Rhesus Chart (9780698140288)

by Stross, Charles

  I grunt, and reach out for them with imaginary fangs and claws. I’m about five meters away but I’ve done this before, through a door even. I can feel their mind squirming like a toad, and there’s something sick about it. It tastes foul. No, she tastes foul. I bite and bite and chew and spit and then I find myself wishing for a psychic glass of water: the trouble with this Eater-of-Souls talent or curse or what-have-you is that there are some people whose souls you’d want to scrape off the underside of your shoe if you trod in them, and you really don’t want them giving you gastric symptoms.

  I rewind her rage and her joy as the door blows, taking down the first attacker, and catch an echo of earlier memories: the memory of sex, the memory of her white-lightning orgasm as she broke Evan’s neck while sitting astride his lap, in a moment of total exultant control over everything she hated. I squeal and try to shove her out of my head but it’s too late, because she’s lying halfway through the doorway with bloody tears trickling from her eyes. I killed her and I’m going to have to live with that.

  I retch at the overpowering stench of blood and shit and worm my way out from under the truck. My hearing is all fuzzed from the explosion and the gunfire, which has died down. I’ve got a job to do, dammit. The fire is suppressive, to convince the people holed up inside to stay down. That’s the plan, anyway. What were Steve and I meant to do, in the office . . . ?

  Oh, that.

  I kneel, then stagger to my feet and lurch forward, slip-sliding on a loop of intestines until I catch my balance and crunch down on the dead woman’s rib cage. There’s another dead body behind the desk, wearing a security guard’s uniform: he’s been dead for some time, going by the way he’s dark to my vision. I briefly consider raising him and using him as a proxy, but it’d take too long to summon a feeder.

  There’s a fuse box on the wall beside the inner door, the one that leads to the archive. I open it and look for the circuit breaker I helped the electrician connect this morning. It’s still open.

  Flick.

  Inside the archive, the string of ultraviolet lights we laid along the top of the storage racks this morning blink on.

  And then the screaming starts.

  • • •

  THE REST OF THE MOP-UP OPERATION GOES SMOOTHLY ENOUGH, modulo the mopping up. Which is . . . disturbing.

  The screaming from inside the warehouse is continuous, high-pitched, and terrible. It’s the kind of sound you associate with cats being skinned alive, or slasher movies, or mediaeval torture-fests.

  I open the door.

  Alex is moaning with fear, not screaming. He lies curled in a ball on the floor beside the doorway, hoodie pulled up, hands and face tucked in. Clever boy. His ward’s toast, so I have to assume he’s been turned, but right now he’s focussed on keeping his hands and face out of the light that burns. He’s smoking, but the duck’n’cover drill combined with his hoodie seems to have saved him from going the full barbie.

  There’s the characteristic black dome of a powered-up ward at one side of the warehouse. Later.

  There is one other body in here, exposed to the eldritch purple glow of the booby-trap lights. It is making a hoarse screeching sound—almost a teakettle whistle. Its spine is curled over and its jaw gapes wide, and there is smoke pouring out of it, with pale fire flickering in its eye sockets and burning within its rib cage, where it is visible through the clothing that has scorched away. I can see the pallor of bone through the tattered charcoal of his trousers. A bell is ringing, and after a while I realize it’s the fire alarm—our friend must have tripped the smoke detector. The worst thing about it all is that he’s still alive and screaming.

  Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

  I touch the press-to-talk mike attached to my helmet. Hope it still works. “Bob here, Howe is down, repeat Howe is down. Unidentified female oppo is down. I’m in the back, lights on, repeat, lights on. Alex is neutral, I can’t see Pete, unidentified oppo is on fire but undead. I need hands here.”

  About a quarter of a ton of heavily armed specops soldiers tackle me onto the floor—forming a rugby scrum with me as the ball—then my earpiece crackles: “Awaiting orders, sir!” (Silly me, I guess I got in front of them again.)

  “Get a tarp over Alex and get him into the front office, handcuffs and sedation—assume he’s been turned. Find the vicar. That dome: point your guns at it; if it collapses and anything comes out of it, shoot them. Then get off me.”

