The Atrocity Archives

by Charles Stross

  "Bastard . . . !"

  "Stop it–" I gasp, just as the raw smell of petrol vapour reaches me and I hear a crackling roar. I get the pigeon claw lit in a stink of burning keratin and an eerie glow, nearly shitting myself with terror, lying in a cold damp puddle, and roll over: "Don't move!"

  "Bastard! What–hey, what's burning?"

  "Don't move," I gasp again, holding the subminiature Hand of Glory up. The traffic camera in the road outside the fence is casting about as if it's dropped its contact lens, but the one on the pole above the office is locked right onto the burning tires of the Range Rover. "If you let go of my hand they'll see you and kill you oh shit–"

  "Kill–what?" She stares at me, white-faced.

  "You! Get under cover!" I yell across the pound, but the guy in the blue suit–the attendant–doesn't hear me. One second he's running across the car park as fast as his portly behind can manage; the next moment he's tumbling forward, blackening, puffs of flame erupting from his eyes and mouth and ears, then the stumps as his arms come pinwheeling off, and the carbonized trunk slides across the ground like a grisly toboggan.

  "Oh shit, oh shit!" Her expression changes from one second to the next, from disbelief to dawning horror. "We've got to help–"

  "Listen, no! Stay down!"

  She freezes in place for a full heartbeat, then another. When she opens her mouth again she's unnaturally cool. "What's going on?"

  "The cameras," I pant. "Listen, this is a Hand of Glory, an invisibility shield. Right now it's all that's keeping us alive–those cameras are running SCORPION STARE. If they see us we're dead."

  "Are you–the car? What happened to it?"

  "Tires. They're made of carbon, rubber. SCORPION STARE works on anything with a shitload of long-chain carbon molecules in it–like tires, or cows. Makes them burn."

  "Oh my sainted aunt and holy father . . ."

  "Hold my hand. Make skin to skin contact–not that hard. We've got maybe three, four minutes before this HOG burns down. Bastards, bastards. Got to get to the control shack–"

  The next minute is a nightmare of stumbling–shooting pains in my knees from where I went down hard and in my thigh where Josephine tried to kick the shit out of me–soaking cold damp jeans, and roasting hot skin on my neck from the pyre that I was sitting inside only seconds ago. She holds onto my left hand like it's a lifesaver–yes, it is, for as long as the HOG keeps burning–and we lurch and shamble toward the modular site office near the entrance as fast as we can go. "Inside," she gasps, "it can't see inside."

  "Yeah?" She half-drags me to the entrance and we find the door's open, not locked. "Can we get away round the other side?"

  "Don't think so." She points through the building. "There's a school."

  "Oh shit." We're on the other side of the pound from the traffic camera in the road, but there's another camera under the eaves of the school on the other side of the road from the steel gates out front, and it's a good thing the kids are all in lessons because what's going on here is every teacher's nightmare. And we've got to nail it down as fast as possible, because if they ring the bell for lunch–"We've got to kill the power to the roofcam first," I say. "Then we've got to figure a way out."

  "What's going on? What did that?" Her lips work like a fish out of water.

  I shake my head. "Case-Nightmare-Green-Scorpion-Stare-Maginot-Blue-Stars tongue be loosed. Okay, talk. I reckon we've got about two, three minutes to nail this before–"

  "This was all a setup?"

  "I don't know yet. Look, how do I get onto the roof?"

  "Isn't that a skylight?" she asks, pointing.

  "Yeah." Being who I am I always carry a Leatherman multitool so I whip it out and look around for a chair I can pile on top of the desk and stand on, one that doesn't have wheels and a gas strut. "See any chairs I can–"

  I'll say this much, detective training obviously enables you to figure out how to get onto a roof fast. Josephine simply walks over to the ladder nestling in a corner between one wall and a battered filing cabinet and pulls it out. "This what you're looking for?"

  "Uh, yeah. Thanks." She passes it to me and I fumble with it for a moment, figuring out how to set it up. Then another moment, juggling the multitool and the half-consumed pigeon's foot and looking at the ladder dubiously.

  "Give me those," she says.

  "But–"

  "Listen, I'm the one who deals with idiot vandals and climbs around on pitched roofs looking for broken skylights, okay? And–" she glances at the door "–if I mess up you can phone your boss and let him know what's happening."

