The Nightmare Stacks

by Charles Stross

  So then another smoke signal from Forecasting Ops came out, with a prediction of an incursion in the vicinity of Huddersfield. Worst case is NIGHTMARE RED. Unfortunately FO projections have the circular error probability of a fifty-megaton nuke, which really doesn’t narrow things down. Moving an OCCULUS unit into the region is a sticking plaster for the bigger problem, which is that since the draw-down in forces triggered by the 2010 defense review, the units the Laundry can draw upon have been depleted. There are now just two SAS squadrons, 120 men in total, to cover all contingencies: and only half of them are available at any given time. If the shit really hits the fan they can draw on the regular Army and the Air Force for support, but there will be delays in getting everyone up to speed. So Derek, playing in the sandpit of Operations Control, is desperately trying to figure out how to counter the FO projection. “Outbreaks of idiopathic macroscopic cryptobiotic infestation” could be anything from the usual tentacle monsters to ice giants or shoggoths or other, less familiar phenomena like the pointy-eared bastards FO have been dropping broad hints about for a while. So the DM just has to hope that CCTV will pick it up in time for OCCULUS to get there before it does too much damage, and if it breaks out past OCCULUS and rampages in the direction of Quarry Hill . . . that’s what the SCORPION STARE camera network is for.

  The idea of firing up an experimental look-to-kill network in the middle of a densely populated city does not fill Derek with joy. It’s a desperation move, and could trigger civilian collateral casualties on a scale that would be even harder to cover up than the national trauma of the last Last Night of the Proms.* And that’s before considering the 0.3 percent false positive rate during the neural network recognizer test in Whitby—a spike far higher than any they’d seen on other tests using the same software build.

  Something about Whitby had nagged at his mind, an untidy loose end: the PHANG, Alex, who was there in his free time. Normally Derek would have dismissed that aspect, writing it off as just another peculiarity of co-workers who insist on “having a life,” whatever that means. But the coincidence of finding lots of false positives when there was a PHANG in the test run was . . . suggestive. He’d listened to Lockhart’s grumbling about Specimen B, and rerun the video several times, and put two and two together, and is hoping he’s made four. Alex is in Leeds, now, and a site he visited two weeks ago has begun showing signs of instability. That’s suggestive. Alex is dating the target the DM identified. That’s even more suggestive. And so the DM begins to roll his dice.

  “Do you think he’s a ringer?” asks Vikram Choudhury. He’s slumped forward in his chair, elbows braced on the conference table and bags under his eyes. Like everyone present in the suite he’s been in the office since Friday morning: they’re all getting a bit rank, and very fatigued. “I’ve met your boy and, unfortunate affliction aside, he seemed sound. A bit inexperienced, but very proficient in his specialty.”

  “Spellcaster,” grunts Derek, rubbing the side of his nose tiredly. With his other hand he massages his dice bag obsessively. “A spellcaster and a v—a PHANG. Breaks all the rules.” Derek’s preferred rules are original Dungeons & Dragons (not even first edition AD&D: Derek is really old-school), but he is grudgingly aware that the real world doesn’t always reduce cleanly to a set of gamer-friendly stats tables. (Vampires, it turns out, are not abominable undead walking corpses: they’re just a character class. He can work with that.) “But according to his file he’s very socially . . . inexperienced.” The DM doesn’t add, like me: it cuts too close to the bone. “Is he really up to this?”

  Vikram shrugs. “Mr. Howard’s late director Mr. Angleton put Dr. Schwartz in the line and he didn’t break. With the approval of Dr. Armstrong, I will remind you. This is just conjectural: there might not be anything there.”

  The DM makes a steeple of his fingers. “I feel a great disturbance in the force . . .”

  “Yes, yes, as if a hundred geomancers cried out in frustration and had to rework their topographic maps because the ley line shifted.” Vikram’s tiredness is overflowing into irritation. “Why don’t you ask Mr. McTavish?”