  The weight eases momentarily. “Yes, sir.” I’ve got tinnitus, dammit. (I feel a momentary pang. I can still smell the contents of Steve Howe’s guts all over me. Taste that awful woman’s weird craving for sex with paralyzed vampires. Someone made her that way. Surely?) I shove the thoughts aside for later. “What about—”

  I stand up. So does the burning man.

  “Freeeeeze,” hisses the burning man. We all freeze. Our wards simultaneously buzz violently, then give up the ghost and start to smoke.

  “Misssster Howard.” Bits of carbonized cloth and flesh drip from his bones as he straightens up and turns to face us, like a walking skeleton with pale red worms writhing in the back of his skull. He’s not hissing just because of the flames: there’s something wrong with his dentition. “We meet again.”

  “Name, rank, and number?” I ask.

  “Don’t you recognize me, what-what?” Skeletal jaws grin, and now I realize I’m hearing his voice inside my head: he doesn’t have lungs or larynx with which to laugh. “I really must thank you. I do appreciate a warm welcome: it affirms my sense of self-worth.”

  The blood-sucking Terminator impersonator steps around the table. “One of you fine upstanding chappies—yes, you—is going to go back there and turn out the bloody lights. Wait. Before you go, give me your gun.” The soldier he’s pointing at jerkily unslings his MP5 and extends it, butt-first, towards Basil. That’s when I realize how terribly pear-shaped this op has gone. “You’ve had your little jape, ha-ha. In case you were wondering, we get harder to kill as we get older. This confirms something I’ve suspected for a decade or two, but lacked the inclination to idly test: mind over matter and all that. It’ll be fun to go out in daylight again when all this is over. Now go and stand over there, in that corner. You’ve been very naughty boys.”

  I stumble along with the other three heavies. I am ashamed to say I’m shaking. Unlike them, I’m faking obedience: his will-to-obey is amazingly powerful, but so is my will-to-resist. On the other hand, he’s pointing a submachine gun at us and I need a few seconds to think. What’s worse than an elderly vampire? Answer: an elderly vampire with a submachine gun and sunburn-induced bad attitude. He’s clearly a whole lot more powerful than the run-of-the-mill newbie PHANGs I’ve been dealing with up to now, and unless my middle names aren’t Oliver Francis I’m only going to get one chance to lay Basil the Self-Propelled Barbecue to rest. While my back is half-turned to him, I cross myself, banker-style: spectacles, testicles, wallet . . . and camera?

  Ah. Camera.

  I pull the battered little Fuji 3D camera out and flick the power button. Mhari’s lot didn’t break it, even though it’s a bit scratched and beaten up. I am going to assume it’s still loaded with the basilisk firmware rather than the normal happy snappy variety, because if I’m wrong I am going to die in the next few seconds. I’ll just have to trust my lack of any memory of having swapped out the memory card for the one with the regular boot image.

  “You’re going to wait in that corner until I receive a phone call from the New Annex,” explains our chatty death-about-town: “There’s a bit of mopping up going on there right now, but once it’s over we can all get in your truck and go home.” Mopping up? That doesn’t sound right, I think fuzzily, stealing a surreptitious glance at the camera back. Have we just been mousetrapped? Yes, it’s showing the gunsight display, not the camera focus graticule. “And then, ah, yes. Most of you can just forget you ever saw me—”r />
  The ultraviolet lights go out, and there is an immediate blood-curdling scream from the front office.

  “What-what?” says Basil, turning and raising his gun.

  • • •

  THERE IS THIS THING ABOUT MATHEMATICIANS AND PROGRAMMERS: they come in several flavors, often overlapping, but with distinct strengths and weaknesses specific to each type.

  Alex’s talents are multivariate and recondite, but he has a particular aptitude for language lawyering. That is, he takes great delight in exploring the nooks and crannies of formal languages and understanding how and in what circumstances they exhibit side effects or anomalous behavior that a naive or inexperienced programmer would not expect.

