine the wizards who walk between the raindrops, that which is dead but dreaming, and those who by force of will alone can chew holes in the warp and weft of reality like moths in the fabric of spacetime?

  The wooden hut beside the gate in the fence is almost disturbingly prosaic, like a cheap garden shed from a DIY store. ’Seph’s working on her eyebrows and just beginning to wonder if they’re on their tea break when the door opens and a guard steps out and strolls towards her. He’s unarmed, she sees. If the prisoners here ever cut loose, guns won’t save you. He’s middle-aged, paunchy, with crow’s-feet around his eyes and salt spreading around the edges of his comb-over. He gestures at her window and she lowers it. “Name?” he asks.

  “Hazard.”

  She waits patiently as he makes a show of checking his clipboard. “Hazard, P.” He makes a note, then walks in front of her car and squints at the number plate, copying it down. Then back to her window. “Do you have any paperwork?” he asks mildly.

  “Yes.” She reaches up and unhooks the leather pouch from around the stalk of the rearview mirror, then passes it to him. She feels the contents squirm for a moment as it leaves her hand. “Is it all in order?” she asks.

  “Seems to be, yes.” He nods, evidently satisfied, and attaches the pouch to his clipboard. “All right, I’m signing you in. Take the first left and park around the side of the canteen. When you’re ready to leave, I’ll sign you out and you must take the token with you—you can’t leave without it—and return it to Doreen in Head Office, or whoever gave it to you. Do you understand?”

  Persephone forces herself to smile. “Absolutely.”

  “You want the interview room in Hut Six. She’s waiting for you.” The gatekeeper hesitates for a moment, then adds: “You’ve not asked f
or my advice but you can have it for free—you shouldn’t believe a word she says. You can’t trust her. She’s poison, pure poison.” He turns his head and spits over his shoulder, then steps back and hauls the chain-link gate open. “Good luck,” he adds.

  * * *

  Buckinghamshire in the Home Counties is stuffed full of stately houses, the provincial palaces of the landed gentry and those with seats in the House of Lords. The lush foothills and valleys of the Chilterns have for centuries provided out-of-season accommodation and country estates for the ruling classes within a day or two’s carriage ride of the capital. During the twentieth century many of the family seats ended up in the possession of the National Trust, having fallen prey to spiraling maintenance costs and steep postwar inheritance taxes. Those that remain in private ownership are the properties of the reclusive and extremely wealthy—or are available for hire to those who wish to temporarily enjoy the lifestyle of billionaires and dukes.

  Nether Stowe House was built as a fortified family manor by one of the endless aristocratic Nevilles that litter the fifteenth century. Over subsequent centuries it spread wings of red gothic brick and softened into flabby architectural middle age. It is surrounded by its former kitchen gardens, reworked as a carefully curated landscape garden by Capability Brown. The building itself was remodeled in the Georgian era as a family home for an immensely wealthy family of merchants, but families rise and fall, and the House changed hands twice during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, finally coming into the custody of the distant descendants of its original owner … who, feeling the chill wind of the Exchequer’s interest during the 1960s, re-established it as a very exclusive hotel.

  One does not reserve a stay in Nether Stowe House in the usual manner, via a hotel booking website or by phoning the front desk. Nor does one check in, receive a key to a room or suite, and hand over a credit card to cover incidental expenses. If you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it and the very discreet management agency will direct your enquiries elsewhere. But if you are acceptable, the entire mansion and all forty full-time staff are in your employ for the duration of your residence, from the butler to the lowliest gardener’s assistant. It’s a serviced apartment for sheikhs and presidents—and especially for those who want to make an impression on the visitors they receive during their stay.