The Atrocity Archives

by Charles Stross

  He's on the phone again. "Very good, any survivors? Two, you say, and three sacrifices? That's excellent. Have you identified–"

  I tap him on the shoulder. "Mo told me what she was researching on the Black Chamber contract," I say. "You really don't want them to get their hands on it."

  Angleton's head whips round. "One minute, boy." Back to the phone: "Get them to sing. I don't care how you do it; by dawn I want to know who they thought they were summoning." He puts the phone down and glares at me. "Tell me."

  "Probability manipulation," I say.

  "Close, but not close enough," Angleton says coldly. He stands up, leaving the armless chair swinging–in the confined space of the truck this is not a good idea. "You got some of it right and the rest wrong. And what makes you think I can afford to risk you? This is an OCCULUS job now: straight in, find out what's there, plant demolition charges, straight out."

  "Demolition charges." I look past his shoulder. The door opens and a familiar face is coming in. Odd, I'd never imagined what Derek the Accountant would look like in battle dress. (Worried, mostly.)

  "The commander's due in half an hour," Derek says by way of introduction. "What's the goat doing here?"

  "Enough." Angleton waves me to follow as he heads for the door. I slide my feet into moon boots, follow him without bothering to fasten the straps. I hurry down the steps into a flashing hell of red and blue lights; Dutch police escorting sleepy hotel guests and residents to safety, firemen gearing up with breathing apparatus in the road. Angleton pulls me aside. "Interrupt if you see Captain Barnes–"

  "Who?"

  "Alan Barnes," he says impatiently. "Listen." He fixes me with a beady stare: "This is not a game. There's a very good chance that Dr. O'Brien is already dead–in case you hadn't noticed, there's no air on the other side of that gate, and unless her abductors wanted her alive they won't have bothered with niceties like a respirator for her. That lack of air is one of the reasons we must close it as fast as possible, the other being to stop the people who opened it from making use of it as a stable egress portal."

  "You say people," I mutter. "Who? The Ahnenerbe-SS?"

  "I hope so," he replies grimly. "Anything else would be infinitely worse. At the end of the war, Himmler ordered a number of so-called werewolf units to continue the struggle. We've never been able to track down the Ahnenerbe's final redoubt, but the suspicion that it lies on the other side of a gate goes back a long way–you've read OGRE REALITY, you can imagine why the Mukhabarat might want to get in touch with them."

  "So the other side of that gate is"–my mind races–"a holdout from the Third Reich, a colony intended to keep the dark flame burning and exact revenge on the enemies of Nazism in due course . . . One that's had fifty years to fester and grow on an alien world . . . But they lost the coordinates for the return journey, didn't they? Something went wrong and they were trapped there until–" I stop and stare at Angleton. "You hope that's what's on the other side of the gate?"

  He nods. "The alternatives are all much worse."

  On further thought I have to admit he's right: a colony of leftover Nazi necromancers and their SS bodyguards are trivially dangerous compared to things like the one that took over Fred the Accountant. And they are small beer by the standards of the sea of universes, where malignant intelligences wait only for an invitation to surge through a knothole in the platonic realm and infect our minds.

  "How are you going to deal with them?" I ask. Angleton leads me around the truck; I can get a good view of the big low-loader that squeezed past us, and there's some sort of tracked vehicle sitting on its load bed. There's a crane, too. I peer closer, but the cordon of cops around it bars my view. "How the hell are you going to get that through a third-floor window?" I ask.

  Angleton shrugs. "I'm sure the hotel owners will file a claim on their building insurance." He looks at me. "Alan's men are professionals, Robert. They're not used to being slowed down by civilians like you–or me. What can you do that they can't?"

  I lick my lips. "Can they open a temporary gate back home if the door there slams shut behind them? Can they safely disarm a live geometry node?"

  "They're the Artists' Rifles," Angleton says witheringly. "They're the bloody SAS, boy, 21st Battalion Territorial Army; what did you think they were, a gun club? Who else do you think we'd trust with a hydrogen bomb wired up to a dead man's handle?"