  Alex is also very intelligent. He is under Basil’s control, but he is not happy about his long-term survival prospects if this situation persists. Especially as his entire face is on fire and it feels as if his nose will fall off if he sneezes. Basil is not, in Alex’s estimate, an entirely thoughtful employer: certainly he is unlikely to prove as accommodating or merciful as the Laundry’s HR department.

  Alex cannot disobey Basil’s direct order. But he can creatively interpret the instructions he has already been given. And he cannot help but overhear what Basil is saying next door.

  And it occurs to him that when Basil said, “. . . stand by the door and kill anybody who comes through it,” Basil didn’t specify which direction they had to be going in.

  In the normal state of affairs, a fight between a highly trained soldier from the Territorial SAS and a pencil-necked geek will tend to end with a de-leaded geek. But in the interests of rebalancing the equation, the highly trained soldier has just handed his principal weapon to the vampire overlord who has turned him into a shambling robot whose motivation is the overriding order to turn out the bloody lights rather than defending himself. And the pencil-necked geek is a fully juiced-up young vampire who has rules-lawyered himself around to some very interesting conclusions about his own freedom of action within the constraints Basil specified, and who is extremely pissed off right now because he has third-degree burns across most of his face.

  Alex isn’t stupid. He lets the soldier pull the circuit breaker, and then he tries to kill him.

  • • •

  I DON’T REMEMBER THE NEXT BIT TOO CLEARLY.

  The light flickered and something of its quality changed: it reddened, or lost something from the blue end of the spectrum.

  There was a scream, and the nightmare figure turned towards the doorway and raised its gun. That’s when I began to turn, and raised my camera, and pushed the shutter release immediately: not even aiming at him, just relying on the firmware to lock onto the person-shaped object closest to the center of the focal area and do the rest.

  I suspect I was in shock at this point, because my memory of the camera is that it felt as if it was made of solid tungsten, and my knees were shaking, and my vision was blurred and I could barely focus on the screen and I felt sick and hot and cold simultaneously. But that’s nothing compared to how Basil felt when I took his picture.

  What happens when you point a basilisk gun at a semi-skeletonized vampire elder?

  Basil sparkles electric blue for just a moment. There’s a loud bang! A fragment of skull whizzes past my ear. And then the pile of red-hot bones collapses across the floor, as does the submachine gun they were holding a fraction of a second ago. (Thankfully, there is no accidental discharge.) One of the hot pieces of bone lands on the edge of the warded bubble, and begins to burn a hole in the paper, scorching the letters and linkages away. The bubble flickers and vanishes, revealing an apprehensive-looking vicar contorted over a chair holding a child. (Thankfully, Basil’s instructions to Scary’s men have overridden my orders to shoot anything that comes out of the bubble.)

  A voice calls, from the office: “Is Basil dead? Can I stop killing this guy yet?”

  What? “Yes, stop!” I shout. On second thoughts: “Alex, I want you to lie down, with your hands behind your back. Wrists together.” I realize I’m still pointing my deadly little camera at the opposite wall and force myself to lower it. I turn and see the soldiers turning away from the wall, shaking themselves and focussing. “Go and restrain him in case Sparkle Boy here implanted any post-mortem commands,” I tell them. “He’ll need burn support. I’m going to sort out the vicar.”

  I’m shaking and shivery but I know what needs to be done. Pete is straightening up and saying something about untying the kid, about V syndrome and needing to get him to a hospital. I blink, feel the shuddering sense of exultation that woman would have taken at the moment Basil’s skull exploded, almost enough to give her a spontaneous orgasm—she hated him and lusted for him at the same time—and I bend over and spit on the floor, because I can taste blood on my lips. I’m soaking in the stuff, actually. I nearly throw up. It’s Steve Howe’s. Poor bloody Steve. It’s scant consolation knowing that if I’d gotten in front of him I’d have taken the vampire hunter’s booby-trap right in the face.

