Some of the Best From Tor.com, 2013 Edition: A Tor.Com Original

by Various

  “Ammonium nitrate. About a ton of it. Harry Edgebaston moved it into the woodshed a month ago, last thing anyone remembers seeing him do.” Howe bares his teeth. “It’ll make a bit of a mess if it brews up.”

  Alan grins humorlessly. “Your theory that the thing in the woodshed is growing more intelligent and more powerful just got a boost, Bob. What do you propose to do about it?”

  I’m about to swither and prevaricate for a bit when my phone rings again. It’s the DO. I listen to what he has to say, then thank him and look at Alan. “A riderless stray horse jumped the gates at St. Ninian’s about fifteen minutes ago. When it left, it had a bareback rider. So I reckon, let’s see, ten miles … you’ve got maybe five to ten minutes to get ready for Octavia and EMOCUM Unit Two. They’ll be trying to get to the barn.” I bare my teeth. “I want a sample retrieval kit, and some extras. Then I’m going to go and talk to the monster while you guys neutralize Octavia and her ride. If I stop transmitting, pull back to a safe distance and use the woodshed for target practice. Any questions?”

  * * *

  Five minutes later, I’m ready. At Alan’s sign, two of his troopers pull the woodshed door open in front of me. I step forward, into the stygian darkness within.

  This is a pretty dumb thing to do, on the face of it; if you’ve read this report and the EQUESTRIAN RED SIRLOIN dossier you might well be asking, “What the fuck, Bob? Why not send in a bomb-disposal robot instead?” And I will happily agree that if we had a freaking bomb-disposal robot to hand we’d do exactly that. Alas, they’re all vacationing in Afghanistan this month— either that, or they’re in storage in a barracks in Hereford, which does us precisely no good whatsoever. And we’re clearly dealing with a many-tentacled occult incursion from the dungeon dimensions here, and those things eat electronics for breakfast. Much better to send in a warded-up human being: faster, more flexible, and I’ve got a couple of field-expedient surprises up my sleeves to boot.

  For one thing, I’m wearing a borrowed helmet with a very expensive monocular bolted to it—an AN/PVS-14 night vision camera. Everything’s grainy and green and a bit washed-out, and I can only see through one eye, but: in the kingdom of the blind, and all that. For another thing, I’m wired up with a radio mike and carry a crush-proof olive drab box under my arm. We’re pretty sure there are no survivors in the building, which makes my mission all the more important.

  For another thing—hey, don’t worry, I’ve nearly finished reading my laundry list—I may not be a hero, but I’m not the fourteen-year-old H. P. Lovecraft either. Dealing with eldritch horrors is part of my day job. It’s not even as bad as the paperwork, for the most part. True, the “moments of mortal terror” shtick really sucks, but on the other hand there’s the rush I get from knowing that I’m saving the world.

  And finally?

  I’m more than a little bit angry.

  So I walk into the booby-trapped woodshed full of explosives. Two guys with guns are waiting behind the door as it scrapes shut behind me. All I have to do is yell and they’ll do a quick open-and-close, then cover my retreat. I plant the horrifyingly expensive mil-spec shockproof LED lantern on the floor. Right now, it’s a brilliant flare of light in my night vision field, quite bright even to my unaugmented eye. Showing me precisely where to jump if, if, if it’s necessary.

  I take another step forward, stop, and call out: “Hey, Shub-face! I’m here to talk!”

  The silence eats my words, but I can feel a presence waiting.

  The air in the woodshed tastes damp and smells of mold. I take a deep breath, then sneeze as my sinuses swell closed. Oh great, I think: I’m mildly allergic to elder gods. (Only it’s not a god. It’s just an adult unicorn in the sessile, spawning phase of the life cycle. A very naughty unicorn indeed.)

  “We’ve got you surrounded,” I add, in a more conversational tone. “Broke your glamor, rounded up all your Renfields. Took down most of your sterile female workers.”

  (Because I have worked out this much: the thing I’m dealing with isn’t just a sexually dimorphic r-strategy hyperparasite; it’s a eusocial hive organism that can co-opt other species the way some types of ant domesticate aphids. And I’ve got another theory about the intelligence that Lovecraft called Shub-Niggurath—although I’m not sure he wasn’t pulling it out of his arse, as far as the name-calling is concerned—and where it comes from.)

