The Labyrinth Index

by Charles Stross

  The Mouthpiece’s wings abruptly still as it embraces DeeDee from behind with four black barbed arms. Its abdomen pulses, sucking back, then thrusts sharply against her hips, rippling and squirting. She gasps and her eyes widen, lips forming a perfect “O” of shock and pain as she welcomes the new Mouthpiece into her—of course Cthulhu’s brood reproduce through traumatic insemination—and then her eyes roll back in their sockets and her arms and legs twitch, a crimson glow rippling outwards as the Lord of Sleep’s will burns through her peripheral nervous system.

  I thought I was doomed before, but I’ve been wrong every time. This time? It’s the real deal.

  * * *

  The toilets on the Concorde are famously cramped, and Jim is too big to fit inside, bundled up in multiple layers as he is. So he peels off his harness and boots, then his flight jacket and body armor. When he’s down to just the sunlight-resistant body stocking he pulls the pants and boots on again, and finally gets the bathroom break he’s been gagging for ever since he forgot to go before leaving Starbucks.

  The interior of a Concorde is divided into compartments by claustrophobic tunnels, like a chain of linked sausages. Jim makes his way forward from the seats in the rear compartment, past a toilet and galley, then into the next compartment. He does a double-take as he sees the bare floor with the permanent invocation grid—a glorified pentacle—that fills the middle of the compartment, in front of the stations for the flight sorcerers and the other ritual equipment. But the grid is powered down, the sacrificial altar folded against the wall, and the manacles unoccupied: it’s safe to cross.

  There’s a large LED display on the front wall to the left of the tunnel leading to the cockpit. It’s currently reading 1280 mph. As Jim watches it rises to 1290. 302 Heavy is in cruise-climb flight, rising gradually as it burns a quarter of a ton of fuel per minute.

  “Mr. Grey?” It’s the primary school teacher. She’s seated at an equipment console: “Can I help you?” she asks.

  “I’m beyond help, I’m afraid. I was just curious,” he says, sizing her up reflexively for a moment. This time he recognizes the Flight Lieutenant’s shoulder-stripes. “I should go back—”

  “No, you’d better take a seat right here.” She points at an unoccupied position in front of a console on the opposite side of the plane. “Strap in, if we hit clear air turbulence at speed I don’t want you bouncing off the ceiling. I need to notify the flight deck so they can shut down the rear cabin aircon pack.” She turns back to her console and speaks into her headset as Jim fastens his three-point safety harness.

  “Why is the air conditioning important?” he asks.

  “At this speed the Concorde’s skin is at oven temperature due to friction. At cruising speed the passenger birds wasted a fifth of their engine power on cooling the cabin. Now that you’re up”—she unstraps and goes aft to slide a partition across the tunnel to the rear of the plane—“we can go faster or higher. Whichever the skipper needs.”

  “How fast is fast?”

  “Depends. During flight testing in the seventies, one of the prototypes hit 1500 miles per hour and held it for half an hour, but that’s not recommended: it’s a good way to weaken the wing spars. If the skipper does it we’ll be grounded for a C check afterwards—that’s at least two months in the hangar, being pulled apart and put back together again. Could be a complete hull loss.” She winks at him. “On the other hand—”

  Lights begin blinking for attention on her console, which features an ancient-looking CRT tube display covered in cryptic green and red glyphs. Suddenly her attention is entirely focussed on the panel in front of her. A few seconds later she updates the flight deck, then Jim. “Air route traffic control center ZDC just ordered a complete ground stop. MARSA in effect, GIANT KILLER calling our path. Uh, got a ground stop at ZHU Center, now ZDV Center joining in as well—looks like they’re grounding everything. Quit-36, flight of two F-15s on active air defense scramble out of Truax Field, heading on an intercept for our ground track.” A pause. “No sir, unless they’ve got tanker support already positioned they can’t touch us—”

  A couple of minutes crawl by. Jim focuses on the pulse in the Defensive Systems Operator’s jugular and tries to remain calm. A clattering, and footsteps from the tunnel behind him, finally get his attention. It’s OSCAR and another officer coming aft. The President nods tensely as he passes Jim’s chair. He clutches some sheets of paper in one hand, as tightly as if they’re the launch codes for the nuclear arsenal. “Constable.”

