The Delirium Brief

by Charles Stross

  Mo moves on, quietly dictating notes. Her gaudy earrings are there to distract attention from a minor technological miracle, a Bluetooth headset so small that it resembles a pair of hearing implants. The flesh-colored earplugs pick up everything she says via bone conduction, and her phone is running a background app that relays her comments to Brains in real time and records them locally in event of loss of signal. With the gain turned up even subvocalized comments work. “—Sleazebag Number Three is the chief financial officer of Telereal Trillium, who handles—”

  Her chain of thought is rudely interrupted by an excited crackle in her ears: “CHIPMUNK to CANDID! CHIPMUNK to CANDID! Whee, does this thing work?”

  Mo manages not to startle as she does a hasty scan. Nobody is watching her. “CANDID here,” she subvocalizes. Then she remembers to pull out her phone and hit the button for push-to-talk. “CANDID to CHIPMUNK, you really don’t need to use the silly code names all the time, Cassie. Sitrep, please.” She holds the phone to her head and fades back against the drawing room wall, between a concealed servants’ doorway and a swag of curtain, as if deep in conversation.

  “I’m fine! There’s a new woman in charge of the kitchen tonight, instead of Lisa; I like her, she’s much calmer and easier to work for. Oh, I just saw Ms. Overholt go inside the private corridor under the main staircase! I caught her PIN!”

  Mo is instantly on full alert. “What was it?” she asks aloud.

  “1-3-3-7! YesYes!”

  Someone is not as smart as they think they are, and it’s not the Queen of Air and Darkness. Maybe Schiller’s security think the presence of a PIN-pad lock on the door will deter intruders, or perhaps they just don’t care, but using LEET as the password for a secure installation is just dumb. The nasty possibility that perhaps they want to sucker intruders inside occurs to Mo barely a second later. “Uh-huh,” she says aloud, then, subvocalizing: “CANDID to MADCAP, did you copy that?”

  “Copy that,” Brains replies.

  “Cassie, will you be noticed if you disappear for a few minutes?”

  “Maybe, but I can tell them I had a stomach bug and had to rush to the little room. Ms. McGuigan will sack me, but who cares? The minibus won’t be back for at least two hours!”

  Mo speaks aloud: “I am moving my lips for the benefit of the cameras, ignore me, rhubarb rhubarb bet you wish you’d hired a lip-reader … okay, back to business. Cassie, I need another hour here to trawl the party. Also, I bet Schiller’s people will all turn out when the main guests show up. So once the PM goes in, that’s when we’ll make our move. Do you copy?”

  “YesYes! How do you want to do it?”

  “I’ll call you five minutes ahead of time. If you’re with people, run your stomach bug excuse. Go into the bathroom under the stairs and await my call. I’ll go in, look around, and if all’s well I’ll come out and give you the all clear. If I call you or if I’m out of contact for more than ten minutes, come in and extract me. Is that clear?”

  “Clear as moonlight!”

  “MADCAP, relay to ZERO. CANDID out. Thanks, dear, you’re a star, now go and fix yourself some rhubarb rhubarb. Bye.” Mo returns the phone to her clutch, then straightens her back, permits herself a momentary wince as she shifts weight onto her back foot, and heads towards the staircase. The night is young, the Prime Minister hasn’t arrived yet, and who knows? There might still be useful intel to extract from the guests before it’s time to start looking behind locked doors.

  * * *

  I can’t stand fucking zombie movies.

  Well okay, I’ll make an honorable exception for Shaun of the Dead. But the point stands: zombie flicks strike too close to home—and too far as well. Ever since I did my own star turn in Brookwood Cemetery (and don’t get me started on my perfidious ex-boss, Iris Carpenter, and her happy clappy friends-and-family Black Pharaoh cult), I’ve had an uncomfortably close relationship with the reanimated. We don’t say undead because there’s no such thing. Zombies are just corpses that have been activated by an Eater that wants to go walkabout and chow down on other folks’ souls. Our Residual Human Resources would do just that if they weren’t locked down tight by Facilities’ geas. PHANGs are living people who have been infected by a terrible commensal symbiote or parasitoid. K syndrome victims are living people who are dying of an extradimensional parasite infection. The Eater of Souls is sui generis but I can confirm its host has a heartbeat and still enjoys a plate of spaghetti bolognese, and so on. The thing is, I can deal with them all, kinda-sorta. (Zombies are easy, PHANGs really don’t get on well with UV laser pointers, and K syndrome isn’t a threat, except to my emotional stability.)