  "Oh," I mumble, then hand her the gadgets and hold the ladder steady while she swarms up it like a circus acrobat. A moment later there's a noise like a herd of baby elephants thudding on the rooftop as she scrambles across to the camera mount. The camera may be on a moving platform but there's a limit to how far it can depress and clearly she's right below the azimuth platform–just as long as she isn't visible to both the traffic camera out back and the schoolyard monitor out front. More shaking, then there's a loud clack and the Portakabin lights go out.

  A second or two later she reappears, feet first, through the opening. "Right, that should do it," she says. "I shorted the power cable to the platform. "Hey, the lights–"

  "I think you shorted a bit more than that." I hold the ladder as she climbs down. "Now, we've got an immobilized one up top, that's good. Let's see if we can find the controller."

  A quick search of the hut reveals a bunch of fun stuff I hadn't been expecting, like an ADSL line to the regional police IT hub, a PC running some kind of terminal emulator, and another dedicated machine with the cameras showing overlapping windows on-screen. I could kiss them; they may have outsourced the monitoring to private security firms but they've kept the hardware all on the same backbone network. The blinkenlights are beeping and twittering like crazy as everything's now running on backup battery power, but that's okay. I pull out a breakout box and scramble around under a desk until I've got my palmtop plugged into the network hub to sniff packets. Barely a second later it dings at me. "Oh, lovely." So much for firewalled up to the eyeballs. I unplug and surface again, then scroll through the several hundred screenfuls of unencrypted bureaucratic computerese my network sniffer has grabbed. "That looks promising. Uh, I wouldn't go outside just yet but I think we're going to be all right."

  "Explain." She's about ten centimetres shorter than I am, but I'm suddenly aware that I'm sharing the Portakabin with an irate, wet, detective inspector who's probably a black belt at something or other lethal and who is just about to really lose her cool: "You've got about ten seconds from now to tell me everything. Or I'm calling for backup and warrant card or no you are going in a cell until I get some answers. Capisce?"

  "I surrender." I don't, really, but I point at my palmtop. "It's a fair cop, guv. Look, someone's been too clever by half here. The camera up top is basically a glorified webcam. I mean, it's running a web server and it's plugged into the constabulary's intranet via broadband. Every ten seconds or so a program back at HQ polls it and grabs the latest picture, okay? That's in addition to whatever the guy downstairs tells it to look at. Anyway, someone else just sent it an HTTP request with a honking great big file upload attached, and I don't think your IT department is in the habit of using South Korean primary schools as proxy servers, are they? And a compromised firewall, no less. Lovely! Your cameras may have been 0wnZ0r3d by a fucking script kiddie, but they're not as fucking smart as they think they are otherwise they'd have fucking stripped off the fucking referrer headers, wouldn't they?" I stop talking and make sure I've saved the logfile somewhere secure, then for good measure I email it to myself at work.

  "Right. So I know their IP address and it's time to locate them." It's the work of about thirty seconds to track it to a dial-up account on one of the big national ISPs–one of the free anonymous ones. "Hmm. If you want to help, you could get me an S22 disclosure notice for the phone number behind thi
s dial-up account. Then we can persuade the phone company to tell us the street address and go pay them a visit and ask why they killed our friend with the key ring–" My hands are shaking from the adrenalin high and I am beginning to feel angry, not just an ordinary day-to-day pissed-off feeling but the kind of true and brutal rage that demands revenge.

  "Killed? Oh." She opens the door an inch and looks outside: she looks a little grey around the gills, but she doesn't lose it. Tough woman.

  "It's SCORPION STARE. Look, S22 data disclosure order first, it's a fucking murder investigation now, isn't it? Then we go visiting. But we're going to have to make out like it's accidental, or the press will come trampling all over us and we won't be able to get anything done." I write down the hostname while she gets on the mobile to head office. The first sirens start to wail even before she picks up my note and calls for medical backup. I sit there staring at the door, contemplating the mess, my mind whirling. "Tell the ambulance crew it's a freak lightning strike," I say as the thought takes me. "You're already in this up to your ears, we don't need to get anyone else involved–"

  Then my phone rings.