  Jim salutes with deliberate irony: the President can’t be expected to be familiar with foreign police ranks, but it’s the fastest and steepest demotion Jim’s ever had. “Sir.”

  “This way,” prompts the airman. There’s a fold-down jump seat next to the containment grid in the floor, opposite the altar, and the RO sets it up and swings it out over the grid then motions the President into it. “Headset.” He plugs the President into an overhead panel. “I just need to set up, then give you the signal to record your speech, sir.” Moving over to Jim’s seat, the airman leans past him and flips three switches. A row of pilot LEDs embedded in the floor all the way around the grid light up red. “Okay, you’re ready to go online, sir,” he tells the President. Then he flips a fourth switch, the invocation grid turns green, and the President begins to read his script.

  * * *

  My fellow Americans, you are receiving this broadcast because our nation is under insidious attack by an enemy within our own borders.

  I am your President, the elected Commander-in-Chief of this nation. I have sworn to defend the Constitution, and I have served as chief executive of this great nation of ours for more than six years. Then, three months ago, you were made to forget me.

  Today, I am obliged to tell you that magic is real—every bit as real as the superheroes of New York and the dragons of the Rocky Mountains. Unfortunately, the government organization tasked with defending our nation against black magic and demonic attacks has gone rogue. I do not yet know why this happened; but for whatever reason, this classified agency decided to make everyone forget that your President exists.

  This was an illegal action on their part, done without an executive order, a law passed by Congress, or the scrutiny of the Supreme Court. They conducted a magical ritual that compels you—everyone in America—to forget my existence every time you fall asleep. In doing so they vastly exceeded their authority, going far outside the boundaries of law, and violating the Constitution by altering your memories without due process.

  This is an outrage. I am appalled, as I am sure you are too. But I am awake, and as you hear my voice, you should be awakened. Hear my voice. I am your President. You must remember that, at all costs. Fight back! Before you go to sleep, write yourself a note. If your friends or family members sleep, remind them when they awaken. If you work in a shop, or office, tell everyone you see, every day: I exist, I am the President, this is an attempted coup, and we must awaken the fighting spirit of our great nation if we are to survive.

  We are awakening. We shall not sleep. We shall search, ceaselessly, until the enemies who tried to make us forget our eternal truths and liberties are rooted out, and their foul schemes are brought to justice.

  Please spread the word. Thank you, and God bless America.

  * * *

  So, about the Prime Minister’s plan.

  When His Darkness set me up with this Mission: Impossible caper, there was only ever one goal: to buy us time. The Nazgûl are not our friends. Forget the so-called Special Relationship; it’s been a dead letter for decades, more an aspirational touchstone for fossils on the 1922 Committee to fret over than anything meaningful. The truth is, the New Management harbors some degree of concern for human survival, however minimal. The Nazgûl don’t. They’re terrifically powerful, and their objective is to bring about the Lovecraftian Singularity and awaken the Lord of Sleep by dismantling half the solar system. This would be an extinction event for humanity. We can’t let
it happen. It is also a who-poisoned-my-beehives event for the Black Pharaoh, which is why He’s trying to prevent it. (We bring Him honey: He keeps us around.)

  The New Management has got something that the OPA lacks: legitimacy. The Prime Minister may be an alien nightmare, but He took control through constitutionally sound means. Granted, these means may have legal historians weeping and clutching their heads for centuries to come, but in the final analysis it was entirely aboveboard and we have only got ourselves to blame for this mess.

  The Nazgûl, in stark contrast, did not win any elections, were not handed any magic swords by watery tarts, and aren’t even members of the House of Lords. They simply seized control by making everyone forget their superiors existed.

