The Labyrinth Index

by Charles Stross

  I get my head down and wait for my new phone to boot up—if we’ve been made there’s no longer any point in religiously staying dark. “Jim. You ready to go at short notice?”

  “What? You mean—” He shakes his head. “Neither of us are dressed for it, and I can’t go that far anyway. We need the survival suits, helmets, and harness.”

  Dammit, he’s right. I grab the overhead handle as we screech sideways into a gap between two semitrailers, then accelerate forward again. Flashing blue lights reflect in the windshield, but then I realize they’re from inside the car—I guess there are some perks to having a Secret Service ride, even if it’s not the presidential armored limo. My phone comes up and I enter my PIN, then check my inbox.

  “Your ride will be ready to take off in about ninety minutes,” I tell them. “Then it’ll take another two hours and ten minutes to come overhead.” Technically, 302 Heavy could take off, light its afterburners, and be over DC in an hour and a quarter—just as long as the pilots pay no attention to the Patriot missile batteries around DC or the F-22 squadron at Langley AFB, and are willing to leave a trail of broken windows down the entire Eastern Seaboard. Oh, and as long as they don’t care about making the pickup. In practice, the plan calls for 302 Heavy to stay subsonic and broadcast a civilian airliner call sign, staying well outside the capital city’s defensive perimeter. “You need to be ready to fly by two thirty to two fifty. Go to a safe location not less than ten miles north of I-495 and not less than ten miles west of Baltimore, then have Mr. Tancredy contact Derek with the details, no later than three o’clock. Jim will pick you—” I glance over my shoulder at the rear window behind the President. “—duck!”

  With a loud crack, the rear window turns opaque. A nearly invisible sheet of something transparent vibrates, just inside it, absorbing the force of the bullet.

  “Fuck.” The President winds up in the legwell of the back seat with Officer Mattingley sprawled atop him, putting his body between his charge and the shooter.

  “A tire shot that went wide, I think,” Jim remarks coolly as Mattingley yelps angrily into his headset. I point my camera at the starred-over window and fire up OFCUT, which requires another PIN and a fingerprint—I swear if they made phones with blood samplers it’d take a drop to unlock—then scan. I can’t quite hear anything, but—

  “Playmates,” I announce. “Two PHANGs in a Dodge Charger, one shooter. You want to deal with them, Jim? I might smudge my makeup.”

  “Happy to oblige,” he says, opening the passenger door and stepping out into the traffic at sixty miles per hour. Then, while I’m grabbing for the door to close it, he goes full Officer Friendly on them. Well, about 80 percent Officer Friendly. He doesn’t have the suit of armor with the custody helmet and flashing blue light on top, so all he brings to the fight is a solidly built silverback-executive-looking guy in a business suit who can fly and punch through walls. Not Superman, but his Hollywood stunt double. The shooter leaning out of the Dodge gets off a couple of shots but they go wide, then Jim gets his hands under the driver-side door sill and flips the car on its side. I wince because it’s trailing sparks like a Roman candle went off under it. That’s one hostile down, with the highway behind us conveniently blocked as one of the semitrailers we overtook earlier jackknifes.

  But then our driver slams on the brakes and I nearly go flying through the front windscreen, saved only by my seatbelt. My mouth dries up like magic and my teeth ache as I feel a silvery shimmery sense: we’ve got company and they’ve blocked the road ahead of us.

  “Wait here,” I tell Mattingley.

  “You can’t—” he says, then shuts up as I bare my fangs at him. I unbutton my collar and pull the hood of my bodysuit over my face, then bail out and go fast.

  As I accelerate, the voices in the back of my head rise from a distant hiss of static to a deafening locust-swarm roar, hungry for blood. Gravity weakens, the air flows thick and surprisingly hot, daylight reddens, and everything around me seems to slow.

  I hit the ground and roll to my feet, taking in the situation. The Escalade is swerving onto the shoulder, preparing to drive around the roadblock. Behind it, I glimpse Jim peeling the roof off the Dodge in slow motion. Someone inside the car is waving a gun around and I hear a dull, hollow boom as they pull the trigger, but Jim is behind them and I’m not too worried.

