The Labyrinth Index

by Charles Stross

  Did I mention the OPA-bred symbionts were bred for a very specific trait—obedience to an overriding will? Did I observe that they’re a whole lot weaker than my own feral infection, acquired by way of a certain London banking institution’s research group? Did I inject symbionts into Jim, already parasitized by Nazgûl PHANGs, and steal him back for my own lineage?

  This is the same, only on a larger scale.

  I throw my puppets at the iron throne one by one. They sizzle and burn on the powered-up grid. This keeps the thing colonizing DeeDee distracted for a precious minute while two of my clumsy half-dominated bodies fumble with a power-distribution board, in the end yanking a three-phase cable out of the wall by brute force. The grid goes down abruptly, with a loud bang from the circuit-breaker box. The smell of roasting meat and burning hair fills the room, and I throw more bodies at DeeDee, dogpiling her with stolen vampire minions.

  There’s a pink flash and sizzling zap of lightning: bodies go flying. But DeeDee isn’t fully integrated yet, not functional as the Mouthpiece of the Lord of Sleep. Her body is still mostly human, and damaged at that, impaled on her predecessor’s stinger-like ovipositor. Quality counts, but quantity has a quality all of its own: the puppets bite and claw at her and she screams incoherently. Flash. Bite. Zap. I pick up the scepter in my right hand and step onto the dais. “Maximize thy entropy,” DeeDee chants, mangling her Old Enochian abominably, but the scepter catches the worst of the curse. The bone handle blackens and chars and the jeweled cap flares violet, hurting my eyes and burning my exposed skin. More pain comes in waves now, and my vision keeps fading to gray. I position two of the puppets to prop me up under each armpit and push me towards the thing on the throne.

  “Do something,” I mumble, hoping like hell that the PM is still in the loop, that He’s still riding my nervous system like a horrible parasite, because anything is better than what the Mouthpiece will do to me if I fail here: “Do something? Anything—”

  “Like this?” I seem to hear His voice mocking me as my right arm rises and the scepter stabs towards DeeDee. Clawed legs lash out from behind the cover of her torso, and I know that if any of them touch me something horrible will happen. But my wrist twists painfully, and the head of the scepter thumps against one of the legs, and there’s a pink flash that eats my vision and a noise so loud I hear only ringing silence afterwards.

  An indeterminate time later, I come to. I’m lying on the floor and my left arm is a throbbing ache from elbow to fingertips. Also, my head hurts, my ears ache, and there are greenish-yellow blotches in front of my eyes. I roll over painfully, push myself up with my right arm, and take stock.

  The puppet-PHANGs on the dais resemble man-shaped charcoal briquettes, with skeletal grins and exposed ribs poking through their carbonized husks. I’m alive because they caught the worst of the blast: the scepter, or maybe His Darkness, shielded me from the backwash. The throne where DeeDee was sitting was at ground zero—

  Nope, not looking, definitely don’t need any more nightmare fuel.

  A handful of puppets are still ambulatory, and a whispery memory of His Majesty’s Will prompts me to shove them forward to clear the charred remains from the containment grid. They’re so easy to push around it’s like having a dozen extra pairs of hands and eyes. They still have minds, but they’re so weak they tear like tissue if I push them too hard. I shudder. Alex and Janice and the other PHANGs I know—never mind Yarisol—they’d swear and punch me if I tried to work them like this. Maybe I’m stronger than I realized. Or His Dreadfulness has done something to me, given me an unasked-for power-up. Either way, I’m thankful for the help, because right now I’m weak from blood loss and shock and too drained to fight off a feisty kitten.

  With the bodies cleared out of the way the damage doesn’t look too bad. I stand in front of the dais and contemplate the complex circle inscribed on the floor around it. It’s a summoning grid, obviously, with containment on top—currently powered down and unoccupied, thank you, DeeDee. If I knew how to make one of these things work, or had my phone, maybe I could do something useful—exactly what, I don’t know. It’s becoming apparent to me that while I was boned previously, I am still boned, only in a different manner. Instead of facing a DeeDee hell-bent on sacrificing me to a giant parasitoid wasp-thing from another dimension, I’m trapped in a labyrinth in the basement of the Pentagon with no way out. Hmm. At least I’ve still got my passport and diplomatic visa, I realize, even though it’s bent and bloodstained. “I assert diplomatic immunity,” I mutter under my breath. “As if.”

