The Labyrinth Index

by Charles Stross

  Reader, I am not suicidal. Nor am I Keanu Fucking Reeves, and this is not The Matrix: I hold my arms up, my passport clenched in my right hand, and I wait.

  After a minute or so, one of the giant armored trucks that has been blocking a gap in the barriers roars into life and reverses out of the way. A huge black Cadillac limousine creeps past. It rolls slowly down the street and parks just beyond the Starbucks. The front passenger door opens and a zentai-suited minion climbs out. It opens the door of the passenger compartment, then freezes in place, watching me.

  I look up at the skyline beyond the limo. There: behind and below the motionless row of spam-PHANGs I see a brief glint of light reflected from a sniper’s scope. I lower my gaze, and slowly—slowly—walk towards the open door of the car.

  “You can lower your arms and put your diplomatic passport away, Baroness, we know who you are.” The woman in the back of the limousine sounds amused. “Ride with me, please.”

  As I stoop to enter the darkened interior of the limo I tense involuntarily: the buzz and chitter of the Nazgûl symbionts rises to the grating screech of a cicada swarm. But as I slide across the slick leather of the bench seat and the uniformed minion closes the door, it stops abruptly. There’s a heavy thunk that I feel in my inner ears. The car is airtight as well as armored and thaum-proof. The light dims noticeably; the windows are heavily tinted, and as thick as my fist. The armor’s so heavy that the interior of the limo is surprisingly cramped. The woman sitting opposite me smiles in the twilight, giving me a brief flash of needle-sharp teeth. “Welcome to the Beast,” she says. “Not many people ever get to ride in one of these.”

  “The Beast?”

  “The White House has no current occupant, so I borrowed it. Nice wheels.” I size up my host as I fiddle with my seat belt. She’s got straight blonde hair and ice-blue eyes, but beneath the carefully applied makeup she looks as if she’s undergone plastic surgery to give her the face of an idealized female senior executive. Her trappings are conservative-leaning boardroom—black suit, nice blouse, heels—accessorized with pearl stud earrings, and a discreet silver necklace strung with the rune-inscribed finger bones of infants. An aura of ominous power swirls around her like a funnel cloud. “Allow me to introduce myself, baroness: I am the Deputy Director.”

  “The Deputy…?”

  “You can call me DeeDee for short.” Her face flickers momentarily between ingratiating charm and concentration-camp nightmare, as if her humanity is a mask. “I used to have a name of my own, but names give your enemies power over you. Anonymity is so much more convenient, don’t you think?”

  I swallow a burp of stale blood-and-coffee breath, the contents of my stomach threatening to repeat on me. I’m so scared I could throw up: She’s one of us! Only with a link to one of them! Fuck! For the past couple of days I’ve been thinking going to die now too often for comfort, but this time I know it’s true. If an ancient horror invites you into its limousine at gunpoint—

  “I’m taking you to see My Lord. He would hear your message, Baroness—or is that Ambassador?”

  Panic flaps my lips inadvisably: “What if I say no?”

  “I wasn’t asking.” DeeDee smiles, not entirely unfriendly, and for a moment I see a reflection of my future time-flensed skull in her eyes. “One does not say ‘No’ to the Mouthpiece of the Lord of Sleep.”

  Why aren’t I carrying a suicide pill? Part of me gibbers. Even my V-symbionts are terrified. Because who the hell can the Lord of Sleep be other than He Who Is Not Dead But Lies Dreaming in the Deep?

  DeeDee leans forward and touches my knee: “Interfering in our affairs wasn’t very clever of you. Especially disrupting our tail on the Uncrowned King.”

  “The President, you mean?” She winces when I say the title.

  “We’ll get him back,” she says, self-assurance personified. “You’d better hope we get him back. If we can’t, the Lord of Sleep has expressed a preference for you as his replacement.”

  “Me?” I can’t help myself.

  “You. It’s quite an honor, you know.” I don’t know exactly what she’s talking about, but it sounds horrid. Succumbing to my cowardly side, I change the subject.

  “Is it true, then? Has your Lord awakened?”

  “Not yet.” But her body language proclaims her proud anticipation. “For the time being, He makes His wishes known through His Mouthpiece.”

