The Labyrinth Index

by Charles Stross

  “So they had a tail on the President.” That’s bad, really bad. After a fuzzy moment—my eyelids keep trying to tell me I’m tired and they want to close—I realize something else. “My phone’s toast. You need to call Derek and let him know. Team should move.”

  “Do you have Derek’s number?” he asks mildly.

  “It was on my—” I feel like kicking myself. “Shit.”

  I force my eyes to stay open and focused on Jim, even though it’s too hot and bright and everything around me is burning. “Nothing for it, we’ll have to run on auto. Derek should have your number on his list—”

  As if on cue, Jim’s breast pocket begins to play the theme from Z Cars.

  “Jim speaking.” He looks at me. “Yes, she’s here.” He holds the phone out to me: “It’s for you.”

  “Hello? Mhari? Listen, Pete and Brains just got here with someone who looks like Jonquil only Pete’s been turned and they were jumped by PHANGs on the way in and it looks like our site’s compromised so we’re about to—”

  “Derek.” I squeeze my eyes shut. Prioritize. What’s most important to the mission? “Tell me. West or east?”

  “What?”

  “Dice, man! Tell me. Go west or go east?”

  “Is that your big question?” I can almost hear his eyes rolling from here.

  “Yes.” I grit my teeth and wait. There is a long pause. I listen for a telltale rattle but his phone’s microphone is too clever to pick up background noise.

  “Dice say … east? Yes, east: Go east, whatever that means?”

  “Thank you.” I take a deep breath, then open my eyes again. “Derek, thank you. My phone’s broken, so once you get the rendezvous details from the Comstock guy text them to Jim, then get everyone home safely. You should mobilize immediately. Remember the Moscow rules apply, as they say. Jim and I will meet you on the other side.”

  “Other side of what?” His voice rises in alarm.

  “Other side of the Atlantic, silly,” I lie through my teeth. I am such a shit, I think guiltily. Then it sours into resentment at the PM for putting me in this position. I pull my cheek back from Jim’s hand and nod at him and he hangs up.

  “What’s that about?” he asks.

  “I got Derek to roll the dice. Doing it this far ahead means there’s some risk of enemy oracles getting a fix on our future direction once the initial uncertainty dies down, but if we get separated—” I swallow. “—you’re to carry on with the plan and go west, not east. Can you do that?”

  “Yes, I—” his voice catches. “What else did he say?”

  “Too fucking much. It’s our worst-case scenario for the pawns on the board, I’m afraid.” I peer at him glumly. We haven’t been half as smart as I thought we were: I just hope we can salvage something from this. Like, oh—“Jim. Tell me how you feel?”

  “How do I…?” He chuckles disbelievingly. “All things considered I’m doing great.” He peers at me. “Is that concussion speaking?”

  “No, it’s just my suspicious paranoid nature wondering why the hell you’re not dead yet.” I lean against him and he wraps a strong arm around my shoulders, supporting me. “Let’s walk. Uh, slower?” We move at an arthritic shuffle at first. How he’s managing that, propping me up while carrying his overstuffed backpack, is beyond me. The world is still slowly spinning, and it’s too bright and fuzzy at the edges and my hand is a dull throbbing lump, but I’m not about to throw up. “Anyway. Here’s what I’ve got. Derek said Team West were ambushed and Pete’s been turned. And of course Pete will have heard me ask Derek for a roll and Derek called it for east, so that’s good.”

  “I could call him back—”

  “No, don’t. Derek will text us when he receives the rendezvous details, but apart from that, the less chatter the better. What he was telling us was, Pete’s been infected with enemy PHANG symbionts. But for a moment I wondered if he meant ‘turned’ in the other tradecraft sense, and then I began to ask myself, what’s the difference?”

  “Eh?” Jim shakes his head. “You’re not a—”

  “The opposition PHANGs are all wrong. No super-speed, not a lot of thaumic power. In New York they felt like they were all one creature, some sort of hive-mind.” Deep breath time. “Jim, if an officer is injured in the line of duty, what do you do?”

  “You evacuate them to receive medical care. It’s a no-brainer. You’re saying … they were trying to tag us? Not kill? So that, what, we’d evacuate our injured? Pete? Me?”

