The Labyrinth Index

by Charles Stross

  “What are you—”

  “Letting the Baroness know we’re bailing on her.” He twitches at Pete: “We need to ditch everything but hand luggage and evacuate to Fallback Bravo.” To Janice: “Can you book two Ubers to collect us in fifteen minutes?”

  “Going where?” she demands, hands on hips.

  “Here, let me show you.” He flips through his notepad, then hands it to her. “We’re going to have to risk a direct ride in daylight. You and J-Jon should be all right, but someone’s going to have to stay with Pete, keep him covered and ensure”—he nibbles his lower lip—“no upsets.”

  * * *

  Reader, I’ve never tried to turn someone before. Directly or indirectly, it makes me an accessory to future murders. But there’s a first time for everything; also, I’m not a politician, even though I play-act one when the boss tells me to—I’m allowed to change my mind when my understanding of the facts changes. Click, click, click and the puzzle pieces slide into a different shape.

  As of now, the mission is a wash if I don’t infect Jim with PHANG syndrome—and if the mission fails, sooner or later a whole lot more people will die.

  Let me explain my reasoning. I am one of a group who were infected with PHANG syndrome as an experiment by an ancient sorcerer embedded within the Laundry. We—me, Janice, Alex, the other survivors—have as much free will as anyone else, just as long as we get the occasional blood meal to keep our parasites fed. It’s like, oh, having a potentially fatal but treatable medical condition that nonetheless keeps you locked into a job that gives you medical insurance that covers it. You might survive outside in the cold … but you might not. Are you feeling lucky, vamp?

  But we now know of other PHANG strains. K syndrome parasites may be a related life-form, or not. The V-symbionts that infest alfär magi are definitely related—so much so that I for one thought they were the same as my own infection. Silly me! Alfär magi are almost all male: the only female one we know of—Yarisol, or Jon as she currently self-identifies—is distinctly non-neurotypical, even for a psychopathic elf. And the alfär also castrate their mages. (Well, except for Yarisol.) Why do they do that? Cassie told us it’s to keep them under control, but she’s not an expert. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that amplifying their hosts’ natural aggression may be a survival trait for V-symbionts in the wild, but is slightly less desirable if you’re trying to enslave them as living weapons.

  Which brings me to the zentai mannequins. Who all taste of the same thought leader, and don’t do super-speed. The OPA runs on enslaved extradimensional horrors, and the US prison-industrial system can be counted on to provide a supply chain of blood and bodies for a cadre of PHANGs. But free will is the last thing the Nazgûl would want in their tools. To their way of thinking, PHANGs are self-replicating muscle, a zombie horde that can infect its targets, infiltrating their organizations. So I can totally see them selectively breeding a strain of V-symbionts for unquestioning obedience—the perfect mass-produced vampire minion.

  Pete’s been infected by the Nazgûl strain of PHANG. It’s probably too late to do anything for him, other than provide secure and humane containment. He’s still himself, I think—but the disturbing way the mannequins all act as extensions of a common will don’t give me grounds for optimism.

  Jim, however …

  Jim has been parasitized but not turned. He’s in that cell in the execution shed, waiting on death row alongside Mr. Kadir. He could die at any moment. That alone is a mission kill for us—we can’t stake the President’s life on his survival, or continue the primary mission if the enemy realize they have a (metaphorical) bomb wired to his brain. But there are worse prospects: they might decide that Jim is a more valuable asset than whoever’s got their fangs in his neck, and shoot the host. At which point, all those V-symbionts will pile into Jim, and Jim, too, will become part of the Nazgûl Vampire Borg, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor.

  But I’ve got this. I’m here, embracing Jim in the shady booth in the back of the cafe, bleeding inside his mouth as I kiss him. If I shovel my own V-symbionts into him and point his eyeballs at the visualizer and do my fucking best to walk him through the conversion process, I might be able to outcompete the hostile parasites and infect him with my own. He’s mine, dammit, and I intend to save him … assuming my symbionts take the hint and don’t eat him by mistake. Assuming he doesn’t have some kind of massive anaphylactic reaction to being cross-infected by two strains of competing parasites simultaneously, on top of his existing low-level K-parasite load. Assuming the enemy doesn’t try to kill him right now.

