The Labyrinth Index

by Charles Stross

  “Peace!” I say. (It translates as “not-pain.”) “Are you true to your nature? Has anyone made you someone else already?” She shakes her head violently. “I will not require this of you.” (There is no word for “force”; it is implied by every statement in the alfär Low Tongue: a brutally direct language.) “However, this quest requires you to pass for an urük.” Human. “Is it your will to join me?” I ask, as gently as her language permits.

  “I obey,” says Yarisol, and she looks away again, overcome by emotional overload.

  “You can go now,” I tell her, and she stands and does her shoegaze shuffle over to the door. I tell Captain Perceval: “We’re done for now. I’ll raise the paperwork to sign her out of here later.”

  He stares at me. “What was all that about?” He hasn’t understood a word of our conversation.

  “Above your pay grade.” I smirk, giving him a hint of fangs, and he recoils. “Let’s just say she’s been assigned to me for a special task, and leave it at that.”

  I shove back my chair and rise. Derek, bless him for being not entirely bereft of social skills, is only a moment behind me.

  “Mhari—” he begins.

  “Later,” I warn him and he falls silent. “We’ll talk back at the office.”

  I watch for a moment as the guards take the alfär mage away, presumably back to her room in the segregation block, and mentally slot several pieces into place in the six-dimensional jigsaw that the Prime Minister has created for me. Then I smile, because it looks like our plan for Yarisol’mün is going to work.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, the same day that Jim and I arrive in New York, another team is driving across Minnesota.

  One does not simply walk into Mordor these days; one drives a rented Cadillac Escalade the size of a county, shiny black and chrome, with a fake walnut dash, and enough black leather to clothe a battalion of Hell’s Angels. Pete the Vicar sits bolt upright behind the steering wheel, peering across the bonnet—no, the hood—of the gigantic all-American land barge as it rumbles along I-90. They’re approximately two hundred miles from Minneapolis, where they arrived the previous afternoon and spent a jet-lagged night in an airport hotel before collecting their rental.

  “Are we nearly there, yet?” Brains singsongs from the front passenger seat, where he is babying a lap-tray full of electronic components.

  Pete checks the satnav, and sighs. “Just over seven hundred and fifty miles to go…”

  Without looking up, Brains says, “I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with M.”

  Without taking his eye off the ruler-straight expanse of cracked concrete stretching in front of him, Pete replies, “Minnesota.”

  Now Brains sighs.

  Minnesota—at least this part of it—is as flat as if God’s own road-roller had spent a million years rumbling back and forth across the landscape, grinding it into grass and ten thousand lakes, oppressed by the gigantic emptiness spanning the horizon. In the far blue distance Pete thinks he can glimpse the peaks of mountains, but they could be hundreds of miles away. He knew in the abstract that the United States was huge, but the landscape they’re crawling across right now is agoraphobia inducing: you could lose the whole of England in it.

  Neither Pete nor Brains are used to driving on the wrong side of the road, that is to say, on the right. Luckily a ruler-straight interstate in the middle of nowhere is a relatively safe place to train one’s subconscious to do a mirror-twist on reality. There’s little traffic aside from trucks, although the highway picks up locals whenever they approach the vicinity of a town, losing them again as they leave. Pete scans his instruments once more, notices that they’ve used almost half the tank of gas, and resolves to stop at the next filling station they pass.

  Pete is driving with some trepidation, for his wheels at home are a Yamaha bike and he’s finding the Escalade a learning experience. As for Brains, the rubric “don’t ask, don’t tell” could well apply to his preferred choice of ground transport: his hovercraft isn’t road-legal and he’s still sore at Environmental Security for impounding his Kettenkrad until it can be thaumaturgically decontaminated.

  “Active service,” Brains says, disgustedly. “I knew there was a reason I didn’t let myself get roped into that stuff.”

  “It’s a bit like cricket,” Pete agrees. “Weeks of endless boredom interspersed with the occasional moment of existential terror.” Then he flinches as he notices that his right front tire is rolling along the solid white line at the edge of the road. There’s no rumble strip to provide a wake-up vibration. “Oh dear.”