  In front of us, the Prius stops and pops all four doors. Faceless mannequins in skintight silver Lycra climb out, not yet going to speed. Two of them have assault rifles and they’re raising them to hose me down as I pull my phone up. “Say cheese,” I say.

  Bang. Looks like their bodysuits are just metallized spandex, which gives zero protection against basilisk weapons. Unfortunately my suit’s no better, and while one of them is now a toppling pillar of flaming charcoal with white bones poking out, the other shooter is aiming at me. Something is wrong with this picture and it takes me a split second and a diving roll to realize what it is: they may be PHANGs but they don’t have the superspeed thing down. If they did, I’d be bleeding out already.

  Thud. (Pause.) Thud. (Pause.) Thud. I roll frantically, then kick off the ground and dash round the back of a large pickup truck as the shooter with the M16 goes full auto and tries to track me. Too late I register the propane cylinder on the truck’s load bed. Is the silver shooter stupid enough to light up a tanker less than twenty meters away? Yes he fucking is, and his mates are rushing around the cab to meet me, and I’m willing to bet that they’ve got handguns or super-strength or something. Yippee. I haven’t had this much fun since I was in the Transhuman Police, mixing it up with superpowered neo-Nazis, and by fun I mean fuck me I demand a pay rise and a nice quiet office job—

  It comes to me as I close with the jokers that I can’t get enough air. Super-speed has a huge drawback: I could leave Usain Bolt in the dust over a hundred meter sprint (if metahumans weren’t banned from sporting events under IOC rules), but getting air in and out of my lungs is murder and I’ll collapse from heatstroke in less than a minute if I keep it up. I’ve got to end this fast—

  The two hostiles are spreading out around the direction I’m running in and one of them is raising a pistol in a two-handed stance that means trouble, so I sprint at him and punch as hard as I can. Blinding agony engulfs my fist and a spike of sound rams my ears as he pulls the trigger, but his gun goes spinning up and away. I shoulder-barge him with my remaining momentum and it’s like hitting a brick wall. Numb and staggering, I topple over his body as his sidekick turns. There’s still no sign they can go fast—I actually took them by surprise—but now I’m flat on the ground and my right hand is a solid ball of fire that won’t unfold properly. If I can’t get up in the next second he’ll be on me, and I can’t breathe—

  Something black and vaguely rectangular sails overhead like the Detroit iron angel of automotive death. It’s the hood of the Dodge Charger, and it cuts Goon the Second off at the waist in a spray of gore. Everything goes red for a moment and I can’t see, and I can tell I’m slowing down because the automatic gunfire is speeding up. The idiot shooter is spraying bullets with random enthusiasm. I gasp for air, desperate to breathe. It feels like I’m burning up. There’s an incredibly strong smell, something like rotten eggs, chokingly intense, as liquid squirts out of holes in the propane tank and runs boiling across the surface of the highway. “Mhari—” Arms like a car crusher lock tight around me and I scream as my damaged hand bounces off the ground. “I’ve got you,” says Fuckboy. “Punching out now.”

  “But OSCAR—”

  “He’ll meet us at the rendezvous. Come on.” Then I’m looking down at the concrete roadbed and lane-divider stripes from above as they recede. He’s holding me against his chest like a stray kitten he’s picked up with a hand around its ribs, and the white stripes begin to unroll at speed. Gale-force wind tugs at my clothes. I fight to take a deep breath, and that’s when the propane vapor evaporating from the puddle beneath the leaking tank ignites and hell’s doors sl
am open behind us.

  TEN

  FLIGHT PLAN

  Jon is fraying at the seams: Jonquil is tattered shreds of memory, but Yarisol is happily in her element here in the ghost roads. It’s not exactly a safe space (there are things that live here, unseen, for to see is to be seen and to be seen is to be understood and to be understood is to come to the end of mortal existence), but she’s come this way many a time before, sneaking behind the backs and minds of her cruel and vindictive trainers. Finding a stakeout at the exit node is nothing new to her. Furthermore, it’s a not-newness she knows how to deal with. Violently.