  I take another step forward and nearly trip over something hard that’s the size of a football. I catch myself and look down. It’s a human skull. Fragments of flesh and the twisted remains of a radio headset cling to it. Shit. Well, now I know for sure where Alan’s troopers ended up. I glance up.

  The beams above my head support a layer of crude planks. It looks uneven and rough in my night scope. Odd trailing wisps of rotten straw dangle from it, as if a plant is growing on the floor above, pushing its roots between the cracks. Something moves. I stare, then look down as I hear a tiny clonk. A conical snail-shell as long as my little fingernail has fallen to the rough floor near the—ick, I glance rapidly away from the decapitated remains of the soldier. Then I force myself to look back. Wart-like, the snails rasp across the pitted and grooved body armor and fatigues, migrating towards the bloody darkness within.

  “Shub-Shub-Shub,” rumbles the huge and gloopy presence resting on the floorboards above my head. I jump halfway out of my skin, then step back smartly. There’s a high-pitched squeal of rage and pain as my foot lands on something that skitters out across the floor: a tiny, gracile horse-shaped thing as long as my outstretched hand.

  “Talk to me in human, Shub,” I call, pointing my face at the darkness above. “I’m here to negotiate.” Here to hear your last confession, I hope. Actually, I’ve overrun my safety point by a couple of paces—I should be standing on, or within three meters of, the door. But I need to find out if any of the troopers—or the little girl, Ada—are still alive. And I urgently need to find out just how intelligent this particular spawning unicorn Queen has become, to be laying gnarly plans to plant hundreds of fertile daughters on the population of a girls’ boarding school, rather than allowing nature to take its course and seed a half-handful of survivors at random around East Grinstead.

  “Shub-Shub-Shub,” says the thing. Then, in a heartbreakingly high voice with just a trace of a toddler’s lisp: “Daddy, why is it dark in here?”

  My stomach lurches. The voice is coming from the attic.

  “Daddy? Turn on the lights, Daddy, please?”

  Lights?

  I take a step back, closer to my safety zone, then swing my head round slowly. With the night vision monocular it’s like having a searchlight, able to pick out details only in a very small area. Close beside the door, there—I see a mains switch and a trail of wire tacked to the wall.

  “Daddy? I’m afraid…”

  I skid across the unspeakable slime on the floor and push the switch, screwing shut the eye behind the night vision glass as I do so. The blackness vanishes, replaced by a twilight nightmare out of Bosch, illuminated by a ten-watt bulb screwed to the underside of a beam.

  Yes, there are logs in the woodshed. They’re piled neatly against the far wall, beyond the rickety stepladder leading up to a hole in the ceiling. There are also the partially skeletonized bodies of two—no, three—soldiers—

  “Daddy! Heeelp!”

  A little girl’s voice screams from the staircase opening, and I realize I’m much too late to help her. Even so, I almost take a step forward. I manage to stop in time. I know exactly why those three troopers died: they died trying to be heroes, trying to rescue the little girl. I close my eyes briefly, take a deep breath of the mold-laden sickly-sweet air. Take a step backwards, to stand in front of the exit from the charnel house.

  (There are two skulls on the floor—one of the bodies still has a helmet. They’re on either side of the ladder. Part of me wonders how the thing in the attic decapitated them. Most of me wants to close my eyes, stick my fingers in my ears, and scream I can
’t hear you.)

  “Talk to me, Shub,” I call. “You want to talk, don’t you? It’s the only way you or any of your brood are going to get out of here alive.”

  The roof beams creak, as if something vast is adjusting its weight distribution. “Shub. Shub. Glurp. Daddy, it wants me to talk to you. Daddy? Will you come up here?”

  I swallow bile and tense my leg muscles to flee. “No,” I say.

