The Atrocity Archives

by Charles Stross

  I take a deep breath and shift my feet. Chaitin isn't saying anything; he's just looking around, looking for signs in the sky or the earth. "Something is eating energy, and information," I say. "Our primary objective–in coming here–is to find out what's going on and report back. I'm saying we haven't found out yet, and what the captain doesn't know can hurt us all."

  Chaitin turns back to face me.

  "It makes sense, doesn't it?" I say. "Like, it all hangs together?"

  He holds up a torch to illuminate his face through his visor. He's grinning at me with a face I haven't seen before: "Sehr gut," he says, then he drops the torch, releases the catches, and lifts his helmet off. Luminous worms of light writhe soundlessly behind his eyelids, twisting in the empty space of his skull, just like the thing that took Fred from Accounting. The out-gassing air from his suit wreathes him in vapour as he leans toward me, grabbing, trying to make a close flesh-to-flesh contact seeing as his comms-cable gambit has failed. Just one moment of electrical conduction–

  The thing that occupies Chaitin's skin and bone is not very intelligent: it's forgotten that I'm wearing a suit, too, and that these suits are designed to take a fair bit of abuse. Still, it's pretty freaky. I drop my sack and hop backward, nearly going arse-over-ears as gravity seems to suck at my backpack. The possessed body scrabbles toward me and I can see, very clearly, a trickle of blood bubbling from his nose as I fumble for the basilisk gun at my waist, grab onto it with both hands, and punch both red buttons with my thumbs. For a panicky moment I think that it's dead, batteries drained by the chilling cold out here–then all hell breaks loose.

  Roughly one in a thousand carbon nuclei in the body that used to belong to Chaitin spontaneously acquire an extra eight protons and seven or eight neutrons. The mass deficit is bad enough–there's about as much energy coming out of nowhere as a small nuke would put out–but I'll leave that to the cosmologists. What's bad is that each of those nuclei is missing a whopping eight electrons, so it forms a wildly unstable carbosilicate intermediary that promptly grabs a shitload of charge out of the nearest electron donor molecules. Then it destabilizes for real, but in the process it's set off a cascade of tiny little acid/base reactions throughout the surrounding hot chemical soup that used to be a human body. Chaitin's body turns red, the kind of dull red of an electric heating element–then it steams, bits of his kit melting as his skin turns black and splits open. He begins to topple toward me and I yell and jump away. When he hits the ground he shatters, like a statue made of hot glass.

  The next thing I know I'm on my knees on the frozen ground, breathing deeply and trying desperately to tell my stomach to be still. I can't afford to throw up because if I vomit in my face mask I will die, and then I won't be able to tell Alan what kind of mistake he'll be making if he sets off the demolition charge.

  This whole world has been turned into a mousetrap: a body-snatching demon, patient and prepared, waiting for us little furry folk with beady black eyes to stick our curious noses inside.

  I pick myself up, watching the steamy vapour pour from the ground around the molten depressions my kneepads melted in the permafrost as I take more deep, laborious breaths. Static ebbs and flows in my ears like bacon frying, the distorted sidebands of a transmission counting down the minutes to the artificial sunrise. I try not to look at what's left of Chaitin.

  They summoned an infovore: something that eats energy and minds. A thing–I don't know what sort–from a dead cosmos, one where the stars had long since guttered into darkness and evaporated on a cold wind of decaying protons, the black holes dwindling into superstring-sized knots on a gust of Hawking radiation. A vast, ancient, slow thinker that wanted access to the hot core of a youthful universe, one mere billions of years from the Big Bang, poised for a hundred trillion years of profligate star-burning before the long slide into the abyss.

  On my feet now, I check my air supply: good for two and a quarter hours. That will see me through–the bomb's going to blow in just over an hour. I look round, trying to work out which way to go. Thoughts are clamouring in my head, divergent priorities–

  The thing was hungry. First it did what it was invited to do, sucked the minds and life from the Ahnenerbe's enemies, occupied their bodies, and learned how to pass for human. Then it pulled more of itself through the gate than they'd expected. It's big–far too big to fit through a man-sized gate–but it had access to all the energy it wanted, and all the minds to sacrifice, more than enough power to force it wide open and squirm through into this new, rich cosmos.

