Scratch Monkey

by Charles Stross

  “Hmmm ...” He winces and blinks. “ You don't want to know that, officially,” he sends via wisdom link. “ ... my guesstimate is maybe as many as twenty cells. All with significant firepower. I mean, the Stasi are tough but they're not sharp. I would expect us to have as many as six gadgets ready to go off, then drones ready to come down and decontaminate the fire zone afterwards. Half a million corpses must raise a hell of a stink. But you heard what I said. Think of the resistant individuals, immune to the afterlife nanoencoders. The Partei doctors use prions –”

  “What's a prion?”

  He looks startled. “You don't –”

  “Wisdom is off-line for the duration, I've only got stored battle-knowledge for now.”

  He looks abashed. “Ack. A prion; sub-genetic virus, I guess. You twist a peptide alpha chain that propagates, maybe loops through some ribosomes and replicates without DNA or RNA. You click on nucleic acids? Genetics?” I nod: my education is patchy but not defective. “Good. Prions are rare. they're not much use to us, but the Partei ... They can't even build a gene spinner, let alone decode a homoeobox, but they slaughtered enough seniles that they found the infective agent for sponge-brain syndrome. Turns out there's an isomer that propagates – slowly – and can be modified to block the nanotech uptake route, some kind of synaptic protein. So guess what our friendly Junta decided to use on their own population?”

  “Ack.” I can see the headlines in one of the newspapers; By order of the Politburo, life after death is decreed to be a Partei privilege . “It sucks, but –”

  He picks up the gunlauncher and slots the barrel into the breech pump with an oily snick. “That's why we're here. Insurance. In case the carpet bombs don't work.”

  Here-and-now:

  The door blows in without any warning, a deep juddering thud pulsing through me like a blow. I dive for the floor, pushing Eri away from me as something thumps me a light blow on the forehead and I grab at my knife, clothes getting in the way but tearing cleanly as I flip the trigger. Someone shouts: I've got a handful of fabric wrapped around a purring death in one hand. I aim it at the door and wave it around as my right eye goes red and sticky and when I blink all the light is gone. Blood. Damn. A graze on my forehead. I trip the knife to full power and brace myself. There's a scream and a sudden crackle of small-arms fire and I switch off the knife and frantically roll for cover. More gunfire. I wince, blink my eye to infrared and get ghost-sight back: something lands on my neck, a gravelly scattering of plaster from the ceiling.

  “Back room! Go! I'll cover!” It's Eri. She's got a gun, some kind of machine pistol, trained on the doorway with finger jammed tight on the trigger. It's smart: it only fires when it sees a target in its sights. I scramble on hands and knees, backing away from the chaos out front. It's on fire now, flames licking the doorway and the hedge beyond – don't know what kind of shit's happening but we're lucky to be alive – and kick the door behind me so hard my ankle feels like it's on fire. It slams open and I wave my knife at an empty room – I go to ground and Eri sprints past me.

  “Ivan?”

  She looks harried. “Come on. Your head – are you injured?”

  “Not badly –” she grabs my wrist and drags me towards the back, over the home-brew nuke, into the servant's pantry where the staircase is. My head is spinning. Where's Ivan? Eri covers as I scramble down the steps into the cellar, where the stalactites glow and shimmer with a heat like death. What about Ton Ang? They were careless – I don't hear any covering fire from behind. I cast around, see the tunnel beside the great pile of weird gadgetry that dominates the floor. It gapes open beside the constructors that pour tendrils down into the city sewers endlessly, to extract the uranium-235 bomb fuel.

  “'S way,” I mutter.

  Eri's behind me. “Make for ground one,” she whispers. “They'll know where to find us if they get free.” There's a colossal thump! from overhead that rattles the ceiling. “You first. Go on. Get down!” She shoves me towards the hole. I scramble down into it feet-first, slide down the buzzing hot constriction into darkness, my heatsight showing me a waterfall of silver nightmares coruscating over my shoulder – then I drop, jarring my ankle again, land with a splash in something cold and soggy and nearly lose my footing. The tunnel's too low, so I duck and waddle a bit, then Eri's down beside me and I can nearly see her. It's pitch-black in here but the heat of the web that covers the ceiling lights her up like day for me. “Can you see anything?” she whispers.

