Pandaemonium

by Christopher Brookmyre

  He felt dreadful about what he had been forced to do to Merrick, as he had felt dreadful throughout the many sleepless nights of prayer and contemplation as he prepared himself for his awful task. He knew there would be loss of life, and he regretted that profoundly. However, this would mostly be among soldiers, and it was the highest nobility of their vocation that they always knew they might have to lay down their lives for a greater good. What greater good was there than this? If Satan was showing his hand so dramatically, then that demonstrated how high the stakes truly must be.

  What might this be the precursor of, he barely dared ask himself. And thus what price a few lives against thwarting the crucial first foothold towards establishing Hell on Earth?

  He had engineered this disaster and he had shot Merrick, but it was not sabotage and it was not murder.

  This was war.

  XXXII

  ‘We need medicine and we need transportation,’ Sendak states. ‘Got twenty-odd people, including injured, holed up down the valley, surrounded by those things.’

  ‘There’s armoured personnel carriers top-side,’ Steinmeyer replies. ‘At the surface compound. Medkits on board. But we need to go via the Cathedral. Shut down the machine. Follow me, we’ll have to go through the labs.’

  ‘The Cathedral?’ Sendak asks as they set off behind the professor.

  ‘The great cavern housing the beating heart of this place. That’s the sound you can hear all around you. The machine is out of control. All the systems have either shut down or gone haywire. The armoury codes appear to have malfunctioned same time as the cages. When the creatures broke loose, nobody could get hold of anything heavier than pistols. Surprise attack by overwhelming numbers . . .’ He nods towards a pool of gore. ‘This is the result.’

  ‘So where did you get that bad boy?’ Sendak asks.

  ‘My desk drawer. This is the prototype. The others required code clearance for use because, quite frankly, the military were more worried about the technology ever getting out than they were about security inside the facility.’

  ‘No shit,’ observes Sendak bitterly.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, so that’s the boy-toys,’ Rosemary interrupts. ‘What about the bloody creatures? Where did they come from? How did they get here?’

  Steinmeyer stops at a sliding door and fumbles through a selection of bloodied keycards. He swipes the appropriate one and leads them through into another carnage-strewn passageway.

  ‘I don’t have an exact answer for either of your questions,’ he tells Rosemary with the awkward over-courtesy of one unused to addressing young females. ‘But I will tell you what I know. The “how” part involves the technology we’ve been developing here. This facility houses a particle accelerator that is a hybrid between a conventional radio frequency atom-smasher and advanced plasma-laser technology. My work here has been principally to do with developing a theory of quantum gravity. I—’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Adnan interrupts, a realisation belatedly dawning on him. ‘You’re Lucius Steinmeyer.’

  ‘I am,’ he confirms, a little surprised by the recognition.

  ‘I’m only familiar with your older work, sir, but I’m totally geeking out here.’

  ‘Well I’m overfamiliar with his newer work,’ Rosemary chastises. ‘And so are a few of our late friends.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Steinmeyer says regretfully. ‘Though in my defence, like many great discoveries in science, this one came about unintentionally. The machine created an anomaly: an unforeseen and, to be entirely honest, inexplicable effect. A portal, though we didn’t know that until something came through it.’

  ‘Inside the accelerator?’ Adnan asks, reining in his excitement for fear of drawing further disapproval.

  ‘No. Even more curiously, the anomaly appeared outside the impact observation chamber: precisely 16.16252 metres from the dead centre of the octant. And when I say precisely, I mean very precisely. Measured by laser.’

  ‘Precisely 16.16252,’ Adnan says. ‘So the distance is a ten-to-the-power-thirty-six multiple of the Planck length.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Rosemary asks.