  But Schiller’s mooks, the ones with giant isopods in place of their tongues who dream of drowning in their god’s mind, give me the willies. And right now they’re trying to give me lead poisoning, too.

  While Captain Partridge, Johnny McTavish, and I were working this scene like it was a corporate storage unit and office inside the Heathrow fence, and while Chris Womack was serving an Anton Piller order on the janitor, a silent, many-legged alarm began sounding in the depths of the warehouse. There is a brood-mother here, and while Schiller’s been taking care of business at Nether Stowe House (and presumably at his apartment near Jamaica Wharf) the brood-mother has been busy happily infecting the airport staff and Schiller’s regular employees. It’s after six o’clock on a Saturday night and most normal people would have somewhere better to be than hanging out at Heathrow, but no: the Middle Temple of the Golden Promise Ministries is holding a revival meeting, and the theme of the event seems to be that when you’re speaking in tongues you can never have too many guns.

  As I open up my mind’s eye the world fades and I find myself standing in a grayscale maze on an infinite plane, the walls of which are chest-high charnel racks of human bones. An invertebrate the size of a grizzly bear rears up above the piled femurs and skulls on dozens of tiny legs and clatters its chitinous mouth-parts at me. The silvery slug-trails of hundreds of half-eaten souls trail away from it in all directions, too numerous to count, like strings of drool. It’s tugging on them—I register this just as a real-world someone brusquely grabs me by the scruff of my neck and yanks me down onto the floor, hard, just before the airspace previously occupied by my skull is shattered by the percussive banging of gunfire. We are indoors, so it’s deafeningly loud, at least until Johnny lines up his AA-12 and starts laying down an artillery barrage, at which point it feels like I’m being punched in the eardrums by an angry woodpecker.

  I sprawl backwards and try not to scream. I can feel the hosts around us, some upstairs and some in the basement, and a bunch more out front. The basement, I think, confused—something about the basement, like a flash of déjà vu to the second Alien movie—oh, right. I crunch down hard, and find myself sucking up the debris of what’s left of Ollie Jackson, 27, single male, born again into the mind of the Sleeper by way of its loyal many-legged servant. Ollie was downstairs with an MP5 pointed at the ceiling, just like those guys in Grozny during the Russian invasion of Chechnya, getting ready to shoot upwards through the floor we’re lying on. Well, not anymore. His mind is a bitter and watery-thin gruel, much of his individuality already digested by the Sleeper before I ended him. I cast the net wider, feel two more above us and off to one side, and another raising his gun on the emergency stairs from the basement—

  Nope, can’t be having any of that.

  “Can you do something about these guys?” Someone is shouting in my ear. It comes through as a thin, high-pitched buzzing.

  “Working on it,” I manage, but it feels as if I’m drowning in secondhand death; the thing is, I can kill at a distance just by willing it so, but I also get to live through my victims’ experience of dying, and—“I’m not a fucking machine gun. Got one below, three upstairs. ’Nother below—”

  There’s another burst of gunfire from a soldier’s G36, then shrieking that doesn’t stop but fades into gasping for seconds at a time before it comes r
ight back at full gutshot volume. No more shooting, though. Someone is giving orders, boots are pounding past me. I struggle to sit up, but I still can’t see anything except the host-mother’s bone maze nest. “Host-mother!” I call. “Get the host-mother!”

  “Bob? How many fingers?” It’s Johnny. He sounds calm enough.

  “Can’t see. Inner eye.”

  “Oh bollocks.” Someone grabs my right arm so hard that I gasp, then they’re lifting and after a moment I flex my leg muscles. It’s at this point that I realize there’s a sharp pain in the middle of my sternum, as if I’ve been punched. “Eh, looks like your vest caught it.”

  “What. Have I been…”

  “Yeah, mate, you’re gonna ’ave a lovely bruise. Also a nice little souvenir an’ a story to dine out on once we’re finished ’ere.”

