The Atrocity Archives

by Charles Stross

  "Wot you fink I should load up on?" Roland asks. "I got silver bullets in seven point sixty-two, but they tend to tumble in low pressure regimes like wot's on the other side of this gate–"

  "Briefing first," Pike says. "Let's go."

  The hotel bar is barely recognisable. Scaffolding and jacks in every corner support a protective raft just under the ceiling; there's a nest of wiring and monitors on the bar top, and some sort of stair-climbing robot camera waiting just inside the doorway. Alan–Captain Barnes–is waiting next to a woman who's sort of slumped all over the robot's control panel, muttering to it and twiddling a circuit tester in a meaningful way. A dozen other men in pressure suits and camouflage overalls are leaning against the walls or sitting down: half of them have backpacks and full face-covering helmets to hand, but there's a surprising shortage of guns and I'm the only one in the room without a notepad–until I pull out my palmtop, which I've been carrying in a pocket more or less continuously since I was ejected from my bedroom.

  There's not much idle chatter: the mood in the room is pretty sombre, and Alan gets down to business at once, like a headmaster conducting a staff meeting. "The situation we're facing is an open gate, class four, with unknown–but undesirable–parties on the other side. They've snatched one of our scientists. A secondary mission goal is to get her back alive. But the primary goal is to identify the parties responsible and, if they are who we think they are, neutralise them and then withdraw, ensuring the gate closes behind us. Let me stress that we are not 100 percent certain who we're up against, so identification and threat characterisation are our first tasks. This isn't as clear-cut a job as we'd like, so I want you all to focus on it and give it a bit of thought. First, the situation. Derek?"

  Derek from the Laundry, Derek the dried-up old accountancy clerk, stands up and delivers a terse, comprehensive sitrep as if he's done it a thousand times before. Who'd have thought it? "Ahnenerbe werewolf colony left over from Himmler's last stand." Mumble. "Mukhabarat." Cough. "Republican guard." Mutter. "Kidnapped scientist." Mumble. I don't need to take notes; near as I can tell I've heard it all before. Glancing round I try to catch Angleton's eye–just in time to see him slipping out the back. Then Derek finishes. "Back to you, Captain."

  "Our mission is to take a look on the other side of the hill," says Alan. "Bringing back kidnapped scientists and neutralising undesirables are tactical tasks, but our number one strategic priority is to do a full threat evaluation and ensure word gets back home. So, step one is to send through a crawler and make sure there isn't a welcome party waiting for us on the other side. If it's clear, we insert. Step two"–he pauses–"we secure the other side, emplace the demolition package in case things go to pieces on us, then improvise depending on what we find." He grins, briefly. "I love surprises. Don't you?"

  Well, yes, otherwise I'd never have volunteered for active duty in the first place. Which is why, half an hour later, I find myself standing on a purple-painted hotel staircase beneath a portrait of Martin Heidegger, breathing through an oxygen mask and waiting to follow a dumpy little tracked robot, half a platoon of territorial SAS, and an armed hydrogen bomb through a rip in the spacetime continuum.

  * * * *

  Blurred shadows dance across the video screen, grey and black textures like ripped velvet laid over volcanic ash. On the floor in front of my feet the coil of cable unspools, snaking into darkness. Hutter, the equipment tech with the control panel, is hunched over it like a video game addict, twitching her joystick with gloved hands. I lean over behind Alan, who has the ringside view; I have to lean because the backpack is a solid mass, thirty kilograms pushing me forward if I even think about relaxing.

  "One metre forward; now pan left."

  The screen jerks. There's a thin wail as air vents through the doorframe and the cable reels out, then the scenery on screen begins to rotate. We see more blurred grey rubble, then a view that swoops away, down to a distant sea. As the camera pans round further the back of the robot comes into view, trailing a white umbilical back into the incongruous side of a wall. There isn't enough light to examine the wall, or enough scan lines: it's a night-vision camera, but we're operating in starlight. The camera continues to rotate until it's pointing back to its original bearing. There is no sign of life.

  "Looks clear," someone whispers in my ear, voice tinny and half-masked by static.

  "If you want to go first, feel free to volunteer," Alan says dryly. "Mary. See any hot spots?"

