New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird

by Michael Marshall Smith

  It had to hurt for a political officer to admit that. Irizarry said, “We’re very likely to find human bones down there. And in their caches.”

  Sanderson started to answer him, but the breeder decided it had had enough. It wheeled toward them, its maw gaping wider, and started through the mounds of garbage and corpses in their direction.

  “What now?” said Sanderson.

  “Keep firing,” said Irizarry. Mongoose, wherever you are, please be ready.

  He’d been about seventy-five percent sure that the rath would stand up on its hind legs when it reached them. Raths weren’t sapient, not like cheshires, but they were smart. They knew that the quickest way to kill a human was to take its head off, and the second quickest was to disembowel it, neither of which they could do on all fours. And humans weren’t any threat to a breeder’s vulnerable abdomen; Sanderson’s pistol might give the breeder a hot foot, but there was no way it could penetrate the breeder’s skin.

  It was a terrible plan—there was that whole twenty-five percent where he and Sanderson died screaming while the breeder ate them from the feet up—but it worked. The breeder heaved itself upright, massive, indistinct paw going back for a blow that would shear Sanderson’s head off her neck and probably bounce it off the nearest bulkhead, and with no warning of any kind, not for the humans, not for the rath, Mongoose phased viciously in, claws and teeth and sharp edged tentacles all less than two inches from the rath’s belly and moving fast.

  The rath screamed and curled in on itself, but it was too late. Mongoose had already caught the lips of its—oh gods and fishes, Irizarry didn’t know the word. Vagina? Cloaca? Ovipositor? The place where little baby raths came into the world. The only vulnerability a breeder had. Into which Mongoose shoved the narrow wedge of her head, and her clawed front feet, and began to rip.

  Before the rath could even reach for her, her malleable body was already entirely inside it, and it—screaming, scrabbling—was doomed.

  Irizarry caught Sanderson’s elbow and said, “Now would be a good time, very slowly, to back away. Let the lady do her job.”

  Irizarry almost made it off of Kadath clean.

  He’d had no difficulty in getting a berth for himself and Mongoose—after a party or two of volunteers had seen her in action, after the stories started spreading about the breeder, he’d nearly come to the point of beating off the steelship captains with a stick. And in the end, he’d chosen the offer of the captain of the Erich Zann, a boojum; Captain Alvarez had a long-term salvage contract in the Kuiper belt—“cleaning up after the ice miners,” she’d said with a wry smile—and Irizarry felt like salvage was maybe where he wanted to be for a while. There’d be plenty for Mongoose to hunt, and nobody’s life in danger. Even a bandersnatch wasn’t much more than a case of indigestion for a boojum.

  He’d got his money out of the station master’s office—hadn’t even had to talk to Station Master Lee, who maybe, from the things he was hearing, wasn’t going to be station master much longer. You could either be ineffectual or you could piss off your political officer. Not both at once. And her secretary so very obviously didn’t want to bother her that it was easy to say, “We had a contract,” and to plant his feet and smile. It wasn’t the doubled fee she’d promised him, but he didn’t even want that. Just the money he was owed.

  So his business was taken care of. He’d brought Mongoose out to the Erich Zann, and insofar as he and Captain Alvarez could tell, the boojum and the cheshire liked each other. He’d bought himself new underwear and let Mongoose pick out a new pair of earrings for him. And he’d gone ahead and splurged, since he was, after all, on Kadath Station and might as well make the most of it, and bought a selection of books for his reader, including The Wind in the Willows. He was looking forward, in an odd, quiet way, to the long nights out beyond Neptune: reading to Mongoose, finding out what she thought about Rat and Mole and Toad and Badger.

  Peace—or as close to it as Izrael Irizarry was ever likely to get.

  He’d cleaned out his cubby in the Transient Barracks, slung his bag over one shoulder with Mongoose riding on the other, and was actually in sight of the Erich Zann’s dock when a voice behind him called his name.

  Colonel Sanderson.

  He froze in the middle of a stride, torn between turning around to greet her and bolting like a rabbit, and then she’d caught up to him. “Mr. Irizarry,” she said. “I hoped I could buy you a drink before you go.”