  I make a huge effort not to hyperventilate and rub my sweat-moistened palms on my skirt. I am totally not ready for this. This is what His Majesty really sent me for, I realize. Forget the thing with the President; the reason He sent me, the reason He insisted I lead my team in person, was because He intended me to convey a message to this … Mouthpiece …

  Within the shielded darkness of the President’s limousine a geas unlocks in my head, and I can finally remember the message the PM wants me to convey to his counterpart.

  * * *

  OSCAR stops yelling as they climb through two thousand feet of air. Jim can’t tell if he was screaming from fear or yodeling in exhilaration. Given the President’s pre-politics bad-boy reputation, it could be either: he did his own movie stunts, after all. But the screaming was a distraction, and Jim can’t afford to be distracted right now. He’s got a plane to catch—and he can’t see it yet.

  Here is an A-level physics problem …

  A Concorde with a full fuel load stalls at approximately 310 kilometers per hour at standard temperature and pressure (sea level, 20 Celsius). A human body reaches terminal velocity in air at the velocity where the force acting on it due to gravitational attraction is equal to the aerodynamic drag it experiences: approximately 200 kilometers per hour if spread-eagled and at sea-level pressure, but considerably higher if streamlined, and/or at higher altitude (hence lower pressure). How much force does Jim have to exert to reach a velocity of 310 kilometers per hour at 2400 meters altitude, if Jim has a mass of 95 kilograms and his passenger has a mass of 88 kilograms? (See provided table of constants for drag coefficients in different configurations.) Extra credit: What is the minimum breaking strain of the rope OSCAR is hanging on?

  Jim isn’t in free fall, but he’s pushing through dense air at a speed greater than his terminal velocity while towing a passenger. He’s pushing his power to the max in the ascent, trying to get nearly two and a half kilometers up in time to transition to horizontal flight and get up to speed before the white dot in the distance runs him down and smashes him like a rabbit under an express train—or misses him altogether. He’s burning mana at a prodigious rate, and he hasn’t been fed his first blood meal yet. What is it like in Jim’s head?

  Jim is thirsty. It’s a wreck-survivor-crawling-through-the-desert kind of thirst, a lovesick thirst, combined with a monstrous chittering at the back of his cranium and a cage of starved rats gnawing on his stomach. He has successfully absorbed a cohort of V-symbionts, and the risk of K syndrome is receding, but he’s burning his own thaumic passengers in this race for altitude and speed, and the V-symbionts are hungry.

  To make matters worse, he is trailing a glorious banquet on the end of a nylon rope. OSCAR doesn’t realize it, but he is no mere human. His countrymen may have forgotten him, but for years he’s been the focus for a nation’s dreams and sense of common cause. Jim’s symbionts yearn for the President’s rich accumulation of mana. There is a reason the nation houses its Uncrowned King in a heavily warded palace within a city laid out on a grid of symbolic power. To the inhuman feeders, he’s a golden glowing beacon of hope and liberty and comfort, dripping with delicious nutrient juices like a well-cooked Thanksgiving turkey: even the half-neutered Nazgûl PHANGs were able to sense him and stalk him.

  Jim is a sworn officer of the law, an immensely self-disciplined and intelligent supercop … and yet he is as tempted as an alcoholic carrying a crate of vintage single-malt Scotch whisky.

  Passing through seven thousand feet (according to the GPS strapped to his left wrist), Jim switches on the compact radio b
eacon in his combat pants’ left pocket, orients in the direction of the coast, leans backwards until he’s recumbent, and pushes as hard as he can against the immovable Earth beneath. The wind is a sullen roar around his helmet, and the cable vibrates like a bowstring. OSCAR is a dead weight, a pendulum tugged backwards by the slipstream as Jim sees his speed readout inch upwards. Two hundred and twenty kilometers per hour. (Too slow.) Two hundred and thirty. (Pile on the throttle—so hungry now—and stare at the sky.) Two hundred and forty. Not going to make it, he thinks, almost despairing. Need to eat. He can feel OSCAR, knows that if he could tap the President’s mojo he could make the rendezvous, no problemo—

  His airband scanner crackles again, but between the slipstream gale and his helmet he can’t hear what it’s saying. Hopefully it’s the first officer of 302 Heavy announcing they’ve got him on the under-nose camera. More likely it’s ATC or the US Air Force, F-16s closing, possessed pilots with green worms spiraling dimly in their eyes at the controls as they search the skies for intruders. No matter. Jim lets the hunger goad him ever faster. There’s blood aboard the pickup, he tells himself, hoping the deafening chorus within his skull is paying attention. Sharp canines cut aching grooves through his desiccating gums.