  “Boss?” Someone calls from the far side of the room. I turn round so fast I nearly black out.

  A new puppet has arrived. He’s standing in the entrance to the bunker and there’s something weirdly familiar about him. I blink through his eyes and realize he’s not in control of his own body, any more than I was in the driving seat when the PM took over during my little contretemps with the Mouthpiece. Someone else is with him—

  “Who’s there?”

  “It’s us!”

  I hear the words twice, and that’s when I realize it’s Brains, and the puppet I’m riding is—fuck, it’s Pete. I stare. Yes, it’s Pete the Vicar—a loose string from DeeDee’s harp—with Brains, who appears to be himself, Jon, or Yarisol, or whatever she’s calling herself today, and Janice. Those two I can feel but not control. Another four blood guards cluster around them, forlorn as abandoned dolls. Prisoners: DeeDee had them rounded up and was bringing them here for some undisclosed purpose—sacrifice, probably.

  “Derek?”

  “We had to leave him.” Brains looks haggard. “Pete’s been—”

  “Shit. I know.” I slide my will into Pete’s limbs. He’s there and protests vaporously, but it’s like thrusting a hand inside an empty glove. I walk him towards me. “Pete is about to join me in the labyrinth. Follow in his exact footsteps. We need to get out of here.”

  Pete’s been compromised, but the boss stole DeeDee’s geas on the OPA’s PHANGs. If I wasn’t half dead right now I could try and bring him the whole way over to the dark side the way I did Jim, but it’ll have to wait. There is no overriding urgency here: the mission is over. Anyway, there may be no point in salvaging him. Pete understands all too well what PHANGs are about, and I’ve got a feeling he’ll only stick around long enough to say goodbye to his family before he walks into the sunrise.

  “What have you done, Mhari?” asks Brains.

  “Long story, no time right now. Janice, can you do something with this grid? Get us home?”

  Janice cocks her head on one side and squints at the control panel. “You’re in luck, kind of,” she says. “Unfortunately I don’t have my gear bag or I could say for sure, but this looks like it’s set up for entangled translocation, being in two places simultaneously. If we had an anchor—”

  “An anchor?” echoes Jon.

  “Coordinates for another grid that just happened to be ready and waiting for us to lock onto—”

  The ghostly tittering of an eldritch prankster echoes between my ears, and I wince. “I can give you an anchor,” I say. Or rather, His Darkness can give her an anchor. He left very precise instructions in my head, wrapped up with a ribbon, or maybe a whoopee cushion. “Just set it up to bilocate and get us all inside. Your parameters are—” My tongue begins to flap without any input on my part.

  Janice looks at me strangely, but nods and gets to work.

  “That’s not you-you, is it?” asks Jon, peering at me, wide-eyed.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I show her my best poker face. Who am I, anyway? I have the most disturbing sense of alienation, as if the Republic of Me is recovering from a state of emergency and martial law.

  “Where’s Jim?” she pushes.

  “Elsewhere.” I shrug, uncomfortable with her line of questioning. “Alive, I hope.” I think I’d know if one I made had died, not that I’ve got much experience in that area.

  “Come on,” calls Br
ains, “all aboard the nowhere express! By the way, can you say where we’re going?”

  “Yes, Brains.” Sick dread settles in the pit of my stomach. Of course, if the PM was serious about everyone on this mission being disposable, now would be the ideal time for a little mopping up. Even though He relayed very explicit instructions through me—but you can’t live your life as if you’re perpetually expecting to be betrayed by your leader. “We’re going home,” I say, picking up the chalice as Janice throws the knife switch.

  * * *

  By three o’clock on the west coast, 302 Heavy has flown a little over 4000 miles. They’re running close to their minimum reserve level of fuel. All that’s left now is the matter of deciding where to land and face the music.

  “Do you think it worked?” asks the President.

  Jim shrugs, uncomfortable at being put on the spot. “I couldn’t say, sir. But”—he glances at the DSO and raises an eyebrow—“how long since the last intercept attempt?”