  “Ack. Right eye's splashed. Scalp's bleeding, can't see except in heatlight.”

  “Heatlight – oh, yeah. Yeah.” She shakes her head. “I can – should do – “

  She's not making sense. “Follow me now.” I carefully don't think about anything in particular, just hobble along with my head ducked to clear the luminescent slime and my hand clutching a knife in a death-grip. “Do you think they –”

  THUMP.

  My ears nearly pop. Water sprays across my back; there's a gravelly rumble that lasts for seconds, then silence.

  “No.” She doesn't say anything more. Doesn't need to. We stand there, motionless, for several seconds while the wave of sewage ebbs around our ankles. I feel a great rift form in my life.

  “Come on,” she prods me, finally. “Let's go. Ground one or bust. Make them pay for that.”

  The sewer is a concrete pipe, round-bore and wide, less than two metres high. Slime wreaths it three-quarters of the way to the ceiling; every so often we pass pipes and vents high in the ceiling of the sewer. It's why we chose the house; why we're still alive. “They have tunnel-runners,” Eri mutters. “Specially-bred animals, some kind of native predator. Haul ass, Oshi. Or they'll –”

  “Fuck it, I'm fine.” I bite down on my tongue in anger. I put one foot in front of the other, knife out front, eyes fixed on that lucid vanishing point of darkness where the scum rises to meet the roof and there's no hatred and the ghosts of lamentation aren't rising to the surface of my mind. I can still see Ivan on the staircase, looking ever so surprised, a gunlauncher clutched in his hands as the door comes in off its hinges – I shouldn't think about it any more, unless I want to join him very soon. Death and upload is not a ticket back to base: our masters do not appreciate failures. “I'll take point. Cover me. Check?”

  “Yo.” She's behind me and I think she doesn't take it so hard but I feel very bitter, very numb. I can't stop seeing him again, wishing I hadn't been so tough on him since we came downstairs. I want to kick myself, so I slosh forward instead – sewer wading as a substitute for mourning. I want to find those Stasi goons and, and –

  “Maybe they were careless, but maybe they knew they didn't need to block out the back,” she whispers over my shoulder. Then: “ eyeball! Contact!” I see what Eri, with her clear eyes and cool head spotted while I was off in the clouds of angst. Cry havoc! and set loose the dogs of war. It's the tunnel-runners, great fat-bodied walrus-things with huge eyes that shine red in the dim sewer-light. They flop and weave around one another, sloshing and foaming in a morass of beast-hungry agression. The nightmares have see us, and now I know why the Stasi didn't bother waiting in the sewers; I duck sideways, knife useless at this range, to give her room to open up ... and lurch head-first into the wall.

  I come awake shuddering with cold and fear and I don't know where I am or who I am or how I got here. Wet. Hurt. One foot is a mass of pain, twice its normal size. My bladder aches. The side of my head is throbbing like a red-hot boiler where I thumped it on the sewer wall. I'm cold. I try to open one eye and it comes back to me. “ Where are we?” I send, twitching wisdom access on a low-bandwidth channel. “ Who's here?”

  “Awake.” It's Eri. I feel her, now, leaning against my back – that's the dry, warm side. She sounds hoarse. “What's your condition? Can you talk?”

  “Ack. Leg feels like –” I take stock. “Those animals. What did you do?”

  She moves, uneasily. She's sitting, I can feel her presence, sitting cross-legged with
her back to me. There's stone beneath my cheek – no wonder I feel sore. This is some kind of platform. It's dark and it reeks of ancient sewage. “I took the roof down. This is a dead-end spur, Oshi. If we want to go home, we've got to dig our way out first.”

  “They were –” sudden panic yanks me bolt upright in spite of myself, both eyes open in the dark. My left eyes stings; I can feel blood and mucus crusted in it, and my head's sore. I can't see anything, it's so dark. “Buried alive. Aren't we? What about Ton and Ivan?”

  “No contact,” Eri says absent-mindedly. “So I dragged you in here and brought down the roof behind us. Anything to keep the guardians out.” I can feel her shudder as she says it. Perversely, this gives me hope.

  “Guardians? Is that what you call them?” I'm too exhausted for the hysterical laugh I feel bubbling up inside me. “What are they?”