  There—

  A white dot bisected by a horizontal line against the blue sky, a painfully bright flare of sunlight reflecting off a mirror-polished cockpit window. It’s distant and dawdling, just hanging in the air, slowly creeping closer. But perspective foreshortening is deceptive. Those inches are measured in kilometers and it’s covering ground faster than a Formula 1 race car. Seconds pass. Jim points his feet at the tip of the onrushing spear and throws everything he’s got into a last, desperate sprint. With a rumble like an express train blowing past, a giant needle-sharp shadow rushes past a hundred meters above his face. Jim gets a brief glimpse of the belly of the beast, an open hatch before the engines roar overhead and rattle his brains in his skull. Then a giant net clamps tight around him with a jolt like a parachute opening.

  The next two minutes pass in a blur of controlled chaos. The capture net tugs harder and vibrates as a hidden motor somewhere behind Jim’s head winches it in. The roaring and buffeting rise to a monstrous crescendo as he’s dragged underneath the long stinger of the aircraft’s tail, below and between the boxy engine pods and then in front of the hoarse, bellowing air inlet ramps. Finally the net squeezes down into a rope as it hauls him up and over the lip of a shield-shaped hatch, into a low-ceilinged compartment beneath the floor of the cabin. Hands grab him and drag him forward, heave another squirming netted figure through the closing hatch. Then the screeching hunger in his head expands to fill the universe, and Jim knows nothing more for a while.

  The next time Jim becomes aware of his surroundings, he’s strapped down in a cramped, backward-facing blue leather chair in a tunnel-like room with curved walls. A bloke in a green flight suit is closing a trapdoor in the floor. A woman leans over him. “Thirty seconds,” she tells him, her tone bossy as a primary school teacher. “It’s in the microwave, just wait, all right?”

  Jim tries to nod but what comes out is a snarl. The Air Force technician recoils. Because the room is tilting and the guy with the trapdoor is off balance, he goes over on his arse and scrambles backwards until he hits a wall. This is unaccountably funny—the prey can’t get away—and Jim laughs uproariously. Meanwhile, the hall monitor who is perpetually sober and on station in the back of his mind is quietly horrified. What am I turning into?

  “Drink.” Hands extend a beaker of crimson liquid towards his face. Without thinking, moving faster than he realized was possible, Jim grabs it and tips it down his throat. Hot ecstasy spreads through his stomach and flashes out into all his limbs, lighting them up silvery-bright, like a strangely dry orgasm. It’s the symbionts’ way of rewarding you, reinforcing the behavior they desire, he remembers his girl Mhari explaining: It’s addictive, you’ve got to stay in control. He shudders, revolted by the discovery that he actually quite likes this, wonders if feeding with Mhari would be like sex, or something better—

  Another mug appears, only for the contents to vanish into the sucking black hole in his stomach. After an agonizing delay for warming, there’s a third. They all smell wonderful and taste subtly distinctive.

  “Are you functional now?” asks the schoolmistressy one. Subtext: Have you got your shit together? (Clearly, the Air Force don’t put their back-seaters through British Airways’ cabin-crew school.)

  “I’m”—Jim forces the words out—“I’m good, I’ve had enough.” He closes his eyes and holds the empties out. He hasn’t had enough: he’s not sure there’s enough blood in the entire universe to fill his hunger. But he’s back in control. The donors, he knows this instinctively, were healthy adults in the prime of life. No hospice-care terminal-release forms were involved. These bags of blood came courtesy of execution warrants. Complicity: it’s a bitch. He shudders. “Back in control now.”

  Jim tiredly slips his gloves off, then begins to unfasten his helmet. “Glad you’re with us, sir,” says the airman with the hatch. Teacher has disappeared, back towards the front of the cabin which is behind him.

  The floor is still tilting down as he looks towards the tail, but now he’s not burning up Jim notices the tiny, deep-set windows. He twists round and sees two more rows of rear-facing seats, then a corridor leading to a row of engineering stations and a cramped galley. The windrush outside the fuselage is loud, and the sky is darkening by the second: they’re climbing far faster than any normal airliner, faster than an early jet fighter. Fuck me, I’m on a Concorde! he thinks, then remembers to ask, “How’s the passenger?”

