Scratch Monkey

by Charles Stross

  “The news,” Raisa said uneasily. She looked queasy, as if it disagreed with her. “Two hours ago. All the goons anyone's been tracking down here disappeared. Back to the throat of hell. Back to the redoubt. The whole place up top will be swarming with them. And we're going to go in there?”

  “Okay.” Oshi glanced round. Everyone was watching her. “In that case we're going to go up top as soon as they get back. If they don't get back we've got to assume they've been captured and do it any way we can but how they expect it. But whatever, we've got to get out of here and clear out that castle as soon as possible. Any questions?”

  “Yeah!” called a thuggish-looking individual from the back. “Who's leading the show?”

  “I am,” said Oshi. Raising her gun: “and you better believe it!”

  Some of them didn't want to cooperate at first, but that was okay. Oshi bared her teeth and did a passable imitation of her old drill-sergeant and scared the crap out of the more impressionable idiots Mik had sucked along in his undertow. (Less than a third of the people in the colony, she discovered, wanted anything to do with Mik and Boris and their schemes. They were so demoralized that their leaders could barely energize them to resistance, let alone cooperation.) “It's like this,” she told them calmly and steadily: “we have a choice. We can wait here for the tapeworm to burst out everywhere and eat us alive, or the radiation storm to fry us. Or we can go up top and try to clear out the castle and deal with the goon squad. Radiation and disease are slow. I don't know about you, but I'd rather take my chances with the goons – especially with the kit we've got here. Or would you rather bleed to death from every orofice or watch the tumours eat your arms and legs a cell at a time?”

  “What about Mik and Boris?” demanded Lorma. “You can't just ignore them!”

  “I'm not going to.” Oshi stared at her hard. You're going to be trouble, aren't you? “They've gone to try and cut the comm link between Anubis and his mind. If they make it, things will go a lot smoother. But we've got to go even if they don't – and we'd better plan on that basis. You!” She pointed at Ish, the soldierly one with the talent for self-effacement, who had ensconced himself between two modular racks of something that she hoped were grenades – “know anything about climbing or fighting?”

  “Climbing?” he stretched, then stood up. “A bit. Fighting too, in a strictly low intensity kind of theoretical way. Why?”

  “Someone's got to do it.” She shrugged. “Rest of you. Any kind of training or experience?” A wave of muttering broke out: “hey, can it! Can't hear myself think. Any of you been places and shot things, preferably people?”

  No hands went up. “Shit. Well, then, here's your chance to learn. Ish, pick five you trust and get yourselves armed. Then go find out what's happened to Mik. The rest of you –” she glanced at her audience, feeling a warm glow of satisfaction with the way they stared back at her – “listen up, it's time to get this gear uncrated and ready to run. We've got work to do.”

  Ish slipped away into the darkness, followed by a squad of nervous draftees clutching improvised weapons. The minutes slipped by like seconds as Oshi checked out unfamiliar kit, gave improptu orders to unfamiliar faces, recited a litany of common-sense advice for uncommon situations. When he reappeared half an hour later Oshi feared the worst – until she saw Mik, tired but grinning, behind him. “What happened?” she demanded, striding past the chaos where a group of cultural attaches were assembling an assault spider. “Did you run into anything?”

  “The place is deserted,” said Ish. “Never seen anything like it. You couldn't even hear the spies on K-band – they've all been pulled back.”

  “The hub devices are primed to blow on command,” said Mikhail. “Boris did a good job.” The man himself ducked self-effacingly. “Anubis' agents must have understood what the tapeworm was. It's not going to be easy to get him out of there.”

  “Any signs?” asked Oshi.

  Mikhail shook his head. “Skywriting in blood-red heiroglyphics on the clouds, quotes from the book of the dead; the usual cryptic gibberish mixed with apocalyptic threats.” He met her stare: his expression was fixed, as if he was supressing something. “Looks like he's pissed. If we don't go through with this now ...”

  “I'll be pissed,” said Boris. “No disrespect, Mikhail, but I did not set this up for your convenience. Not to be switched on and off like a light. We should act immediately. Unless you have any pressing objection –” Behind him, Ish waved his irregulars over to the door. They took up positions in the entrance hall, covering the front of the building.