  She talks quietly, slowly, feeling her way around the words as if they're strange boulders in a dark landscape. “Some kind of rodent-analogue. Pre-terraforming, so they're marginal in this ecosystem. Stasi feed them trace nutrients and use operant conditioning to keep them down here. Until they got them, the zombies held the sewer system.”

  “Uck.” I lean against her and she puts an arm round my shoulders. “Look, we got to get out of here. If the Stasi find the gadget they'll run and before that happens diMichaelis will pull the plug. I give it maybe six hours. How long was I out for?”

  I feel her shrug. “How should I know? After you put yourself out things got busy for a while. That was a bad one. What happened?”

  “Dunno. Disorientated by the bomb, I guess. Ears go pop, vestibular whatsits go dizzy, which way is up? So I guess I slammed my head by accident. Now what? Think they're still waiting?”

  “Yes. No. Maybe. I can't shift the rubble, though. Fluid's backed way up, we'd drown in shit. All we can do is start digging. Got a shovel?”

  “No, but I – ah, shit.” I try and pat myself down but I can't find the knife. All I find is some more bruises plus me, wearing a wet wool dress and wet animal-hide boots and a too-tight belt and wet vegetable-fibre undergarments. No hidden zap guns, concealed micro drones or Secret Agent pocket gatecoder. “I lost my knife.”

  I hit bottom then. Everything is dark, inside as well as out. Maybe Eri senses this because she squeezes my shoulder and says; “no worries. Not your fault. No problems – I've got mine here.”

  “You – no. If we had one we could –” she fumbles around my lap, finds my hand and forces something round and cold between my fingers. “Cut the stonework out and maybe we can crawl ...”

  “Would be way too tight. Have you figured out how much room we've got, yet?”

  “No – “ I try to stand up. I don't do it very fast, which is a good thing because the ceiling is very low indeed. Poured concrete. My stomach lurches. I've just remembered: there's no echo in here. “This is a tube tunnel, right?”

  “Ack.” quiet, now.

  “And it's terminal?” I shuffle forward, hands stretched out in front until I graze rough rock with my knuckles. Turn round, shuffle back, step over Eri's legs, fumble my way to the mass of rubble at the other end of the tunnel. “Damn. four, five metres. Couldn't you have found something bigger?”

  Even though it's pitch black I can sense her watching me. “It was the best I could do. They were behind us, Oshi. They can strip a horse down to bonemeal in under a minute. Teeth like a man trap.”

  I sit down again, feel my way across the floor towards her. The first thing I catch is her fingers: we hold hands for a minute as I try to make sense of this cold coffin burial she saved us for. “If we're more than about five metres under we won't make it. Damn, I hope we've got enough air. Or maybe Ivan and Ton will dig us out. You never know.”

  “Depends,” she says quietly. “They might not be around.”

  “You figure that?”

  The silence hangs guilty over my head.

  “I wish you hadn't asked,” she says.

  “Oh –” I squeeze her hand. Feel self pity and anger wash over me. And loss, angst, hatred. Maybe they'll make it – and maybe I'll stop kidding myself.

  “Is it murder to hand a toddler a loaded pistol and tell them it's a toy?”

  The silence is gravid. Something rattles, a long way away. I lean against her shoulder. “If the web's set up right we can maybe capture those who're still hooked for Dreamtime upload. Thus removing the Partei power-base at a stroke. You suppose diMichaelis will wait before setting off the carpet bombs?”

  “No. You're being optimistic. I think it all smells wrong, Oshi. The Partei are very tough people. That can't be what the Boss is planning.”

  “But ...” I stop and think. A vision steals into my eyes: Eri strokes my visual cortex with a low-level wisdom burst. Nukes wrapped in carpets. The carpets are upload webs, holographic tracking nodes capable of spitting souls wholesale into the afterlife – the real bomb, more terminal than any nuke. A weapon designed to subvert the minds of the people it is used against. “The idea was that if we got turned over the Stasi would mistake it for a nuke job. And you don't need more than one nuke per city, do you?”

  “Wrong-o, Osh. You can't rely on ignorance – that's underestimating the enemy. Think about it.” She leans against me. “I'm too tired to say. It's real bad. We don't have much longer, I guess.”

  “Huh? What's –” going on, I was about to say, but it all clicks together and suddenly makes a horrible kind of sense, like a thermite explosion going off behind my eyes. “But the Stasi don't have nuclear demolition charges! Even if they knew how to use them.”