  “Shub! Shub! Shub!” The thing with Ada in the attic, the thing working her vocal cords, booms at me, a menacing rumble. Obviously, it’s not happy about its latest self-propelled snack refusing to follow the lure upstairs. I use the rumbling as my cue to unhook the sample jars and look around. Her spawn crawls over the woodpile, near the dead and half-eaten troopers. Tiny horses and cone snails, swarming and chewing. I swallow again. Look sideways: near the door, a handful of snail shells crushed by boots. Survivors inch across the floor around them. I crouch down and use my forceps to take living samples, one per glass-walled tube. Snail, horse, snail, horse. They go back into the crush-resistant fiberglass box and I lock it and sling it over my shoulder.

  That’s what I’m really here for, you know. It was pretty clear that this was a zero-survivor situation once Alan confirmed that brick three was missing. But anything I can learn from the Queen …

  “We have met before,” the Queen says through Ada’s childish larynx.

  “Have we?” I ask.

  “You remember me. I was your Hetty. I said we would meet again. Isn’t that right?”

  My skin crawls. I begin to frame a reply, then stop. I was going to say something human, but: do not disclose operational intelligence to happy fun serial group mind horror. I try again: “You wake up each time: reincarnation, isn’t it? You find yourself fat and sleepy and spawning in a warm, food-rich place. And you remember who you were—who you are. Is that right?”

  “I knew you would understand! Come close and you can join me.”

  Bingo. “And you keep trying to do better each time, don’t you? What was the idea, this time?”

  “Will you join me if I tell you? I will make you immortal and we will thrive and feed and dance joyous through the aeons—”

  “Yes,” I lie.

  “It has been so long since I have mated with another mind … Yes, you must join me! My idiot offspring eat their mother’s flesh and then their siblings, before they mate and grow sleek and strong and seek out a nest and settle down, and I awaken behind their eyes. One or two in each brood prosper that way. But I have worked out a way for more to survive to maturity. Join me, help me, and we will be fruitful and amplify and become myriad.”

  “I don’t think so.” I can’t hold it back any more.

  “Why won’t you—”

  “Your last worker is on its way home to visit, carrying your last Renfield. But it’s not going to be allowed to get here, Shubby. We’re not going to let you distribute your spawn via the girls at St. Ninian’s. The school’s on lock-down, and they know what to search for. Acid baths, Shubby. Anything that looks like My Little Pony is going to take a one-way trip through an acid bath and a furnace on sight. Snails, too.”

  A snarling animal scream cuts through the air behind me, from beyond the closed doors. It’s cut short by a harsh chatter of automatic gunfire.

  The thing above me roars in existential pain and heaves its bulk up, then brings it smashing down on the ceiling. Paint dust and splinters fall and the light bulb shakes, the shadows flickering across the room. “My children! My beautiful future flesh! My babies! Traitor! I would have loved and cherished your memories forever!” The snails and tiny horses swarm on the skeletonizing remains of the dead soldiers. Another voice cuts through the cacophony: “Dadd-ee! Help me!”

  I step back towards the door. I tap my throat mike and speak quietly: “Got samples. No—” I glance at the ladder— “survivors. Over.”

  “Roger,” Alan says calmly. “Target neutralized in yard behind you. Come on out. We’re falling back now. Over.”

  I throw myself backwards at the woodshed doors. The ceiling creaks and screeches and then begins to buckle, giving way and drooping from the edges of the loft stairwell opening. Something huge is pushing through from above, something like the rasp of a slug the size of a bus, iridescent and putrefying and bubbling with feculent slime. It vents a warbling roar, “ShubShubShub.” The door gives way behind me as I topple, getting a vague impression of writhing tentacles, a huge nodding eyeless horse-head, something like a broken doll impaled on a wooden stick—

  Someone catches me and then I’m sprawling across a back as they pick me up and run across a farmyard, dodging around the fallen bulk of another of the horses from hell. I can see stars and a high overcast of cirrus whirling overhead as my rescuer pounds across the packed earth. Wall to one side, reflecting the livid glare of a burning building. “Get down!” someone shouts in my ear as he drops me on the ground in the lee of a drystone wall.

  “Got it—” I scramble for cover as the incendiary fireworks surge overhead and the woodshed lights off with a whump I can feel in my bladder.

  And then I lie there until Sergeant Howe gives everyone the all clear and sends a medic to look me over for triage, clutching the sample box like grim death and telling myself that it was all over for Ada Doom Edgebaston long before I walked through the woodshed door.