  “Lorma says you screwed up,” Oshi said bluntly. “Anubis has pulled in and all he needs to do is wait out the tapeworm. It'll suck our guts out, the radiation storm will finish it off afterwards, and he can wait it all out behind ten metres of solid rock. How you going to get him out?”

  “The hard way, I think.” Boris scratched his head. “Didn't know the radiation storm would be that bad. Are you sure ..?”

  “Sure?” Oshi snorted. “Listen, we're under attack! I figure we've got less than a day to go, maybe much less. If you haven't moved by then Anubis will call your bluff and send the goons in. How many have you got ready to move –”

  “Yo!”

  Everyone glanced round. One of the sentries was waving from the doorway. “Getting a signal over the external channels, one of the environment support bands nobody ever uses. Want me to pipe it in?”

  “Voice only.” Mik looked thoughtful. “Any signs of life?”

  “Everyone gone to ground. Apart from that, no.”

  “Okay.”

  Raisa stood up. Lorma tried to hold her back; she shook the hand off and edged round the semi-assembled climbing spiders. “Wait,” she said.

  “Why?” Mik stared at her.

  “I've been figuring out the growth profile for the tapeworm.” She looked round, nervous, eyes somehow avoiding Oshi, Mik and Boris even though she was addressing them: “a day, topside, before it hits singularity. We can't sit and wait it out. It's going to grow too fast.”

  “Well, then. Why don't we listen to what the dog-head's got to say?” Mik asked, deceptively reasonable. “It can't be any worse –”

  A tingling in the back of her head, an itching in her toes: “we need to move,” Oshi said.

  “In due course.” Boris glanced over at Ish; “get your comms lead to patch it through.”

  “Ack.”

  A dry rustling, dust devils on an imaginary desert plain. “ Let there be no rest for the wicked, no solace for the evil,” chanted a desolate voice : “ let their eyes be ripped out and their tongues cloven, let their inner parts and reins be scattered to the four winds and their limbs be rent from them and eaten by serpents. For we know yet what they do, and there will be a time for justice: yea, even though the father may forgive the son shall remember, and there will be an accounting.”

  “He's pissed, alright,” said the communicant, grinning over her backpack.

  “In that case –” Oshi's eyes widened. “Shut it down!”

  An eerie screech sizzled out of the voice node's speaker, climbing rapidly into painful inaudibility. Weird discordant overtones jangled across it, digging agonizing claws into her arms and legs as if she was wired for power and somebody had just plugged her into a badly shielded generator. Shit shit SHIT some kind of carrier signal – her internal wisdom resources kicked in. You're being nobbled. Low bandwidth signal achieving handshake with feedback loops established by crude tampering in the substantia nigra. Likely to radically impair your functionality if no countermeasures are taken. Filter [y/n]?

  Kill it. Her teeth ached. Someone was screaming: no, several people were screaming. There was a hollow popping sound as she brought her gun to bear with jerky movements; she couldn't hear anything now, except for a roar of random white noise drowning out the interference signal her backbrain had been wired to wait for. Aim, load, fire –

  The noise stopped. Her ears rang with the deafening a
ftersilence of the shots. The screaming, however, continued.

  “For fuck's sake, get us medical support now –” one of the engineers who had been working on the climbing spiders was thrashing around, a mess of blood covering her face. Others – at least two people – were screaming. Smoke coiled from the smashed comms terminal. Raisa stood up slowly, clutching her head, and stumbled towards the fallen tech; someone else converged from the other side, clutching some kind of toolkit. Oshi glanced round. Mik was sitting up, shaking his head, a dazed look on his head. Then he saw her watching and pushed himself upright.

  “Backbrain burner,” he gasped. “Thought we found all of those –”

  “All?”

  “Got two. Dog-breath must go for redundancy. Shit, my arms ache. How long you think we've got?”

  Oshi glanced up instinctively. “About three minutes, if they jump from the axis. Maybe fifteen if they take the lift.”

  “Let's get moving then.”