  The monster they summoned gave the Ahnenerbe more than they asked for. As well as damping the fusion phoenix at the heart of every star, it started to drain energy directly out of spacetime, messing with the Planck constant, feeding on the false vacuum of space itself. Light stretched, grew redder; the gravitational constant became a variable, dropping like a barometer before a storm. Fusion processes in the sun guttered and died, neutrons and protons remaining stubbornly monogamous. The solar neutrino flux disappeared first, though it would take centuries for the sun itself to show signs of cooling, for the radiation-impeded gravitational collapse to a white dwarf core to resume. Meanwhile, the universe began to expand again, prematurely ageing by aeons in a matter of years.

  Back to the here-and-now. Here I am with a corpse. And a gun. And the corpse manifestly killed using the gun in my hands. Shit. I twiddle the squelch on my radio but get nothing but loud hissing and incoherent bursts of static. What am I going to tell Alan–"Look, I know I appear to have shot one of your men, but you've got to abort the mission"?

  I glance up at the sky. It's night, but maybe the sun would be visible if I knew where to look. Visible–and shrunken, farther away than it is back home, for as the creature sucks energy out of spacetime, space itself is getting bigger, and emptier. Losing energy. Find Alan. Stop the bomb. Get everybody out fast. It took a lot of energy for the thing to fully open the gate to its original home and bring itself through to this shattered Earth; energy that is no longer available in this drained husk of a universe, energy that it needs if it's to move on to pastures new. About all it's capable of on its own right now was to listen for an invitation–from the terror cell in Santa Cruz–and answer their call. What will it do if we dump more energy into it? Open a gate back to its original home? Expand the gate to our Earth? There's a worst-possible-case scenario here that I don't even want to think about–I'm going to have nightmares about it for years, if I have any years ahead of me to have nightmares in.

  Having dragged its huge, cold presence through to squat in the ruins of the victorious Reich, it settled down to wait: patient, for it has waited for an infinity of infinities already, waiting for a hot, fast thinker to open the gate to the next universe. Focussed in one place, it will be able to move far faster this time–no need for a sacrifice of millions to get its attention. Once invited–by the clever stupidity of a terrorist cell, perhaps–it can take possession of a body and, using what it has learned of the nature of humanity from the Ahnenerbe-SS, manipulate those around it. The possessed, its agent on the other side of that first gate, must arrange to open a connection, then find an energy source to crack it wide open, big enough to admit the rest of the eater. Opening a gate wide enough for a human body, with an agent at both ends, would take about as much energy as it had left–the lives of all the remaining Ahnenerbe-SS survivors in this world, hoarded against such an eventual need. But to open a gate so that it can admit an ice giant–a being big enough to carve monuments on the moon and suck dry a universe–will take much more energy: energy gained from either a major act of necromancy or a singularly powerful local source.

  I look around. I'm at the foot of a hill; on the other side of it there's a wall, and a couple of pathetic corpses, and half a platoon of SAS specialists. Behind me there's a petrified forest and a castle of shadows, populated with nightmares. (Oh, and a hydrogen bomb that's going to go off in about seventy minutes.) Where is everybody? Strung out between the cas
tle and the gate, that's where.

  Got to tell Alan not to set off the bomb. I pick up my sack of hands and stagger downhill toward the skeletal trees, feet and ankles tensed with that walking on glass sensation you get when you're afraid there's nothing but black ice underfoot, one hand clutching the basilisk gun at arm's reach. Branches claw at me in the twilight, making me flinch inside my helmet; they snap and tinkle against my visor, rigid bundles of mummified twigs with all the heat sucked out of them. If there's more than one of the body snatchers here . . .

  I skid and go down on one thigh, hard. Something crunches underfoot, like twigs snapping. I lever myself upright, rub my leg and wince, breath loud in my ears. Looking down I see a hump of frozen brown, a small rabbit or a rat or something else that's been dead for years. Dead. I stoop and pick up my bag of severed hands, tagged for identification at a later date. Wouldn't this be a good time to think about precautions? In case there are other demons stalking this frozen plain in stolen bodies?

  Well, yes. I cast a glance in the direction of the redoubt, racking my brains for a half-forgotten lecture on occult stealth technologies.

  * * * *

  Fifteen minutes later–ten precious minutes of which expire in a feverish rush of poking clumsily at a severed ulna and radius with my multitool and a roll of duct tape–I'm standing in the middle of the dead ground in front of the redoubt. Things have clearly gone very pear-shaped indeed. I clutch the talisman like a drowning man and try to figure out what to do now.