  I take another deep breath, feeling shaky. “Next question. Do you know the origin of the term Fifth Column?”

  I feel his arm go tense. “Mhari Murphy, you are not telling me I’m—”

  “No, let me retry. Did you ever see that Futurama episode with the Brain Slugs?”

  “Wait, what—”

  There’s only one explanation that fits, really. “Somehow they turned Pete. They’d probably have caught and turned Brains, too, if we hadn’t sent Yarisol along for the ride. They got their PHANGs into you, and it’s only a matter of time before they drain you or turn you. Probably they planned to grab and turn our entire team as we bail out.” There’s a Starbucks on the other side of the street, on the next block. “They had the President in a sandbox the whole time, until we accidentally blew the doors off it. The V-parasites they’re using aren’t free-range symbionts: they’ve been bred, or enslaved, to do a very specific job. But aside from that one thing, they’re not very good. Fancy a fancy coffee?”

  Jim sighs. “You’re planning something, aren’t you?” he complains.

  “Yes.” I thump him lightly on the shoulder. “I don’t feel like waiting for the walk light and jaywalking’s illegal in this state: pick me up and fly me over.”

  Jim does his square-jawed superhero thing and scoops me up in a carry, then levitates across the street, narrowly missing an overhead electrical cable before settling onto the pavement. He walks through the door of the semi-deserted cafe, then approaches the counter, startling the hell out of a barista before he remembers to put me down. Clearing his throat: “I’ll have a venti latte with two extra shots. To sit in, thanks.”

  “And I’ll have a double espresso, please.” I smile, then remember to yank my hood back off my face. “We’ll be in the back booth,” I add, then wobble slightly.

  “What,” Jim mutters as he sits down opposite me and dumps his bag, “are you thinking?”

  I glance round. It’s dark in the back—no windows—which is good. And the cafe is just about dead right now. We’ve somehow missed the lunchtime rush. Also good. “Give me your phone. Unlocked, please.”

  “Why?” He complies all the same. I tap into OFCUT, go into secure messaging, and fire off a FLASH message, eyes-only, to the Senior Auditor, cc’d to Persephone in case the SA is out of action, and Mrs. MacDougal in Human Resources, who is a level-headed sort and will know what needs to be done. (Dear God—and by God, I do not mean the Black Pharaoh—the mountain of paperwork this is going to create for me when I get home will be brutal.)

  While I’m finger-typing with my off hand, the barista comes by with our order. (Tipping large in an empty cafe is good for that kind of personal service.) Jim sips his latte and keeps an eye on the entrance and the door to the back room, while I follow up with another message, this time describing what I’m about to do next, only carefully framed in the past tense, because it’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.

  Then I back out into OFCUT, sign in again using an extra ID and password that is approved for Jim’s account but he doesn’t know about because I’m not stupid enough to tell him everything, and load up Alex’s visualizer. Right, here goes nothing. “Pass me the first-aid kit, Jim?” I say, looking straight at him as I flip his phone around so that the animation is running on the table in front of him.

  “Mhari?” He rummages in his bag, then puts the first-aid gear on the table and looks back at me.

  “Whatever you do, don’t move,” I tell him. I go fast
, lean across the table, yank the ward out from under his collar, and wrap my arms around his upper arms, pinning him in place. Then I bite through my lower lip and kiss him bloody.

  * * *

  A blue flash of light in a darkened living room surrounded by blackout curtains: three figures appear in the middle of a cat’s cradle of network cables and compute nodes laid out on the carpet. Predictably, one of the three takes a step forward and trips over a wire. As this is Brains, and Pete is leaning heavily on his shoulder, they both go down. This prompts some very inappropriate swearing from the member of the clergy. Derek is a bemused witness as Brains cries, “This is a clear health and safety violation!”