  * * * *

  As it happens we don't visit any murderous hackers, but presently the car pound is fronted with white plastic scene-of-crime sheeting and a photographer and a couple of forensics guys show up and Josephine, who has found something more urgent to obsess over than ripping me a new asshole, is busy directing their preliminary workover. I'm poring over screenfuls of tcpdump output in the control room when the same unmarked car that dropped us off here pulls up with Constable Routledge at the wheel and a very unexpected passenger in the back. I gape as he gets out of the car and walks toward the hut. "Who's this?" demands Josephine, coming over and sticking her head in through the window.

  I open the door. "Hi, boss. Boss, meet Detective Inspector Sullivan. Josephine, this is my boss–you want to come in and sit down?"

  Andy nods at her distractedly: "I'm Andy. Bob, brief me." He glances at her again as she shoves through the door and closes it behind her. "Are you–"

  "She knows too much already." I shrug. "Well?" I ask her. "This is your chance to get out."

  "Fuck that." She glares at me, then Andy: "Two mornings ago it was a freak accident and a cow, today it's a murder investigation–I trust you're not planning on escalating it any further, terrorist massacres and biological weapons are a little outside my remit–and I want some answers. If you please."

  "Okay, you'll get them," Andy says mildly. "Start talking," he tells me.

  "Code blue called at three thirty the day before yesterday. I flew out to take a look, found a dead cow that had been zapped by SCORPION STARE–unless there's a basilisk loose in Milton Keynes–went down to our friends in Cheltenham for briefing yesterday, stayed overnight, came up here this morning. The cow was bought from a slaughterhouse and transported to the scene in a trailer towed by a stolen car, which was later dumped and transferred to this pound. Inspector Sullivan is our force liaison–external circle two, no need to know. She brought me here and I took a patch test, and right then someone zapped the car–we were lucky to survive. One down out front. We've, uh, trapped a camera up top that I think will prove to have firmware loaded with SCORPION STARE, and I sniffed packets coming in from a compromised host. Police intranet, fire-walled to hell and back, hacked via some vile little dweeb using a primary school web server in South Korea. We were just about to run down the intruder in meat-space and go ask some pointed questions when you arrived." I yawn, and Andy looks at me oddly. Extreme stress sometimes does that to me, makes me tired, and I've been running on my nerves for most of the past few days.

  "All right." Andy scratches his chin thoughtfully. "There's been a new development."

  "New development?" I echo.

  "Yes. We received a blackmail note." And it's no fucking wonder that he's looking slightly glassy-eyed–he must be in shock.

  "Blackmail? What are they–"

  "It came via email from an anonymous remixer on the public Internet. Whoever wrote it knows about MAGINOT BLUE STARS and wants us to know that they disapprove, especially of SCORPION STARE. No sign that they've got CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, though. They're giving us three days to cancel the entire project or they'll blow it wide open in quote the most public way imaginable unquote."

  "Shit."

  "Smelly brown stuff, yes. Angleton is displeased." Andy shakes his head. "We tracked the message back to a dial-up host in the UK–"

  I hold up a piece of paper. "This one?"

  He squints at it. "I think so. We did the S22 soft-shoe shuffle but it's no good, they used the SIMM card from a prepaid mobile phone bought for cash in a supermarket in Birmingham three months ago. The best we could do was trace the caller's location to the centre of Milton Keynes." He glances at Josephine. "Did you impress her–"

  "Listen." She speaks quietly and with great force: "Firstly, this appears to be an investigation into murder–and now blackmail, of a government department, right?–and in case you hadn't noticed, organising criminal investigations just happens to be my speciality. Secondly, I do not appreciate being forcibly gagged. I have signed a certain piece of paper, and the only stuff I leak is what you get when you drill holes in me. Finally, I am getting really pissed off with the runaround you're giving me about a particularly serious incident on my turf, and if you don't start answering my questions soon I'm going to have to arrest you for wasting police time. Now, which is it going to be?"

  "Oh, for crying out loud." Andy rolls his eyes, then says very rapidly: "By the abjuration of Dee and the name of Claude Dansey I hereby exercise subsection D paragraph sixteen clause twelve and bind you to service from now and forevermore. Right, that's it. You're drafted, and may whatever deity you believe in have mercy on your soul."

  "Hey. Wait." She takes a step back. "What's going on?" There's a faint stink of burning sulphur in the air.