  However, the Nazgûl were sloppy and their amnesia plot has a weakness: the President. He’s one of the few ordinary US citizens who the forgetfulness glamour can’t get its claws into. People exposed to him remember. If they’d arrested him immediately, they’d have risked him waking up his captors. Worse: the OPA are not the only US government occult agency. They did a number on their rivals such as the Occult Texts Division of the Postal Inspectorate (the Comstock Office), but when you start peeling the bureaucratic onion there’s always another layer. Leaving the President in a sandbox with a pared-back bodyguard probably seemed like a good idea at the time, a magnet to draw institutional enemies of the Nazgûl out of hiding. But some of their opponents are foreign agencies, and by focussing solely on domestic threats they fucked up.

  Now, His Darkness has a certain reputation for deviousness. He always zigs when they expect Him to zag, and this caper is no exception. Thus Plan East, and Plan West.

  Derek’s oracle-defeating dice roll suggested Plan East.

  Plan East called for Concorde to turn northeast and hit the afterburners once OSCAR was aboard, not slowing down until it reached the Bristol Channel and final approach for Heathrow. The President, now an asylum seeker, would make obeisance before the throne of His Dark Majesty. In return for sanctuary, the PM would relieve him of all the mana accumulated from centuries of secular worship by hundreds of millions of Americans.1 In other words, it’s a straightforward magic heist, facilitated by a team of expendables and the only flying supersonic airliner in the world: the sort of scheme a totalitarian brute squad staffed by Cthulhu-worshipping bureaucrats would buy into uncritically …

  But then there’s Plan West.

  Plan West calls for the presidential executive transport to turn west and fly like a bat out of hell from coast to coast, broadcasting via the Emergency Alert System as it steers a wide course around Air Force bases capable of mounting an intercept attempt.

  Shooting down a Concorde in flight is almost impossible. During the Cold War, NATO air defenses in Europe regularly used Concorde charter flights for intercept practice, because it was the nearest match for the fastest Soviet bomber, the Tu-160 Blackjack. It turns out that unless they knew exactly when and where it would show up on radar, they could never get a missile lock.

  Of course, the plan assumes they’ll try to shoot it down—we’re counting on it, to distract them from trying to shut down the EAS for at least the first hour. Eventually they’ll figure out that it’s simpler to lock us out of the radio network. But we’ve got a fallback: the modified ROM Brains slipped into the entrypoint hardware at WOCZ-FM, hacked to prevent them switching it off remotely. This should buy us another hour, or even two, during which OSCAR’s voice can reach upwards of a hundred million Americans.

  Finally, running low on fuel, 302 Heavy is to hurtle west across Oregon, out across the Pacific, then turn northeast and make an emergency landing in Seattle. The plane will probably never fly again, but the shitstorm produced by the sudden reappearance of a missing president is bound to liven up a dying news cycle.

  These weren’t the only plans we brainstormed. But we—Mahogany Row, I mean—managed to talk His Darkness down from Plans North and South. We are living through the early days of a darker aeon, and the world is not yet ready to see the PM’s giant glass-and-chrome skull rack capped with the screaming undead head of the President. Nor is it considered appropriate to break the glamour by brute force, sacrificing OSCAR sixty thousand feet over the American heartland in order to rain regal blood on the cornfields of Iowa.

  (I mean, it could work, if we had access to Air Force One and could convince an American agency to do the job … but as foreigners? The optics are terrible. Nope, not going there.)

  Anyway, if you’ve been paying attention, you will have noticed there are a couple of explanations missing from this account. One is the minor detail that when Derek said “east,” Jim told the pilots to fly west.

  And the second is an accounting of who lived and who died.2

  * * *

  Matrix-time recap:

  If Jim has done his part, he and the President of the United States are flying cross-country at upwards of Mach 2, broadcasting a wake-up call loud enough to raise the dead. He’s sitting in a defensive grid in case the Nazgûl try to fry his brain remotely, and 302 Heavy is listening in on the military chatter and taking evasive action before the fighters can get close—there are some advantages to pulling this stunt in the airspace of a NATO ally, and one of them is being able to listen to their encrypted military communications because we use the same kit.

