Wireless

by Charles Stross

  “Together?” he asked. Already the eyestalks were drooping; the great lungs wheezed effortfully as it struggled to frame a reply.

  “I was going to ask you,” said the farm, and half its legs collapsed under it, with a thud like a baby earthquake. “Oh, Joe, if only . . .”

  “Maddie?” he demanded, nerveless fingers dropping the tranquil izer gun.

  A mouth appeared in the farm’s front, slurred words at him from familiar-seeming lips, words about Jupiter and promises. Appalled, Joe backed away from the farm. Passing the first dead tree, he dropped the nitrogen tank: then an impulse he couldn’t articulate made him turn and run, back to the house, eyes almost blinded by sweat or tears. But he was too slow, and when he dropped to his knees next to the farm, the emergency pharmacopoeia clicking and whirring to itself in his arms, he found it was already dead.

  “Bugger,” said Joe, and he stood up, shaking his head.

  “Bugger.” He keyed his walkie-talkie. “Bob, come in, Bob!”

  “Rrrrowl?”

  “Momma’s had another breakdown. Is the tank clean, like I asked?”

  “Yap!”

  “Okay. I got ’er backup tapes in t’office safe. Let’s get’t’ank warmed up for ’er an’ then shift t’tractor down ’ere to muck out this mess.”

  That autumn, the weeds grew unnaturally rich and green down in the north paddock of Armitage End.

  A Colder War

  ANALYST

  Roger Jourgensen tilts back in his chair, reading.

  He’s a fair-haired man, in his mid-thirties: hair razor-cropped, skin pallid from too much time spent under artificial lights. Spectacles, short-sleeved white shirt and tie, photographic ID badge on a chain round his neck. He works in an air-conditioned office with no windows.

  The file he is reading frightens him.

  Once, when Roger was a young boy, his father took him to an open day at Nellis AFB, out in the California desert. Sunlight glared brilliantly from the polished silverplate flanks of the big bombers, sitting in their concrete-lined dispersal bays behind barriers and blinking radiation monitors. The brightly colored streamers flying from their pitot tubes lent them a strange, almost festive appearance. But they were sleeping nightmares: once awakened, nobody—except the flight crew—could come within a mile of the nuclear-powered bombers and live.

  Looking at the gleaming, bulging pods slung under their wingtip pylons, Roger had a premature inkling of the fires that waited within, a frigid terror that echoed the siren wail of the air-raid warnings. He’d sucked nervously on his ice cream and gripped his father’s hand tightly while the band ripped through a cheerful Sousa march, and only forgot his fear when a flock of Thunderchiefs sliced by overhead and rattled the car windows for miles around.

  He has the same feeling now, as an adult reading this intelligence assessment, that he had as a child, watching the nuclear-powered bombers sleeping in their concrete beds.

  There’s a blurry photograph of a concrete box inside the file, snapped from above by a high-flying U-2 during the autumn of ’61. Three coffin-shaped lakes, bulking dark and gloomy beneath the arctic sun; a canal heading west, deep in the Soviet heartland, surrounded by warning trefoils and armed guards. Deep waters saturated with calcium salts, concrete cofferdams lined with gold and lead. A sleeping giant pointed at NATO, more terrifying than any nuclear weapon.

  Project Koschei.

  RED SQUARE REDUX

  WARNING:

  The following briefing film is classified SECRET GOLD JULY BOOJUM. If you do not have SECRET GOLD JULY BOOJUM clearance, leave the auditorium now and report to your unit security officer for debriefing. Failing to observe this notice is an imprisonable offense.

  You have sixty seconds to comply.

  VIDEO CLIP:

  Red Square in springtime. The sky overhead is clear and blue; there’s a little wispy cirrus at high altitude. It forms a brilliant backdrop for flight after flight of four-engined bombers that thunder across the horizon and drop behind the Kremlin’s high walls.

