The Nightmare Stacks

by Charles Stross

  Finally she pulls back a little. “From now on, whatever you do, don’t tell anyone your name—or mine. Names have power. I am known as Agent First of Spies and Liars, and I will live up to that: believe nothing I say once we cross the threshold until . . . well, until whatever happens, happens.” She kisses him again. “Trust me, I’m a very good liar.” Then she lets go and pushes him away, her face smoothing into a mask of haughty arrogance. “Remember, I have bound you as a vassal and you are compelled to obey me,” she says. She turns to face the blue-glowing portal. “Follow me.”

  Together they step through the doorway to the Host’s marshaling area.

  * * *

  By seven o’clock in the morning, the worst case of motorway gridlock ever recorded in the UK is rapidly engulfing London. Unusually, the cause is neither an accident nor a surfeit of rush-hour traffic: the police have simply closed the entire clockwise carriageway of the M25 between junction 7 and junction 23.

  The proximate cause of the blockage is crawling north at barely seventy kilometers per hour: a convoy of thirty bellowing desert brown low-loaders bearing tarpaulin-shrouded payloads. Each low-loader—including its load—weighs close to a hundred tons. Many of the Army’s heavy tanks have been sold off since the 2010 defense review, and most of the rest are stored in Germany against the ever-present threat of a Soviet invasion through Poland. But almost all the Challenger-2s in working order in the UK are now on the move, crawling from the complex of hangars in Hampshire where they’re stored as fast as the mechanics can gas them up, arm them, and find transporters for the five-hundred-kilometer trip to Leeds.

  The heavies don’t travel unaccompanied. More low-loaders follow them, carrying recovery vehicles and spare engine packs; there’s a steady trickle of regular trucks and Land Rovers playing catch-up, with as many spares as they can scour from the depot. Not that the tanks are ready to fight yet. Ammunition will arrive separately from one of the Defense Munition Centers in Warwickshire, converging as fast as the trucks can move it—again, with a huge police escort, because nothing gives the civil authorities indigestion like hundreds of tons of high explosives driving around the motorway grid in rush-hour traffic.

  But it’s going to be late afternoon before any of this stuff gets where it’s needed, and by then the battle will probably be over.

  * * *

  It’s eight o’clock in the morning on a Sunday, and the Right Honorable Jeremy Michaels is in a foul mood.

  He’s been booted and suited for three hours as he walks along the red tunnel to the door of the secure meeting room in the Cabinet Office building, where an extraordinary session of the combined Civil Contingencies Committee, Defense Committee, and a bunch of spooks from the Intelligence side of the table has been thrown together in a blinding hurry. Whitehall has been a self-kicking centipede orgy since four o’clock this morning, with phones ringing and secure email systems smoking since whatever it is that’s kicking off kicked off in cloth-capshire or wherever it is up north, interrupting Jeremy’s post-prandial beauty sleep. It shows no sign of dying down, and nobody seems to be able to tell him just what the purple throbbing fuck is going on. He’s carpeted a couple of spads but whatever this is it’s not a flying-under-the-radar exercise left running by one of the useless tossers who walked the plank during the last reshuffle. Losing airliners to some sort of terrorist attack is really bad PR and after the bollocking he’s given them they should have a story ready for him to feed the inevitable press conference in a couple of hours—but what he’s getting from the Home Office is that it’s not terrorism, it’s MOD territory—and what the blithering fuck is the Army up to in Leeds?

  This, Jeremy has decided, is intolerable. And when he decides something is intolerable, he is in the habit of sharing the pain. So he’s got the Chief of Defense Staff, the Minister for Outsourcing Arms Contracts—that would be, the Minister of Defense—Her Bitchiness the Home Secretary, and a chorus line of spooks out of their beds this morning. He is determined to get to the bottom of this clusterfuck, and God help them if they don’t bend to it.

  There’s an empty seat waiting for the Prime Minister at the head of the table, and Jeremy takes his place without hesitation. It is his by right of birth, breeding, and the parliamentary equivalent of a quick knee to the balls behind the bike shed when none of the prefects were watching; and it’s his job to chair this sesh and figure out what to do and who to blame for it.