  He couldn’t help the deeply suspicious look he gave her. She spread her hands, showing them empty. “Truly. No threats, no tricks. Just a drink. To say thank you.” Her smile was lopsided; she knew how unlikely those words sounded in the mouth of a political officer.

  And any other political officer, Irizarry wouldn’t have believed them. But he’d seen her stand her ground in front of a breeder rath, and he’d seen her turn and puke her guts out when she got a good look at what Mongoose did to it. If she wanted to thank him, he owed it to her to sit still for it.

  “All right,” he said, and added awkwardly, “Thank you.”

  They went to one of Kadath’s tourist bars: bright and quaint and cheerful and completely unlike the spacer bars Irizarry was used to. On the other hand, he could see why Sanderson picked this one. No one here, except maybe the bartender, had the least idea who she was, and the bartender’s wide-eyed double take meant that they got excellent service: prompt and very quiet.

  Irizarry ordered a pink lady—he liked them, and Mongoose, in delight, turned the same color pink, with rosettes matched to the maraschino “cherry.” Sanderson ordered whisky, neat, which had very little resemblance to the whisky Irizarry remembered from planetside. She took a long swallow of it, then set the glass down and said, “I never got a chance to ask Spider John this: how did you get your cheshire?”

  It was clever of her to invoke Spider John and Demon like that, but Irizarry still wasn’t sure she’d earned the story. After the silence had gone on a little too long, Sanderson picked her glass up, took another swallow, and said, “I know who you are.”

  “I’m nobody,” Irizarry said. He didn’t let himself tense up, because Mongoose wouldn’t miss that cue, and she was touchy enough, what with all the steelship captains, that he wasn’t sure what she might think the proper response was. And he wasn’t sure, if she decided the proper response was to rip Sanderson’s face off, that he would be able to make himself disagree with her in time.

  “I promised,” Sanderson said. “No threats. I’m not trying to trace you, I’m not asking any questions about the lady you used to work for. And, truly, I’m only asking how you met this lady. You don’t have to tell me.”

  “No,” Irizarry said mildly. “I don’t.” But Mongoose, still pink, was coiling down his arm to investigate the glass—not its contents, since the interest of the egg-whites would be more than outweighed by the sharp sting to her nose of the alcohol, but the upside-down cone on a stem of a martini glass. She liked geometry. And this wasn’t a story that could hurt anyone.

  He said, “I was working my way across Jupiter’s moons, oh, five years ago now. Ironically enough, I got trapped in a quarantine. Not for vermin, but for the black rot. It was a long time, and things got . . . ugly.”

  He glanced at her and saw he didn’t need to elaborate.

  “There were Arkhamers trapped there, too, in their huge old scow of a ship. And when the water rationing got tight, there were people that said the Arkhamers shouldn’t have any—said that if it was the other way ’round, they wouldn’t give us any. And so when the Arkhamers sent one of their daughters for their share . . . ” He still remembered her scream, a grown woman’s terror in a child’s voice, and so he shrugged and said, “I did the only thing I could. After that, it was safer for me on their ship than it was on the station, so I spent some time with them. Their Professors let me stay.

  “They’re not bad people,” he added, suddenly urgent. “I don’t say I understand what they believe, or why, but they were
good to me, and they did share their water with the crew of the ship in the next berth. And of course, they had cheshires. Cheshires all over the place, cleanest steelship you’ve ever seen. There was a litter born right about the time the quarantine finally lifted. Jemima—the little girl I helped—she insisted they give me pick of the litter, and that was Mongoose.”

  Mongoose, knowing the shape of her own name on Irizarry’s lips, began to purr, and rubbed her head gently against his fingers. He petted her, feeling his tension ease, and said, “And I wanted to be a biologist before things got complicated.”

  “Huh,” said Sanderson. “Do you know what they are?”

  “Sorry?” He was still mostly thinking about the Arkhamers, and braced himself for the usual round of superstitious nonsense: demons or necromancers or what-not.