  I stare at the low-loader and realise that the cops around it are all carrying HK-4s and facing outward. "I can provide you with a different kind of insurance policy. Give me the charts and I'll see they make it back alive–with Mo, if I have any say in the matter. Plus, aren't you just a little curious about what the Ahnenerbe might have been doing with a Z-2 and its descendants for the past fifty years?"

  "Do you want me to strangle him now, or wait till he's finished annoying you?" asks Alan, who has sneaked up behind me so quietly I never even noticed. Needless to say I almost jump out of my skin.

  "Leave him be." Angleton almost looks amused. "He's still young enough to think he's immortal–and he's cleared for active. All waivers signed, next of kin on file, carries an organ donor card, that sort of thing. Can you use him?"

  I have to turn my head to keep both of them in view: Angleton, the old, dried-up ghost of intelligence spooks past, and Alan–Captain Barnes, that is–schoolmasterly and intense. "That depends," Alan tells Angleton. Then he focuses on me. "Bob, you can come along on this trip on one condition. The condition is that if you get any of my men killed by arsing around, I will personally shoot you. Do you understand and agree?"

  Somehow I manage to nod, although my mouth's gone very dry all of a sudden. "Yup, got it. No arsing around."

  "Well, that's all right then!" He claps his hands together briskly, then softens very slightly. "As long as you do what you're told, you'll pass. I'm going to give you to Blevins and Pike; they'll look after you. I know what your specialities are: weird alien runes, ancient Nazi computers, esoteric rocket science, that sort of thing. Boffin city. If we run into anything like that I'll let you know. What's your weapons clearance, if any?"

  "I'm certified to level two, unconventional." I frown. "What else do you need?"

  "Ever used scuba gear?"

  "Er, yes." I neglect to add that it was on a holiday package deal, an afternoon of training followed by supervised swimming near a coral reef, with instructors and guides on hand.

  "Okay, then I'll leave Pike to check you out on the vacuum gear. You'll be issued with a weapon; you are not, repeat not, to use it under any circumstances while any soldiers are left alive unless you are explicitly ordered to. Got that?"

  "Find Pike. Learn how to use vacuum gear. Do not use weapon without orders."

  "That'll do." Alan glances at Angleton. "He'll make a good Norwegian Blue, don't you think?"

  Angleton raises an eyebrow. "Bet you he'll be 'pining for the fjords' within hours."

  "Hah! Hah!" Alan doesn't bray: his laughter is oddly fractured, as if it's escaping from a broken muffler. Loss of control, that's what it is. He's thin, wiry, intense, and looks like the kind of schoolmaster who's spent years slitting throats in strange countries, and took to teaching as a way of passing on his knowledge. A weird breed, not uncommon in the British public schools, who recycle their own graduate cannon fodder to train the next generation in an ethos of military service. And whose mannerisms are aped lower down the academic ladder. Artists' Rifles indeed!

  * * * *

  I try telling myself that mo will be all right, that they wouldn't have bothered abducting her if they didn't want her alive, but it's no good: whenever I get some idle time my brain keeps looping on the fact that someone I feel strongly about has been snatched and may already be dead. Luckily I don't have much time to obsess because Alan immediately drags me back inside the OCCULUS control truck and throws me to Sergeant Martin Pike, who takes one look at me, mutters something about the blessings of Loki, and starts grilling me about nitrogen narcosis, the ben
ds, partial pressure of oxygen, and all sorts of other annoying things I haven't studied since school. Pike is a sergeant. He's also a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and designs things that go fast and explode, when he isn't being a weekend soldier in a special unit hung off the SAS. He's met people like me before and knows how to deal with them.

  A second–and then a third–fire-control truck has drawn up outside the evacuated hotel and we're in the back of vehicle number two, which seems to be a mobile armoury. I'm stripping off the survival gear and struggling into something like a bastard cross between a body stocking and a piece of bondage rubberwear from hell–low pressure survival gear, Pike tells me–a lycra and silk contraption that seems to consist mostly of straps and is designed to do the same job as a space suit in terms of holding me together and helping me breathe.