  I’ve been shot, I realize, but the body armor worked. Okay, that and I’m blind. With a massive effort of will I withdraw from the odd corner of my attention that I’ve been locked into, and force myself to open my physical eyes again. “Whoo,” I gasp. “Johnny, there’s a host-mother stashed about thirty meters thataway. Mooks are guarding it and I’ve got a, a sense that it’s concealed storage. They were setting up to pincer us from above and below. They’ve got guns—”

  “We’d noticed,” he says drily. “You comin’?”

  “Got to: if we don’t nail the mother it’ll summon all its offspring, and it’s rooted the airport police…”

  TEN

  A VERY BRITISH COUP

  Being a PHANG, Mhari has blindingly fast reflexes and superhuman strength, and during her time with the Transhuman Police Coordination Force she got regular workouts and practical self-defense training, thanks to the police college at Hendon. It’s a habit she’s kept up, because even though she doesn’t have much time for super-heroics she’s come to appreciate a good workout. So she’s out of the kitchen door before Persephone has finished speaking; she bounces off the living room wall and spins through into the master suite, pulls the door closed behind her (cushioning it at the last instant), and skids to a stop in front of the mirrored doors of the floor-to-ceiling walk-in wardrobe.

  “Fuck! Hide. Where?” Her palms are damp, and she forces herself to slow down, reaching for the rail rather than shoving the door aside by hand—it wouldn’t do to leave a sweaty handprint in the middle of the polished surface. She slides it to one side and confronts a hanging wall of a male occupant’s suits and shirts. Below them, suitcases. She cranes her neck back. There’s a shelf, about two meters up, entirely suitable for boxes—and it’s empty except for a couple of spare pillows in plastic storage bags. “Perfect.” She reaches up, gives a tentative tug to check that it can take her weight, then pulls herself up by her fingertips, rolls smoothly onto the shelf, and slides the door shut behind her.

  It’s the work of a couple of seconds to squeeze behind the bagged-up pillows and excavate just enough space between them to breathe, hear—and if the door opens again, to see what’s going on. Then she gets comfortable, and waits.

  Doors bang and more than one pair of heavy boots thud across the lobby. There are no shouts of alarm or other signs that the arrivals have seen Persephone. But after a few seconds the sound of heavy breathing and muffled swearing filters through the barricade as someone opens the bedroom door. It sounds like they’re dragging a sack of potatoes with them. “Over … on the bed. Carefully, don’t drop her.”

  The bed in Schiller’s room has a memory foam mattress so there are no springs to squeak, but the muffled thud of someone depositing a heavy load reaches Mhari’s sensitive ears. She waits, heart in mouth, for their next move. Shouldn’t they have searched the flat first? she wonders. Schiller’s goons are sloppy, to be so trusting of a burglar alarm. Gary blocked the suite alarm system between the control panel and the outside world using the StingRay—intercepting the high-end burglar alarm’s GSM modem was about the only thing the box of tricks was good for—and once she got inside, Persephone installed a dodgy firmware upgrade on the in-room control panel. That sort of thing is above and beyond the call of duty for regular burglars, but even so, it’s still poor practice for security guards to believe the story the alarm head unit is telling them.

  “That’s harder than it looks in the movies.” A younger voice, male. There’s something odd about it, a flatness of affect.

  “Put her in the recovery position while I prep her,” says the other man—older, gravelly voice—then the wardrobe door nearest Mhari’s feet slides open without warning. She manages not to flinch as halogen light floods in. Her lower legs and feet aren’t concealed, but she’s far enough back on the upper shelf that unless he looks up, above head height, he won’t spot her. And indeed gravel-voice does not look up. Instead, he pulls out one of the drawers from the storage unit adjacent to the suit rail and rummages around. A silvery clattering tells Mhari that he’s after the bondage gear, and she dry-swallows, choking back rising bile. “Yes, like that. Wrists behind her. Ankles, like so.” More clanking of fetters. “No, not the ball gag—use the bridle instead. If you obstruct the airways while she’s unconscious, she might inhale her vomit. Nausea’s always a risk with Rohypnol when it wears off.”