  "You've just talked yourself into the Laundry," I say, shaking my head. "Just try to remember I tried to keep you out of this."

  "The Laundry? What are you talking about? I thought you were from Cheltenham?" The smell of brimstone is getting stronger. "Hey, is something on fire?"

  "Wrong guess," says Andy. "Bob can explain later. For now, just remember that we work for the same people, ultimately, only we deal with a higher order of threat than everyday stuff like rogue states, terrorist nukes, and so on. Cheltenham is the cover story. Bob, the blackmailer threatened to upload SCORPION STARE to the ring of steel."

  "Oh shit." I sit down hard on the edge of a desk. "That is so very not good that I don't want to think about it right now." The ring of steel is the network of surveillance cameras that were installed around the financial heart of the city of London in the late 1990s to deter terrorist bombings. "Look, did Angleton have any other–"

  "Yes. He wants us to go visit Site Able right now, that's the lead development team at the research centre behind SCORPION STARE. Um, inspector? You're in. As I said, you're drafted. Your boss, that would be Deputy Chief Constable Dunwoody, is about to get a memo about you from the Home Office–we'll worry about whether you can go back to your old job afterward. As of now, this investigation is your only priority. Site Able runs out of an office unit at Kiln Farm industrial estate, covered as a UK subsidiary of an American software company: in reality they're part of the residual unprivatised rump of DERA, uh, QinetiQ. The bunch that handles Q-projects."

  "While you're busy wanking over your cow-burning nonsense I've got a ring of car thieves to–" Josephine shakes her head distractedly, sniffs suspiciously, then stops trying to fight the geas. "That smell . . . Why do these people at Kiln Farm need a visit?"

  "Because they're the lead team on the group who developed SCORPION STARE," Andy explains, "and Angleton doesn't think it's a coincidence that our blackmailer burned a cow in Milton Keynes. He thinks they're a bunch of locals. Bob, if you've got a trace that'll be enough to narrow it down to the building–"

  "Yes
?" Josephine nods to herself. "But you need to find the individual responsible, and any time bombs they've left, and there's a small matter of evidence." A thought strikes her. "What happens when you catch them?"

  Andy looks at me and my blood runs cold. "I think we'll have to see about that when we find them," I extemporise, trying to avoid telling her about the Audit Commission for the time being; she might blow her stack completely if I have to explain how they investigate malfeasance, and then I'd have to tell her that the burning smell is a foreshadowing of what happens if she is ever found guilty of disloyalty. (It normally fades a few minutes after the rite of binding, but right now it's still strong.) "What are we waiting for?" I ask. "Let's go!"

  * * * *

  In the beginning there was the defense Evaluation and Research Agency, DERA. And DERA was where HMG's boffins hung out, and they developed cool toys like tanks with plastic armour, clunky palmtops powered by 1980s chips and rugged enough to be run over by a truck, and fetal heart monitors to help the next generation of squaddies grow up strong. And lo, in the thrusting entrepreneurial climate of the early nineties a new government came to power with a remit to bring about the triumph of true socialism by privatising the post office and air traffic control systems, and DERA didn't stand much of a chance. Renamed QinetiQ by the same nameless marketing genius who turned the Royal Mail into Consignia and Virgin Trains into fodder for fuckedcompany-dot-com, the research agency was hung out to dry, primped and beautified, and generally prepared for sale to the highest bidder who didn't speak with a pronounced Iraqi accent.

  However . . .

  In addition to the ordinary toys, DERA used to do development work for the Laundry. Q Division's pedigree stretches back all the way to SOE's wartime dirty tricks department–poison pens, boot-heel escape kits, explosive-stuffed sabotage rats, the whole nine yards of James Bond japery. Since the 1950s, Q Division has kept the Laundry in more esoteric equipment: summoning grids, basilisk guns, Turing oracles, self-tuning pentacles, self-filling beer glasses, and the like. Steadily growing weirder and more specialised by the year, Q Division is far too sensitive to sell off–unlike most of QinetiQ's research, what they do is classified so deep you'd need a bathyscaphe to reach it. And so, while QinetiQ was being dolled up for the city catwalk, Q Division was segregated and spun off, a little stronghold in the sea of commerce that is forever civil service territory.