  ‘Nothing that sheds any light on what was created. We had no idea what the anomaly was, and I was still deliberating how to probe it when the first of the creatures came through. As to the question of from where . . .’ Steinmeyer sighs with a deep and enduring frustration. ‘There are three possibilities: that they are from somewhere else in our universe, and the anomaly is a bridge or gateway via higher dimensions; that they are from a completely different universe, and the anomaly is a rupture in the membrane separating theirs from ours; or even that they are from right here, a parallel version of our Earth, where the path of evolution developed differently. In which case the anomaly—’

  ‘Is like a way of tuning to a different reality,’ Rosemary says, glancing at Adnan in acknowledgment.

  ‘Quite,’ says Steinmeyer. ‘The curtain between worlds, between universes, is gossamer-thin; it’s possible there may even have been naturally occurring breaches in the past, hence these creatures’ previous excursions into our world may have given birth to our demon myths. I would know more if we had been able to study the effects properly, but that didn’t happen. When the first specimens came through, the military people freaked. They brought in Cardinal Tullian, and in their superstitious, cowardly panic, they let him order off the menu in terms of his remit. He and his staff have had absolute control over the creatures ever since. I can say with some authority that what happened here has quite comprehensively given the lie to the phrase “non-overlapping magisteria”.’

  ‘So why didn’t the military just shut it down?’ Rosemary asks, prompting an ironic snort from Sendak.

  ‘They never know whether to fish or cut bait,’ the Sarge adds. ‘Also known as a wait-and-see policy. With so much invested, my guess is, no matter how spooked they got, they weren’t gonna pull the plug just like that. Am I right?’

  ‘Very astute, Sergeant Sendak. We would need years, decades to work on this, but Tullian was angling for a shutdown from day one. All developments in cosmology have been obstructed by Tullian’s church, from Copernicus onwards, because they threaten its own explanations. They can’t burn you at the stake any more, but they still have their methods of applying pressure. I knew a shutdown was inevitable. That’s why I raised my counter-concern that if we turned off the machine, we might never be able to recreate the anomaly. Thus it was only military indecisiveness that postponed the shutdown so long.’

  ‘But that shutdown order was given?’ Sendak asks.

  ‘Yes. General MacCormack ruled that it be mothballed.’

  ‘Which would effectively close the portal forever, because the anomaly might not be replicable.’

  ‘That was the impression I gave him.’

  ‘The impress—You knew otherwise.’

  ‘There was a power surge one night, a few weeks back. I had to reset all systems and the anomaly was lost. But when I restored the previous settings, it reappeared. I decided to keep this to myself and pretended to be desperately opposed to any suspension of the operation. I was protecting years of work. I had to make everyone think that shutting down the machine and closing the anomaly would be the end of it. Then, I hoped, we could later resume proper, unhindered research once we had dampened the hysteria and regained control of our own operation.’

  ‘But somehow the freaks got loose before the shutdown could commence?’ Sendak suggests.

  ‘No. The shutdown sequence was well under way. I was packing my bags. The creatures got loose when all of the magnetic locking systems failed, which could have been caused by the machine suddenly being flipped to inverse polarity. That’s not something that just happens by itself. And nor do all of the armoury cabinets spontaneously malfunction.’

  ‘You think this was sabotage?’

  ‘I think my beaten-man performance didn’t fool everybody. I suspect there’s somebody in here for whom mothballing isn’t enough. Liste
n to the sound of the machine.’

  Sendak is finding it increasingly difficult to hear anything else. The pulsing has been getting louder and stronger with each corridor Steinmeyer leads them down, each doorway they pass through: disproportionately so, in Sendak’s estimation. It’s not just a pulse, either: it’s a cycle of pulses, and it seems to intensify with each new round.

  ‘It isn’t getting louder simply because we’re getting nearer,’ Steinmeyer confirms. ‘The pulse is getting stronger. It’s the inverse polarity. It allows things to go through from our side instead of vice versa.’

  ‘What would happen if something tried to go through at normal polarity?’ asks Adnan.

  ‘It wouldn’t get near it. All of the specimens try when they first come through, but it’s repellant, similar to bringing together two like poles of a magnet. Basically, it’s not a two-way street. We reversed the polarity so that we could try sending probes through the portal, but we couldn’t devise a way of retrieving them remotely . . .’