  Once seated he glances around, taking in his audience. On display are: a mixture of anticipation (Jessica Greene, the Home Secretary, is wearing her crocodile smirk, as if expecting a blood meal imminently), irritation (Nigel Irving, the Minister of Defense, has the red eyes and dog-breath of a habitual heavy Saturday-night binge-drinker), and lugubrious hang-dog guilt (a senior parliamentary secretary from the Joint Intelligence Committee who apparently expects to be crucified). There are also some unfamiliar faces—a general, an RAF air marshal, and a couple of whey-faced spooks who look as if they’ll burst into flames if exposed to daylight. In other words, the usual.

  Jeremy opens the slim agenda on his blotter. The Cabinet Office staff, bless their socks, have at least sketched out a list of bullet points, and he scans it quickly in search of the usual suspects—Al Qaida, airliners, final demands—when—

  “What on earth is this RED RABBIT thing?” he barks. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  The Chief Cabinet Secretary, Adrian Redmayne, clears his throat. “I am afraid it isn’t, Prime Minister,” he says calmly. He slips in Jeremy’s title as a placatory prophylactic: the PM can become quite irritable (to use the correct euphemism) when exposed to circumstances that threaten his authority. “It’s an official contingency plan from the MOD’s playbook. Although”—he glances at one of the bland-faced spooks—“I gather it’s one of the Never-Happen scenarios we aren’t routinely briefed on.”

  “Not briefed? Why?” The PM glares at the agenda, as if he expects it to confess that it’s all just a good laugh between friends: but the paper remains stubbornly silent. He bottles his initial reaction, choleric and unquotable on TV before the watershed. “Who made that decision?”

  “Let’s find out.” Redmayne smiles over the top of his half-moon reading glasses, like an executioner sizing up one of his customers for the drop. “Dr. Moore—do we have a Dr. Moore present? Representing, ah, Q-Division, SOE? Please could you give the PM a brief backgrounder on SOE, and what they have to do with an airliner crash in Yorkshire?”

  Dr. Moore turns out to be one of the anonymous-looking spook-side people. Subtype, female, early middle age, a bit plump, wearing a suit that Jeremy thinks his wife wouldn’t be seen dead giving away to charity: cheap, very cheap (although it’s not her fault she wasn’t born into money).

  Moore clears her throat and recites, tonelessly: “SOE, the Special Operations Executive, goes back a long way, historically: it was established by the Ministry of Economic Warfare in 1940 on the orders of Winston Churchill, as an espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance agency in parallel to MI5. It was publicly dissolved in January 1946—but Q-Division remained in active operation and was transferred to the Ministry of Defense at the same time as GCHQ. The organization is tasked with detecting, evaluating, and responding to paranormal threats to the nation. As most aspects of the paranormal—magic, colloquially—are side effects of mathematical manipulation . . .” She stops. The PM is rolling his eyes. “Sir?”

  Jeremy is ignoring the background noise. It seems more productive to examine his cabinet subordinates for their immediate reaction to this garbage. The Home Secretary appears to be doodling electric chairs on her blotter, eyes downcast to spare her neighbors the psychotic giggles: clearly her personal coach has been reminding her not to swallow baby mice in public again. Nigel has poured himself a water glass and is gazing at it as if trying to turn it into Absolut by sheer force of willpower. Redmayne is wearing a peculiarly glazed expression that Jeremy remembers fro
m the headmaster’s waiting room that time when the lower sixth were carpeted for hot-wiring Miss MacDonald’s Mini Clubman and borrowing it for a panty raid on St. Ninian’s—oh. It’s that serious. Jeremy snaps back into focus, and latches onto the last word he remembers hearing: “Magic, you say?”

  He’s expecting bashful backsliding or at least a semblance of professional embarrassment, but Dr. Moore’s expression hardens unexpectedly. She raises her hand above the desk. “Yes, sir. We anticipated this reaction: however, you are aware of the recent appearance of superpowers. I assure you that the two phenomena are connected. Allow me to demonstrate.” She makes a very strange gesture, fingers twisting as if double-jointed, and quietly adds: “ . . .”*

  Jeremy misses the rest of the sentence because he’s mesmerized by the green glow between Dr. Moore’s fingers, and the way her hair writhes as if she’s holding onto a Van de Graaff generator. “Very pretty,” he says dismissively, “but I can’t go on Newsnight and do that, can I? And you still haven’t explained what this has to do with the Yorkshire clusterfuck. Get to the point. What’s going on?”