  The playground bullies (Jonquil’s metaphor, not Yarisol’s) cluster around the glowing portal, looking in. It’s a stakeout in Washington DC, the capital of the enemy’s empire in this universe. Yarisol peers past them, employing the inner eye visualization trick that lets her see the informational density of the world around her. The landscape of this place is a fictional construct mapped to the mana flow of the space beneath it. In the near distance, a few miles away in the real world, a gigantic labyrinth of power glows around a dreadful star-bright kernel that defies scrutiny. Other lines and arcs of power form a graph of energy flowing around the boulevards and avenues of the ceremonial capital. Jonquil’s memories of a documentary about DC’s construction return to prompt her: there is strong ritual magic here, a binding at the center of empire. The urük may lack the sophistication of alfär magic but they are not completely ignorant. The British must have known this, for they burned the White House—and the Library of Congress—in 1814, before the binding came to full power. But the sacrificial repository at Arlington, its proximity to the Pentagon, and its distance from the Library … it all makes sense to Yarisol.

  Patrolling the ghost roads around their labyrinthine hub, the Nazgûl’s minions have stumbled upon the anchor that the team in DC have established for Jon to home in on. Now they’re waiting to see who uses it. Too bad for them, she thinks, nursing the glow of righteous retribution. Seen by her inner eye, the four playground bullies are shadowy humanoid figures, greenish jellyfish with tendrils limning central nervous systems surrounded by the dull red glow of freshly fed peripheral tissues. They’re magi, but curiously weak and uniform in appearance. They crouch around the glowing beacon, looking inwards as if they think it’s an entry point rather than an endpoint.

  Jon examines her two companions, hunkered down just ahead of her. They’re the pinkish-orange of healthy humans, although Brains shows a faint stippling of dry rot around his head—an early sign of K-parasites attracted by the rich flavor of his thoughts. Neither of them are fighters, so this is all on her. “Stay,” she hisses at them, then darts forward, summoning her full power and turning it on the enemy.

  Good: the nearest Nazgûl mage sparkles and bursts into flames as abruptly as if she’d dropped a high-tension power line in his puddle. His neighbor to the left is thrown off his feet and tumbles backwards. Less good: the one on the right staggers but keeps his balance and turns towards her, snapping a directional shield into position with a flick of his fingers. Worst: the fourth mage doesn’t waste time with a shield but shouts a word of unbinding at her. It’s a weapon specific to these implied spaces, fuzzing and dismantling any structure it encounters. It’s also highly directional. Jon anticipated resistance, and her dive and roll takes her out of the entropic effect, though she feels the backwash: her hair crackling and feathering, her clothing taking on the form of a leathery integument.

  “Fuck!” One of her companions shouts behind her. She ignores them, goes fast, frantically mouthing words of control and binding and despair. The enemy shield bearer has concentrated single-mindedly on blocking simple attacks. He succumbs instead to creeping dread and curls in on himself, shuddering and wailing in terror. The chittering of her helpers rises to a crackling roar as she throws up a shield of her own. Playground bully number two won’t stay down: he’s sitting up, firing a handgun at the urük. This will not do! Jon throws a second jet of heat at him, and his hair catches fire and smokes most satisfactorily. She scrambles aside and circles the remaining active threat, which is bully number four.

  Closing to within twenty meters—oh for a handgun, Jonquil’s ghost laments—Yarisol comes to the fore and blocks. The enemy is slow, so slow, and doesn’t seem able to go fast. His blood is weak. Their loss, Jon’s gain. A bolt of unmaking draws a frozen line through the not-air where she was standing moments earlier but she’s no longer there, somersaulting in an arc above the plane of intersecting realities.

  A deep, long-drawn-out shout rises from a human throat behind her as bully number four’s shield lights up. Good, one of the urük has a basilisk on their phone. It’s little more than a distraction in this place, but bully number four is indeed distracted and turns to deal with the new threat. Their aim isn’t great and the bolt of unmaking they fire goes astray. The distraction is exactly what Jon needs, and as she comes down off her arc she strikes at the enemy with words of love and contagion and gravity. The last one works: regardless of their resistance to changes of emotional or epidemiological state, enemy magi splatter very satisfactorily when you squish them.