  “Are we done yet?”

  “Nearly.” A clicking of metal on metal suggests a padlock to Mhari’s imagination. “That should hold her. Yes, we’re done here.”

  “What if she—”

  A snort. “That’s between her and our Lord and Savior. She’s still got time to repent. Anyway, she’s a whore: if she wasn’t, she wouldn’t be here, would she?”

  “I don’t like this. Can I go?”

  Another snort. “Go on, wait in the living room. I’ll finish up here. We’re not supposed to leave until our Master is on his way back.” The door opens and closes. Mhari hears the older security guard walking around, a rattle as he tugs on a chain, then the light goes out and the door opens and closes again.

  “Fuck,” Mhari swears very quietly, and worms her way round until she can pull her phone out. She listens intently, holding her breath, but hears only the faint whispery breathing of the drugged woman on the bed. Lying on her back she pulls up the camera app on her phone, switches off the flash, then slowly drags the wardrobe door open and snaps away. What the camera sees is what she expected, and she swears some more. A skinny blonde in an off-the-shoulder dress and stilettos lies on her side on the bed. They’ve pinioned her ankles and wrists behind her back, and there’s some sort of gag-like contraption hugging her head, but she’s out for the count.

  Mhari hits the push-to-talk icon and whispers: “Gary, got a developing problem here. ’Seph and I have gone to ground, there are guards in the living room, and they just stashed a prisoner in the master bedroom. She’s incapacitated and unconscious and I really don’t think their intentions towards her are good. What’s our countdown at?”

  “Checking … you’ve been down fifty-nine minutes. Are these the same guys Schiller sent out before he left? Because they’re supposed to clock off after their last assignment of the evening.”

  “Tell them that,” Mhari says grimly. “I overheard boss-man tell his assistant they can’t go until they hear that Schiller’s on his way home.”

  “That’s unfortunate.” Gary sounds rattled. “Let me check something. Maybe Ms. Hazard can suggest a solution. I’ll text you back.” He drops the call, leaving Mhari alone in the darkness, trying not to count the minutes until the portal back to safety closes.

  * * *

  Mo takes another seventy minutes to ghost around the perimeter of the party, kibitzing on a conversation here, exchanging a smile and pleasantry there, graceful and courteous and forgotten within seconds everywhere she goes. She’s working the middle-aged invisibility field—carefully nursing her power, feeding it with all the skill she’s learned over years as a practitioner of the eldritch arts. It’s a talent she first mastered during the previous year’s close encounter with a nervous breakdown. Women of a certain age tend to be
overlooked, unless they go out of their way to make themselves look younger or kick up a stink. Normally it’s a nuisance, but when you have the ability to amplify it to the level of a preternatural power it’s even better than a cloak of invisibility. True invisibility would be a disastrous nuisance (people walk into you; photons travel right through your retinas without stopping, rendering you effectively blind), but Mo’s self-effacing superpower renders her anonymous and uninteresting. Onlookers simply dismiss her and walk on by. Burglars would view her with envious regard—if their eyeballs didn’t slide past her without stopping.

  It’s probably a good thing that she’s socially invisible at this event, Mo decides as she pauses to pick up a glass of unadulterated orange juice; the risk of running into people who know her professionally would otherwise be unacceptably high. The Home Secretary isn’t on the guest list—she’s probably at home in her burrow, laying eggs in a paralyzed illegal immigrant or something—but Mo recognizes a deputy commissioner from the Met, the Dean of Music from one of the second-tier London University colleges, several knights and dames and sundry other members of the House of Lords, and a couple of other hangers-on and power groupies. She slinks around in the shadows, avoiding eye contact with intent. Anyone who is here at Schiller’s invitation must be considered a potential recruit for the enemy, if not yet actually possessed. That excludes Cassie, with whom she exchanges a quiet smile and nod in the gallery overlooking the ballroom, then carefully avoids. Mo is the invisible woman, wryly amused—or perhaps just slightly bitter—about the way the world passes her by (although that’s all to the good right now). Having confirmed that everything is in place, Mo continues to whisper her running narrative to the analysts back in the safe house. And as she does so she realizes with sinking heart that Schiller has woven a sticky spider’s web indeed.