  Which is why I kiss him like this is our last goodbye, our last chance ever, and the end of the road. Because, God help me, I might be killing him.

  * * *

  “Well this is bad,” says Derek. “Mhari’s still with Jim. She says to remind everyone we’re on Moscow rules, and evacuate ASAP.” He puts the phone down.

  “What are Moscow rules?” asks Janice, looking annoyed and puzzled.

  Derek twitches. He thought everyone who’s filled out the basic Intro to Fieldwork workbook or role-played a game of Espionage! knew that. “Look them up on Wikipedia,” he suggests. Then he relents. “They’re tradecraft rules for working in hostile territory. Assume we’re being followed, trust your gut, take nothing for granted.”

  “We need to go, now,” he adds. “Where are those Ubers?”

  Two cars are waiting outside the safe house. Derek bundles Janice into the first one, with carefully framed instructions to look after Pete, who is riding with her with a paper shopping bag scribed with a no-see-’em ward pulled down over his head. He seems largely uninterested in anything, sits hunched around his abdomen as if an ulcer is burning away at his stomach, responds to questions only in monosyllables. Derek is quite—English understatement—worried about him. Concerned, even. Being shot is unquestionably justification for feeling under the weather, as is the whole infected-with-vampirism thing, but Pete’s changed behavior is so uncharacteristic that it’s almost as if he’s had a total change of personality. But there’s no time to waste. The next car arrives and he climbs into it with Brains and Jon, who sits in the front passenger seat, gawking in all directions as if the experience is wholly new to her.

  They travel in silence to the fallback house, unload their bags, and go inside. The curtains are drawn. Janice is pacing the living room like a caged animal, while Pete flops bonelessly on the sofa. “Airport baggage drop opens in three hours,” Janice whinges. “Why are we even here?”

  Derek puffs his chest up. “I’m waiting for a call, then I have to relay some information to Jim’s phone. Then I’m done here. If you want to head to the airport early you can do that, but loitering at airports is one of the things security organizations watch for.”

  “Jim’s phone.” Brains looks at him. “What happened to Mhari?”

  “She broke hers again.” Derek huffs. “I think. I spoke to her—”

  “—I hear you,” says Pete, turning his head in Derek’s direction.

  Derek knows he should find Pete’s resumption of dialog encouraging, but the lack of human warmth in his words undermines any spark of fellow feeling. “Janice, have you got the makeup kit?” She nods. “Can you do Pete’s face? Then—” He thinks for a moment. “—the two of you head out. Find a restaurant in town, take your time over lunch, do some shopping, do whatever it is couples do when they’ve checked out of a hotel on their last day and are waiting for their flight home—” He deliberately ignores her expression of studied incredulity. “You can hit the airport before check-in time if you want, just keep moving.”

  “You. Want. Us. To act like a couple.”

  Brains chips in: “It’s called role-play, not foreplay. Anyway, nobody in this town knows who you are.”

  “And thank fuck for that.” She gives Derek a final token glare but subsides grumpily.

  “Brains, Jon, you stick with me for now.” To be honest, he should send Brains packi
ng, but there’s Jon to consider, and Derek’s afraid to be on his own with the weirdly bouncy blonde. Jon seems to oscillate between effervescent social butterfly and obsessive-compulsive blood-mage. That isn’t so bad, but it’s not obvious what triggers the shift. “I’ve got to wait where there’s cell service, until—”

  Derek’s phone rings, just as Janice starts chivvying Pete to get off the sofa. “Come on,” she urges him, “you need to get your slap on and then we can go and hunt down some lunch.”

  Derek answers his phone. “Yes?”

  “Derek?”

  “Gilbert—” He pauses. “—let me get a pen.” He reaches for his notepad and scribbles, one-handed, phone wedged between shoulder and ear. “Got that. Okay, let me repeat that.” He reads back a set of GPS coordinates. “Correct? Good. Okay, I’ll pass it on. If you don’t hear back from me, we’re good.”

  He hangs up, then photographs the page of his notepad, and is entirely focused on attaching the image to a secure message when Pete grimaces apologetically, says “I’m really sorry,” and lunges for his throat.

  Derek’s brain freezes. “What—” His fingertip hovering over the “send” button, he holds the phone away from the interruption before he quite registers that Pete has yanked him against his chest, one-handed, and is gnawing on his jugular. He drops notepad and phone as he pushes against Pete’s arm.