  Johnny McTavish is leaning back in his conference chair, eyes closed, booted feet planted firmly on the seat of the empty chair adjacent to the rubbish bin. He is not snoring, but it’s pretty obvious that his interest in the proceedings has hit rock bottom. At the sound of his name his eyelids open nearly instantly. “Yer wot?”

  Vikram clears his throat fussily. “Derek was casting aspersions on Dr. Alex Schwartz’s ability to handle circumstances he’s never experienced before, if indeed it transpires that the ley line shift up north has something to do with the recent change in his social life reported by his housemates . . . and with the cause of our current weekend alert status. Given that the endpoint of this particular geodesic is twenty meters below surface level in a Tempest-shielded bunker where our young protégé’s mobile phone is unlikely to get a signal, we might have a problem if he runs into a Boojum.”

  “All right, me old cock.” Johnny swings his boots back down onto the floor and sits up. He is, of course, yanking Vikram’s chain: this is understood by all present. Johnny doesn’t answer to anyone except Persephone, and he answers to her the way that a fight-trained pit bull usually responds to its owner—as long as it isn’t currently trying to bite someone’s throat out. “So what you’re saying is, you sent our man into harm’s way and now you’re worried about what to do if he don’t come back?”

  Vikram rolls his eyes as Derek the DM nods, very seriously. “Yes, exactly that.”

  Johnny sighs heavily. “’Is mentor’s the Vicar, isn’t he? And ’e’s got the mad science clown crew for backup, and an OCCULUS team, and Catterick Garrison just up the road if ’e wants a conga line. And this bird ’e’s smitten with? Seems to me you don’t want to get ’Seph out of bed for this. She’s still jet-lagged from that caper in Queensland last Thursday.”

  Vikram shakes his head. “Then we shall let BASHFUL INCENDIARY sleep in,” he agrees. Sending one of the Laundry’s most powerful witches on a wild goose chase is a bad idea: Persephone has a vicious temper when sleep-deprived. “Any other suggestions? Things we can do to help from up here?”

  “When in doubt ask a policeman.” Johnny winks at Vikram. “’Ow about it?”

  Another head-shake. “I can’t go calling out the TPCF on a house call either. They’re external to our reporting chain and you should see what they bill per hour.” The supercops who police the superpowered might have been set up with loaned Laundry personnel and a nod and a wink from the Home Office, but there is a hugely complicated reorganization in process, as part of the fallout from the Albert Hall debacle.

  “So what’s left?” Johnny asks.

  Vikram sighs as Derek looks at him and harrumphs significantly. “I think you’d better telephone the frat house, Mr. Choudhury. Get the Vicar, he’s the responsible adult. If he’s not there, get Pinky. Tell him to sit up and call back if Dr. Schwartz isn’t home by”—he checks his antique wristwatch—“midnight and hasn’t checked in by mobile.”

  “And then?” Vikram asks.

  “Then we start phoning the on-call list and waking people up. What else would you suggest doing?”

  * * *

  “We need to have that talk as soon as we’re done here. Sooner,” Alex whispers, crouching down beside the keyhole. They’ve scouted the grounds around the bunker but found nothing. As far as Alex knows, the two dead soldiers and the changed locks are the only signs that anything is wrong. But they’re pretty big signs that the DM is right about a major incident kicking off here, and all his instincts are screaming at him that it would be a really bad idea to go inside without knowing more.

  “YesYes . . .” Cassie stands with her back to the wall beside the door, holding her mace. “I am sorry, didn’t mean to”—she swallows—“mislead.”

  Alex closes his eyes. My girlfriend is an alien princess an
d her father’s soldiers just tried to kill us, he thinks, then shoves his doubts aside, because of course people like Cassie are imaginary, just like vampires don’t exist, and yet here he is and there she stands. He stretches his sensitive hearing as far as it can go, trying to listen in on the other side of the door, but the distant rumble of traffic on the ring road drowns out anything closer to hand. “I’m getting nothing,” he says. “Can you hear anything?”

  Silence for a moment. Then, “Your heartbeat is too loud. Step around the corner for a moment.”

  Alex holds his breath, tiptoes to the corner, and stands there for almost a minute. Finally Cassie waves him over. “Yes?”