  "Nothing," the tech reports.

  "Okay. Bearing zero six zero, forward ten or until you see anything, then halt and report."

  She follows through and the little robot lurches forward into the grey and black landscape on the other side of the gate. "Ambient air pressure, ten pascals. Ambient temperature–thermocouple gives an error, FLIR is flat lined, but that backup sensor is claiming somewhere between forty-five and sixty Kelvin. Gravimetric–it's Earth-like. Uh, I'm worried about the power, boss. Battery load is normal, but we're losing power like crazy–I think it's in danger of freezing solid. We never designed a robot to do this kind of environment–it's colder than summer on Pluto."

  Someone whistles tunelessly until Pike tells them to shut up.

  "How does this affect our environment model?" Alan asks aloud. "The suits are only certified down to a hundred and twenty Kelvin."

  Someone else clears their throat. "Donaldson here. I think we should be okay, sir. We're only going to be in contact with the ground via the feet, and we've got plenty of insulation–and heating–there. No air means no convective loss, and we're not going to radiate any faster just because ambient is cooler. Our regulators use a countercurrent loop to warm incoming air from whatever we breathe out, so they're not in danger of icing up. The real risk is that we're going to be more visible on infrared, and if we get into a firefight and have to take cover we are going to get frostbitten so fast it isn't funny. That lake is probably liquid nitrogen–don't walk on any shiny blue ice, it'll be frozen oxygen and the heat from your feet will flash-boil it. Oh, and it's diamagnetic: your compasses won't work."

  "Thank you for that reminder, Jimmy," says Alan. "Any more compelling insights into why the laws of physics are not our friends?"

  The camera pans round: same landscape, but now we see the gate framed by a low mound of dirt heaped up on one side, and a broken-down wall on the other. The lake is clearer, and some sort of rectilinear structure is just visible over the crest of the ridge.

  "I don't understand the temperature," Donaldson says pensively. "There's something about it I can't quite put my finger on."

  "Well, you're going to get a chance to put your finger on it quite soon. Mary, still no hot spots? Good. Alpha team–ready, insert."

  On the other side of the doorway three guys wearing dark, insulated suits and backpacks quickly duck through the open gate and are gone from our universe. The robot's camera, pointing backward, catches them for posterity: ghosts leaping over it and passing out of view to either side.

  "Chaitin: clear, over."

  "Smith: nothing in view. Over."

  "Hammer: clear, over."

  The camera pans round and takes in three shapes hunched low behind the bluff, one of them pointing a stubby pipe back past the robot.

  "Don, if you'd be so good as to take a look round the rear of the gate. Mike, Bravo team insert."

  Three anonymous bulky figures push past behind me, through the pressure doors erected in front of the hotel room: a gust of wind howls past my helmet as they enter the gate. The camera pans–

  "Chaitin: nothing behind the gate. Landscape is clear, rising to hills in the middle distance. I see some kind of geometric inscription on the ground and one, no, two bodies. Male, naked, gutted with a sharp implement. They look to be frozen–handcuffed behind their backs."

  My heart flops over and I begin to breathe again, ashamed but relieved that neither of them is Mo. "Howard here: that'll be the human sacrifices they used to open the gate," I say. "I
s there a kind of metal tripod nearby with an upturned dish on top?"

  "Chaitin: nope, somebody's cleaned up around here."

  "Bloody typical," somebody mutters out of turn.

  "Charlie, insert," says Andy. He taps me on the arm: "C'mon, Bob. Time to party."

  Ahead of us, Pike picks up the controls on something that looks like an electric street cleaner–the kind of wheeled cart you walk behind–and drives it forward toward the doors. It nudges through and the gale almost sucks me forward; I follow in his wake, trying not to think about the cart's payload. You can make a critical mass out of about six kilos of plutonium, but you need various other bits and pieces to make a bomb; while they've been fitted inside an eight-inch artillery shell before now, nobody has yet built a nuke that you can carry easily–especially when you're wearing a thirty-kilo life-support backpack.