  Dr. Moore’s eyes blaze for a moment, as if she’s about to mouth off—but then she bites back on whatever she was about to say and lowers her hand to the table. “Sir. Seventy-two hours ago our threat analysis division issued a storm warning—high probability of a high-powered incursion. These warnings are like earthquake warnings, rarely accurate and usually erring on the side of alarmism. But this time it appears to have been fully justified, and as of seven hours ago we became aware of what appears to be a level one incursion in progress—that is, an invasion by a Power from outside our universe. In response we immediately began mobilizing resources to contain the major incident, and the armed forces are responding in accordance with our prearranged contingency plans for a surprise attack on the nation.” She looks pointedly at the Cabinet Secretary, who in turn is looking everywhere except at her: “I believe the MOD can give you more details of the conventional forces response posture and time to engagement, but the situation in Leeds is evolving rapidly—”

  Jeremy dismisses her from his attention. “That’s enough, now. Adrian, speak to me. Do we have any idea who is to blame for this? And is there a timetable for breaking this before the news cycle rolls in? What about social media?”

  Adrian draws breath: “I took the liberty of announcing a 1 p.m. conference. That will kick the ball back just far enough to keep it out of the lunchtime programming, and with some careful spin we can ensure the newspapers don’t get hold of the details before they have to go to press—”

  The HomeSec looks up from her doodle. “Blame a supervillain,” she says coldly. “That should plausibly muddy the waters. Start a bunch of rumors on Twitter, all of them obviously silly; it’ll make it easier to control the direction once we provide a plausible narrative. If you like I can have my office put out a statement attributing it to asylum seeking supers from Syria, supporting the preferred immigration line. It’ll take at least two cycles for the press to work out that it’s a red herring and by then we can have a new story waiting in the wings.”

  Irving cracks: he raises his tumbler and chugs the contents convulsively, Adam’s apple bobbing. Then he slams it down on the table. “You don’t close motorways to make way for tanks just for a run-of-the-mill mad scientist!”

  “But they won’t know about that until later if we hit them with a DA-notice covering all military movements,” Jeremy points out smugly. “It’ll leak, but this will all be over by tomorrow, won’t it?” he adds, trying to raise the morale of the various civil service nebbishes who don’t rate a real seat at the table. He nods at Irving: “I want a full report on this Q-Division as soon as the dust settles. Obviously someone took their eye off the ball,” he adds. “There will be a reckoning, I assure you. But not until the enemy at Broadcasting House lose interest. Smoke and mirrors, people, smoke and mirrors: we can’t show them weakness.” He leans forward. “Now, ah, General Stewart, can you tell me what’s happening on the ground and in the air? Without any of this nonsense about magic.”

  18.

  SCORPION STARE

  Alex has done some stupid things in his time, but following a self-confessed renegade from a culture of psychopaths into an armed camp full of dragons and battle magi is near the top of his list, second only to accepting a job developing new algorithms for an investment bank’s high-frequency trading arm. (And look how well that turned out.) On the other hand: he has a working phone, a damsel in distress who needs rescuing, and he’s doing it of his own free will. That’s got to count for something, hasn’t it?

  One moment he’s facing a swirling blue vortex of light. The next, he’s stepping onto an uneven hard surface—stone, he thinks, but worn and natural rather than poured concrete—in darkness that smells of night and grass, with an edge of burning iron and sulfur that sets his nose on edge. Blood, too, fresh human blood has been spilled here recently. He salivates and his teeth throb in his gums as Cassie squeezes his fingers one last time, and lets go.

  Figures step out of the darkness with raised maces. She answers in the grating, inhuman phonemes of an alien language, the alfär High Tongue: “Halt! I come by order of All-Highest of this Host. I am Agent First of Spies and Liars and this one is mine.”