  VOICE-OVER:

  Red Square, the May Day parade, 1962. This is the first time that the Soviet Union has publicly displayed weapons classified GOLD JULY BOOJUM. Here they are:

  VIDEO CLIP:

  Later in the same day. A seemingly endless stream of armor and soldiers marches across the square, turning the air grey with diesel fumes. The trucks roll in line eight abreast, with soldiers sitting erect in the back. Behind them rumble a battalion of T-56s, their commanders standing at attention in their cupolas, saluting the stand. Jets race low and loud overhead, squadrons of MiG-17 fighters.

  Behind the tanks sprawl a formation of four low-loaders: huge tractors towing low-slung trailers, their load beds strapped down under olive drab tarpaulins. Whatever is under them is uneven, a bit like a loaf of bread the size of a small house. The trucks have an escort of jeeplike vehicles on each side, armed soldiers sitting at attention in their backs.

  There are big five-pointed symbols painted in silver on each tarpaulin, like pentacles. Each star is surrounded by a stylized silver circle; a unit insignia, perhaps, but not in the standard format for Red Army units. There’s lettering around the circles, in a strangely stylized script.

  VOICE-OVER:

  These are live servitors under transient control. The vehicles towing them bear the insignia of the second Guards Engineering Brigade, a penal construction unit based in Bokhara and used for structural-engineering assignments relating to nuclear installations in the Ukraine and Azerbaijan. This is the first time that any Dresden Agreement party openly demonstrated ownership of this technology: in this instance, the conclusion we are intended to draw is that the sixty-seventh Guard Engineering Brigade operates four units. Given existing figures for the Soviet ORBAT, we can then extrapolate a total task strength of 288 servitors, if this unit is representative.

  VIDEO CLIP:

  Five huge Tu-95 Bear bombers thunder across the Moscow skies.

  VOICE-OVER:

  This conclusion is questionable. For example, in 1964 a total of 240 Bear bomber passes were made over the reviewing stand in front of the Lenin mausoleum. However, at that time technical reconnaissance assets verified that the Soviet air force has hard-stand parking for only 160 of these aircraft, and estimates of airframe production based on photographs of the extent of the Tupolev Design Bureau’s works indicate that total production to that date was between 60 and 180 bombers.

  Further analysis of photographic evidence from the 1964 parade suggests that a single group of twenty aircraft in four formations of five made repeated passes through the same airspace, the main arc of their circuit lying outside visual observation range of Moscow. This gave rise to the erroneous capacity report of 1964 in which the first-strike delivery capability of the Soviet Union was overestimated by as much as 300 percent.

  We must therefore take anything that they show us in Red Square with a pinch of salt when preparing force estimates. Quite possibly these four servitors are all they’ve got. Then again, the actual battalion strength may be considerably higher.

  STILL PHOTOGRAPHIC SEQUENCE:

  From very high altitude—possibly in orbit—an eagle’s-eye view of a remote village in mountainous country. Mud-brick houses huddle together beneath a craggy outcrop; goats graze nearby.

  In the second photograph, something has rolled through the village leaving a trail of devastation. The path is quite unlike the trail of damage left by an artillery bombardment: something roughly four meters wide has shaved the rocky plateau smooth, wearing it down as if with a terrible heat. A corner of a shack leans drunkenly, the other half sliced away cleanly. White bones gleam faintly in the track; no vultures descend to stab at the remains.

  VOICE-OVER:

  These images were taken very recently, on successive orbital passes of a KH-11 satellite. They were timed precisely eighty-nine minutes apart. This village was the home of a noted mujahedin leader. Note the similar footprint to the payloads on the load
beds of the trucks seen at the 1962 parade.

  These indicators were present, denoting the presence of servitor units in use by Soviet forces in Afghanistan: the four-meter-wide gauge of the assimilation track. The total molecular breakdown of organic matter in the track. The speed of destruction—the event took less than five thousand seconds to completion, no survivors were visible, and the causative agent had already been uplifted by the time of the second orbital pass. This, despite the residents of the community being armed with DShK heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and AK-47s. Lastly: there is no sign of the causative agent even deviating from its course, but the entire area is depopulated. Except for excarnated residue, there is no sign of human habitation.