  ‘And I’m guessing you struck out on volunteers to do it manually,’ Sendak suggests.

  ‘Quite. Our efforts were further limited because we found that the machine can’t stay inverse for long without becoming unstable. Security protocols were put in place to ensure the polarity could only be inverted under highly controlled conditions. That those protocols have been overridden is how I know this wasn’t an accident. If we don’t intervene, the machine is going to destroy itself.’

  ‘Given how this shit has worked out so far, you want to tell me why that’s a bad thing?’

  ‘The machine is powered by a fission reactor connected to the biggest nuclear train set outside of CERN. If we don’t shut it down, it’ll blow the mountain apart and kill everything within five miles of here.’

  Blake was a God-send: literally a God-send.

  Even as Tullian stood there, contemplating the enormity of having just broken the most sacred of commandments and killed a man in cold blood, he had glanced at one of the CCTV screens and read the message the Lord was sending. It could not have been less ambiguous: in his moment of greatest doubt, no less than a priest had been delivered into his midst.

  But no sooner had he noticed the collar on one of the four figures picking their way along a corpse-strewn corridor than a movement on another of the screens told him what work was still to be done. Steinmeyer had survived, and was making his way through the Alpha labs. In a matter of mere minutes, their paths would surely cross. It was imperative that he be the one to apprise his fellow clergyman of the situation before Steinmeyer delivered his version of events.

  Fortunately, he knew a few short cuts, and by feeding the test chamber’s monitor with one of Merrick’s video files he had a means of causing the new arrivals to tarry there a while: a means that would throw a large spoke into Steinmeyer’s ‘rational’ explanations.

  ‘Like “a gossamer curtain”, that was how he always described it,’ Tullian tells Blake. ‘Someone should have strangled him with one.’

  Tullian opens a security lock and checks the path ahead. He spots a shock-pike lying abandoned on the floor and hands it to Blake as he ushers him through the doorway, demonstrating the charge button with a push of his thumb.

  ‘Make no mistake, Father, I am no Luddite. Quite the contrary. I love science. In fact I owe my position in the Church to my passion and dedication to it. But here, in this place, is where science met its limit, and Steinmeyer refused to face that. Science could not account for some of the phenomena we were encountering. This was the advent of a paradigm shift of cosmological proportions, but Steinmeyer was effectively still saying the Earth is flat and the sun orbits around it. Steinmeyer is the most dangerous kind of zealot: a scientist who cannot accept what the data is telling him. Everyone in this place could see what was plain except him: he had opened up a gateway to Hell.’

  ‘You’re not using that as a figure of speech, are you,’ Blake asks rhetorically. ‘How do we close it?’

  ‘The machine is out of control. It’s going to consume itself. No one must prevent that. Unfortunately, Steinmeyer is still alive and will give anything to do just that. If he encounters your friends, he will use them, lie to them, and if it serves him, he will sacrifice their lives to his ambitions like his zealotry sacrificed all these others.’

  Marianne lets out a strained moan and winces, the pain in her hands throbbing with her pulse now that the morphine has worn off. Cameron is still unconscious, which may be a mercy, but she suspects it’s not down to his continuing analgesia.

  ‘You okay?’ Deborah enquires. ‘Sorry, I know I keep asking that. It’s just . . .’

  ‘It hurts,’ Marianne says, her voice strained.‘A lot. I’m worried about infection too. Think I’m getting a temperature. My head’s thumping and it looks like the lights keep pulsing.’

  ‘That’s not your headache,’ Deborah assures her. ‘The lights are pulsing.’

  Kirk glances up at the fluorescents, watching their glow fade and intensify, fade and intensify. He’s convinced the latter phase is getting marginally brighter each time, but it could just be the effect of the contrast.

  He glances towards Miss Ross and indicates the hockey stick, now disconnected from the mains.

  ‘Wasn’t me,’ Heather insists. ‘Sockets are on a different circuit. Anyway, this doesn’t feel like power fading. This is power growing.’