  “Hey!” Brains shouts, rising. Janice, who was rummaging in her bag, looks up with a hiss, eyes flaring with emerald light. A burning pressure clenches around Derek’s neck, stopping the breath in his throat. His view of the room begins to narrow. “Stop that!”

  Derek goes limp, hot dampness pumping across his chin. Pete is making a glutinous snuffling sound, as if he’s trying to breathe while chugging a yard of ale. Someone punches Pete in the head, inhumanly hard and fast—one of the other PHANGs, perhaps, but Derek can’t quite figure out what’s happening. Everything is confusing and fuzzy-edged. There’s another sharp jerk, then a crackling sound as Jon twists Pete’s head sharply away from Derek’s throat, and keeps twisting until it’s pointing backwards.

  Derek lies on the carpet, feeling surprisingly comfortable apart from the searingly numb void in the side of his throat. He knows there’s something he should do, but he can’t quite remember what it is. Ah. I should be dying, he thinks. This realization brings him no great sense of satisfaction. Upset people are babbling across him, something about the laws of sympathy and contagion and Pete’s infection and, and—

  Janice crouches on the bloodstained carpet beside him and peers into his eyes. “Derek?” she says. “Blink if you can hear me?”

  Derek wheezes a sad bubbling eruction through the hole in his throat. Speech seems to be impossible for the time being. He blinks at her repeatedly. His hands and feet feel very far away, and he’s profoundly tired. Thirsty, too, but mostly tired. There’s something he should have done, but he’s not sure what, and that realization bugs him.

  Janice’s face disappears for a moment. “He’s conscious,” he hears her tell the others. Her voice is muffled by the odd buzzing, crackling sound in his ears, like a swarm of billions of locusts converging on him from a thousand miles away.

  “What about Pete—”

  “Don’t ask. What the fuck happened?”

  Where’s my phone? Derek wonders. I need to hit “send” … He tries to raise his right hand, manages to lift it a couple of inches off the floor. Everything weighs too much.

  “He should be dead. I mean, look at the blood, it went everywhere—”

  “Pete went for him. Why the fuck would he even do that? It’s not like him! He wouldn’t hurt a—”

  “Pete-Pete are not being himself since he is blood-shot,” chirps Yarisol, her Jonquil overlay shredded by stress. “Pete has the bad blood magic, Nazgûl blood magic. Hear through his ears, see through his eyes. They make, made him, attack Derek.”

  “Why now?” Brains asks tensely. “Why not hours ago? Why the fuck—”

  “Derek just took a phone call,” Janice says, dull-voiced. “He was waiting for a call. He hung up, then Pete went for him.”

  “Fuck—”

  Legs squish across the carpet before Derek’s face. An alien thirst grinds away at his guts, and there’s an enticing smell-sense-something wafting his way. The rich smell of life uneaten. Unnoticed by the others, his eyes glow green. There’s something I need to do, he thinks, as the locust swarm at the back of his head encourages him, Yes, do it. Across the impossible range of carpet, he glimpses debris: an upside-down notepad, a pen, a smartphone. I just need to see the message again … his arm quivers, and then he moves his hand towards his throat.

  “Hey, he’s moving!” It’s Janice, suddenly vulnerable and human, all her spiky defenses dissolved by chaos. “Derek?” She touches his shoulder, then leans closer. “I swear the fucking hole in his throat is closing—”

  “Shit, cable ties, now!” snaps Brains.

  “What for?” Janice asks.

  “Pete.”

  “In my backpack, I always carry some.” Brains bolts across the room. That makes sense, Derek thinks foggily. The numbness in his throat is already receding. PHANGs can take a lot of damage and if Pete bounces back from acute spinal trauma—Friendly now, sing the locusts of imagination—they’ll need to immobilize him. To prevent future neck-biting. No need for that, the locusts point out, now you’re one of us.

  Derek finally manages to touch his throat. It’s sticky and feels wrong but it doesn’t hurt. He pushes his palm against the bite. Dental tracheotomy. Whatever. Breathing becomes incrementally easier, although lots of thick phlegm, or some other liquid, bubbles up. He can swallow, now. Need the phone.

  “Derek?” asks Janice. “Are you trying to talk?”

  He blinks rapidly.

