The Labyrinth Index

by Charles Stross

  I give him my best, falsest, New York smile and ask, “What is it, dear?”

  “Get your camera out,” he says conversationally.

  “Camera—” oh fuck. Then I hear the mindless static chittering of approaching V-parasites. Don’t know how they found us here, but that’s for later.

  “Did you ever watch La Femme Nikita?” he asks. “The Luc Besson movie version, not the shitty remake?”

  “You’re thinking of the restaurant fight scene, right?” He nods.

  By this time I have my phone in hand and unlocked. I raise it and use the front camera to peek over my shoulder. My skin crawls as I spot them. Two mannequins, their head-to-toe suits silvery-blue in the dimness of the restaurant vestibule, scanning for—well, if I can feel them at this range, they can sure as fuck feel me—

  OFCUT firmware: loaded. A targeting box frames Jim’s head; I angle my phone away from him. “Going to get messy in three, two—”

  “Go now—”

  I turn as Jim picks up his steak knife and draws his arm back. Time seems to slow. The light fades to red, the air around me feels hot and viscous as syrup, and the voice of my V-parasites rises from a quiet purring to a harsh screech of hatred and rage. As I bring the basilisk gun round I feel a huge surge of energy beside me, then Officer Friendly hurls his knife. It’s an invisible blur even to PHANG-accelerated vision, but I hear the thud of impact as I hit the firing button on my basilisk gun and light up the nearest hostile.

  The moving mannequin sparkles for a fraction of a second, then flames spurt from it in all directions. (It. I’m distancing myself, aren’t I? It makes the flashbacks easier to handle.) Great gouts and streamers of sparks like a phone battery exploding flare across the white linen table cloths and well-dressed office workers to all sides, lighting up the ceiling, the slamming thud driving needles into my ears as the front window blows out. Splash one.

  The second mannequin gathers himself and leaps over his comrade’s flame-gouting skeleton, which is still falling apart—all of this takes a fractional second—and he twists and kicks off the ceiling ten feet overhead, bearing down on me. Or he would be, if he hadn’t punched his leg right through the overhead paneling and set himself spinning. His parasites’ scream of rage and hunger deafens me as I bring my phone up and aim it at him—then realize the screen of my Samsung is impaled on the second joint of my right thumb. When I fired the basilisk app I punched right through the screen, the circuit board, and the stainless steel back. Which ruined my nail polish, and now it’s getting really hot.

  Shit. I throw my chair at him, then do a rolling forward somersault down the stairs. I rip the burning-hot phone off my thumb, tearing my glove up some more. Smoke and sparks boil out of it. The first screams of fear and pain begin to arrive from the other diners as I tumble across the landing. Where’s Jim? Don’t panic. When Officer Friendly cuts loose, he’s close enough to Superman for government business: he can look after himself. As long as nobody bites him. Don’t think about that.

  Then I hear another, most unwelcome, sound. Looks like the Seventh Cavalry is piling in upstairs—and they’re not ours.

  I slam into the floor at the bottom of the staircase and kick off. A flash of silver at the top of the stairs, then muffled thuds striking the floor around me. Are they shooting at me? Fuck that shit. I throw my phone at them, gushing smoke and bursts of blue-white flame—lithium batteries are quite impressive when they cut loose—and the shooting stops as I hurl myself along the corridor to the kitchen. Heat, stainless steel, the sluggish shouts of human chefs. Where’s the knife block? I grab a big Sabatier-K in each hand and as a silver figure dives through the door I hurl one overhand. I duck below the center island. The chefs stand as if frozen, implements in hand, mouths opening as my knife embeds in the wall. I grab a heavy skillet as a metallic blur whips round and bears on me and I bring it up just in time to catch a double-tap of slugs that were meant for my chest.

  There is a click from my assailant’s gun and he reaches for his reload. But he’s unaccountably slowed almost to human speed. Maybe he hasn’t fed recently? I leap and scream wordlessly and bash him over the head with the pan. Then I’m past him. A squat extractor duct disappears through a panel in the wall, a covered-over window. I slam a steel Crock-Pot into it so hard that the pot crumples. Brick dust sprays everywhere. I dig my fingers into the extractor ductwork, tear it away, and scramble out, sharp edges tearing a rip in my coat. I’ve lost my hat somewhere along the way, and I’m in a cellar with a skylight, so I yank my fake turtleneck up and over my face before I jump and haul myself up into the alleyway behind the restaurant.