  “Yes-yes! We win! Wiktory!” Jon chants as the terror-stricken enemy’s back arches and they go into clonic seizures. She capers and waves her fist triumphantly at the dead sky. Then an apprehension that all is not right steals over her. “What-what?” she demands, dropping back into real time and looking round.

  Brains is kneeling by a supine form. “Over here!” he calls. He’s kneeling over Pete, compressing his left arm. Blood wells up between Brains’s fingers.

  Shoving her blood thirst to the back of her head with practiced brutality, Jon strides towards him, breaking stride to duck under the two frozen gashes the enemy sorcerer ripped in their local reality. “What happening?”

  “It’s Pete! He’s been shot.” In the grip of Yarisol’s ascendency she’s terrible at reading urük faces, but Brains seems distressed. Yarisol focuses, sharpening down into Jon, and recognizes that Pete has been hit by a blood strike. “What’s happening to—”

  “Where is his ward?” Jon snaps.

  “Burned out? By the lakeshore, remember? We were using our phones as backup. The OFCUT toolkit includes a protection app, but—”

  “—That’s no good here.” Jon peers at Pete. He’s not fitting and he hasn’t caught fire or bled out, but there’s something wrong with him. Something familiar as well. Blood calls to blood, and evidently the enemy urük magi have worked out a few tricks—enough to be dangerous to unprotected mortals, anyway. “Oh,” she says. She snorts, amused, and a fragment of Jonquil makes her say, “Rats deserting the sinking ship?”

  “What does that mean?” Brains demands angrily. “Can you save him?”

  “Sure,” Jon says carelessly. “He’s not in any danger? But we must enter the gateway first.” The blue-glowing circle on the ground pulses soothingly. “The others can staunch the bleeding?” She thinks for a moment. “You should avoid getting his blood on yourself, you know? And stay away from his mouth, at least until he’s been castrated: he’ll be very thirsty when he wakes up.”

  “What—”

  “He’s been blood-shot,” Jon explains patiently. “Hit by a bullet with an inscribed grid carrying some of the shooter mage’s V-symbionts. It creates a feeding link—take the feeder to the blood, rather than vice versa.” She pauses in thought for a moment. “Very elegant, any wound is rapidly fatal and the victim’s mana is transferred to the shooter. But then the shooter died, leaving the symbionts in need of a new host, yah? Pete will be fine once he learns to feed?!” She flashes Brains a brief grin, then does a double take at his expression of dismay. “Is something wrong?”

  * * *

  Tell me if you’ve heard this one: a vampire and a superhero walk into an ambush—

  I must have lost consciousness for a bit, because when I wake up Jim is holding me in a bridal carry, my right hand burns like it’s been dipped in molten lead, an
d the world is far too bright and is zooming in and out of focus. But at least we’re not flying any more. Jim peers at me anxiously. “Can you hear me, love?”

  “Put me down. I feel sick.”

  It comes to me that the reason my hand feels like the Spanish Inquisition have been testing new pilliwinks on it is that it’s clenched in a fist around something solid. Jim gingerly lowers me to my feet and I force my fingers to unclench, agonizingly slowly. Pain crosses my palm with lines of molten silver as my hand opens and something that might once have been a smartphone falls out. It tinkles as it hits the pavement. “Shit. Ow.” Memo to self: do not punch vampires while holding a phone. I’m insanely lucky the battery didn’t catch—

  —fire—

  “Whoa!” Jim swiftly pulls me two steps back from the pyre.

  My hand is still burning. I raise it and look, then shove it in my pocket hurriedly, even though it hurts so badly I want to cry. The palm of my bodysuit is ripped, exposing skin that is starting to blister and smolder in the daylight. “Need gloves,” I explain. “Feel sick.” Both Jims look at me with evident concern before I get my eyeballs pointing in the same direction. “Sym-sym-things will fix the concussion and broken hand,” I explain, “if sunlight doesn’t finish me.” I take a tentative step back, nearly trip and go over, but manage to regain my balance. I take a deep breath. “Sitrep.”

  “We’re about five blocks away. I walked the last two carrying you and the gear bag. Nobody followed us that I could see. There were two cars. I think it was a simple tail that went wrong when we spotted it. They weren’t ready and now they’re dead.”