The Labyrinth Index

by Charles Stross

  “Clear.”

  The President starts walking. It’s a fair day: the temperature is well above freezing. The two officers follow as he approaches a five-way intersection of footpaths. “Which way?”

  Mattingley consults the GPS again. “Second left, sir.” Cho darts ahead; the senior officer takes up the rear as OSCAR makes his way towards a copse of well-manicured trees, their mostly bare branches overshadowing a platoon of perfectly aligned headstones.

  The President is about ten meters away from the nearest tree when a compact shadow flits across the lawn towards him. “Incoming!” Cho brings his rifle up and Mattingley draws his pistol as a tall man, clad from head to foot in motorcycle leathers and a helmet with a full-face visor, lands lightly before them, hands raised. “Show your face.”

  “If I do that, I’ll go up in flames,” the visitor says calmly. “Senior Officer Mattingley, we meet again. I’m Jim Grey. Baroness Karnstein and I ran into a spot of bother after we left you in traffic, coming up on three hours ago.”

  Cho sidesteps and keeps his rifle leveled at Jim, but reverts to scanning for threats from all quarters. “What happened?” asks the President.

  “Vampires don’t exist,” Jim says, with ironic emphasis. “Tell everyone, all right? The plan is still on and the clock is ticking. We’ve got eight minutes to get you kitted out and airborne, no second chances. Are you good to go, sir?”

  The President swallows, just as the compact airband scanner in Jim’s front pocket emits a burst of static. “Let’s do this,” he says.

  Mattingley closes his eyes with deliberate gravitas. “As officer in charge of your personal protection team I’ve really got to say that this is the stupidest, worst, no-good idea ever—”

  “Hey.” The President grins, although it’s false bravado: “If it worked for the CIA in Tibet in the fifties, it’s good enough for me.” He looks at Jim. “What do you need me to do?”

  “Can I move?” Jim asks Cho, then lowers his hands without waiting, and shrugs out of his backpack, opens it, and pulls out a bundle of mountaineering rope, a five-point suspension harness, and a compact parachute: “Let’s get you wrapped up, sir…”

  Jim straps the President into the harness and parachute, then pulls another harness on over his own leathers. Then he hooks them together using the climbing rope, connected by a coupling that’ll open the President’s parachute if the rope breaks. (Nobody wants to risk splattering the President all over Maryland if the pickup goes wrong.) “Check us?” he asks Mattingley.

  “This looks secure,” Mattingley admits grudgingly.

  Jim rummages in his backpack for the last component: another helmet. This one isn’t a biker’s lid. It’s olive-drab, with a mirror-finished visor designed to close over a fighter pilot’s oxygen mask. “Found this in an army surplus store,” he comments as OSCAR tightens the chin strap. “It gets quite cold up where we’re going. Uh. Three minutes. Are you ready?”

  “I’m ready,” says the President.

  He turns and gives Mattingley the thumbs up, just as Mattingley’s walkie-talkie crackles. “Contact! Contact on three!”

  Mattingley’s eyes widen. “Go! Go!” He waves at Jim. “We’ve got company!”

  Cho is already stalking back towards the parked pickup truck as Officer Friendly takes hold of the President’s ropes and ascends into the Maryland sky.

  * * *

  So here’s the thing: it turns out that infecting people with PHANG symbionts isn’t the hard part. The hard part is living with yourself afterwards, when you sit alone in the booth at the back of a cafe staring at the lip-smear on the rim of your espresso cup as it cools, wondering how many executions they’ll have to schedule, how much fear they’ll have to stir up to rubber-stamp the vote to extend the death penalty, to keep him fed.

  I can live with feelings of inadequacy and paranoia about my elevation to the peerage. That’s just imposter syndrome, and it’s so common we have a name for it. I can deal with the superhero stuff and the juvenile James Bond shit when I have to. I refuse to regret dallying with Jim: he’s my Fuckboy, and you’ll have to fucking live with it.

  But by turning him, I indirectly signed a bunch of execution warrants. Or helped with a number of assisted suicides if we get off lightly, but I have to assume the worst. If we survive this mission, you can add two or three deaths a year to his side of the balance sheet. That’s the price of simply staying alive. If he has to use them to fuel his paranormal powers it’ll cost even more lives. Jim is forty-eight. Give him another forty years—a normal male life expectancy these days—and do the math.