  I’m halfway to the end of the alley when there’s a thud behind me. I whirl and get my hands up just as a very dusty Fuckboy—tie askew, coat dripping something horrible, and I can’t help noticing he’s bleeding from a graze on the back of one hand—lands in a crouch. A small avalanche of bricks and drywall fragments bounces harmlessly off his head and shoulders. “Mhari?”

  “Go! Go!” I blur towards the side-street, Jim right behind me. Abruptly I feel a great lassitude as a knot of hunger twists in my gut. I’ve been running on PHANG mojo for almost thirty seconds. It’s incredibly draining. I force myself to straighten up my posture and slow down. “Anyone following?” I gasp.

  “Think I lost them.” He stops abruptly. “A dragnet, I think. We must have pinged their radar last night. Fuck that was close.” Suddenly his arms are around me and I’m burrowing my face into his chest. I wrap my arms around his waist, inside his coat, before either of us quite realize what’s happening.

  “I thought I’d lost you.” I take a deep, sobbing breath as I try to get my shit together and make sense of the past minute. “How did you get out?”

  He strokes the back of my neck as if soothing a frightened animal. “When in doubt, go through the walls. Their backup tried to swarm me but I punched two out, then went up three floors, through the sidewall into the next building over, then back down the outside.” I feel rather than see him cringe in remembered guilt: “I don’t even want to think about the property damage. Architecture is fragile. How about you?”

  I haul in another lungful of sweet, blessed air. “Live-action Nikita re-enactor here, with added vampire mojo. I broke my phone, but other than that, it was nothing.” Like hell it was, but I’m not ever telling Officer Friendly that. I sniff at him. “Your coat’s wrecked and you’ve got plaster in your hair. Did you get mixed up and try to role-play Leon instead?”

  “You smell of smoke and your coat’s wrecked, too.” He lets go of me and we step back, then he grins. “But we’ve got two hours before we have to catch our train. I think this calls for evasion and a change of appearance?”

  I take hold of his proffered arm and conjure up the fakiest ever fake Barbie squeal of ironic delight: “Let’s go shopping!” Because I’ve got a government-backed credit card and I know how to submit an expense claim.

  * * *

  Rewind a week—again.

  “What about our other adversaries?” I asked the Senior Auditor.

  “Which ones?” Dr. Armstrong looked mildly amused.

  “The internal—” I began, then thought better of it.

  “Ah yes, that.” His amusement faded.

  I took a deep breath and looked around the interior of the black dome. Actually, there was nothing to see: just the two of us, our chairs, and the circle of floor beneath us, inscribed with the circuitry of Persephone’s security grid. It was more than airtight: I could barely hear the chittering of my parasite load. Stay here too long and I’d starve into dormancy, but not before the SA and I ran out of oxygen to breathe. This wasn’t a timestop grid, like the one the alfär used to store their alien weapon-beasts, or Basil used to stash his victims between blood meals. It was a spacestop grid: time continued at the same rate as on the outside, but shielded by an event horizon.

  “We’re quite alone in here, I assure you.”

  “Yes, I—”

  Dr
. Armstrong made a steeple of his fingers. “Conan, what is best in life?” he quoted.

  “What? Now you’re being annoying! I don’t understand.” What has some macho Xena knock-off got to do with—

  “I apologize.” He sighed. “It was a quote, but I meant to illustrate a point I haven’t made yet. What is best in life? Go on, Mhari, that’s a serious question.”

  What is best in life? Well, how about being able to go about in daylight without being forced to cover up and wear vampish clownface? How about not feeling this bitter thirst all the fucking time, a reminder that my life is built on death? How about not being expected to carry out executions? How about us not being collectively enslaved by an ancient evil as the alternative to human extinction?