  “Is it the phone call? You were meant to call Jim?”

  He blinks rapidly again.

  “Huh.” Janice picks up his phone. “Hey, you were writing a message. Want me to—”

  “No!” shouts Brains.

  Derek hisses and levers himself laboriously up from the carpet. Janice’s eyes go wide. Brows lowering, she stares suspiciously, then looks at Brains. “What?”

  “—Nazgûl PHANG they rooted Pete and used Pete to root Derek trying to intercept the message don’t let him see those coordinates—”

  “Gotcha.” Derek lurches to his knees as Janice dances back a step. His vision grays: all he can hear are the locusts of infinity, telling him to rise and feed. “Huh, well, okay, Jim, was it?” Derek tries to obey and stand up, but everything’s too heavy. “Sending it now,” Janice tells him casually, then bends his phone into a pretzel between fingers and thumb. She drops it in the puddle of blood: a moment later it begins to smoke and fizzle. Hope has not completely fled: his eyes turn to the notepad. It’s lying face-down in the splatter from his throat, but if it hasn’t soaked up any blood it might be—

  “I don’t think so!” Yarisol singsongs as she pushes him face-down in the carpet and picks up the notepad. “Not yours, bad boy!” She drops it on the burning smartphone. The flames spread.

  Demoralized and exhausted, the locusts allow Derek to succumb to unconsciousness.

  * * *

  There’s a side-street just off Maryland Route 32, after it crosses Interstate 70, near West Friendship, an affluent exurban development outside DC. An anonymous white crew-cab rumbles along the narrow blacktop between rows of trees and low brick walls. Memorials sprout like mushrooms in the shade among the shrubs: the memorial gardens around Crestlawn Cemetery.

  Officer Mattingley’s fingertips are white with tension on the steering wheel. His tired eyes scan restlessly as he searches the arcs and loops and tiny traffic circles of the cemetery grounds. There are plenty of discreet signs to steer the bereaved to the resting places of their dearly departed, but they’re not positioned to be read from inside a moving vehicle other than a golf cart or a motor mower. Officer Cho rides shotgun beside him, gun tucked discreetl
y below window level. Periodically his head tilts back or sideways, and he shakes it vigorously, fighting off the impulse to micro-sleep. They’ve been on the go for too long, and the slow attrition of the protection team isn’t helping: if the Brits don’t show up, pretty soon there’ll come a point when everyone falls asleep simultaneously.

  OSCAR rides in the back seat. Two other cars are parked on the street outside the cemetery, guarding the approaches. They’re all that’s left of the improvised Presidential Protection Detail, and even their rides are stolen from a Ford dealership’s lot. (OSCAR hastily scribbled an Executive Order, committing to pay for the trucks from the White House budget, before they hot-wired the vehicles.)

  “Looks like a nice day for a walk in the park,” OSCAR announces. He raises a fist to cover his mouth, concealing a yawn. “How far to go?”

  Officer Cho glances at the GPS. “About two hundred yards, sir. We’re three minutes early.”

  Mattingley: “I really wouldn’t recommend—”

  “Overruled. If the bad guys have gotten a snatch team past Murph and Sylvia, then the game’s up, isn’t it?” Mattingley shakes his head in denial, but his heart’s not in it. The President continues: “They’re not going to shoot me, that’s not what this is about. Anyway, I’ve got the suit.” He’s wearing a zippered-up nylon flying jacket and baggy combat pants over close-fitting body armor, ceramic plates embedded in Kevlar. It makes him look bearish, layered up against the risk of a winter storm on a fair-weather afternoon. “Stop the car, I want to get out and walk. One last time.”

  “Sir—” Mattingley begins.

  “Just do it, Nick,” Cho says tiredly. Mattingley casts his subordinate a look of explosive disbelief—Mutiny!—then reconsiders and gently squeezes the brake pedal.

  “I can’t recommend this, sir.”

  “Tough.” OSCAR gives him a thin-lipped smirk as he pops the door open.

  Cho is out of the car a heartbeat before the President. He scans the vicinity, his short-barreled assault rifle at the ready. Mattingley’s shoes hit the ground a second later, his hand traveling to the butt of his service pistol. They’re alone in the cemetery grounds, apart from the birdsong and the distant rumble of traffic on the interstate. “Clear?”