  Like most cops, Jim has some inflexible moral boundaries. He may think he’s thought things through and that he’s prioritizing the mission, putting the national interest first, or some similar bullshit notion, but I don’t believe him. I don’t think he’s enough of a monster in his soul to survive the realization that he’s become a monster in the flesh. So I’ve got to work very hard to ignore the horror. If I notice the charnel house there’s a chance that he’ll see me noticing it, and once he finds himself unable to ignore it he’ll break, and then he’ll burn and I’ll lose him anyway.

  I sit in the booth and stare at the dregs of my coffee while the stain on the edge of the cup darkens to the color of rust. Remember the way he flinched in surprise when I bit my lip, then froze as I caught his gaze. Thrusting my tongue into his mouth past the wasp-sear of pain in my lip, watching his pupils dilate as he sucked, the sinuous warmth of his tongue as he kissed me back. His eyes gradually glazing as I picked up his phone and held it next to my cheek, screen held where he had no choice but to see it. The astonishing sense of thrusting into him, pumping something I can’t quite grasp that is nevertheless desperate to fill up a host with a new and different life. The huge and deadly and weirdly perverse turn-on—I get an intense shiver, an erotic chill, from remembering it—as I fuck his brain with V-symbionts.

  “Are you okay, ma’am?”

  It’s the barista, leaning over my table. He smiles and he’s taller than I am so of course I smile back up at him warily, social training kicking in. “I’m … fine.” I’m not fine, actually: I’m a monster who has just fought a running battle, regenerated a mild concussion and a broken hand, and used her V-symbionts to turn her human boyfriend into an executioner. It comes to me that I’m unbelievably thirsty.

  “Did that guy just dump you?” the barista asks in a tone of voice I don’t care for. I realize we’re alone in the cafe: we’ve been alone for some time.

  “No, he didn’t dump me,” I say very evenly as I push my coffee cup away.

  “Your mouth—is that blood?” He reaches out and touches my lip. I pull back and he grabs my chin. “I think he did dump you.”

  He sounds excited, which is a really bad mistake because it stirs up the dull roaring in the back of my head. We’re alone and my job isn’t done yet, and you should go now, the human part of me thinks at him. “Come back here with me,” he says, “I’ve got something for that.” He grabs my wrist firmly and pulls me towards the storeroom door, which is ajar. Oh you silly boy, I think, but I’m too tired to resist and he smells heavenly, and also: hitting on a woman alone in a cafe, really?

  I let him lead me into the storeroom and turn me around. He pushes me back against the inward-opening door. There are no other exits. Huh, fancy that. He stares at my face hungrily. “I’ve got you what you need, bitch,” he tells me, pressing down on my shoulders.

  Well, that makes things easy, I think, unzipping the dime-store rapist’s fly. He’s already sprouting wood, his cock hardening, the vein on top of it pulsing and full of blood. I lick my lips. “Suck me dry,” he demands, tightening his fingers in my hair, so I take his cock and give him exactly what he asked for, if not exactly what he expected.

  Afterwards, I leave him curled on his side among the cleaning supplies, as if he simply took a nap during a quiet period and never woke up. Who’s the monster now? I think vindictively as I step over him.
Everything feels warm and happy. Even the daystar glaring down outside the front window can’t hurt me, for I have my sunblock on. I take a minute in the restroom to tidy my hair, reapply my lipstick, and make sure my passport is close to hand, then I walk past the impatient customers waiting at the counter and step outside to face the music.

  * * *

  Back during the Second World War, helicopters barely existed. They certainly weren’t an off-the-shelf solution to the problem of plucking a spy or a crashed pilot into the sky and bringing them home. Which is why British and American special forces began experimenting with skyhooks.

  At first, the hapless evacuee would be tied to a cable suspended between the tops of two tall poles. A cargo plane would make a low pass overhead, trailing a grappling hook on the end of a rope: if it made contact, the human cargo would be yanked from the ground and winched aboard. Later, they got rid of the poles and raised the tether using a helium balloon. The Fulton Surface-to-Air Recovery System, STARS, got a workout during the Cold War, but mostly in the movies: it works, but it’s a stunt—under almost all circumstances, it’s easier to send a helicopter.