  (The talisman glows dimly, an eerie blue light chewing away at the fingertips. To get it lit, I used the basilisk gun on a tree stump and thrust it against the glowing coals. The deep incisions in the palm are the red of firelight reflected in freshly spilt blood. I grip the grisly artifact by its exposed wrist bones and hope like hell that it performs as advertised. See, if you stick a phase-conjugate mirror on the base of a Hand of Glory you can make it spit light; but that's a modern perversion of its original function . . .)

  Overhead, the stars are going out one by one. The moon is a blood-soaked red disk; shadows are creeping across the landscape, settling across the hills I can glimpse through my night-vision goggles. And something like a fire is burning on the roofline above the last redoubt of the Ahnenerbe-SS: What's going on?

  I try the radio again. "Howard to anyone, anyone still out there, please respond." The hissing, frying interference crashes in on my ears, obscuring any answer. I stumble forward on the icy ground just as something that might once have been human dashes around the side of the building, heading in the direction of the gate. It doesn't see me, but someone inside sees it: sparks blossom on the cold ground behind it, and I see brief muzzle flashes coming from a window-slit on the second floor. It was one of ours originally, but no human being can sprint around a building with their helmet off and backpack missing in a fimbulwinter cold enough to freeze liquid oxygen.

  The possessed soldier raises something blocky to its shoulder and sprays cartridge cases all over the night. Maybe one or two of the bullets come close to the upstairs window, but if so they don't stop whoever's upstairs from catching it with their next burst: for a moment it capers across the ice, then it flops down and lies still. "Shit," I mutter, and find myself stumbling into a clumsy trot toward the gaping garage door with its welcoming airlock.

  Nobody shoots at me; the talisman is doing its job, fogging the senses of anyone who can see me. I skid to a halt just outside, a nasty suspicion blossoming in my mind, and very carefully inspect the threshold. Yup, there it is: a black box taped to the wall, thin wire stretched taut across the threshold at knee level. Some wag has stencilled THIS SIDE TOWARD LIFE INSURANCE CLAIMANT on its case. I very carefully step over the tripwire then try the radio again. "Howard to anyone. What's going on? Who's shooting?"

  A crackling whine flattens the answer, but at least this time there is one: "Howard! What's your condition? Report." I try to remember who it is, those clipped tones: Sergeant Howe.

  "I'm in the garage with a Hand of Glory," I say. I swallow. "It got Chaitin while I wasn't watching him, but I got away–shot it while it was trying to assimilate me. A demon, that is. They take possession if they can touch you–it takes skin-to-skin or electrical contact. There was more than one out here but I'm not sure any are still up. I improvised a stealth talisman to get me back in here; you've got to put me through to Alan, immediately."

  "Wait right there." He sounds tense. "You in the garage?"

  I try to nod, then answer: "Yeah, I'm in the garage–I spotted the spring surprise in time. Look, this is urgent; we've got to disable the demo gadget before we get out of here. If it blows–"

  The outer airlock door edges open. "Get your ass in the airlock now, Howard. Close and lock the door. When it cycles, put anything you're carrying down and raise your arms. When the door opens, don't move until I say so. Don't even breathe until I say so. Got it?"

  "Got it," I say, and open the airlock door. I freeze–then carefully put the Hand of Glory down outside the lock, power down the basilisk gun and isolate the charge circuit, drop the sack of severed hands, and make sure my palmtop is asleep before I look inside the chamber again. I swallow. There's a green spheroid taped to the inner door, a fine wire stretching from one end to the rubberised gasket that seals the lock. Below it, there's another gadget: a thaumometer, a sensor that monitors spatiotemporal disturbances indicative of occult activity. That, too, has a wire vanishing inside the gasket. I swallow again. "I'm stepping inside the lock now," I say. My legs don't want to move. "I'm closing the outer door."

  I tell myself I know Alan, and he's not going to do anything stupid. I tell myself that Sergeant Howe is a professional. Locking myself in a room the size of a shower cubicle with a live hand grenade on the end of a string still gives me the cold shudders.

  Air hisses through vents and I raise my arms, stiffly forcing the suit to comply. At the last moment I think to turn and make sure that I'm leaning against the side of the lock, not facing the inner door. Then the door clicks–audible, there must be air pressure inside–and swings open. Someone is kneeling outside, pointing a gun at me from behind a body that's sprawled on the floor right in front of the lock.