  "Vacuum isn't as hostile as you probably imagine if you've read too much bad science fiction," he says while I'm grunting and wheezing over the upper half of the suit. "But you'd have real fun breathing without a decent gas seal around your regulator, and without this suit and pressurized goggles you'll end up half-blind and covered in blood blisters within ten or twenty minutes. The real problems are heat dissipation–there's no air around you to keep you cool by convection and insulated from the ground, which is going to be fucking cold–and maintaining your breathing. Cooling we can deal with–this cloth is porous, you start sweating and the sweat will evaporate and keep you cool, and there's a drinking bottle in your helmet. Don't let it run dry, because running one of these suits is a bit like running a noddy suit in the Iraqi desert–you will sweat like hell, you will drink a pint of water and electrolytes every hour, and if you forget to do that you will keel over from heat stroke. Turn round, now." I turn round and he starts tightening straps all the way up my back as if I'm wearing a corset. "These are to keep your rib cage under a bit of elastic tension, help you breathe out."

  "What if I need to take a piss?" I ask.

  He chuckles. "Go ahead. There's enough adsorbent padding that you probably won't freeze your wedding tackle off."

  Trussed up in the pressure suit, I feel like a fifties comic-book hero who's blundered through a fetish movie's wardrobe. Pike passes me a bunch of elbow and knee protectors, a tough overall, and a pair of massively padded moon boots. Somehow I struggle into them. Then he comes up with a lightweight backpack frame with air tanks and–"A rebreather? Isn't that dangerous?" I ask.

  "Yup. We aren't NASA and we can't waste five hours depressurising you down to run on pure oxygen. 'Sides, you're not wearing a hard-shell suit. You're going to breathe a seventy/thirty nitrogen-oxygen mix; we scrub the carbon dioxide out with these lithium hydroxide canisters and recycle the nitrogen, adding oxygen to order."

  "Uh-huh. How do I change tanks?"

  "On your own? You don't–there's a trick to it and we don't have time to teach you. You cut over from tank one to tank two with the regulator valve here, then you ask me to change tanks for you. If someone wants you to change their tank, which they won't unless things go pear-shaped in a big way, you do it like this–" He demonstrates on an unmounted backpack and I try to keep track of it. Then he shows me the helmet and the chest-mounted monitors that keep track of my gas supply, temperature, and so on. Finally he seems satisfied. "Well, if you remember all that you're not going to die by accident–at least not immediately. Still happy?"

  "Um." I think about it. "It'll have to do. What about radio?"

  "Don't worry about it–it's automatic." He flicks a switch or two on my chest panel, evidently making sure of that. "You're on the general channel–everyone will be able to hear you unless they explicitly shut you out. Now . . ." He picks up a gadget that looks like a pair of underwater digital video cameras strapped with gaffer tape to either side of a black box gizmo of some kind. "Have you ever seen one of these before?"

  I peer closely, then unclip the lid on the box and look inside. "I didn't know they'd successfully weaponised that."

  He looks surprised. "Can you tell me what it is and how it works?"

  "Can I–yeah, I've seen this arrangement before but only in the lab. This chip here is a small custom-built ASIC processor that emulates a neural network that was first identified in the cingulate gyrus of a medusa. Turns out you can find the same pathways in a basilisk, but . . . well. There's a load of image processing stuff on the front end, behind those video cameras. Now, I would guess that the two cameras are the optical component of this gadget: we're performing some sort of wave superposition on the target, so . . ."

  "Fine, fine." He passes me a somewhat shop-soiled video camera manual. "Give this a read. And this." He hands me a bundle of typed pages with bright red SECRET headers, then passes me the lash-up. I look it over dubiously: there's an arrow on top of the neural network box with the caption THIS SIDE TOWARD ENEMY, and a flat-panel camcorder viewfinder on the back so you can pretend it's just a computer game you're playing with while you kill people.

  What this gadget does violates the second law of thermodynamics: nobody's quite sure why it's so specific, but the medusa effect seems to be some kind of observationally mediated quantum tunnelling process. It turns out that something like 0.01 percent of all the atomic nuclei of carbon in the target zone acquire eight extra protons and a balancing number of neutrons, turning 'em into highly electronegative silicon ions. A roughly balancing proportion of carbon nuclei just seem to vanish, wrecking whatever bonds they were part of.