  “Oh, they stopped nearly an hour ago.” She grins broadly. “The chatter got interesting.”

  On the front bulkhead, the display shows their speed dropping below a thousand miles per hour and altitude descending through fifty thousand feet. 302 Heavy has completed its run across the Midwest and up the Pacific coast, staying as far away as possible from Nellis AFB in Nevada, home of the only fighters in the continental United States that have a good chance of shooting down a Concorde. The advanced F-22s there are able to fly higher and cruise faster than F-15s, but they’re mostly deployed in overseas hotspots, not on domestic air interception duty. If they were, Plan West would have been unacceptably dangerous. As it is, after the encounter with the pair of F-16s patrolling near DC, three different pairs of F-15s tried to intercept the Concorde. The first two attempts failed. The third …

  “I think you really confused that major, sir,” offers the DSO.

  The President nods, wearily. “I’m going to have to follow that up. I mean, I hope I’m in a position to—you know what I mean. Because he’s going to be in a world of grief when he lands.”

  “Yes, he will be.” She nods. “On the other hand, we were squawking a genuine IFF code on a standard NATO frequency and had the right encryption keys for his voice channel, and if he got close enough to see us—well, I wouldn’t want to make that judgment call—”

  Her headset chatters for a few seconds, diverting her attention. “Yes, sir, I’ll tell him.” She makes eye contact. “That’s the skipper. We’re on approach for Sea-Tac. Tower are definitely woke but keeping a lid on it. We have a pair of Air National Guard F-16s inbound as escorts, they’re woke too but the skipper says please can you to talk to them personally, just in case. I can hook you up right now…”

  Over the next ten minutes, Jim listens in as the President shoots the shit with a pair of fighter pilots who are putting their best professional face on not freaking out, as they converge on the supersonic airliner that’s squawking its ID as Executive One. He’s tired, his eyes burning from the diffuse sunlight filtered through the tiny windows, and he’s thirsty. He can’t help glancing between the President and the Defensive Systems Operator, focusing on the pink flush of their skin, the pulse in the DSO’s wrist, the rumble of blood in her veins. This is all new to him, and it’s going to take some getting used to—to not thinking about the origin stories of each little plum-dark bag of life-juice, to not seeing the people around him as a walking buffet, to never lying on a beach in the noonday sun, to all the things he’s going to have to give up—

  “Sir?” He blinks. It’s the airman who hauled him aboard. The loadmaster. “Sir, would you mind taking a seat in the rear cabin for landing?”

  “Of course.” Jim stands up and they head up the aisle towards the back of the cabin. He finds himself licking his lips. “Is there a spare bag of go-juice in the galley?” he asks.

  “Uh, I’ll just check, if you could strap yourself in—”

  Jim takes his seat. A numinous sense of guilt washes over him. He’s no saint. He’s not a criminal, but all law-abiding citizens are guilty of doing shitty things from time to time. This, however, feels like he’s stepped across a line. He’s about to raise his voice to say he changed his mind when the airman returns, holding a cup full of warm blood. “This is the last one, sir.” He holds it out for Jim to take, and Jim notices he’s wearing latex gloves.

  Jim sighs. “I changed my—” He takes the cup and swallows his words along with his qualms. They wouldn’t have loaded the blood bags if they didn’t want me—or other PHANGs—alive, he reasons. As tools of the state. It feels like a dirty and self-serving argument for state-sanctioned killing, and the liquid ecstasy leaves an unclean aftertaste.

  “We’ve got a three-ring circus waiting for us when we land, sir,” says the loadmaster, strapping himself into a seat on the other side of the cabin. “The governor, local heads of the FBI and Secret Service offices, camera crews from the major news agencies, and a whole bunch of police. Also, the resident from the British government office. The consul from San Francisco is en route, along with legal counsel. You’ll be needed for a press conference when you’ve been debriefed, but until then we’re supposed to keep quiet. We broke an unbelievable number of rules and regulations and committed several felonies that carry serious prison time, mostly aviation-related offenses. Your man up front is the ultimate get-out-of-jail card, but let’s not push our luck.”