  But these are not normal circumstances; these are desperate times.

  So desperate that they call for a superhero and a Concorde.

  (Best of British, right? I mean, if he existed I’d have sent for James Bond, and bugger the cocktail and baccarat bill. But alas, he’s a fictional character. So we had to make do with what we’ve got, and I improvised.)

  Now, boarding a Concorde in flight is, shall we say, just slightly harder than a regular STARS pickup.

  For starters, STARS usually used a prop-powered transport aircraft, flying low and about as slow as it could go without falling out of the sky. A Concorde turns into a lawn dart if it slows below two hundred old-money miles per hour, so it has to make a much faster pickup.

  Secondly, a Concorde in flight is dagger-sharp. You can’t just open the doors and snag a passing passenger. Anything that gets too close to its belly is liable to get sucked into one of the four Rolls-Royce Olympus engines clustered near the tail—the same engines (and same number of them) that power the Royal Navy’s shiny new aircraft carriers. The term “flying Cuisinart” springs to mind.

  Luckily, where there’s a will there’s a way. It turns out someone was thinking ahead when they drafted the requirements for 666 Squadron’s aircraft, and jumping out, or dropping things out, was on the list, along with the blood bag–warming oven and the summoning grid. The passenger retrieval mechanism was the only major modification necessary.

  The other special ingredient is Officer Friendly. Who, despite rumor, is not actually stronger than a locomotive or able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, let alone squeeze coal into diamond in his grip. However, Jim is able to fly while wearing body armor and dangling a President on the end of a climbing rope.

  So here’s the plan, as drafted by the 666 Squadron mission planners:

  302 Heavy staged out to Goose Bay a week ahead of our schedule, then prepped for flight. With a range of 4500 nautical miles, a Concorde B can just about do Newfoundland to Washington DC, then fly anohter 3000 fly another 3000 nautical miles. More with the aid of a pre-positioned tanker aircraft or two.

  Of course the airspace around Washington DC is heavily guarded with surface-to-air missile batteries, a pair of F-16s on combat air patrol, and more F-15s ready to scramble at short notice. Which is why 302 Heavy takes off under a carefully contrived flight plan consisting of vicious lies and innuendo.

  Some six hours before 302 Heavy approached DC, UK Air Traffic Control announces the departure of a cargo 747 from Heathrow, heading northwest across the Atlantic. It doesn’t exist. However, the details of the nonexistent flight get handed off to Shanwick Oceanic—the air traffic control sector over the northeast Atlantic—and are updated as if it’s flying towards North America, out of range of radar. Meanwhile, a Dutch air force KC-10 tanker that has been waiting in Reykjavik as part of a NATO exercise takes off and heads for the northwest corner of Shanwick’s airspace.

  In due course 302 Heavy takes off from Goose Bay and heads out into the Gander oceanic sector, over the West Atlantic, staying slow and low—that is, at a mere Mach 0.85 at 30,000 feet. Once out of range of coastal radar, 302 Heavy transitions to Shanwick Oceanic, saying goodbye to North American air traffic control, and makes rendezvous with the tanker.

  With fuel tanks filled to the brim, 302 Heavy turns southwest and joins the North Atlantic tracks, adopting the call sign of the fictional 747 bound for Nassau. Flying subsonic at thirty thousand feet, a sharp-eyed plane spotter might notice something hinky as it passes overhead … but it is following a flight path a couple of hundred miles offshore.

  As it comes due east of DC, 302 Heavy flips its transponder beacon to code 7600. A minute later, it squawks 7700, turns sharply west towards Baltimore, and begins to descend. Code 7600 means loss of communications, or radio failure; Code 7700 means there’s an emergency. DC traffic control are alerted, but as far as they know what they’re seeing is a cargo 747 in unspecified trouble, slowing and descending through ten thousand feet towards Runway 28 at BWI.

  302 Heavy misses its approach to Baltimore airport. In doing so it turns northwest, away from DC, and slows to two hundred knots at six thousand feet. The missed landing approach puts it two miles north of Crestlawn Cemetery—with its belly hatch open, trailing a 200-meter-long cable and a giant high-tech butterfly net.