  "Bob." It's Alan. "If that's you, I want you to tell me who else was in the classroom with us."

  Phew. "It was taught by Sophie, and we were in it with Nick from CESG."

  "That's good. And you're still wearing your helmet. That's good, too. Now I want you to turn around slowly, keeping your hands up–that's right. Now, I want you to slowly raise your visor. Hold it–keep your hands still." The guy with the gun keeps it levelled on my face. Mo was right: I never realised you could see the grooves–lands–of a rifle barrel at three metres; it looks huge, large enough to drive a freight train down.

  Something jabs at my left leg and I nearly stumble, then: "He's clean," announces someone who was right next to me all the time–I never noticed–and I lower my arms. The guy who's been keeping me covered points his gun at the floor, and suddenly I'm breathing normally again.

  "Where's Alan?" I ask. "What's been happening here?"

  "I was hoping you could tell me," Alan says in my left ear. I look round and he grins tensely. The grin doesn't reach his eyes, which are the colour of liquid oxygen and just as warm. "Tell me exactly what happened to you when you went outside. Tell it like your life depends on it."

  "Uh, okay." I shuffle away from the lock door and someone–Scary Spice?–swings it shut again.

  I spill the beans, including the way Chaitin jumped me. I figure they already know that something's taking over brains and bodies wherever possible. My eyes keep being drawn back to the floor. It's Donaldson, the guy who was speculating about meteorology earlier. He doesn't look real, somehow, as if he ought to get up and walk away in a minute or two, peel off the rubber gore applied by the special effects people and have a laugh with us over a pint. "I figure the whole thing is a trap," I finish. "We were lured here deliberately. Only one of the pos
sessors came through to our world, and it could only control one body at a time, but there may be more here. They're working for, or are part of, something that's not human, but that's had years to study us–to study the survivors from the Ahnenerbe-SS. It took over some useful idiots who tried to summon it from our side in order to use it for a terrorist incident; then it stalked us, kidnapped Mo as bait. It did that because it wants us to provide a power source that'll allow it to expand the gate and push its main body through into our universe. It's a lot bigger than the possessors we've seen so far–it's, like, it's achieved a limited beachhead but it needs to grab an entire harbour from the defenders–us–before it can land the main body of its forces."

  "Right." Alan looks pensive. "And how do you think it's going to do this?"

  "The demolition gadget. What yield have you set it to?" I ask.

  Howe raises an eyebrow. "Tell him," says Alan.

  "It's a selective yield gadget," says Howe. "We can set it to anything from fifteen kilotons to a quarter of a megaton–it's a mechanical process, screw jacks adjust the gap between the fusion sparkplug and the initiator charge so that we get more or less fusion output. Right now it's at the upper end of the yield curve, dialled all the way up to city-buster size. What's this got to do with anything?"

  "Well." I lick my lips; it's really cold in here now and my breath is steaming. "To open a gate big enough to bring through a large creature like whatever ate this universe takes a whole lot of entropy. The Ahnenerbe did it in this universe by ritually murdering roughly ten million people: information destruction increases entropy. But you can do it in other ways–an H-bomb is a really great entropy and energy generator, it minimizes the information content of lots of stuff." They look blank: I glare at them. "Look, it's the intersection between thermodynamics and information theory, right? Information content is inversely proportional to entropy, entropy is a measure of how well randomized a system is–that's one of the core assumptions of magic, right? That you can transfer energy between universes via the platonic realm of ordered information–mathematics. I think what this monster has been doing all along was raising enough hell via its minor agents to provoke a response–one in which we'd lash out, giving it all the juice it needs to expand the gate. As it is, the minor gate it yanked Mo through is shrinking; I figure that was all it could manage. It's drained so much energy from this universe already that it had to wait for precisely the right moment before it dared open that one; this place is falling apart, and there may not be enough power for the monster to open even one more minor gate. Have you noticed how the stars are going out and we're getting radio interference? I think what we're seeing is fossil starlight–what's left of this universe may only be a bit larger than the solar system, and it's shrinking at close to light-speed. Give it another few hours and it'll collapse like a soap bubble, taking the ice giant with it. Unless we feed it, or them, or whatever the hell it is, enough energy to shore open the gate to our own world and expand it until they can squeeze through."