  A burst of static filled her wisdom sense as Mikhail booted the climb-spiders, dumping control objects into their primitive nervous systems. A clutch of the spidery exoskeletons staggered to their feet, black-shelled iron maidens gaping for their living prey. Oshi grabbed for the nearest one, swung her feet up, and let it draw her back into its padded interior. Her left ankle screamed in protest as the robot grabbed it and locked a boot around her foot. “Anyone else ready yet?”

  “Ack.” The exoskeletons had voice-to-wisdom converters, a primitive of telepathy simulator. “ Mikhail here. Who else –”

  Oshi glanced round. Infrared sensors built into her climb-spider cut in, flaring crude green highlights across the scene of carnage. People scrambled everywhere, first-aid packs sprouted tentacles to administer the kiss of life to their human recipients: and a handful of alert individuals made for the assembled climb-spiders and other military bionics that Boris's people had kluged together from any and all available sources. “ I think we can expect the goon squad to drop in real soon. We should deploy countermeasures around the perimeter then retreat. This is not going to be defensible.”

  “Ish here. We can't retreat! The casualties –”

  Oshi glanced up. Radar flickered out, pulsing the distance to the ceiling: deafening echoes blinded her in a weird, synaesthetic rush. “ We're all casualties if we don't move. This is a killing jar.” She turned and lifted one foot: put it down again, a metre nearer the door. She flexed her shoulders and felt a smooth stinger extension weld itself into her proprioceptive sense, grafted into her body image like a transplant of death. It whirred up to speed, nozzle tracking across the wall behind her focal point. “ Come on.”

  She stepped over the prostrate guards, climb-spider humming. It was dark outside: she felt a distant jolt through the soles of her feet, then a smooth sense of acceleration as the spider stretched up to full height with her first outdoor stride. “ Which way is the gate?”

  “Jan here. Follow me.” Another exoskeleton emerged into the night air and reared, legs uncoiling beneath it in strange broken-jointed geometries. It froze still for a moment, then leapt forward into an alley between dark-looming tombs. Oshi followed, edgily aware of her unaccustomed extensions and the silent threat from above. Her skin crawled with the urge to send active radar pulses skywards, to track the insurgents she could almost feel falling through the silent night air towards her –

  They ran through dark alleys of stone, past tumbled walls and ominous pillars, under the sign of the eye of Horus. Dust devils whirled at the side of the funerary road, whisps of smoke rising in the heat of the night. Amplifiers boosted their strides, fitting seven league boots to their heels. As they ran the buildings became smaller and more decrepit, decaying into sand-crusted mounds of ancient wreckage.

  Oshi felt the extensions to her body-image take shape, weird limbs and shapeless organs grafted onto her sensory homunculus. New senses augmented her own. She listened to radar and watched for the luminous flicker-pulse of high bandwidth comms, felt the mind-bending static of quantum transfer links forcing its way to her attention. The cylinder was a huge echoing tube, grinding and shuddering with the intensity of the signals bouncing up and down it. A thousand billion Dreamtime nodes pulsed in synchrony, tracking the state transfers of every nervous system in the pocket world. For a claustrophobic instant she was almost blinded by a gut-churning insight: despite its tremendous mass and complexity, this ecosphere of the mind was fragile beyond belief. The puny mutterings of the escape committee had already begun to destabilize it. That, combined with the ominous thermal noise from outside, might signal the end of all life in this solar system.

  There were twenty of them now, distorted marionettes encased in sinister confections of armour and bone. A ping in her ear notified Oshi that a secure voice link was coming on-line, encryption keys swapped via an uncrackable quantum channel. “What's your fallback plan?” she asked, selecting Mik's key.

  “Nothing certain. Head for the funicular, I think, and work our way up to the top. We have smart mines to send in first –”

  “Bad idea,” Oshi interrupted. “Anubis isn't dumb. Ever seen a successful frontal attack without surprise?”

  “I'm not that kind of soldier,” Mik admitted.

  “Then listen. If we try to take the front door we are going to get eaten alive. But if we go up the wall – I don't think he'll expect that.”