  “How’s it coming along?” he asks Brains, to break the boredom.

  “Slowly.” Brains bites his upper lip. “Need to stop this evening so I can use the soldering iron.”

  “It needs soldering?” Pete is surprised.

  “It’s not exactly the kind of thing you can order pre-assembled off the shelf from Radio Shack. I can only do so much while we’re bouncing all over the road.”

  His lap-tray bears a bunch of components: an Arduino board, a couple of shields, a wire-wrap breadboard, some ICs, and a USB power bank. Pete is not, in fact, bouncing them all over the road—his driving hand is steady—but the road surface itself is rough, with occasional potholes that threaten to throw Brains’s collection of components to the wind.

  “Maybe you should put it away for now and look up a motel we can stop at overnight?” Pete suggests.

  Brains frowns. “The sooner we get there, the sooner we can fuck off home again,” he complains. “Don’t you want to get back to your wife and kid?” He doesn’t notice Pete’s fingers whiten slightly where they grip the rim of the wheel, or relax a second later.

  “Give my regards to Pinky, when you see him.” Brains’s husband.

  “Touché,” Brains backs down. “I’m sorry. This landscape—it’s getting on my tits.”

  “Mine, too,” Pete admits. “Seriously, though, I can’t do more than another six or eight hours of this. And if you take over, firstly you’ll be driving through the night—” on the wrong side of the road, at that—“and secondly, we won’t be at our best when we arrive.”

  “Whatever happened to straight in, see what’s happening there, straight out and report home?”

  “Two thousand miles of interstate happened.” Pete drums on the steering wheel.

  Pete and Brains have drawn the long straw on this mission. Theirs is the easy if extraordinarily dull task: fly into Minneapolis, hire a set of wheels, drive a thousand miles to Colorado Springs—taking instrument readings for the last five hundred miles using the thaumometer that Brains is assembling in his lap—have a quick look around a few churches just to make sure they haven’t erupted in tentacles, and drive back to Minneapolis to catch a flight home. The plan is subject to updated orders from HQ, of course, but it’s a simple in-and-out. Which is about all they can be entrusted with, because they’re not really field officers: this kind of amateurism is what you get when the capricious über-boss tells His sorting hat to pick names at random out of the House of Those Who Won’t Be Missed.

  The one real drawback is all the driving the plan calls for. Flying straight into Denver would save a couple thousand miles, but Schiller’s people might be keeping an eye on international arrivals. Hence the decision to enter via the state next door, to muddy the reporting chain.

  Pete, for all that he looks like a skinny, middle-aged biker, is actually an ordained vicar in the Church of England, and thus ideologically suspect per the New Management. He was sucked into the Laundry when the Eater of Souls made a regrettable but necessary judgement call a few years ago (he needed an expert on pre-Nicene heresies in a real hurry), then Pete accidentally made himself useful during the desperate struggle to defend Yorkshire. When the target of a mission is notorious for its collection of mega-churches—almost unknown in the UK—and has previously been implicated in the Nazgûl’s attempt at subverting the New Management, sending a churchman along seems pruden
t. As for Brains (who resembles a famous mythbusting television personality), he’s been in Technical Services for a decade and a half.

  Between them, they’ve got exactly the skill set that seems appropriate on the fact-finding side of this mission.

  * * *

  Jim is through with the bathroom surprisingly fast, and steps back into the dayroom of the suite just as I’m tipping the bellhop who delivered our “engagement presents.” By the time I’ve showered, dried my hair, and reapplied my anti-combustion makeup, he’s got our new phones plugged in to charge and is downloading their new firmware. I yawn. “Dinner, or I’m going to fall over,” I tell him, which is a little bit of an exaggeration—of necessity I’m a bit of a night owl these days—but it’s already past midnight back home.

  “Let’s take a walk.” He pauses.