  But Sanderson said, “Cheshires. Do you know what they are?”

  “What do you mean, ‘What they are’? They’re cheshires.”

  “After Demon and Spider John . . . I did some reading and I found a professor or two—Arkhamers, yes—to ask.” She smiled, very thinly. “I’ve found, in this job, that people are often remarkably willing to answer my questions. And I found out. They’re bandersnatches.”

  “Colonel Sanderson, not to be disrespectful—”

  “Sub-adult bandersnatches,” Sanderson said. “Trained and bred and intentionally stunted so that they never mature fully.”

  Mongoose, he realized, had been watching, because she caught his hand and said emphatically, Not.

  “Mongoose disagrees with you,” he said and found himself smiling. “And really, I think she would know.”

  Sanderson’s eyebrows went up. “And what does Mongoose think she is?”

  He asked, and Mongoose answered promptly, pink dissolving into champagne and gold: Jagular. But there was a thrill of uncertainty behind it, as if she wasn’t quite sure of what she stated so emphatically. And then, with a sharp toss of her head at Colonel Sanderson, like any teenage girl: Mongoose.

  Sanderson was still watching him sharply. “Well?”

  “She says she’s Mongoose.”

  And Sanderson really wasn’t trying to threaten him, or playing some elaborate political game, because her face softened in a real smile, and she said, “Of course she is.”

  Irizarry swished a sweet mouthful between his teeth. He thought of what Sanderson has said, of the bandersnatch on the Jenny Lind wriggling through stretched rips in reality like a spiny, deathly puppy tearing a blanket. “How would you domesticate a bandersnatch?”

  She shrugged. “If I knew that, I’d be an Arkhamer, wouldn’t I?” Gently, she extended the back of her hand for Mongoose to sniff. Mongoose, surprising Irizarry, extended one tentative tendril and let it hover just over the back of Sanderson’s wrist.

  Sanderson tipped her head, smiling affectionately, and didn’t move her hand. “But if I had to guess, I’d say you do it by making friends.”

  It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.

  At the Mountains of Madness · H.P. Lovecraft (1931)

  • A COLDER WAR •

  Charles Stross

  Analyst

  Roger Jourgensen tilts back in his chair, reading.

  He’s a fair-haired man, in his mid-thirties: hair razor-cropped, skin pallid from too much time spent under artificial lights. Spectacles, short-sleeved white shirt and tie, photographic ID badge on a chain round his neck. He works in an air-conditioned office with no windows.

  The file he is reading frightens him.

  Once, when Roger was a young boy, his father took him to an open day at Nellis AFB, out in the California desert. Sunlight glared brilliantly from the polished silverplate flanks of the big bombers, sitting in their concrete-lined dispersal bays behind barriers and blinking radiation monitors. The brightly colored streamers flying from their pitot tubes lent them a strange, almost festive appearance. But they were sleeping nightmares: once awakened, nobody—except the flight crew—could come within a mile of the nuclear-powered bombers and live.

  Looking at the gleaming, bulging pods slung under their wingtip pylons, Roger had a premature inkling of the fires that waited within, a frigid terror that echoed the siren wail of the air raid warnings. He’d sucked nervously on his ice cream and gripped his father’s hand tightly while the band ripped through a cheerful Sousa march, and only forgot his fear when a flock of Thunderchiefs sliced by overhead and rattled the car windows for miles around.

  He has the same feeling now, as an adult reading this intelligence assessment, that he had as a child, watching the nuclear powered bombers sleeping in their concrete beds.

  There’s a blurry photograph of a concrete box inside the file, snapped from above by a high-flying U-2 during the autumn of ’61. Three coffin-shaped lakes, bulking dark and gloomy beneath the arctic sun; a canal heading west, deep in the Soviet heartland, surrounded by warning trefoils and armed guards. Deep waters saturated with calcium salts, concrete coffer-dams lined with gold and lead. A sleeping giant pointed at NATO, more terrifying than any nuclear weapon.

  Project Koschei.