  I stumble and go over on one ankle as I walk towards Pete. He’s saying something else now, something urgent, something about Basil storing his prey in the MAGIC CIRCLE OF SAFETY archive. I shake my head. Something is coming into focus, something huge and nasty and vile: Who added reviving MAGIC CIRCLE OF SAFETY to the training-wheels project list, I wonder? As if I can’t guess. More importantly, why did Basil do it? “We’ve got to get back to the New Annex,” I say. Then I remember I’ve got a phone. “Wait.” I pull it out but iPhones don’t work too well when they’ve been sprayed with blood and rolled around on. “Shit.” I turn and stumble towards the front office, past the guys who are apologizing to Alex as they apply the handcuffs and leg restraints, ignore that woman, shuffle past the dead security guard who is staring unblinking at the ceiling with gunshot-wound eyes, and see his phone on the desk.

  I lean over the corpse and dial a number from memory, finger shaking so badly that I have to stop and start over twice before I get it right. It’s picked up on the second ring.

  “Operations.”

  “Howard here.”

  “Transferring you now—” They’ve been pre-briefed.

  Two seconds later, I hear a familiar voice. “Speak, boy.” It’s Angleton. He sounds distracted.

  I dry swallow, trying to ignore the taste in my mouth. “Code Red,” I manage.

  We don’t use Code Red very often. In fact, I’ve never heard of it being used before. Code Blue means there’s an off-site emergency, probable hostile action on our soil. Code Red means there’s on-site hostile action. Like the attack I expect Basil to have arranged, to take out everyone who might suspect his existence.

  “You’re a bit late,” Angleton says laconically. I hear banging in the background. “We’ll talk later,” he adds. Then the line goes dead.

  18.

  A NAKED LUNCH, WITH VIOLIN

  THE CATASTROPHE UNFOLDED IN MY—AND MO’S—ABSENCE. IT was rapid and devastating, and it’s quite possible that the only reason I’m around to record this account of the event is because I wasn’t there.

  I feel compelled to raise my hand and admit that I’m partly to blame. I’m no more to blame than everyone else on the Senior Auditor’s ad-hoc working group, but no less. If we’d realized that Basil had infiltrated the DRESDEN RICE committee—hell, if it had occurred to us that our mole might come in the guise of an elderly, low-level administrative employee—we might have paid more attention to reducing the threat surface of the working group. But he’d been working his mind-fogging magic within our halls since before I was born. He predates the Senior Auditor; he was certainly here during the organization’s salad days as part of SOE during the Second World War. He predates Angleton. He was a careful planner, and although he operated at a relatively low level he had access to all our non-current HR files and declassified internal records. Consequently he got inside our event loop, with fatal conseq
uences.

  While we thought we were very cleverly mousetrapping our adversary at an off-site location of our choice, our adversary was simultaneously mousetrapping our away team . . . and tricking his oldest, deadliest enemy into a suicidal assault on the New Annex, promoted by a trickle of cunning lies and assisted by the loan of a warrant card, keys, and a floor plan.

  Actually, this had been on the cards for a very long time. Months, certainly; possibly for years, maybe even for decades. After all, the first rule of vampires is, vampires don’t exist, and the elders take its enforcement as a matter of deadly importance. So a corollary of this rule is that any viable strategy for eliminating an old and powerful rival is going to be non-obvious.

  There are a couple of long-term survival strategies open to the occult practitioner who has let the wrong symbiote in. One of these is to hunker down and squat, invisible, in the center of a miasmic mist of misleading magic that befuddles and bamboozles anybody who speculates about your existence. The leading proponent of this strategy, the strategy of the hedgehog, was the late Basil Northcote-Robinson, and it served him well—up to a point.

  The other leading strategy is to turn the PHANGs’ ability to compel belief to the accretion of wealth and power, and to use those accumulated assets to build a pearl, layering protective nacre around your sand-grain heart. This strategy, the strategy of the fox, is the one that Old George Stephenson employed. What kind of vampire elder owns a founder’s stake in one of the nation’s largest investment banks? Answer: one who is not afraid to take risks in the pursuit of profit.

  First Basil nudged us into taking Old George’s Scrum-shaped experiment away from him. Then he bamboozled Old George into loaning him not-Marianne the assassin, by presenting a common front. Finally, he removed himself from the firing line, warned Old George that the Laundry working group on PHANGs was coming for him, and thereby triggered a game of “let’s you and him fight.”