  “I’d better get dressed then, shouldn’t I?” I unlock my suitcase, then grin at him over my shoulder because I never get tired of him looking at me like that: bend over, waggle butt, watch Fuckboy’s face. Then I tense. There’s a note inside the case: THIS BAG HAS BEEN OPENED BY THE TRANSPORTATION SAFETY ADMINISTRATION. Well, fuck. I systematically unpack and check that nothing’s gone missing, or been added, before I unwind a millimeter and assemble an outfit. I let the chilly sweat in the small of my back evaporate before I put it on. A fully clothed Mhari emerges, entirely sober and professional, as I silently process all the ways I nearly fucked up just now. “Have you checked your bag?” I say aloud.

  “No, should I?”

  “Yes, yes you should. But—not yet.” He freezes over the combination lock. “Wait until your phone’s ready and then scan it with OFCUT first.”

  “Why?”

  “Stop thinking like a cop and remember we’re illegals, maybe?”

  “But—” He bites his tongue, and I can see the gears turning in his head as I hold up the TSA notice. “Oh.” He takes a careful step back from his case.

  “I screwed up; I don’t need you to screw up also. Nobody planted a bomb in my bag so they probably didn’t make us, but even so. I got a distinct being watched feeling back in arrivals.” I shrug. Jim’s face is a picture. “C’mon, sexytimes are just our cover story.” I tug him in the direction of the vestibule. “Try not to lose situational awareness.”

  “Thank you for balancing that invigorating bucket of ice water on the door edge, Madame Director.” Jim takes a couple of shuddering breaths as I scrawl an amateurish ward on the inside of the door. “Dammit,” he adds under his breath, then offers me his arm.

  “It was a wake-up call for me, too,” I say, sotto voce. “This kind of thing really isn’t my cup of cocoa.”

  “We’re amateurs. Babes in the fucking wood.”

  “Yes. So let’s shape up, shall we?”

  I know the criteria for Active Service training. Back in the old days—between about 1991 and 2001—there used to be a battery of psych tests, then between two and four years of supervised experience before they’d consider putting an agent into the field. But then everything accelerated out from our control, and we had to cut back training to six months, like an army on the losing side of a war throwing green recruits into the meat grinder. And now this: people with relevant skill sets being expected to improvise, playing by 1939 rules. Sometimes it works, and the survivors get to write the training manuals for the next generation, but the personal consequences of failure are drastic, and you can’t learn from a fatal mistake.

  I yawn (and snap my mouth shut just in time as the lift stops and the doors slide open): I’m that tired. Not even Jim squiring me out into the neon-lit twilight of a semi-legendary city I’ve always meant to visit can stop the yawns coming.

  There’s this myth that New York is the city that never sleeps, but that seems to only be half-true. A lot of the smaller shops on the side-streets are shuttered and dark, although a few blocks away I can see the illuminations from Times Square. But people dine late in this town, and there are plenty of bars and restaurants still open. Unfortunately, our phones are still downloading stuff, and I didn’t think to bring a paper guidebook, so we’re stuck with wandering aimlessly until we see something we like the look of.

  We end up in a family-style Lebanese diner a few blocks from the hotel in the opposite direction from the bright lights. I’m hopelessly lost and relying on Jim to navigate, because all these ruler-straight roads and high-rise buildings look the same to me. The food’s probably good, but I barely taste it on the way down. “No wine for you,” Jim says repressively, and I roll my eyes before conceding the point. Maybe tomorrow.

  Afterwards, with my stomach pleasantly stunned, I stand on the sidewalk outside and look up at the stars. They’re spectacular with PHANG-enhanced vision. “If we go straight back I’ll fall asleep,” I tell him. “Walk for a bit?”

  He nods, glancing around. “Let’s get a feel for things.” Jim has police eyes: he spent years training and more years working the beat. His gaze is never still, always flickering around when we’re in public, assessing and evaluating. Although I’ve done an accelerated police training course I’ll never have his situational awareness. We pass a couple of side-streets where even to my eye transactions appear to be taking place, either bottle-washers sharing a cigarette break or locals engaging in a little bit of extralegal trade. Jim twitches, then determinedly turns away and walks on, which makes me smile.

  “Not our circus, not our monkeys,” I murmur, and he nods.