  Because reincarnation only works for alien group mind horrors, doesn’t it?

  Keep telling yourself that, Bob. Take your sample tubes back to R&D in London, leave the burning wreckage of the farm behind. Take your cold comfort where you can, and keep telling yourself that the nasty thing old HPL saw behind the woodshed was lying or mistaken, and that you’ll never meet it again.

  Who knows? You might even be right …

  HOME OFFICE

  CONFIDENTIAL

  Procurement Specification: HO/MPMU/46701

  Date of Issue: May 3rd, 2006

  Requirement for:

  Enhanced-Mobility Operational Capability Upgrade Mounts for Police Mounted Units

  It is becoming increasingly clear that in the 21st century mounted police are seen as an anachronism by the public. Despite their clear advantages for crowd control and supervision of demonstrations and public sporting events, mounted operations are expensive to conduct, require extensive stabling and support infrastructure, and compete for resources with other specialist units (e.g. airborne, tactical firearms, scene of crime investigation).

  This document contains the operational requirements for upgraded genetically engineered mounts that will enhance the capabilities and availability of our mounted officers …

  Desirable characteristics:

  Mounts should exhibit three or more of the following traits:

  • Endurance in excess of 6 hours at 30 miles/hour over rough terrain (when ridden with standard issue saddle, rider, and kit)

  • Endurance in excess of 30 minutes at 50 miles/hour on metaled road surfaces (when ridden with standard issue saddle, rider, and kit)

  • Ability to see in the dark

  • Ability to recognize and obey a controlled vocabulary of at least 20 distinct commands

  • Invisible

  • Bulletproof

  • Carnivorous

  • Flight (when ridden with standard issue saddle, rider, and kit)

  State of Requirement

  CANCELLED September 5th 2006

  by Order of Cabinet Office in accordance with recommendation of SOE (X Division) Operational Oversight Audit Committee

  Reason for cancellation order:

  Sussex mounted constabulary has no conceivable operational requirement for sentient weapons of mass destruction.

  This requirement document has no identifiable origin within the Home Office.

  It echoes historic attempts to induce adoption of Equoid-friendly facilities within the armed services via requirements raised within the MoD. All of these have been successfully resisted.

  It is speculated that s
omeone is trying to pull a fast one on us: does Shub-Niggurath have a posse in Whitehall? This matter warrants further enquiry, and has therefore been referred to External Assets for investigation and permanent closure.

  Copyright (C) 2013 by Charles Stross

  eISBN 9781466855472

  Art copyright (C) 2013 by David Palumbo

  Contents

  Title Page

  Begin Reading

  The cold dawn light creeps onto the mountaintops; they emerge like islands in the valley’s dark sea, tendrils of steam rising up from the thickets clinging to the rock. Right now there’s no sound of birdsong or crickets, no hiss of wind in the trees. When Maderakka’s great shadow has sunk back below the horizon, twitter and chirp will return in a shocking explosion of sound. For now, we sit in complete silence.

  The birds have left. Petr lies with his head in my lap, his chest rising and falling so quickly it’s almost a flutter, his pulse rushing under the skin. The bits of eggshell I couldn’t get out of his mouth, those that have already made their way into him, spread whiteness into the surrounding flesh. If only I could hear that he’s breathing properly. His eyes are rolled back into his head, his arms and legs curled up against his body like a baby’s. If he’s conscious, he must be in pain. I hope he’s not conscious.

  * * *

  A strangely shaped man came in the door and stepped up to the counter. He made a full turn to look at the mess in my workshop: the fabrics, the cutting table, the bits of pattern. Then he looked directly at me. He was definitely not from here—no one had told him not to do that. I almost wanted to correct him: leave, you’re not supposed to make contact like that, you’re supposed to pretend you can’t see me and tell the air what you want. But I was curious about what he might do. I was too used to avoiding eye contact, so I concentrated carefully on the rest of him: the squat body with its weirdly broad shoulders, the swelling upper arms and legs. The cropped copper on his head. I’d never seen anything like it.

  So this man stepped up to the counter and he spoke directly to me, and it was like being caught under the midday sun.