  “Nothing,” she says, very positively. Then, less certainly, “At least, nothing that I could hear . . .” Her ear twitches, and an echo of a long-ago seminar on evolutionary biology raises the dust in Alex’s memory: gracile hominids with predatory adaptations. H. neanderthalensis was adapted for a cold climate, H. habilis for ruggedness in a way later hominid species didn’t need thanks to their mastery of weapons. H. sapiens was adapted for speech, tool-use, teamwork. What would you get if you had a hominid species adapted for thaumaturgy and hunting? Alex looks at her in a new light. She’s on the outside, not briefed on their plans . . . a spy? Or a traitor?

  All of this passes through Alex’s mind in an instant as he reaches for the doorknob and says, “Well, then,” and realizes—further insights cascading—that these are not questions for now but questions for later, if he and Cassie make it back to safety. The DM is already alert to a potential problem and doubtless tracking him on the metaphorical game board. Alex needs to phone home or alarm bells will ring. But if he does phone home and he has missed a watcher or misjudged Cassie, he’ll be giving the hidden adversary vital information. Thinking in these terms makes his head ache. Most of the threats the Laundry is called upon to deal with are brainless gibbering horrors with chitinous claws and wildly waving stinger-tipped tentacles, not Machiavellian strategists with spies to do their bidding. “Well, then,” he repeats doubtfully, and twists the doorknob and braces his feet and—shoves.

  Vampire super-strength is a poor fit for many of the modern world’s problems—it really doesn’t help you fill in your time-sheet any faster—but when it comes to breaking damp-weakened wooden door frames it’s superb. The door crunches, deafeningly loud to Alex’s amped-up hearing, and then it flies open so fast that he barely has time to grab it before it slams against the interior wall.

  A carefully drawn summoning grid fills the entire floor space of the overgrown shed, surrounding the stairs down into the bunker. The diagram’s arcs and nodes are lit up like a radioactive slug-trail left by a mollusk the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. Someone has helpfully poured an outer circle of pristine white salt crystals around it, clearly intended as a vampire trap. Alex looks away from the pool of thaumaturgic energy locked inside the shaft: peering into it hurts his head, and as for the salt, the counting cantrip babbling in the back of his skull is the only thing averting complete paralysis. Cassie is frozen, staring past him into the building, an expression of horror on her face. “FuckFuck!”

  Alex grabs her left arm and pulls her back out of the doorway. “Explain,” he snaps.

  “Is—was there a, I don’t know the word for it . . . a road here? A line of power from hither to yon, connecting sacred sites?”

  “A ley line?” Alex stares at her. She stares back, her eyes wide and dark in the moonlight. “What if there was?”

  “Let me see—” He holds her forearm carefully, as if it’ll shatter if he lets go of it. She pivots around him as if he isn’t there at all, and looks through the opening. She squeaks unhappily. “Thought so.” She swivels back out hastily, pushing him away from the door, then collapses against him. “Come, go, sit, stand, move somewhere else.”

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere!” she cries vehemently.

  “Why?” he demands.

  “If, if we go in there”—she’s breathing fast and deep, hyperventilating—“the path at the bottom of this fastness will carry us to my father’s people.”

  “Good.” And Alex steps into the doorway.

  13.

  THE BUNKER

  The new world’s landscape spreads out beneath Highest Liege’s wings, impressing her with both its familiarity and its sheer alien weirdness.

  She soars high above the ridge-line of the low mountain range that bisects this landmass from north to south, protected from observation by her back-seater’s powerful aversive countermeasures, looking down through her mount’s incredibly sensitive photoreceptors. The shape of this land is similar to that of her former home. But rather than forming the western extremity of a continent, it is separated from its neighbors by a shallow sea to the east, covering the fertile lowlands and slave plantations she remembers from before the war. To the west, another channel floods the farmland and turns the westernmost fingerling of the continent into a separate island. The land is shrunken by the risen ocean, its shape eroded and warped. And that’s not the worst of it.