  We walk for a couple of kilometers outside the tourist areas, I think. Shops seem to cluster by trade. One block is nothing but buttons, trimming, and wholesale beads, another is all fabric importers. But the streets are all deep cement-lined canyons, and whenever I look up I nearly fall over with a combination of fatigue and dizziness. At one point I see a familiar silhouette looming above me: the Empire State Building, comically foreshortened. But there’s no giant ape clinging to the airship mooring mast at the top, and at street level it’s surrounded by scaffolding. Home—London—is the same, I suppose. All big cities have a lived-in feel and smell of fast food and truck exhausts, in a way that no movie can ever convey.

  Finally we turn and head back towards our hotel. “You’re sure this is the right way?” I ask, lost as I am.

  “Yeah.” He nods. “Follow Broadway to Times Square, then go four blocks north and two east.” He says it patiently, as if it should mean something to me. “It’s not far.” Although not far in Jim-speak could mean anything. “I could fly it in about a minute, if…” He stares upward, wistfully.

  “No flying,” I tell him, tightening my grip on his arm. Even though it would be fun, doing the Superman and Lois Lane thing. “Nothing that might raise your parasite load. Operational use and emergencies only.”

  He nods, jaw muscles tensing. We’re in potentially hostile territory, and it’d be a really bad idea for Jim to attract the attention of the local vigilantes, half of whom are neo-Nazi thugs.

  By the time we get to Times Square it’s past ten o’clock local time, three in the morning back home, and even Jim is beginning to flag. There are lots of people about but the shops have either closed or are closing—giant flagship branches of famous trademarked brands, Skittles and Disney, and cosmetics chains like Sephora. There’s a police station in the middle of the square and two black-and-white cars parked nearby, but what gets my attention—and Jim’s—is the quartet of silver-suited figures posed motionless on the roof. If they weren’t silver they might resemble Autons, the murderous shop mannequins from Doctor Who back when I was a kid. No capes, no boots, just silver body-stockings that cover every inch from crown to toe. They face outwards, looking across the sea of late-night idlers like a promise of blood on the wind. Something about them feels terribly familiar. Then I hear them in the back of my head, a distant hungry buzz and chatter. I think back to the “engagement presents” waiting in the hotel room and realize what the mannequins are. I nudge Jim: “They’re PHANGs—but not ours. Don’t make eye contact,” I hiss. They’re scanni
ng the crowd, looking for a certain type of trouble.” Let’s get out of here. Don’t run, and don’t, whatever you do, power up.”

  Bless him, he obeys without asking questions until we turn the corner and pass a wall of souvenir-shop windows full of overpriced electronics and tacky made-in-China memorabilia. “What?” he asks.

  “They’re alert.” I shiver, remembering their hungry chatter. (I was fed well—don’t ask—before we left: mine is not an active appetite right now.) I would know if their V-parasites were of the same lineage as mine. The infestation riding the people in the silver suits feels subtly wrong, weirdly synchronized, as if they’re a single organism in four separate bodies. I can still hear them distantly, the same way I sense members of my own tribe. “Local PHANGs, out in public, standing around on an NYPD shop roof. What does that tell you?”

  He stares at me. “Is there a local TPCF?” (Transhuman Police Coordination Force, our very own official team of supercops.) “I mean, New York State or City?”

  “Not that I know of—I thought it was all vigilante assholes and the military over here.”

  It’s a puzzler. But then, American police arrangements are utterly weird to British eyes, with every municipality and state and transport authority potentially having its own sheriff’s department or police force or state troopers or thief takers or whatever. And that’s before you even think about the federal agencies like the FBI and DEA.

  “They could be federal. Or city.” He squints over his shoulder. “Or you know who.”

  “Don’t say it.” We’re near the entrance to our hotel. I can recognize that much. “Do you suppose He knows?”

  “Why else do you think He sent us here, darling?” He slows and turns to embrace me.

  “Yes, let’s work on our cover story.” I lean in close and kiss him lightly as he slides his arms around me. Presently I pull back and lean my cheek against the side of his neck. “Mmm, that’s good. Yes, He fucking knew. Or guessed. Jim, something is very wrong here.”