  Crestlawn Cemetery is located a few miles outside the northern edge of the Washington DC Air Defense Identification Zone. It’s at extreme range for the NASAMS long-range air defense missiles around the Capitol. A freighter squawking an emergency code, skirting the ADIZ at only two hundred knots, is cause for concern but not an immediate shoot-down. As it happens, a pair of F-16s flying out of Bolling AFB are airborne and on assignment to the capital’s air defenses under Operation Noble Eagle today. But curiously—and absolutely not by accident—three light planes are buzzing around the southeast periphery of the ADIZ, generating piles of paperwork and keeping the fighter jocks busy. It’s astonishing what you can get an idiot with a private pilot’s license to do if you offer them enough bitcoins or threaten to send their stash of kiddie porn to the FBI. And it’s astonishing how many weekend flyers there are in the US. Go figure.

  666 Squadron are able to do this because from the 1950s to the 1980s the RAF’s mission planners regularly gamed how to sneak a four-engined bomber into attack range of the Capitol as a training exercise. Rumor has it that during one Red Flag run in the early ’70s a Vulcan actually dropped a paint can on the White House lawn. They tried to warn their USAF counterparts about the risk of a sneak attack, but got the usual bureaucratic not-invented-here runaround—nobody likes a smart-arse. Besides, the received wisdom was that bombers were obsolete in the direct nuclear strike role. Then the Cold War ended. But the RAF kept the plans on file, because you should never say never …

  * * *

  In an Airbnb in DC, arguing in a blood-drenched living room:

  “They’re compromised. The OPA has rooted their nervous systems. Also, they’re both too badly injured to fly out. What do we do now?”

  “Fuck. Derek and Pete need a hospital set up for PHANG support, plus a terminal donor or three each. There’s no way—”

  “If we had some donors, we could fix them up. You’d be astonished how fast a PHANG can heal when you pump them full of Type O negative.”

  “Yeah, and if we went on a dementia-killing spree in the neighborhood and somehow got them patched up and in clean clothes, what then? They’re OPA assets now. Everything they know belongs to the OPA. You know what the, the Prime Minister would expect us to do.”

  “All-Highest is also All-Ruthless! Yes?”

  “I know but I can’t—” (pause) “—friends. Fuck. I know his wife. He’s got a four-year-old daughter.”

  “So you could maybe kill Derek because he’s got no life, but the Vicar is off-limits because h
e spawned—”

  “No, fuck you, that’s not it at all! It’s just not right!”

  “The Baroness wouldn’t blink twice, she’d ice them for the good of the state. She’s cold.”

  (Reader, that’s not true.)

  “I could kill them for you! Just a little bit?”

  “Shut up, Jon, you’re not helping.”

  “Thinking here.” (A pause.) “There’s no way to turn them back, I take it?”

  “I don’t think so. Pete was a problem from the moment he was shot. Then I broke his neck when he took a bite out of Derek, but that made enough of his symbionts jump ship to cross-infect, not just feed. So now we have two problems.”

  “If you hadn’t broken his neck—”

  “Derek would be dead, not compromised.” (A pause.) “This wasn’t a situation we could have come out on top of. Hell, we’re lucky to be alive. If Pete told them where—”

  “Oh you did not just say that.”

  (Sirens, in the distance.)

  “Memorize these words, Jon: all you need to do is repeatedly say I assert diplomatic immunity, and show them your passport. You’ve got it, yes, the one with the extra pages? Good. Repeat after me: I assert diplomatic immunity—”

  “—Bet you it doesn’t work any better than saying I believe in Tinker Bell—”

  “—Shut up. Let’s practice saying it together: I assert diplomatic immunity—”

  (Sirens, getting closer.)

  (Fade to gray.)

  ELEVEN

  A DEAD GOD DID IT AND RAN AWAY

  They have the block surrounded when I emerge, blinking behind my Ray-Bans in the early afternoon sunlight.

  American cops are so heavily militarized these days that the only way I can tell the difference between them and the army is the color of their body armor—that, and the army is less trigger-happy. They’ve got the street cordoned off at both ends of the block, with armored cars and SWAT teams hanging back behind the barriers. I can’t see them, but I hear the thudding beat of helicopter rotors overhead, reverberating between the ten-story office blocks. When I glance up at the roofline opposite, I see a row of shiny silver statues looking down on me.