  The terrain Highest Liege and her wingman cruise above has been blighted by the urük. Gone are the impenetrable, dark northern forests of the western uplands of the empire. There are scattered stands of trees, clearly coppiced and curated by farmers, but for the most part the ground is carved into a patchwork of fields, slashed through by roads—so many roads!—lit up with chains of amber lamps. The metal carts her husband’s idiot daughter described crawl along them, picked out by brilliant white and red lights fore and aft. Hovels pock the sides of the peasant tracks, bunch up into great carbuncular masses every few leagues, and in the distance they form a glowing lump of cancerous tissue so vast that it lights up the underside of the clouds. All the urük slums emit the same lurid orange glow, although some shed a pale white glare from open windows. It will take blood and iron to cure this disease, she thinks as she monitors her mount’s senses, circling around the smelly masses of urük habitation. But it will have to wait until the full body of the Host arrives in the marshaling area and commits to the lightning attack on the enemy palace. Once their autarch has succumbed, the All-Highest will add the geasa that control these subhuman scum to his own might and turn their own militia against them. But for now, it falls to her to observe and monitor and scout for signs of hostile intent in the rolling landscape around the Vale of the Bad Village, as the urük call the staging post.

  Highest Liege of Airborne Strike can find no sign of enemy troops upon the landscape. Such castles as she can see appear to be indefensible, bastions slighted, towers in ruins. She has cruised high above more than one great house, set well among trees and fields surrounded by rambling stone walls: they appear to be built for peace. She can feel no defensive wards around them, and her back-seat magus is becoming increasingly disturbed by the lack of thaumic resonances and ground-works. There are ley lines aplenty, and signs of ancient defensive workings allowed to fall into disrepair, but the lack of power suggests that the dumb urük cattle have no mastery of the arts and sciences whatsoever—either that, or this land has been free from war for an improbably long time. The mystery of their spread across the landscape deepens as she spares it the odd moment of consideration. How can barbarians and primitives have multiplied so prolifically?

  Also puzzling are the curious linear cloud formations that rip across the dome of the sky many leagues above. In the absence of tribal war bands that might stumble upon her husband’s marshaling forces, that demands her scrutiny like nothing else she has seen this morning.

  Circling for altitude, Highest Liege tells her back-seater and wingman to get a fix on the spearpoint of one of those clouds. “What, if anything, are they emitting?” she demands.

  Wingman reports: “The trailing clouds are just clouds, my Liege. Water vapor, from the egg-shaped things under the wings of the . . .”

  “The flying cattle-carts.” Highest Liege perm
its herself a smile. “You are certain there is no mana in them?”

  She hears the flight-magi conferring in the back of her mind. Presently her back-seater reports: “They are entirely inert, my Liege. We sense metal and minds, many minds—and engines like those of the carts. But there is no trace of science to them, merely brute physical artifice.”

  “Then attend,” she commands. “In the past eighty stances I have counted seven of the flyers passing overhead. Mostly from southeast to northwest. Confirm my count and maintain your own while we return to base. This patrol will now conclude.” The urük use roads on the ground; it is to be expected that they use set paths through the sky as well. All-Highest will welcome a diversion, and although the cattle-carts fly unattainably high overhead (for the dragonriders carry no bottled air: in the empire’s world to be seen above the battlefield is to die instantly, so as a rule they stay close to ground cover) their presence suggests an exciting tactical opportunity to her.

  * * *

  Cassie grabs at Alex but she’s too slow to stop him going inside. The strength she found in action a minute before has vanished, leaving her shaky. She takes a deep breath, dizzy, then feels his arms around her like an echo of the hungry magus in the sending. His cheek against her neck is rough and sandpapery, warm to the touch.

  “You shouldn’t have done that! It’s a trap.” Her heart flutters in her chest at the memory of her stepmother’s sending, the traumatic experience of the death that powered it. She remembers it, and her father’s geas works through her to latch onto her stepmother’s last words with the unyielding pressure of steel handcuffs in her head: Present yourself and your prize . . . or your loyalty will be questioned.