  Mist spurts out around me as I walk through the gate, and suddenly the ground under my feet isn't carpet anymore: it's crumbly, crunchy, like a hard frosted snowfall over gravel. I hear a faint buzz as heat exchangers switch on in my helmet, using the warmth of my breath to heat the air I'm breathing in. My skin prickles, abruptly feeling tight, my suit seems to contract all around me, and I emit an enormous and embarrassing fart. External air pressure: zero. Temperature: low enough to freeze oxygen. Jesus, it is springtime on Pluto.

  Pike drives his gadget forward about five metres, halfway to the parked robot, then stops and begins unreeling a spool of cable from on top of it. He almost backs into me before I get out of his way. "Bob, take this." He hands me some kind of joystick-like gadget with a trigger built into it, plugged into the wire.

  "What is it?" I ask, thumbing my intercom to his channel.

  "Dead man's handle. We use two of them to detonate while we're out of range of the permissive action link signal–this side of the gate. Go on, pull the trigger, I've got the other one. It's perfectly safe to let go of one trigger at a time, it only goes bang if both triggers are released for ten seconds at the same time."

  "Gee, thanks. How long did you say this wire is?"

  I lumber in a circle, taking care not to let the wire get twisted around my feet as I take in the view. The gate is inscribed in a low wall; our footsteps have obscured the transient map in front of it, but behind the wall that supports the aperture the pattern is more or less intact (along with the two victims who were sacrificed to open it). The ground is crunchy, like loose soil after a heavy frost. Behind us and to the left and right it slopes up toward a low ridge; in front, the ground slopes down and broadens out into a valley. The stars overhead are unwinking, dimensionless points of light in a harsh vacuum. They look reddish, demonic eyes staring down at me; a universe of red dwarves, long after the sun has burned down.

  Alpha and Bravo teams have fanned out ahead and behind the wall, advancing in a curious duck-walking crouch from cover to cover. I spot a lump sticking out of the ground about five metres away, and plod over to inspect it. It's a tree stump, shattered half a metre above the ground and hard as ice. I reach out to touch it and a thin mist bursts from the wood–I yank my fingers back before the stream of gas can chill them into frostbite. Wood crumbles and falls away from the stump, shattered by the warmth. I shudder inside my layers of compression fabric and insulation, and fart again.

  There are boot imprints in the ground behind the gate, and they don't look like ours.

  "Howard, get back to the gate. Don't tangle up the wire you're holding."

  "Understood." I stomp back toward the gate, collecting loops of wire from the handle (which I have carefully avoided arming).

  "Give." An anonymous, bulky figure holds out a hand: above the visor I see the name BLEVINS. I pass Roland the trigger and he attaches it to his chest with a Velcro pad, then heads for the low rise behind the gate.

  "Howard, Barnes here. I'm on the rise behind you, twenty metres upslope. Come tell me what you think of this." A click as he hops frequency, to check on everybody else in turn.

  I come up beside him on the rise and find him hefting a heavily insulated camera in front of his faceplate. Someone–Sergeant Howe, I think–is crouching farther up the slope with some kind of shotgun or grenade launcher in his arms. "Come on and look at this," Alan says; he sounds mildly amused as he waves me forward. "Keep your head low and no sudden movements. That's far enough, Bob."

  I can just peep over the ridge, which falls away abruptly in front of me. More dead tree stumps; the ground beneath me, the crunching–now I can see that it's grass, freeze-dried and mummified beneath a layer of carbon dioxide frost. Hills or low mounds of some kind rise in the near distance, and then–

  "Disneyland?" I hear myself saying.

  Alan laughs quietly. "Not Disneyland. Think Mad King Ludwig's last commission, as executed by Buckminster Fuller." Cheesecake crenellations, battlements with machicolations, moat and drawbridge and turrets. Spiky pointed roofs on the towers–like the police stations in West Belfast, designed to deflect incoming mortar fire. Arrow slots filled with mirror glass half a metre thick. Radomes and antenna masts in the courtyard where you'd expect armoured knights to mount up.

  "I didn't know the RUC were Cthulhu-worshippers."

  "They're not, laddie," says Howe, and I flush. "Check out the slope up to that moat. Probably got rammed earth behind those walls, but they're not really expecting direct artillery fire. Intruders on foot, rockets, I don't know what–but not tanks or direct fire."