  In the presence of such unique indicators, we have no alternative but to conclude that the Soviet Union has violated the Dresden Agreement by deploying GOLD JULY BOOJUM in a combat mode in the Khyber Pass. There are no grounds to believe that a NATO armored division would have fared any better than these mujahedin without nuclear support . . .

  PUZZLE PALACE

  Roger isn’t a soldier. He’s not much of a patriot, either: he signed up with the CIA after college, in the aftermath of the Church Commission hearings in the early seventies. The Company was out of the assassination business, just a bureaucratic engine rolling out National Security assessments: that’s fine by Roger. Only now, five years later, he’s no longer able to roll along, casually disengaged, like a car in neutral bowling down a shallow incline toward his retirement, pension, and a gold watch. He puts the file down on his desk and, with a shaking hand, pulls an illicit cigarette from the pack he keeps in his drawer. He lights it and leans back for a moment to draw breath, force relaxation, staring at smoke rolling in the air beneath the merciless light until his hand stops shaking.

  Most people think spies are afraid of guns, or KGB guards, or barbed wire, but in point of fact the most dangerous thing they face is paper. Papers carry secrets. Papers carry death warrants. Papers like this one, this folio with its blurry eighteen-year-old faked missile photographs and estimates of time/survivor curves and pervasive psychosis ratios, can give you nightmares, dragging you awake screaming in the middle of the night. It’s one of a series of highly classified pieces of paper that he is summarizing for the eyes of the National Security Council and the president-elect—if his head of department and the DDCIA approve it—and here he is, having to calm his nerves with a cigarette before he turns the next page.

  After a few minutes, Roger’s hand is still. He leaves his cigarette in the eagle-headed ashtray and picks up the intelligence report again. It’s a summary, itself the distillation of thousands of pages and hundreds of photographs. It’s barely twenty pages long: as of 1963, its date of preparation, the CIA knew very little about Project Koschei. Just the bare skeleton, and rumors from a highly placed spy. And their own equivalent project, of course. Lacking the Soviet lead in that particular field, the USAF fielded the silverplate white elephants of the NB-39 project: twelve atomic-powered bombers armed with XK-PLUTO, ready to tackle Project Koschei should the Soviets show signs of unsealing the bunker. Three hundred megatons of H-bombs pointed at a single target, and nobody was certain it would be enough to do the job.

  And then there was the hard-to-conceal fiasco in Antarctica. Egg on face: a subterranean nuclear test program in international territory! If nothing else, it had been enough to stop JFK running for a second term. The test program was a bad excuse: but it was far better than confessing what had really happened to the 501st Airborne Division on the cold plateau beyond Mount Erebus. The plateau that the public didn’t know about, that didn’t show up on the maps issued by the geological survey departments of those governments party to the Dresden Agreement of 1931—an arrangement that even Hitler had stuck to. The plateau that had swallowed more U-2 spy planes than the Soviet Union, more surface expeditions than darkest Africa.

  Shit. How the hell am I going to put this together for him?

  Roger’s spent the past five hours staring at this twenty-page report, trying to think of a way of summarizing their drily quan tifiable terror in words that will give the reader power over them, the power to think the unthinkable: but it’s proving difficult. The new man in the White House is straight-talking, demands straight answers. He’s pious enough not to believe in the supernatural, confident enough that just listening to one of his speeches is an uplifting experience if you can close your eyes and believe in morning in America. There is probably no way of explaining Project Koschei, or XK-PLUTO, or MK-NIGHTMARE, or the gates, without watering them down into just another weapons system—which they are not. Weapons may have deadly or hideous effects, but they acquire moral character from the actions of those who use them. Whereas these projects are indelibly stained by a patina of ancient evil . . .

  He hopes that if the balloon ever does go up, if the sirens wail, he and Andrea and Jason will be left behind to face the nuclear fire. It’ll be a merciful death compared with what he suspect lurks out there, in the unexplored vastness beyond the gates. The vastness that made Nixon cancel the manned space program, leaving just the standing joke of a white-elephant shuttle, when he realized just how hideously dangerous the space race might become. The darkness that broke Jimmy Carter’s faith and turned Lyndon B. Johnson into an alcoholic.