  It’s been a tense, stressful morning. Janice is in a grumpy mood, bristling at everyone even though it’s Mhari she’s pissed off at, because of her unrealistic expectations of Janice’s ability to magically conjure up an isolation grid using pocket lint. Or perhaps simply because Mhari is quietly frantic over Jim’s PHANG infection and is spreading her stress around. Either way, Derek doesn’t have anything more to do until Mhari calls him to roll the dice, which only makes Janice worse, because anxiety loves company almost as much as misery. Even after Mhari and Jim’s departure, the atmosphere in the safe house remains tense. So, having packed their kit, Derek and Janice take it in turns to watch the grid. And it just so happens that Derek is on duty when the gate to the dream road opens and the team from Colorado tumbles out.

  The next few minutes are loud, confusing, and alarming. Pete is bleeding from a gunshot wound to his left arm—bloody but not life-threatening, except Brains, who is usually almost psychotically laconic, is completely losing his shit over it. He’s also utterly paranoid about the bleeding, and yells at Derek, “Don’t touch it! Don’t get blood on you! It’s deadly!”

  Pete, eyes screwed shut, grunts. “Get. Janice.”

  Jon adds: “Bring tampons!”

  So Derek scuttles into the hallway. “Janice?” he calls. “Janice? We’ve got visitors! They want tampons? Do you have any?”

  A snarl of vampire rage answers him from the third bedroom. Derek decides prudence is the better part of valor and dives back into the living room. “She’s coming,” he reports breathlessly. “I think!”

  Ten minutes later everything is under precarious control. Janice loudly explains that Derek interrupted her in the process of patching a serious security hole that had just come to light, affecting all their compute nodes. “This is easier,” she adds as she slides a tampon into the hole in Pete’s arm. “The army figured it out in Iraq: they had large numbers of women in combat positions for the first time and it turns out sterile, expanding, blood-absorbent cylinders have more than one use. Who knew? Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a bunch of very sick computers to nurse and I’m thirsty”—she looks at Pete in perplexity—“why don’t I want to bite you?”

  Pete’s jaw clenches. Then, after a moment, he relaxes. “Go,” he whispers.

  Jon has wandered through into the kitchen and is staring wide-eyed at the oversized appliances. “Where’s the kettle?” she asks Derek.

  “There.” He points at the tin kettle sitting on the stovetop.

  “No, I mean the real kettle, the one that plugs in?”

  “This is America: electric kettles are a Communist plot, and tea is a Chinese conspiracy. Would you like some coffee instead? They haven’t figured out it comes from Arabia yet.”

  The blonde woman who isn’t quite Jonquil nods vigorously. “Yes, I think I would certainly like some coffee-coffee!” For a moment Derek sees a flicker of alfär magic, a curtain brushing aside to show him the strange magus from the prisoner-of-war camp, but then it flips back into place again. She jitters around the kitchen as if she’s too wired to sit down. Abruptly she turns to face Derek, although her gaze slides past his eyes: “You are human, yes?”

  Derek freezes, a coffee capsule poised above the Keurig machine. “What if I am?”

  “Brains is still human,” Jon observes. “So are you.” She leans close: “But Pete-Pete isn’t,” she confides. Derek recoils as she grins, carefully keeping her lips sealed, and rolls her eyes. “Out-numnumnumbered!”

  Derek pushes the button on the capsule machine. “Would you please get to the point? Threatening to drink the blood of your co-workers is harassment,” he adds pointedly. This hybrid of Yarisol and Jonquil probably knows that, but it never hurts to remind. A moment of doubt: “What happened to Pete?”

  “The enemy has magi!” Jon waves her hands. “They shot him with a blood bullet! But then,” she confides, “I killed them. So he’s infected, too.”

  “Jim was bitten, do you think—”

  “I’m getting thirsty,” Jon adds, “but I can cope for now.” For a moment her sense of identity veers alarmingly into Jonquil territory: “Sweetie, Pete and I—and Janice, too, I think—we need to nip out for a bite if we’re still here this evening, paint the town red. Otherwise you humans won’t be safe around us, capisce?” A hand flashes out and pinches Derek’s cheek. “Mm, plump and juicy!” Her pupils are dilated and the backs of her eyes flash emerald at him. Paralyzed, he can’t look away. Then the coffee machine beeps and she looks at it, and he hastily gets out of her way. “Mm, espresso!” she says, and cradles her cup appreciatively, humanity reasserting itself. Derek doesn’t have the nerve to tell her he used decaf. Instead, hands shaking slightly, he brews up enough coffee for everyone—decaf for PHANGs, regular with an extra shot for himself and Brains. He has a feeling they’re going to need it.