  I was about to open my mouth and say some of this, but I choked on my tongue just in time as I realized that these were not the best things in life: they were among the worst.

  “What is best in life, Michael?” I asked, staring at my nails by way of studied ironic emphasis. “How about you tell me instead of tap-dancing around a shitty metaphor?”

  He gave me a long stare. “Our first priority is the same as it ever was,” he said: “survival. Not all of us, or any of us in particular, or forever, but survival is the principal goal. It’s the function of all life forms to persist for as long as possible. If nobody and nothing survives, nothing matters. And I don’t know about you, but I’m deeply uncomfortable with that.”

  Eh. I nodded cautiously.

  “We’re human, and mere survival isn’t enough,” he continued after a moment. “We have executive function and theory of mind and language. We make plans. It’s what makes our species so spectacularly successful. But we need to have some hope for the future, we need to be able to think we see light at the end of the tunnel, or we despair and we give up and then we die. If you like, our biggest adversary is our own fear. So, Mhari—before we discuss threats—what do you hope for? I want to know what kind of future you would like to see.”

  “I—”

  “Be honest, now,” he said with an impish grin, then without pausing for breath added, “Onyx, Hadean, Cantabrian, Luciferous: Execute Sitrep One.”

  “Subjective integrity is maintained. Subjective continuity of experience is maintained. Subject observes no tampering.” It was my own voice speaking through my own lips, but I wasn’t moving them.

  “Now execute Sitrep Two, Mhari.”

  I heard myself say, as from a great distance: “V-parasites at zero point eight, stable. Interference at zero point one five, rising. Subjective compliance at zero point nine five, stable.”

  “Good.” His voice was tense, over-controlled. “Now I’m about to go off script before terminating this session, Mhari. I want to apologize in advance for any distress this may cause you … what future do you hope for?”

  All the sensible inhibitions which would normally stop me vomiting my innermost feelings in a co-worker’s lap had shut down. Distantly, I knew I should be furious. I should be throat-rippingly enraged, locked in a seeing-red, fang-extending haze of murderous blood hunger. But I wasn’t. I felt calm, almost placid, as I said: “I lost hope two years ago.” Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Dr. Armstrong.

  But instead of looking shocked, he frowned thoughtfully and nodded to himself, as if I’d just confirmed an unwelcome line of speculation. “I’d like you to think back to what it was like before you lost hope,” he said. “And tell me what you wanted from your life.”

  I almost threw up. “What most teenaged girls want? Boyfriends who respected me, a rewarding, enjoyable job, enough money not to feel hard up? Later, a romantic wedding to an adoring husband and a house, then a couple of cute babies who’ll grow up into adults I can be proud of?” And a magical pony on top. “I got the job,” I added, just a tad bitterly, “and I can’t say I didn’t get the boyfriends, at least some of the time.” But the rest was a smoking crater.

  Dr. Armstrong tried another angle. “When did you give up hope?”

  That was easy. “PHANG fucked up everything. And my boyfriend at the time”—well, okay: Oscar was married to someone else, but he’d been threatening to divorce her for ages—“was one of Basil’s victims.”

  “Oh dear.” The SA shut up and looked at me. “How did PHANG syndrome fuck things up for you?” he asked.

  I was incredulous under the thick blanket of externally imposed apathy, but the oath of office compelled me to give the clearest factual answer to the question that I could formulate, rather than just swearing. “PHANG syndrome is contagious, lethal, and blood-borne. I can infect a victim by drinking their blood. Nobody knows whether other bodily fluids create the feeder link, but I don’t want to find out the hard way on someone I like.” Or love. “So it’s strictly condoms or non-penetrative sex, and as for babies”—too late—“nope.” I swallowed bile. “But that’s the easy bit. You know I have to feed, and you know what feeding does to the donors. I’m an obligate cannibal, Mike. If I don’t kill people, I will get sick and die horribly. And not just me: the others are in the same boat. I never wanted this! I’m trying to minimize the damage by organizing blood distribution and finding an approved source of donors—” I retched.

  “Exit supervision,” he said hastily. “You can stop now.”

  Fury descended on me, but I bottled it and sat, head down, choking with rage and shame.