  He stands up, nervously shifts from one foot to the other. Looks round at the walls of his cubicle. For a moment the cigarette smoldering on the edge of his ashtray catches his attention: wisps of blue-grey smoke coil like lazy dragons in the air above it, writhing in a strange cuneiform text. He blinks, and they’re gone, and the skin on the small of his back prickles as if someone had pissed on his grave.

  “Shit.” Finally, a spoken word in the silence. His hand is shaking as he stubs the cigarette out.

  Mustn’t let this get to me. He glances at the wall. It’s nineteen hundred hours; too late, too late. He should go home, Andy will be worrying herself sick.

  In the end it’s all too much. He slides the thin folder into the safe behind his chair, turns the locking handle and spins the dial, then signs himself out of the reading room and goes through the usual exit search.

  During the thirty-mile drive home, he spits out of the window, trying to rid his mouth of the taste of Auschwitz ashes.

  LATE NIGHT IN THE WHITE HOUSE

  The colonel is febrile, jittering about the room with gung ho enthusiasm. “That was a mighty fine report you pulled together, Jourgensen!” He paces over to the niche between the office filing cabinet and the wall, turns on the spot, paces back to the far side of his desk. “You understand the fundamentals. I like that. A few more guys like you running the company, and we wouldn’t have this fuckup in Tehran.” He grins, contagiously. The colonel is a firestorm of enthusiasm, burning out of control like a forties comic-book hero. He has Roger on the edge of his chair, almost sitting at attention. Roger has to bite his tongue to remind himself not to call the colonel “sir”—he’s a civilian, not in the chain of command. “That’s why I’ve asked Deputy Director McMurdo to reassign you to this office, to work on my team as company liaison. And I’m pleased to say that he’s agreed.”

  Roger can’t stop himself. “To work here, sir?”

  Here is in the basement of the Executive Office Building, an extension hanging off the White House. Whoever the colonel is, he’s got pull, in positively magical quantities. “What will I be doing, sir? You said your team—”

  “Relax a bit. Drink your coffee.” The colonel paces back behind his desk, sits down. Roger sips cautiously at the brown sludge in the mug with the Marine Corps crest. “The president told me to organize a team,” says the colonel, so casually that Roger nearly chokes on his coffee, “to handle contingencies. October surprises. Those asshole commies down in Nicaragua. ‘We’re eyeball-to-eyeball with an Evil Empire, Ozzie, and we can’t afford to blink’—those were his exact words. The Evil Empire uses dirty tricks. But nowadays we’re better than they are:
buncha hicks, like some third-world dictatorship—Upper Volta with shoggoths. My job is to pin them down and cut them up. Don’t give them a chance to whack the shoe on the UN table, demand concessions. If they want to bluff, I’ll call ’em on it. If they want to go toe-to-toe, I’ll dance with ’em.” He’s up and pacing again. “The company used to do that, and do it okay, back in the fifties and sixties. But too many bleeding hearts—it makes me sick. If you guys went back to wet ops today, you’d have journalists following you every time you went to the john in case it was newsworthy.

  “Well, we aren’t going to do it that way this time. It’s a small team, and the buck stops here.” The colonel pauses, then glances at the ceiling. “Well, maybe up there. But you get the picture. I need someone who knows the Company, an insider who has clearance up the wazoo who can go in and get the dope before it goes through a fucking committee of ass-watching bureaucrats. I’m also getting someone from the Puzzle Palace, and some words to give me pull with Big Black.” He glances at Roger sharply, and Roger nods: he’s cleared for National Security Agency—Puzzle Palace—intelligence, and knows about Big Black, the National Reconnaissance Office, which is so secret that even its existence is still classified.

  Roger is impressed by this colonel, despite his better judgment. Within the byzantine world of the US intelligence services, he is talking about building his very own pocket battleship and sailing it under the Jolly Roger with letters of marque and reprise signed by the president. But Roger still has some questions to ask, to scope out the limits of what Colonel North is capable of. “What about FEVER DREAM, sir?”