  “Let’s not,” Jim agrees. The crackling whispers in his skull have fallen into a satiated sleep. He glances out the window at the F-16s holding formation some distance away. Sunlight reflects painfully bright from their cockpit canopies. It’s an honor guard, not an intercept. We made it, he realizes. I wonder if Mhari succeeded.

  EPILOGUE

  DEBRIEF

  Three days later:

  Evening in London. I follow Iris into the Prime Minister’s study at 10 Downing Street. “He’ll be along in a few minutes,” she says, giving me an unreadable look. “Make yourself at home.”

  I nod, then take a seat at the coffee table with my back to the bay window and drawn curtains. There are refreshments served on fine bone china: tea, scones with clotted cream, strawberry jam the color of fresh blood. I carefully position my gift-wrapped parcel on the table as Iris sits opposite me and busies herself with the teapot. I ignore the food: I’m not hungry right now. There are butterflies in my chest. Finally she sits back and looks at me. “I know what you did,” she says. “Thank you.”

  I feel nauseous. “Did you tell Him?” How did you find out?

  “I didn’t tell Him.” Her smile is worthy of Catherine de’ Medici. No wonder she’s survived six months as His chief courtier. “Your substitute was good, but not good enough to fool a mother, let alone the PM. You should probably avoid Jonquil for a while—she’s sore about missing out.” Her smile turns cold. “But thank you for keeping her safe.”

  Brr. Now the version of Catherine de’ Medici she’s channeling is about to call for her poisoner. I nod, unable to frame an appropriate reply. I’m sorry I kidnapped your daughter and hid her in a POW camp seems somehow inadequate. Also, sorry (not sorry).

  I’m still trying to work out whether my tea is safe to drink when the door behind us opens and I feel the Prime Minister’s presence. We rise as one, turn, and bow deeply. It’s not normal protocol but it feels like the right thing to do in the presence of the People’s Mandate.

  “Baroness, fancy meeting you again! What a pleasant surprise!” He sits down and we follow suit.

  I show Him the fakiest smile I dare, and flash a little fang. “So pleased to be here,” I say, hoping desperately that they’re not my famous last words. I still don’t know why He waited until now to summon me. I slide the gift-wrapped package towards him. “I brought you a present.”

  After the bloodbath in DC, I spent a few very disagreeable hours stumbling and screaming along a ghost road with the other survivors. When we reached the end of the road it turned out to be a sum
moning circuit the PM had drawn on the middle of the State Dining Room, ruining a priceless nineteenth-century Persian carpet, and coincidentally spoiling the day for the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Group cops on the front door (who were rather upset by the sudden appearance of a group of blood-stained intruders in the Prime Minister’s residence).

  We got it sorted out eventually. Nobody got machine-gunned or staked, or even arrested: it turns out He’d simply forgotten to tell them He was expecting visitors. My diplomatic passport helped cool things down then Iris arrived, led us through the not terribly secret tunnel to the Foreign Office basement, and arranged transport to a secure medical facility. I was then given no less than three transfusions from separate donors, along with a wholly unnecessary tetanus shot. I don’t want to think too hard about the logistics of those transfusions, by the way. Janice and Jar—no, Jon—needed blood, too, and so will the others, if they don’t end themselves. Or if they’re ever released, in Jim’s case.

  If.

  I look at the PM. “This is where you give me a well-deserved chewing out,” I say briskly, putting my head on the block because there’s no point in delaying the inevitable reckoning. “Needless to say, you’ll have my resignation letter if you want it.”

  The PM’s smile is like a dead star rising above the horizon of an airless moon. “Baroness, I have always had your resignation letter. It’s not something you write yourself.” He crosses His legs and laces His fingertips around His knee. He doesn’t seem to be angry or upset; if anything, He’s … pleased? “But before we discuss that, I’d like to hear you explain what you think you did wrong.”

  “What…” Words fail me. “Wrong?” My voice rises. “I lost the DM!” (A unique, highly specialized, impossible-to-replace operative.) “Two other members of my team—only seven bodies to begin with—were infected with hostile V-parasites along the way! I had to turn one of them or the mission would have been a total washout! All but one of us were captured by the opposition, and, and…” I swallow. “They were waiting for us. It was a trap.”