  OSCAR might be able to wake up his people, but it won’t be enough if the power behind the glamour is still on the loose. The PM can’t leave his home territory, so he sent me as his proxy, a weapon disguised as a diplomat. Politicians aren’t supposed to get their hands dirty with wet work, but I’ve known all along I’m not qualified for this—it’s not really imposter syndrome if you really are a fake. Nor are my targets—DeeDee and the Mouthpiece—afforded the benefits of sovereign immunity. Not without actually admitting that they’ve held a coup, anyway. So the gloves are off and someone isn’t going to get out of here alive.

  (Probably me.)

  Back to the Pentagon basement:

  DeeDee jitters and twitches atop the throne of the Mouthpiece as if she’s sitting in an electric chair. A bruised-looking purple aura surrounds her head: glowing red runes ripple across her skin. I spare a glance over my shoulder. The blood guards in the labyrinth have collapsed, collateral damage from the seizure gripping their controller. The grid around the dais is lit up yellow and lethal. If I approach her, it’ll fry me. If I try to leave, I’m in the middle of the Pentagon basement and the PHANGs will be bound to recover before I can escape. If I wait, DeeDee will recover. And as the new Mouthpiece, she’s a lot closer to her Lord’s focus of power than I am.

  I realize I’m running out of time as I look around the dais and take in the various ritual objects laid out around us, the bone scepter and the skull chalice—

  Oh.

  I stumble forward and grab for the chalice with my right hand. It has a history: taken and used as an ashtray by Stalin, lost to Jimmy Carter in a game of poker by a very drunk Leonid Brezhnev in 1977. As ritual objects go Hitler’s plated skull is totally tacky, but totally appropriate for what I have in mind. I kneel down and drag it close. The boss will need … oh, yes. I pull out my passport, shake it, and grab the ceramic knife. Then I grit my teeth as without conscious volition my right hand shoves my left sleeve up and slashes lengthwise down the inside of my forearm, opening it from elbow to wrist.

  The pain in my left hand was bad enough already: this is shocking and total. My V-symbionts deafen me with their shrieking protest. I gasp for breath and try not to double up as venous blood drips—not squirting, thank fuck, I missed the artery—and trickles rapidly down my arm. I hold my damaged hand over the upturned cup and squeeze my arm with my other hand, trying to open the vein further. The dripping turns to a steady flow. I nearly black out again but some external force keeps me conscious through the agony. If this keeps up for too long I won’t just fill the chalice, I’ll bleed out. On the other hand, if I don’t go through with it I’m dead anyway. My Lord and I are
of one mind right now: the only way out is in. My symbionts are outraged. They aren’t party to my pact with the Black Pharaoh, the pact enforced by my oath of office.

  The chalice is less than a quarter full when I stumble to my feet. Black spots pulse in my vision. I feel nauseous, and there’s a steel band pressing behind my eyes. My arm is on fire and my fingers are tight skins of agony, but they form hooks inside Hitler’s eye sockets and scoop up the goblet nevertheless.

  Behind me, the zentai puppets begin to stir. The thing in DeeDee’s flesh stops twitching, and her eyelids flicker open. She makes a low, moaning sound. Blood bubbles from the side of her mouth as she tries to sit up. Behind her, the old Mouthpiece is a quiescent husk, like a ghastly leather seat cushion that supports her impaled body atop the iron throne.

  “Hello, sister,” the Prime Minister speaks through me, and as DeeDee looks at me and opens her mouth to speak I throw the chalice at her. The blood goes everywhere—including into her open eyes and mouth.

  For a moment I wonder if it’s failed. But then I feel the Mandate’s Will fill me, pouring thickly through my skin and infusing the blood dripping down my arm. The V-symbionts still wail, but now they’re listening as well, and I feel their sense of anticipation. I feel something else, too, the sound of the parasites bound to the will of the thing on the throne. The hunger fades as my symbionts feed on their weaker kin, supplanting their control over the puppets. I open a pair of eyes I didn’t have a moment ago and find myself staring at the back of my own head. Then another pair of eyes, and another, as one by one all of DeeDee’s minions come on line and make obeisance to the thing I’ve invited into my head.