  "They won," Alan says distantly. "This isn't a fortification. Bob, I should apologise: it is a police station." Light glistens on the Gestapo battlements as I try to understand what he means.

  "What happened to them?" I ask.

  "Look," says Howe, pointing off to the left. I follow his direction and get my first inkling of just how far beyond our experience this world is. From up here the moon is visible, gibbous and close to the horizon; but the familiar man-in-the-moon pattern of marias and seas has been erased, replaced by a shadow-scribed visage carved across the entire lunar surface in runes ten kilometres deep. It's astonishing to behold, a miracle testimonial to one man's vanity on a scale that makes Mount Rushmore or the pyramids look like a child's sandcastle. And from the small tuft of moustache to the keynote cowlick of hair, the face is instantly recognisable.

  From a quarter of a million miles away, Hitler's image stares at me across a land given over to ice and shadow. And I know the Ahnenerbe can't be far away.

  Chapter 8

  STORMING MOUNT IMPOSSIBLE

  The artists' rifles storm the Ahnenerbe's secret fortress with speed and élan, moderated only by tactical caution and a degree of perplexity that deepens as they determine that the castle is, in fact, unoccupied.

  First in is the little reconnaissance robot, portaged into position and released by a couple of tense soldiers half a kilometre away from the rest of the expedition. As it rolls onto the flat killing apron around the redoubt, Bravo team moves like ghosts through the petrified forest on the other side of the castle. Everybody is tense: nobody talks on radio while their line of sight is on the castle, and nobody wants to be visible, either–on infrared against this chill landscape, a human being will stand out like a magnesium flare.

  The robot rolls out onto the killing apron in front of the castle, little puffs of snow fountaining up behind its treads. At this point if anyone is guarding it we'd expect to see fireworks, but nothing happens: nobody shoots, nothing lights up. I hunch over behind Hutter's shoulder, watching the video feed via the secure fibre-optic cable. The castle is dark, except for a central building that glows red hot, two hundred and fifty degrees hotter than the ambient temperature. It silhouettes the battlements, towers, and radomes nicely.

  Alan circles a hand above his head twice, and a long way away a sleeping dragon erupts. A dot of light sizzles across the frozen landscape on a jet of flame and slams into the outer door of the gatehouse: lumps of stone and metal tumble silently through the empty vacuum above it. Things begin to happen very quickly as A
lpha team lays down fire on the gatehouse and Bravo team skids out across the ice behind the castle and makes for the forbiddingly high walls. A chain of fireworks erupts from the ground and bursts over the battlements in front of them, then–

  Nothing. Nothing but silence and the jerky movements of Alan's men. They reach the foot of the wall and swarm up it as if they aren't wearing heavy backpacks, while a second Dragon launcher pops a rocket off at the front of the castle and someone–Sergeant Howe, I think–beats the courtyard with machine-gun fire that makes small mushroom clouds of white vapour burst from the ground. And there's still no answering fire.

  "Alpha secure," someone grunts in my headphones. Then: "Bravo secure. Cease fire, cease fire, we've got an empty venue."

  "Empty? Confirm." It's Alan's voice. He doesn't sound perturbed, but–

  "Alpha here, the place is empty," insists whoever's using that call sign. "As in abandoned."

  "Bravo confirms, Mike here. There's a dead truck in the courtyard but no sign of life up here. Dunno about the central target, but if they've retreated in there they aren't coming out. They wouldn't have heard us, anyway." He sounds nervous, breathy.

  "Mike, keep under cover, don't assume anything. Hammer, close in fast and secure the gatehouse. Chaitin, lay on the central blockhouse but hold fire on my word. Charlie team move in."

  Alan stands up and runs forward, crouching close to the ground; across the landscape I can see the others moving toward the castle's shattered gates–popping up and lunging forward for a few seconds then diving flat to the ground, ready to fire.

  Still nothing happens. What's going on? I wonder. Only one way to find out: I stand up and jog forward heavily, feeling the backpack ramming my feet down onto the frozen ground. The empty killing apron is about a hundred metres wide and I feel really naked as I step out onto it, out of the cover of the petrified forest. But there's no sign of life in the castle. Nothing at all untoward happens as I trot forward and, panting, heave myself into the shadow of the gatehouse.