  Red Square Redux

  Warning

  The following briefing film is classified SECRET GOLD JULY BOOJUM. If you do not have SECRET GOLD JULY BOOJUM clearance, leave the auditorium now and report to your unit security officer for debriefing. Failing to observe this notice is an imprisonable offense.

  You have sixty seconds to comply.

  Video clip

  Red Square in springtime. The sky overhead is clear and blue; there’s a little wispy cirrus at high altitude. It forms a brilliant backdrop for flight after flight of five four-engined bombers that thunder across the horizon and drop behind the Kremlin’s high walls.

  Voice-over

  Red Square, the May Day parade, 1962. This is the first time that the Soviet Union has publicly displayed weapons classified GOLD JULY BOOJUM. Here they are:

  Video clip

  Later in the same day. A seemingly endless stream of armor and soldiers marches across the square, turning the air gray with diesel fumes. The trucks roll in line eight abreast, with soldiers sitting erect in the back. Behind them rumble a battalion of T-56s, their commanders standing at attention in their cupolas, saluting the stand. Jets race low and loud overhead, formations of MiG-17 fighters.

  Behind the tanks sprawl a formation of four low-loaders: huge tractors towing low-sling trailers, their load beds strapped down under olive-drab tarpaulins. Whatever is under them is uneven, a bit like a loaf of bread the size of a small house. The trucks have an escort of jeep-like vehicles on each side, armed soldiers sitting at attention in their backs.

  There are big five-pointed stars painted in silver on each tarpaulin, like outlines of stars. Each star is surrounded by a stylized silver circle; a unit insignia, perhaps, but not in the standard format for Red Army units. There’s lettering around the circles, in a strangely stylized script.

  Voice-over

  These are live servitors under transient control. The vehicles towing them bear the insignia of the second Guards Engineering Brigade, a penal construction unit based in Bokhara and used for structural engineering assignments relating to nuclear installations in the Ukraine and Azerbaijan. This is the first time that any Dresden Agreement party openly demonstrated ownership of this technology: in this instance, the conclusion we are intended to draw is that the sixty-seventh Guard Engineering Brigade operates four units. Given existing figures for the Soviet ORBAT we can then extrapolate a total task strength of two hundred and eighty eight servitors, if this unit is unexceptional.

  Video clip

  Five huge Tu-95 Bear bombers thunder across the Moscow skies.

  Voice-over

  This conclusion is questi
onable. For example, in 1964 a total of two hundred and forty Bear bomber passes were made over the reviewing stand in front of the Lenin mausoleum. However, at that time technical reconnaissance assets verified that the Soviet air force has hard stand parking for only one hundred and sixty of these aircraft, and estimates of airframe production based on photographs of the extent of the Tupolev bureau’s works indicate that total production to that date was between sixty and one hundred and eighty bombers.

  Further analysis of photographic evidence from the 1964 parade suggests that a single group of twenty aircraft in four formations of five made repeated passes through the same airspace, the main arc of their circuit lying outside visual observation range of Moscow. This gave rise to the erroneous capacity report of 1964 in which the first strike delivery capability of the Soviet Union was over-estimated by as much as three hundred percent.

  We must therefore take anything that they show us in Red Square with a pinch of salt when preparing force estimates. Quite possibly these four servitors are all they’ve got. Then again, the actual battalion strength may be considerably higher.

  Still photographic sequence

  From very high altitude—possibly in orbit—an eagle’s eye view of a remote village in mountainous country. Small huts huddle together beneath a craggy outcrop; goats graze nearby.

  In the second photograph, something has rolled through the village leaving a trail of devastation. The path is quite unlike the trail of damage left by an artillery bombardment: something roughly four meters wide has shaved the rocky plateau smooth, wearing it down as if with a terrible heat. A corner of a shack leans drunkenly, the other half sliced away cleanly. White bones gleam faintly in the track; no vultures descend to stab at the remains.

  Voice-over

  These images were taken very recently, on successive orbital passes of a KH-11 satellite. They were timed precisely eighty-nine minutes apart. This village was the home of a noted Mujahedin leader. Note the similar footprint to the payloads on the load beds of the trucks seen at the 1962 parade.