  “Up the wall –” Silence broken by the rhythm of pounding feet, as the spider-born runners reached the outskirts of the necropolis and paused on the edge of the scrubby wasteland. “That's five kilometres. Straight up.”

  “In reducing gravity, with powered exoskeletons. The real danger is that he'll take one look at the end wall, see us, and there'll be no cover. So a distraction is on order, no?”

  “I understand.”

  Oshi glanced round, trying to work out which of the looming shadows was Mik. In the twilight they all looked alike, menacing moorlocks stalking the edge of the jungle. For a moment she was awe-struck by her own presumption in being here, in pretending to command: these people were entrusting their lives to her judgement, and yet ... she must be as much a cypher to them as they were to her. Strangers barely met in passing. Their willingness to act must bespeak some deep desperation, a frustration with their fate so intense and passionate that even under pain of death they were ready to move at the first call. Then she remembered her interview, only days before – or so it seemed – the Boss standing, smiling down at her with a face like an empty mask pulled by wires, telling her exactly what she would do and why. And everything seemed less strange to her for a moment. Yes, there was a reason to be free from the Superbrights, and if she understood it, then how much more might Boris and his people ...

  Six of the soldiers turned back, hurrying back into the necropolis on many-jointed legs. “What's going on?”

  “I told them to go climb the funicular and knock on Anubis' door,” said Mik. “We've got less than twenty minutes. Back at the temple they've spotted the goons. Don't look up.”

  They spread out in single file, hurrying along a narrow gravel path that led from the crumbling mortuary into a shadowy architecture of trees and undergrowth. Insects creaked in the night, but there was no sound of higher animals: it was almost as if the forest cowered in fear, aware that a greater predator by far was stirring in sleep within the necropolis. Oshi tried to relax her body, to let the climb-spider take the strain of her motion, but her traitor muscles refused to unwind. She had the sick fluttery sense of impending disaster, every nerve ending awake and straining for the whisper of descending death.

  They splashed across a shallow stream, surged up a low hillside, wiping undergrowth aside with a hiss of power saws. Oshi stole a backward glance: saw a faint dusting of something like snowflakes falling from on high, a distant glimmer of fire. Their course took them away from the road, through bewilderingly dense stands of trees and a maze of little barren tracks that made the forest floor resemble a carpet magnified for the perspecti
ve of a mite. A slow, shallow canal crossed their path, beneath listless willow trees. Something unseen snapped at her ankles as she strode across the causeway. Then they were on an uphill slope, leaning into their stride, ascending above the level of the forest below.

  Mik: “it's the end-wall. Lucky Memphis is only about three kilometres away. We could have had a long run.”

  “That's yet to come.” They stopped at the treeline. Oshi looked up at the grey stony slope ahead ... and up, and up, and up. It made her feel as if she had a crick in her neck; then a miracle of perspective cut in and it was not that she was looking up, but that she was standing on the surface of a wall, looking across towards a far horizon ... instant vertigo.

  “What do we scale it with?” She didn't recognize the questioner's voice.

  “There's cheap steel behind the cladding. Electromagnets in your toes and fingers. Let's go.” Jan, the faceless lead, scampered past Oshi: sharp brilliances of naked metal extended from his claws and clicked against the wall with a noise like bone. He surged upwards, hand-over-hand. Oshi gulped, flexed her fingers – until claws appeared – and did the same to her (oddly extensible) toes. Looking down she saw that her real feet were unchanged, but the extra joints she could sense had sprung from the tips of her walking skeleton.

  “If they spot us we're dog food,” she said, selecting Mik's private channel. “How long will your distraction last?”

  “Which one?”

  She swung her hands against the wall, fingertips outstretched, and used her climb-spider to drag herself up it. Kicked out – felt toe-holds as solid as crampons when her feet locked tight to the wall. “The others.”

  “Don't look back,” he advised.

  “I won't.” She already knew what the snowflakes meant: goons jumping from the axial tube, falling slowly at first in microgravity, then faster – accelerating into a downward tumble towards the necropolis, tentacular limbs waving, drool flying – “just climb.”