  “He’s up front. Sir, I’m supposed to ask you for a direction—”

  “Plan West,” says Jim. He closes his eyes. “Chase the sunset.”

  “Great. Be right back.”

  The airman rushes past him in the direction of the forward cabin, and Jim leans back against his headrest. A terrible post-coital lassitude creeps over him, but the side of his face feels hot and prickly where it’s exposed to the daylight filtering through the nearest window. He rubs his cheek and suddenly realizes it’s excruciatingly sore, like really bad sunburn. Two minutes of indirect sunlight filtered through three layers of glass, he realizes. No more beach holidays. Wondering how the President is doing, he unclips his lap belt and shrugs out of the shoulder restraints. Then he stands and heads towards the cockpit.

  * * *

  Air forces love bragging rights: Who’s got the most planes, the most firepower, the highest, the fastest? Bragging rights get you budget approval for more and shinier (higher, faster) toys. Which is why, back in the 1980s and 1990s, the US Air Force really resented the fact that both British Airways and Air France beat them like a broken piñata when it came to total hours of supersonic flight.

  Everyone knows that supersonic warplanes are, well, supersonic. What most people don’t realize is that it’s more accurate to call them supersonic-capable. They’re rarely called upon to break the sound barrier. Doing so puts enormous wear and tear on engines and airframe, guzzles fuel at a ridiculous rate, and annoys the hell out of everyone on the ground within earshot. Only a few modern fourth-generation jets, notably the F-22 and Eurofighter Typhoon II, are capable of supercruise, extended supersonic flight without afterburner assist. Even then, they can only supercruise at a relatively sedate Mach 1.5. Going flat-out still takes fuel-hungry afterburners, and these fighters can only sustain their top speed of Mach 2.2 to Mach 2.4 for about ten minutes. (Mach 1.5 is a little over 900 miles per hour. Mach 2.2 is 1300 miles per hour.) So most military pilots seldom, or never, fly supersonic.

  Concorde is all about the supersonic—it set the record for the longest supersonic range of any aircraft, and nothing has ever beaten it. Cruising at Mach 2.2, serving cocktails to VIP passengers at flight levels normally occupied by SR-71 spy planes, the six British Airways Concordes shuttling between London and New York used to rack up more
supersonic hours annually than the entire US Air Force.

  As Jim and OSCAR were being winched in through the belly hatch of 302 Heavy, airborne intercept controllers were directing the pair of F-16s on patrol over Washington DC to check out a pair of Beechcraft wobbling dangerously close to the air defense zone. The unidentified blob making two hundred knots a few thousand feet up, thirty to forty miles north and squawking 7700, is next on their to-do list. But once the belly hatch closes and seals, 302 Heavy’s captain turns northwest, pushes the throttles all the way forward past the reheat stops, and pulls the nose up in a full power climb.

  Three minutes later the F-16s get a flash alert to go to full afterburner. But they’re too late.

  302 Heavy, climbing through thirty thousand feet and accelerating towards supersonic transition, is over a hundred miles ahead of the DC air patrol fighters. Three minutes later, 302 Heavy passes through fifty thousand feet, accelerating towards a thousand miles per hour. A stern chase is a long chase, and the pair of F-16s are sprinting to catch up with a marathon runner with a mile-long head start. Eighteen minutes after receiving their first advisory about 302 Heavy, the F-16 pilots report bingo fuel and turn away to rendezvous with a tanker, never having closed to within a hundred miles of the target. Meanwhile, 302 Heavy isn’t even up to cruising speed yet.

  There are two seats in the compartment behind the cockpit, positioned left and right of the aisle. They both face bays of radio equipment and defensive avionics. Right now, both seats are occupied. OSCAR, sitting in the port seat, is looking around wide-eyed. He sat in a space shuttle’s cockpit once, but not in flight; this is the highest and fastest he’s ever been, the sky fading to indigo and the curvature of the Earth’s surface becoming visible. On the other side of the aisle an RAF Squadron Leader—the equivalent of a major—is punching buttons, configuring the VHF radio to relay the output of a hastily retrofitted ENDEC module in one of the racks that line the long tunnel of electronics behind the cockpit.