  "How much damage can this thing do to a person?" I ask.

  "How much damage will a stubby shotgun do?" Pike responds. "Enough. Silicon-hydrogen bonds aren't stable. Don't point it at anyone and don't switch it on and most of all don't hit the OBSERVE button unless I tell you to. Which I won't, unless you are very, very unlucky. Or unless you decide to blow your feet off by accident, which is your own lookout."

  "Understood." I switch off the viewfinder and power down both cameras then gingerly put the gadget down. "You aren't expecting trouble by any chance?"

  Pike stares at me. "No, it's my job to see that you don't get into trouble," he says. I take a second to recognise the expression: he's wondering if I'm going to be a liability.

  "Tell me what to do and I'll do it," I say. "You're the expert on this."

  "Am I?" He looks sceptical. "You're the occult specialist, you tell me what we're up against." He bends down, picks up a rebreather regulator, begins stripping off the insulation panels in an absent-minded sort of way. "I mean it. What are you expecting to find on the other side of this gate?"

  Something clicks in my mind: "You've gone through gates before, right?"

  He glances at me. "Maybe. Maybe not." I realise that he isn't looking at the rebreather as he strips it: he's got it down to a set of motions he can run through in total darkness. Then it hits me: I'm going to be hopelessly dependent on these guys for just about everything more challenging than breathing. Liability, me? Maybe I don't know what I'm getting myself into after all. But it's a bit late to back out now.

  "Well." I lick my suddenly dry lips. "This one, we hope the only things waiting for us are a bunch of superannuated Nazis who've kidnapped one of our scientists. Trouble is, this bunch sent someone through to California, and London, and maybe to Rotterdam, who isn't too superannuated to be banging heads. So I'll take a rain check on the predictions, if you don't mind–expect the worst and hope you're disappointed."

  "Indeed." His tone is dry as he adds, "I love these bastard colostomy-fucking reconnaissance jobs, I really do."

  * * * *

  They force me to catch a couple or three hours sleep by sticking a needle full of phenobarbitone into my left arm and making me count backward from ten. I never make it past five; then there's a pain in my other arm and Pike is shaking my shoulder. "Wake up," he says. "Briefing in five minutes, action in half an hour."

  "Euurgh," I say, or something equally coherent. He passes me a mug full of something that might be mislabelled as coffee and I sit up and try to drink it whi
le he disposes of the used antidote syrette. I have a vague memory of dreams: eyes with luminous worms swimming in them, eyes like a friendly death staring at me across an electrodynamic summoning trap. I shudder as a little rat-faced guy sits down opposite me and opens up a zippered and incongruously expensive-looking golf bag.

  Pike takes it upon himself to introduce us. "Bob, this is Lance-Corporal Blevins. Roland, this is Bob Howard, a Laundry necromancer."

  Rat-face looks at me and grins, baring unfeasibly large and yellow incisors. "Pleased ter meet yer," he says, pulling an iron out of his golf bag–one with telescopic sights and thick foam insulation over most of the visible surfaces. Vacuum-adapted, I realise: these guys have been exploring gates before. "Allus nice ter 'ave a bit of animal with us."

  "Animal?"

  "Magic," Pike explains. "Listen, you stay close to me or Roland unless I tell you otherwise. He's the squadron backup: what this means is, he'll either be in the rear or deployed to cover a quick in-and-out. He'll park you somewhere safe and keep an eyeball on you if I'm too busy to nursemaid."

  "Diamond geezer, mate," Blevins says, winking horribly, then he pulls out a bunch of jeweller's screwdrivers and goes to work on his gun, fiddling with the sights.

  What I think is, You guys really know how to make someone feel wanted, but I end up saying nothing because, once I get my ego out of the way, Pike is right. I am not a soldier, I know nothing about what to do and what not to do, and I'm not even in good physical condition. Fundamentally, I guess I am a liability to these guys, except for my specialist expertise. It's not a very pleasant thought, but they're not going out of their way to rub it in, so the least I can do is be polite. And hope Mo is all right.