  ‘How long have they been gone?’ Radar asks, casting a concerned glance at Cameron.

  Kirk looks instinctively at his watch. It still reads 11:00, as it has done since the hike. He hauls it off in frustration and casts it to the floor. Instead of hitting the ground, it whips away sideways through the air and sticks to the wall, drawn by irresistible magnetic forces.

  He looks at Heather, like he needs a corroborative witness that this just happened. Her expression does the job.

  ‘Did I dog Physics the day we covered this?’ he asks.

  ‘My fear is that Steinmeyer has in fact been possessed,’ says Tullian, leading Blake through another sodium-lit service duct. ‘And that is why he is, literally, hell-bent on preserving this infernal gateway. He was always a driven man, admirably so, but not like this, not to the exclusion of reason. However, perhaps this very drive was what made him a suitable vessel. He has certainly proven an effective one.’

  Tullian turns and places a hand on Blake’s forearm, gripping it as he looks intently into his eyes.

  ‘I have to warn you, Father, that there is a strong possibility, should your friends come into his sphere, that they will be contaminated too. I’m telling you this in order that you may prepare yourself and understand that, if this is the case, then they are no longer your friends.’

  Tullian advances into the duct, Blake following. This one is only a few yards long, housing a ladder at the end. An aluminium plate beside it reads ‘Observation Platform Emergency Access’.

  Tullian puts a foot on the first rung and then stops, turning around to face Blake, something having occurred to him.

  ‘There is another thing I need to tell you, in case anything should happen to me.’

  He reaches among the folds of his robes and produces an iPhone, which he holds up momentarily for Blake to see before popping it back whence it came.

  ‘If for any reason I don’t survive, it’s imperative that you recover this.’

  ‘What’s on it? The Pope’s mobile number?’

  ‘Evidence that I can use as leverage if any government, any organisation, ever attempts to repeat this madness: evidence proving that what was brought forth here was not merely some unknown species, but the forces of Hell. This phone contains video files and test data demonstrating that holy water burns their skin, while ordinary water does not. There is no chemical explanation for why mere water, once blessed, can do that to living tissue. This constitutes proof that the scientific paradigm has met its outer boundaries. This constitutes proof that what we have been telling the world for two thousand years is true.’


  Blake had seen the footage in the lab, simultaneously amazing and appalling. He saw holy water burn living tissue: the tissue of a living creature, restrained and helpless, unable to resist or retreat as its skin blistered and burned. He also saw a corpse alongside: a demon that had been tortured and crucified.

  He understands a terrible truth. Kane was right about him: he never truly believed. All these years, he’s just been searching for a reason to. Well, now he’s been given one, and he doesn’t like how it feels. If Hell exists, then so must Heaven, but he finds them two sides at war: battle and slaughter, enemy prisoners tortured and executed. Didn’t he already have this in the old world yesterday?

  ‘Gimme a hand here,’ calls Sendak, beckoning Adnan to help him clear the doorway of bodies. They’re only feet apart, but he has to all but shout above the sound coming from beyond the doors.

  ‘This is the Cathedral,’ Steinmeyer announces, swiping a keycard. ‘Once we get inside, I don’t need to warn you to stay back from the anomaly.’

  Sendak spots a pistol gripped in the hand of a dead soldier. He tries to wrest it free, but it is locked solid.

  ‘Sarge,’ Adnan yells, using his head to indicate the floor by his feet, his hands occupied by dragging what’s left of some poor grunt.

  Sendak looks across and sees the shotgun lying beneath the body Adnan is shifting. There are also two boxes of twelve-gauge ammunition by the wall, one of them spilled open.

  They both begin loading shells into their weapons’ breeches, which is when Sendak notices that Adnan looks concerned.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fresh weapons and spare ammo just outside a big door. End-of-level-boss and a major battle up ahead.’

  ‘This is real life, kid, not a video game.’

  ‘Yeah, and in real life, somebody stashed this hardware for a fight - and still never made it.’

  XXXIII