  “Was that entirely necessary?” I demanded as soon as I could talk again.

  “Yes. Look at me.” I looked him in the eye and saw the faint green glow reflected there slowly dim. “You seem to be in a bad place, Mhari. And we’re trusting you with a lot of lives. That’s why somebody had to ask you these things. To make sure you don’t simply give up and die halfway through the job, taking everybody else with you.”

  “I’m not going to give up now,” I snarled, making an oath of the simple fact. My own life might be a desolate wasteland, but if I gave up it’d all be for nothing, wouldn’t it? At least if I kept going now someone else might benefit. Not the donors, and especially, please God, not the New Management, but …

  “Let me tell you what I—and the rest of the inner circle, the team who set up Continuity Operations—are working towards,” said the Senior Auditor. “Let me tell you what keeps me going through the night. Then you can make up your own mind if it’s enough for you.”

  And he told me, and it’s going to change everything—but not yet, and first we have to survive the New Management.

  SIX

  LEVIATHAN’S REPRESENTATIVE

  Gilbert’s first reaction to the stranger in the mailroom is flat-out terror. He’s deathly afraid that the sudden appearance of the man with the British accent means that his cell has been cracked by the enemy. Second thoughts strike him before he can speak: there is no earthly reason why the Nazgûl would toy with him this way. They’d go straight for the kill.

  “Who sent you?” he demands, heart pounding. He looks around for a weapon he can grab, but the Library of Congress basement is lamentably short on such things.

  “I’m from the British government,” says the stranger, raising his hands warily. “We want to help.” The British? Gilbert stares, hard, trying to understand what’s going on. He doesn’t look like a British spy, although Bond movies are a dubious guide to reality at best—a portly, middle-aged, short-sighted James Bond? Wearing a gray button-up knitted vest?

  “You are Gilbert Tancredy, formerly of the Occult Texts Division of the Postal Service Inspectorate?”

  Gil stares at him. There’s no point denying it, something very strange is happening here. “That’s me. Who are you?”

  “Derek Blacker from, ah, your former agency’s opposite numbers—”

  “—What, the Royal Mail inspectors?”

  “No.” He grimaces. “An organization you haven’t heard of, we do secret stuff for the government—but we’re not like the Nazgûl,” he adds hastily, then spoils it slightly by adding, “I hope not, anyway.” An uncomfortable pause.
“Did you know Bill McKracken?”

  Gil unwinds very slightly. The name is familiar. “Not sure. Why?”

  “He”—Blacker deflates—“he died, actually. In London, enemy action. One of yours. We owe him.”

  Blacker is so quintessentially, bumblingly amateurish that Gil is at a loss to understand how this could be anything other than what it looks like: an onrushing train wreck. “You mentioned the P-President.” The word is hard to pronounce, but gets easier every time. “Why?”

  Blacker shrugs, then reaches into a pocket and pulls out a couple of translucent dice. As he bounces them on the palm of his left hand Gilbert sees there’s something very odd about them, almost as if they’re not cubes but shadows cast by some species of higher-dimensional object. “An oracle told me I’d find you here,” he says apologetically. “We need to arrange a meeting between the President and one of our people. It’s very important. We know the Nazgûl are looking for him, and Forecast—our oracle—said you were our best bet for finding him first. Before they do.”

  “A meeting.” Gilbert is still disturbed, but at least this is something concrete he can latch onto. “Why?”

  “It’s not in anyone’s interests for the Nazgûl to get their hands on the President. As an allied power, we can help.”

  That’s a non-answer if ever Gilbert has heard one, but at least this encounter now makes some kind of—admittedly surreal—sense. “I can’t put you in touch with the President,” he says, “but I can forward your request to somebody who can arrange something. If the President people think it’s a good idea.” Derek looks at him oddly, and for a moment Gil wonders if he misspoke. Blacker refers to the President as if it’s the title of a person. A person on the run from the Nazgûl, he suddenly realizes, and it makes a horrible kind of sense, although he can’t quite put his finger on why that might be so. Maybe this President person was somebody high up in the Postal Service Inspectorate? Someone who knows where the bodies are buried?