  Alex forces himself to stillness. Her speech is hard to understand, the phrasing weirdly stilted and the accent abominable—but it’s close enough to Old Enochian that he recognizes roughly two words in three. The four sentries, armed and armored like the two at the bunker, close in. One of them touches the tip of a mace to his back lightly: not pushing, just making its presence felt, as if it’s a gun. He keeps his face motionless, suddenly grateful that he lacks the long and expressive ears of these people.

  “Welcome and hail, Agent First of Spies and Liars.” A woman speaks, her hooded silhouette just visible against the shadows and starlight in front. There’s some sort of rocky outcrop overhead, although open ground is visible beyond the greeter. “Is your vassal entirely controlled? I smell the power of the magi—”

  “He’s entirely mine to control,” Cassie replies sharply. “A magus of the urük, bound and brought hither in accordance with the will of All-Highest.”

  She’s not lying, Alex realizes, bewitched by the change in her speech and poise in this place. Cassie’s posture is abruptly assertive and overbearing, her voice sharp, bearing an acrid tang of authority. She’s very good at misdirection, he thinks proudly. The Civil Service has a term for this art: being economical with the truth. He begins to dare to hope.

  His back pocket vibrates silently, as his emailed report departs on a pulse of radio waves. And now he is on a countdown. Assuming Lockhart agrees to his suggestion, assuming the clock in his phone hasn’t gone too far adrift while they walked the dream road together, they have a handful of hours to make this work. And then there are the unspoken ifs it depends on. If Cassie keeps her side of their implicit agreement, the part she hinted at, unable even to speak it aloud (for treason never prospers among the People). If he can play his part. If either of them fails, they’re probably both dead, or worse than dead, but at least Lockhart will know what’s going on now, and can set events in train—

  “Hey, urük! Worthless human! You obey me, don’t you?” Cassie’s words come as a shock but not a surprise. Alex nods slowly, trying to act dumb, then remembers: the People aren’t familiar with the body language of other hominin subspecies.

  “I hear and, and obey, High Lady,” he says haltingly in Enochian, not bothering to match her accent. (Best to sound barbarous: that’s the next thing to stupid in a bigot’s mind.)

  “Witness and observe! It is domesticated and obedient! It even talks! Hasten now and bring word to All-Highest that I come to report, as ordered!” Cassie’s whiplash expectation of obedience is unmistakable, part of her strident new personality.

  “Yes, my lady. You: go.” The woman who stands
before them waves one of the guards off. She spins and runs away into the darkness, her armor (Alex is guessing here) muted, as if the sounds of metal surfaces clattering are muffled by distance. “I celebrate your success. Please command your vassal to follow me: I will pen it with the—”

  “No.” Cassie crooks her finger at Alex and he steps closer to her, slowly. The guard behind him follows, mana-saturated mace pushing at the small of his back. “He is mine and I will not surrender him until I have presented him to All-Highest as commanded.” She bares her teeth in an expression that is anything but friendly: “Lest happenstance deprive me of the evidence of the success of my mission.”

  Alex is missing some of the nuances here, for the speech of the People is not only oddly accented but flowery and full of words that strain the limits of his vocabulary—the Laundry’s analysts use Enochian as a tool, not an everyday tongue. But what he gets right now is the hissing disputation of two cats arguing over the fate of a captured mouse. He shudders and mentally rehearses the activation commands for two or three macros—brief memorized command sequences he can trigger at will if everything is about to go to hell.

  “So Agent First has bound her first magus?” the woman says lightly. “How novel!” She has a tinkling chuckle. “It’s almost as if you’re taking after your father at last!”

  “Are we waiting here forever?” Cassie demands.

  The woman seems to come to a decision: “No, follow me. Guards, attend.” She turns and strides into the night, Cassie following, Alex and his escort at the rear.

  As they leave the shelter of the overhang Alex notices another group of armored figures heading towards the dream road at a jog: again, their armor is curiously muffled. They seem to coordinate without speech, he realizes, as if they’ve got radio headsets—or feel the invisible mental tugging of an intricate web of geases that prod them whenever they’re needed. He feels acutely aware of his own ignorance, of the dangers it exposes him to: Who are they following? Cassie seems to know their greeter, and vice versa, but—