  Back in the living room, Pete is topless. Brains, wearing blue latex gloves and a paper breathing mask, is rolling a long bandage around Pete’s chest and shoulder. He’s treating Pete with the degree of care due a statue carved from time-expired explosives. “What—” Derek asks, then nearly swallows his tongue as he sees the silver lines of an elder sign peeping out from under a corner of the bandage. He tries again: “Does it hurt?”

  “Not now, thanks to Janice.” Pete’s eyes track towards the far side of the room, where Janice is building a stack of unplugged compute nodes and laying out the cables side by side, grouped by color and length. “There’s a macro the alfär magi taught our people. For battlefield minor wound management.” A macro being a command that triggers a whole bunch of computational invocations in one go.

  “What do they do with major wounds?” asks Derek.

  “They reclassify the victim as ammunition and feed them to the magi.”

  “Don’t you throw up on me now!” Brains tells Pete. “Hold this.” He presses Pete’s hand against one end of the bandage while he reaches for the micropore tape. Soon, he’s finished. “Okay, that should hold for a while.”

  “Where did you learn first aid?” Derek asks. “Was it on the training course for active ops?”

  “No, I did it back in Cub Scouts.” Brains peels off the gloves and drops them in a bin bag, then drenches himself in alcohol hand rub. He looks at the PHANGs: “I think we’re safe for now. If you could take the trash out? Please? It’s not like this waste is a serious health hazard to you people.”

  “I’ll do it!” Jon capers around, grabbing Pete’s discarded shirt and jacket and the bag of rubbish and anything else that might conceivably be contaminated and isn’t nailed down. “Taking out the trash! Right now!”

  “What’s our status?” Pete asks.

  Derek shakes his head. “Baroness Karnstein and Mr. Grey left about an hour and a half ago. She said they’d be back in not less than two hours if all went to plan.” He pulls out a small notepad. “Flights … everyone on the team is checked in, as of an hour ago. I have your e-ticket numbers if you want to obtain boarding passes. No need to be at the airport until five o’clock.” He takes a deep breath. “I’m just waiting for a saving throw and then we’re all done.”

  “Right.” Brains glances at Pete thoughtfully. “So … airport at five. That’s still daylight, isn’t it? What time is sunset?”

  “Sunset? Full dark isn’t until six fifte
en.” Derek blinks owlishly behind his thick glasses. “Why? Oh.”

  Janice comes out of her sulking corner and advances on Pete. She drops into a crouch before him. “Let me see him.”

  She touches his face and Pete flinches, then grimaces. “That feels weird,” he says. “Like spiders. Lots of baby spiders.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” she tells him unsympathetically. “Clothing, gloves, a hat. I think I’ve got enough Liquid Skin for your face, but it’s going to look a bit weird. Might squick the airport security people, get you some extra attention.”

  “He could wear it to the luggage drop-off, then peel it off in the bathroom,” Derek thinks aloud. “Go through security with bare skin, the departure area is windowless except at the gates, isn’t it? So he should be okay if he sticks indoors until after sunset. When we arrive…”

  “We can arrange for someone to pick him up at UK immigration.” Brains nods. “Does he need to feed before we get him home?”

  Pete screws his eyes shut. “I’m not thirsty,” he insists.

  Eyes meet over his head. Nobody believes him, but nobody’s willing to call him out.

  “We may need to move out sooner,” Derek says in the silence.

  “What? But we only just got here!” Brains looks disgusted.

  “You were attacked,” Derek points out. “Tell me where it happened.”

  “Four hostiles were waiting—” Brains’s eyes widen. “Oh shit.”

  “I killed them! Me are deadly!” Jon is as proud of her accomplishment as a farm cat with a nest of dead mice.

  “Oh shit is, I think, the correct response.” Pete slowly pushes himself upright. “We’ve got however long it’ll be before someone notices their goons haven’t checked in and comes looking. I’m going to need help getting dressed,” he adds, swaying slowly.

  Derek is already pulling out his phone. “How do I send her a mess—oh, yes, here.”