  She strokes my shoulder. “They have them now. Thanks to us. And they know we're planning something for the city. They're opposed to the Dreamtime in a serious way, some kind of political control-meme that's taken over. If they figure we're going to upload the entire city they might just –”

  “Don't say it.” I shake her hand off angrily. “Nobody could be that cruel –”

  I'm lying across her legs and she's moaning. I'm dizzy from the noise that goes on and on like an earthquake. Everything creaks and shudders around us. The floor tips up and the angry giant shakes us some more, but the roar is dying away. My ears hurt. “What's that?” I say, unable to hear my own voice. “I say what's that?”

  She sits up and clutches at me desperately, “the fuckers did it, they're mad, gave a pistol to the paranoids, like a scorpion that stings itself to death if it sees itself in a mirror and can't kill the reflection –”

  A hot wind blows through the tube. The floor tilts some more and the pile of rubble slides towards us and a cold horror bathes me in cold sweat. Shuddering, I roll over and shake her, drag her down on top of me, “ lie still, open your mouth, hope the overpressure doesn't –”

  A shower of gravel bursts over us and round us and we kick and shove against a slurry of rocks and hot stinking shit-churned mud. “ Oh heaven oh hell what have we done –” The cloud is choking us and it's hot, too hot to breathe. With a groaning roar the end of our coffin pokes out of the seared ground; overhead, the noon sky is the colour of an angry sunset. We slide down the gravel heap towards the back end of the tube. “Got to get out,” she says aloud, very clearly. There's a ringing in my ears that at first I think is real – then I realise it's my wisdom, listening to raw microwaves torn from a bleeding sky.

  Moments later, without really understanding how, I'm standing on top of the cracked pavement outside. Eri is with me, propping me up; my ankle throbs. The pavement is hot, almost too hot to stand on. There's rubble everywhere. Something like a broken stick, on fire, protrudes from a shattered car with half a house lying across the front of it. Flesh runs molten. There's a sickly meat smell in the air that makes me want to salivate and throw up simultaneously. And a continuous rumble of fire, drumming desolation across the wasteland that only a minute ago was a city.

  I look up. From this close – only a couple of kilometers away – the cloud looks nothing like a mushroom. It's more like a gr
eat angry pillar of fire that merges with the red sky, a bridge between earth and gehenna. I'm deaf, wisdom cut off abruptly by the magnetic storm triggered by the dying fireball. I don't think anyone around us can have survived.

  “We did it,” Eri sobs. “Handed them a pistol and showed them, 'if you don't use it now we'll do it for you.' And they believed it. They fell for it. Like a scorpion faced with a mirror ...”

  I slap her face, turn and hobble away. Ivan and Ton Ang are dead, I tell myself. Dead forever. They died shortly before the blast: it takes time to be packet-shifted out to the gatecoders, up to the great afterlife processors in the sky, and nukes are notorious for scrambling uploads. Feeling something nameless and unimaginable, I concentrate on going anywhere, just so long as it is away from the rumbling tower of death that casts a shadow over us. Why couldn't it be me? In the distance, over the hills and far away, the sky is still blue; it seems like such a monstrous injustice that I'm alive to see it. I don't need this kind of guilt. Nuclear sunburn prickles on the nape of my neck as the city smoulders. I stop, look down at an obstruction. A body lies at my feet, blackened like a log in a forest fire: no face, just a grinning cinder suggestive of eyes and teeth. diMichaelis must have told the Stasi where to find us. Then planted both devices at just the right time, with just enough information to tell the Partei leaders what we were doing. Which made them–

  “Wait for me.” I feel her presence behind me. “Wait, please. Oshi. You shouldn't be running. Slow down. Don't leave me alone here.”

  I stumble, stop in the shadow of a stone building with windows that lie in the street outside, frames blistered and scorched. She trudges up behind me. For the first time I realise she's limping worse than I am. Face covered in grime, native costume ripped and smeared and scorched, blood on her hands and face. “It's not my fault. They had to destroy their own city in order to save it for their ideology,” she explains. She looks like a madwoman, eyes staring from a soot-smudged face, grimy blonde hair turned to fire by the setting nuclear sunburst.